Fragmentos de textos e imagens catadas nesta tela, capturadas desta web, varridas de jornais, revistas, livros, sons, filtradas pelos olhos e ouvidos e escorrendo pelos dedos para serem derramadas sobre as teclas... e viverem eterna e instanta neamente num logradouro digital.
Desagua douro de pensa mentos.
When the men under the charge of the brave Odysseus arrive at Circe’s home in Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,”
the film shifts from seafaring epic to body horror. Circe, played with
rawness and mystery by Samantha Morton, is a witch who turns the men
into swine, but fear not — she’ll soon be outsmarted by Matt Damon’s
late-arriving Odysseus, like all the other monsters he’s encountered on
his way back home. She is just another obstacle to be vanquished on the
hero’s journey.
That’s not exactly
how things unfold in the original text. When Homer introduces Circe,
she’s described as a beautiful, enchanting woman singing and weaving at a
loom — drawing a parallel to Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus
who is forever weaving as she waits for her husband to return home.
Circe’s domicile is a kind of palace where she reigns supreme. In Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation — the first into English by a woman
— it is a place of “polished stones, on high foundations,” where nymphs
carry fancy cloths, gold cups and silver bowls for guests and where
wild animals fawn around her like house pets. She was a memorable
presence in the most enduring of tales, a character as wily as the hero,
and more knowledgeable. This latest portrayal feels like a particularly
disheartening disservice to one of the earliest examples of a powerful,
sexually autonomous woman in literature.
Many
translations refer to Circe as a goddess who executes her
transformations with a potion and the flick of a wand; that’s a far cry
from the gruesome, torturous process onscreen now. As the men gorge
themselves on the food she serves, she stretches and molds their heads
like putty, sticking her hands into their mouths and shaping their faces
into pig snouts. It’s horrific, and the movie seems to cast it as
unwarranted, as though it’s so unlikely that a woman living alone,
accosted by a group of soldiers we’ve seen loot and kill in another
city, would feel threatened.
This
Circe seems cruel and crazed. In Homer’s telling, Odysseus becomes so
enamored of her that she becomes a kind of substitute wife. In the
story, when Odysseus goes to Circe’s home to save his men, he uses an
antidote given to him by the gods, threatens her with his sword and then
sleeps with her. When she changes Odysseus’ soldiers back, Homer notes
that they’re even more handsome than before, and are bathed in oil and
dressed in nice clothes. Odysseus and his men spend a year living
happily with Circe and her nymph servant girls, as Wilson writes in her
translation: “Then every day / for a whole year we feasted there on meat
/ and sweet strong wine.” In fact, after that year of leisure it’s
Odysseus’ men who bring up that they should probably get back on the
road to Ithaca; only then does it seem to occur to Odysseus that they
should leave their cozy vacation spot and now welcoming host.
Of
course every adaptation offers its own twist on her. This has been true
dating back millenniums, to early classics writers like Ovid and
Hesiod. In some versions, Circe bears Odysseus’ children; in others she
is an obsessive, vengeful predator. Contemporary authors like Madeline Miller
reclaim the character as more than a brief detour in Odysseus’ journey
and offer a more sympathetic, well-rounded version of her.
Over
the years Circe’s transformations of Odysseus’ men have been read in
various ways depending on the cultural context and sexual politics of
the time: as a commentary on etiquette and social behavior, as a
philosophical critique on the inherently beastly nature of men, as a
misogynist cautionary tale against a sexually liberated woman. One can
often determine the politics and perspectives of an “Odyssey” adaptation
by how Circe is depicted.
So what
does that say about Nolan’s dark, succinct telling? In this film of
majesty and scope, of star power and visual appeal, Circe helps show how
Nolan’s “Odyssey” ultimately takes the epic at face value, reducing it
to terms the director is most comfortable with: Odysseus is a man
burdened by the weight of his brilliance. Circe is an obstacle he must
overcome, just like the other women in the film have very specific ways
to round out the hero’s tale of triumph. Calypso’s role is to trap
Odysseus. Athena’s to act as his (mostly silent) conscience. Helen and
Clytemnestra are simply disloyal women at the periphery of Odysseus’
journey. And Odysseus’ faithful wife, Penelope, isn’t shown doing much
of anything, but gets an adamant speech about her queenly autonomy to
telegraph her as a more modern, empowered hero-wife. None are
fulfilling, but none feel as dismissive as the evil witch treatment of
Circe.
At the end of the day, this is
a man’s story of greatness. Even in Odysseus’ questionable moments,
there’s never any question that he is still the noble warrior, the
honorable leader. As for the women — the lovers, the betrayers, the
goddess and, of course, the witch — they’re no more than the trimmings
on our hero’s armor.
Oil, Hunters and Dr. Phil: How a Long-Shot Project Is Shaking Up Greenland
A U.S. oil company says it could be on the verge of a major discovery in
Greenland. The proposal comes at a tricky time for the Arctic island,
and locals are lining up against it.
In one of the most remote towns on earth, on the frozen crust of Greenland’s east coast, the American oilman made his pitch.
Near
to the very room where they were all sitting, he told a crowd of
Greenlanders, could be as much as 13 billion barrels of oil. His company
planned to drill two exploratory wells, and if it struck oil, it could
be a major worldwide discovery bringing much-needed jobs, loads of tax
money and relief to world energy markets.
The people who attended the meeting, which was held in June in an isolated town called Ittoqqortoormiit, had some questions.
Why would Greenland get only 15 percent of the profit?
What kind of chemicals would be used?
And what about the musk ox?
(Musk ox hunting is a big deal up there.)
Image
A
store selling items made with sealskin and musk ox furs in Nuuk,
Greenland’s capital. The area believed to have vast oil reserves, known
as Jameson Land, is a protected environmental zone home to musk ox,
foxes and migrating birds.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
The
meeting wrapped up with a lot of unhappy people filing out, according
to a video of it that was shared with The New York Times, and a showdown
over oil exploration has now joined the cloud of issues swirling over
Greenland.
The wildcat oil project is
being pumped up by Dr. Phil McGraw, the TV personality known as Dr.
Phil, and Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, both powerful allies of
President Trump. It’s the latest push by the MAGA camp to close in on
this gigantic Arctic island that Mr. Trump threatened to annex and
remains a fixation of his.
If the
discovery is anything close to what the company says, and if it makes
economic sense for major production — and those are two enormous ifs —
this project could thrust Greenland into a radically different future,
possibly as an Arctic petrostate.
But
it’s off to a bumpy start. After a wave of negative publicity, protests
by Greenlanders and a slip-up by the project’s organizers who have a
drilling license, Greenland’s authorities tapped the brakes. This week
the government pushed back the timeline for granting final approvals,
saying that it’s unlikely any drilling would be authorized before 2028.
The
Texas-based firm leading the project, Greenland Energy Company, now
says it will focus on drilling only one well, not two. And the delays
are expected to cost millions. As a result, Greenland Energy’s share price has plummeted, trading at little more than a dollar, half its value from just days ago.
Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Greenland? , and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
A few years ago, Greenland declared it was suspending oil exploration.
The Arctic is among the fastest-warming regions in the world, and the
Greenlandic government felt it was wrong to contribute more fossil fuel
pollution.
Image
The
landscape near Ittoqqortoormiit in 2024. Warming temperatures mean less
ice on Greenland’s coast, making any oil discovered cheaper to export
than it would have been decades ago, an executive said.Credit...Olivier Morin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But
the oil prospectors in this case are operating with a valid license
granted before the policy changed, according to documents reviewed by
The New York Times. So Greenlandic officials, who have been trying to
navigate the intense pressure Mr. Trump has put on them, find themselves
in a tight spot.
They are more than
aware that if they reflexively block Americans from drilling, especially
at a time when world events have squeezed the global oil supply, that
could give Mr. Trump the pretext he needs to return to his threats to
“get” Greenland, “one way or the other.” At the same time, there’s
obvious resistance from ordinary Greenlanders and government officials
to the project.
“In
a world where Donald Trump has pursued such a confrontational policy
toward Greenland, you can’t help but be a little concerned,” said Mikkel
Runge Olesen, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for
International Studies. “If you suddenly throw a major oil discovery into the mix, who knows what might happen.”
For
months, the United States, Greenland and Denmark — the island’s former
colonial master that still controls many of its affairs — have been locked in sticky negotiations over the island’s future. One key issue has been American access to Greenland’s natural resources.
Ever
since Mr. Trump set his sights on the island, Greenland has become a
magnet for investors and allies chasing Arctic resource dreams. But oil
has never been easy.
Chevron and
Shell prospected decades ago with no success. It’s incredibly expensive
to build an oil industry from scratch in one of the most remote and
inhospitable places on the planet. Most of Greenland is covered in ice.
One major U.S. company, ARCO, decades ago sank today’s equivalent of
$250 million — far more than the $80 million the current players have
raised — into seismic studies in the same area, only to abandon the
project in 1990.
“There are so many
red flags here,” said Naaja Nathanielsen, Greenland’s former minister of
natural resources and now a representative in Denmark’s Parliament. She
says she hasn’t seen any hard data supporting the project’s tantalizing
claims, adding, “I think they are selling hot air.”
Not so, say the backers of the project, a joint venture between Greenland Energy, the small, publicly traded U.S. company that raised the money, and 80 Mile Plc, a British outfit that acquired the drilling licenses several years ago.
Roderick
McIllree, 80 Mile’s executive director and a board member of Greenland
Energy, said this stretch of Greenland had the same geology as the North
Sea oil fields, where European countries have extracted billions of
barrels. And climate change is working in their favor, he said.
Warming
temperatures mean less ice clogging Greenland’s coast, making any oil
discovered cheaper to export than it would have been decades ago, he
said.
“Greenland
could be exporting two million barrels of oil a day,” said Governor
Landry, Mr. Trump’s special envoy to Greenland, in a Fox News interview in May. He added, “Think about what kind of pressure that would relieve in the Straits of Hormuz.”
Image
Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana was appointed by Mr. Trump to be the special envoy to Greenland.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Before
the project is allowed to start, its plans, including a detailed
environmental assessment, must be approved. But the organizers have been
moving ahead anyway and recently carried out two disputed equipment
transfers.
First, they brought in a
barge of equipment from another part of Greenland on what authorities
said was an expired permit. Jorgen Hammeken-Holm, the head of
Greenland’s mineral resources department, called the move “naughty,
naughty.”
Then, a few days later, they unloaded another piece of heavy equipment without proper notification, the authorities said.
“We
have the police and the military,” Mr. Hammeken-Holm warned. “They can
assist in dealing with unlawful activities if necessary.”
Mr. McIllree, the 80 Mile executive, admitted, “We kind of fell down.” He said the company apologized to Greenlandic officials.
The
potentially oil-rich area, known as Jameson Land, is a highly protected
environmental zone, an Arctic swampland of sorts, home to tenacious
shrubs and musk ox, foxes and migrating birds like the pink-footed
goose. The musk ox is prized for its meat and its fur, which is turned
into a luxurious yarn.
All this has attracted Dr. Phil, who did a recent 44-minute podcast
on the project. He titled the episode “Frozen Gold,” and according to
documents on Greenland Energy’s website, the company has established “a
wide-ranging partnership” with him to make a six-episode series on “this
modern-day treasure hunt.”
Image
Dr.
Phil McGraw, the television personality known as Dr. Phil and an ally
of President Trump, dedicated a recent episode of his podcast to talking
up the oil project in Greenland. It was titled “Frozen Gold.” Credit...Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press
His
company did not respond to requests for comment about his involvement
in the project. But on his podcast, Dr. Phil said he would soon head to
the Arctic.
“I’m going to have to mug a kitten and get some mittens because I’m going to go up there and see this firsthand,” he said.
Ittoqqortoormiit
(It-tok-kor-TOR-meet), population 329, is trying to make sense of
what’s happening. This spring, members of the local council seemed ready
to negotiate and drafted a list of things they wanted from the oil
company: a heated community pool, new hunting cabins and funding for
residents to fly over Jameson Land in helicopters one last time before
their hunting grounds were turned into an industrial site.
But the public meeting in June changed the mood.
Mr. McIllree conceded that the team that led the meeting didn’t show enough respect.
“They forgot whose house they were in,” he said.
Still, some residents support the project.
Aage Uugi Pike Barselajsen, a construction worker, said in a telephone interview that Ittoqqortoormiit desperately needed jobs.
“You have to think about the future and the money,” he explained. “Maybe Greenland could become like Dubai. That’s my dream.”
Since
a band of rebels led by Fidel Castro pushed out Cuba’s dictator in
1959, the island’s government has largely been defined by its defiance
of its far larger neighbor to the north — and its ability to survive the
intense pressure that friction has provoked.
But the current U.S. campaign, led by an effective oil blockade, is the most intense in a half-century. And it is pushing the Cuban government to the brink.
Tourism
has cratered. The energy grid collapsed three times over nine days this
month. And other than a single Russian oil tanker in March, Cuba’s
allies have not been willing to test President Trump’s order that no
fuel be delivered to the island.
Yet, more than six months later, the government is still intact, and Cubans are finding ways to get by.
This
month, we visited Cuba on the first journalism visa granted to The New
York Times in nearly eight years. In Havana, I interviewed Cuba’s deputy
foreign minister, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, one of the Communist
government’s interlocutors with the United States.
He
said Cuba’s main strategy to escape the Trump administration’s ire was
to enact a series of economic policy changes, including opening the
country to foreign investment. Mr. Trump could even invest himself, Mr.
Fernández de Cossío said.
White House
and State Department spokespeople called Cuba a national security
threat and accused it of harboring terrorists, which Cuba denies. They
blamed Cuba for the energy crisis, saying it sold off fuel to enrich
elites and failed to maintain its electric grid. And they said Cuba’s
political and economic system are broken and must change, though U.S.
officials have not clarified what would be required to lift the
blockade.
The two sides acknowledge
that their talks have made little progress. Many people, especially
Cubans, are now watching closely for signs of what is next.
The
Trump administration seems to be demanding changes to Cuba’s political
system. Your government has said that is not on the table. What is?
I
can be sure that the government of the United States would not
negotiate its Constitution and political system with another government.
So there should be no surprise that Cuba is not ready to discuss its
internal political issues with the United States.
So what is the Cuban strategy then?
We introduced some changes in our economy a few weeks back. We believe they can allow us to cope.
Yet,
if the United States is trying to provoke humanitarian difficulties in
Cuba, unfortunately it has the power to. There’s nothing Cuba can do.
And
if they lead to military action against Cuba, we will suffer thousands
of deaths. Probably there will be a blood bath in Cuba. There will also
be deaths of young Americans.
But
after all this damage is caused, what is the goal gained by the United
States? That is where we believe there should be some common sense
within the American people.
Image
A Russian-flagged oil tanker arriving in Matanzas Bay, off the coast of Cuba, in March.Credit...Norlys Perez/Reuters
Russia
delivered a single tanker of fuel in March, but no other country has
challenged Trump’s threats to not ship fuel to Cuba. Where are your
allies?
The coercive arm of
the United States has proved to be very successful. To tell a European, a
Latin American, an Asian company that you cannot export your national
resources to Cuba, it’s a new world order.
Do you expect more oil coming from Russia, Mexico or Brazil?
We
do expect some oil to come from some part of the world. We believe that
the capacity of the United States to isolate Cuba and deprive countries
of their right to export their own products cannot be forever.
Trump has discussed “taking Cuba.” Is Cuba preparing militarily?
It’s
absurd. What excuse can there be to carry out a military action that
will cause death and destruction against a peaceful country?
Now,
regardless of how irrational it is, we would be naïve if we did not
prepare ourselves, if we did not update our military strategy, which is
based on the involvement of the population as a whole. We understand the
asymmetric reality in terms of technology and firepower, but our people
will defend our country. We have weekly preparations for that.
Image
Young members of the Cuban military during a May Day celebration this year.Credit...Lisette Poole González for The New York Times
There have been reports
that an Emirati developer is building a luxury resort on a Cuban island
and wants to pitch it to the Trump Organization as Trump Island. Is the
Cuban government entertaining a Trump Organization project on Cuban
soil?
We’re
not entertaining specifically, I would say, anything like that. But we
are trying to attract foreign investment from any country. And that does
not exclude the United States.
Does it exclude President Trump?
If he wants to do it peacefully, we see no specific reason to exclude.
Have you heard of this Trump Island proposal on this part of Cuba?
I
saw the news. There are many developments there already in place and
some projected, and we’ve presented this to business people in several
parts of the world. If somebody comes and says they have connections
with important business people in the United States, we’re ready to
engage. If it’s with the Trump administration, in principle, there’s no
reason for us to say no.
What
prohibits Donald Trump from investing in Cuba are U.S. laws. We don’t
exclude him or his organization from doing business in Cuba, if it does
it respecting Cuban laws.
The
police in Brazil recovered eight stolen works by Henri Matisse on
Thursday, officials said, months after armed men made off with them from
a library in São Paulo.
The police
tracked the pieces, which belong to the French master’s 1947 series
called “Jazz,” to an apartment in the suburb of São Bernardo do Campo,
the São Paulo city government and the police said.
One person was arrested at the apartment on suspicion of receiving stolen goods, according to the police.
The
pieces were stolen in December from the Mário de Andrade Library, São
Paulo’s largest, during public viewing hours. Along with the eight
Matisses, the thieves also took five works by the Brazilian modernist
painter Candido Portinari, the authorities said.
In
the heist, the men overpowered a security guard and two bystanders,
according to an emailed statement from Rodrigo Bezerra, a police
spokesman. Soon after, they were seen carrying the pieces around on the
street in security camera footage
released by the authorities. At one point in the video, a man places a
stack of frames next to a pile of garbage on a sidewalk, then returns to
pick it up.
The authorities in Brazil alerted Interpol after the heist because they were concerned that the pieces might be smuggled out of the country.
The
police said that they had arrested one suspect in the robbery the day
after it took place. It said that two other suspects in the library
heist had been arrested in April in a separate art-theft case: a woman
and a man described as the organizer of the crime.
Totó Parente, an official in the São Paulo government, said
on Thursday that recovering the Matisse works was of “enormous
importance” to the city. The police said that they had yet to locate the
Portinari pieces.
Matisse’s works are coveted by galleries, museums and collectors around the world. And by art thieves.
His “Odalisque on the Terrace” was one of three paintings stolen
from a private art museum in Italy in March. The thieves broke into the
Magnani-Rocca Foundation and made off with the three artworks in just
three minutes, the police said.
And “Odalisque in Red Pants,” taken from a museum in Venezuela, was recovered in 2012 by F.B.I. agents in Miami, who arrested two people and said they were trying to sell the painting.
It was not clear when “Odalisque in Red Pants” was stolen from the Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas because a fake version of it was placed after the theft.
The
eight pieces recovered in Brazil on Thursday were “The Clown”; “The
Circus”; “Monsieur Loyal”; “The Nightmare of the White Elephant”; “The
Codomas”; “The Swimmer in the Aquarium”; “The Sword Swallower”; and “The
Cowboy.”
'A Viagem de Chihiro' e a psicodelia de sonhar acordado
"A cena do trem atravessando o mar ao entardecer concentra tudo isso. Não acontece quase nada. O silêncio ocupa mais espaço do que os diálogos. A água parece não ter fim. Os passageiros embarcam e desembarcam sem dizer uma palavra. Há uma tristeza serena naquela viagem, como se todos soubessem que certas travessias não permitem retorno. É uma das cenas mais belas do cinema, justamente porque não tenta explicar o que sentimos.
Toda transformação guarda um instante assim. Aquele momento suspenso em que já não somos quem éramos, mas ainda não sabemos quem seremos. "
‘Farra dos cachês’ evidencia o fracasso da política cultural nos municípios
"Chamam a atenção as ligações dos municípios com a chamada “farra dos cachês”. Das 2.006 cidades que tiveram shows públicos dos 40 artistas que mais receberam no período analisado, 1.069 decretaram situação de emergência (comprometimento parcial dos recursos locais) e outras 13 formalizaram estado de calamidade pública (incapacidade total) — por seca, inundação ou outros motivos. Um disparate de gestão pública.
Muitos dos pagamentos de shows também “comeram” os orçamentos no período. Em Estrela do Norte (GO), os gastos com alguns dos tais 40 artistas alcançaram 2,9% de seu orçamento de 2024. Enquanto isso, o índice de mortalidade infantil do município é o dobro da média nacional, segundo o documento."
'Não fazia ideia do buraco': jovem perde bolsa de estudos do Prouni devido ao vício da mãe em apostas online
"“Eu não fazia ideia do buraco em que ela estava se enfiando. O celular dela é de uma pessoa completamente adoecida”, disse Eduardo, que chegou a contabilizar apostas em mais de 500 endereços de cassinos on-line.
Para o jovem, fica a frustração, além de um sentimento de ‘raiva’. “Não da minha mãe, a questão não é sobre quem joga, mas sobre quem está lucrando com isso, como as plataformas e os influenciadores que vendem esse discurso de que é possível ganhar dinheiro fácil com as apostas. Isso é um descompromisso com a população, com a saúde pública”, critica"
It was 92 in the shade and we fled to the nearest theater to escape
the heat and the shrouds of smoke from distant fires that had drifted
across the Cascades into the Valley. The movie was “The Odyssey.”
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, not Homer’s, which quickly became
apparent. The screen was 28 meters wide, roughly the width, by the way,
of the theater of Dionysus on the south slope of the Acropolis in
Athens, where many plays depicting episodes from the Trojan War and the
homecoming were performed. The cost of the ticket was $35, much cheaper
than the $1,000
some New Yorkers have shelled out for the chance to watch the
three-hour epic on 70mm IMAX screens, through the latest innovation of
late-capitalism, dynamic pricing. (Thank you, Bruce Springsteen.) In
4th-century Athens, the city-state comped entry fees for the 25,000
people who would assemble to watch the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and
Euripides. Maybe Mamdani will provide a city subsidy for at least a bag
of popcorn, which now costs more than a movie ticket did a decade ago,
when there was still a film industry in the US.
The less said about Nolan’s film, the better. Frankly, there’s not
much to critique. It is what it is, a spectacle in search of a reason to
exist, like Cleopatra or Ben Hur or Gone With the Wind. It’s not
history. It’s not literature. It’s an entertainment. It’s, in the words
of a pretty astute cultural critic: “a joke.” 173 minutes summed up in
two words. Top that, Pauline Kael. It is a joke, but alas, not a funny
one. Christopher Nolan has no sense of humor. Neither did his hero
Stanley Kubrick, but Kubrick at least had the smarts to hire
screenwriters like Terry Southern, who did, and actors like Peter
Sellers, who could inject a jolt of life into an otherwise dreary
exercise in literature-to-big-screen hokum like Lolita.
The funniest thing Nolan did was to cast Matt Damon as Odysseus, the
great prankster of Greek literature and not give him one funny line, not
even a pun. Nolan has populated his films with recognizable faces, an
all-star lineup of Hollywood celebrities. Some of them are fine actors.
But not in this film. None of the actors act. They pose and speak,
stilted words, arthritic phrases. (In a revealing casting choice,
Menelaus, Helen’s cuckolded and abusive husband who scars her face to
despoil her legendary beauty, was played by John Bernthal,
an outspoken defender of Israel’s genocidal rampages in Gaza, who
invited ex-Israeli special forces soldiers onto his Call to Arms and
praised their “wet-work”.)
Nolan doesn’t need actors. There’s little room for acting here. Nolan
said that because he insists on shooting with 70 mm IMAX cameras, he
can only film for three minutes at a time. The
demands of character development and emotional depth must be sacrificed
to the demands of action. How can Odysseus have the time to think about
what he has done or what he will do, when a jump cut must be made every
couple of minutes to a new scene of peril? In fact, Nolan doesn’t even need much of a script. It’s all about the images, even when the montage of images is inchoate. The classics scholar Emily Wilson, whose vivid and energetic new translation of The Odyssey
Nolan claimed to have consulted for his film, scorched the film, saying
she would have been “ashamed to have written any part” of the
screenplay.
The heresy, if that’s what you want to call it, in casting Zendaya as
Athena and Lupita Nyong’o as Helen (and her sister Clytemnestra) isn’t
that they are black actors but that the allegedly “woke” Christopher
Nolan gave these black actors so little to do. Like Helen, Nyont’o is
one of the world’s most beautiful humans, a rarefied model of the
perfection of the species. And that captivating allure shines through
her scar-riven face. Nolan gives her a handful of lines, merely to
advance the plot. But how does Helen feel about being dragged back to
Sparta, bound as a sex-slave and war trophy to the dull-witted man who
shredded her face and killed her lover? We’re left in the dark.
Athena may well have been black (see: Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization).
As one of the supreme Olympian deities, she was certainly capable of
assuming whatever form or skin color she desired and Zendaya may well be
the closest living human to a goddess on Earth. But Nolan has her do
little more than console Odysseus, while wrapped in a drab woven cloak,
looking like Mary Magdalene, patting Jesus on the back. But this is
Athena, the great intellect and warrior goddess, who, consumed by petty
jealousy (See: the Judgement of Paris), plotted and enabled the sacking
of Troy and the genocide of the Trojans and provided a shield of
LAPD-like impunity for her favorite killer. We’d like to hear her
explain herself.
I’m a little dismayed at MAGA’s hostility toward Nolan. After all, he
shares their rosy nostalgia for a past that never existed. He wants to
Make Cinema Grand Again in the tradition of Griffith, DeMille, and Ford.
Big pictures with big budgets made only on film (despite its
environmental consequences) projected onto big screens in big movie
palaces. Big, big, big. All of it backed by bankers, private equity,
insurers and reinsurers. Nolan’s megalomania is almost Trumpian. But
surely the future of movie-making, if it has a future, is elsewhere. At
the end of his life, Jean-Luc Godard was making movies shot on his
iPhone and found it liberating. The two breakout films of the summer,
Obsession and Backrooms, were made by former YouTubers. Why go back? Why
chain yourself to the demands of the money men and cinema owners?
Classicists
are having a moment on social media, happily discussing whether
Odysseus was “polytropos,” “polymetis” or “polymechanos.” And that’s
very cool. Thank you, Mr. Nolan.
Christopher
Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is a throwback to the days when Hollywood big
shots fearlessly took on literary classics, undaunted by the challenges
of bringing vast, thorny tales to the screen.
Conjuring
the Civil War in “Gone With The Wind”? Recreating the desert
battlefields of World War I in “Lawrence of Arabia”? Depicting the
Russian Revolution in “Doctor Zhivago”?
Why not?
Nolan’s
portal to ancient Greece has lured audiences back to theaters and
spiked book sales of Homer’s “The Odyssey,” over 12,000 lines of
dactylic hexameter verse composed in the seventh or eighth century
B.C.E. Nolan has turned one of the foundational works of Western
literature into an entertaining adventure saga.
Nolan
told Stephen Colbert that he used every trick in the book to achieve
his stunning visual effects. (The Mediterranean was ready for its
close-up!) Yet the director failed to capture the essence of the man of
tricks and twists, Odysseus, who delighted in storytelling and feigned
identities.
Much of the moral
ambiguity has been drained to make Matt Damon’s protagonist more
likable. Except for a few mournful appearances by Zendaya’s Athena, who
seems more like Odysseus’s conscience than his shape-shifting partner in
deception, Nolan doesn’t depict any of the major meddling gods from the
story. Besides being rich, fascinating characters, the gods are the
framework for everything that happened in the ancient world. If you take
the gods out of the picture, you just have people struggling within
themselves. You lose the depth and force of the epic.
Nolan’s nearly three-hour masterwork, the classicist Mary Beard noted,
does not have Homer’s “elusive sexiness.” In keeping with Gen Z’s
waning interest in sex, the poem’s famous sex scenes have been excised,
sapping erotic power from the female characters. As a headline in New York magazine wondered, “Is No One Horny in ‘The Odyssey’?”
Nolan
brought the dark spirit of his last hit, “Oppenheimer,” with him to
Greece, imbuing Odysseus with shame about his brilliant engineering
invention that won the war: the horse that tricked the Trojans. His
Odysseus is filled with remorse and haunted by the idea that his actions
may lead to the end of civilization as they know it.
Homer’s guy, not so much. After Odysseus and his men sacked Troy, they went across the way and sacked another city.
Emily
Wilson, whose popular modern translation of “The Odyssey” inspired
Nolan, said the director turned Odysseus into an all-American hero
weighed down by anxieties foreign to the ancient Greeks.
“He’s traumatized Jason Bourne,” she said of Damon’s portrayal on Derek Thompson’s podcast.
“He’s an action hero who feels bad about being an action hero. He’s not
that complicated. Unfortunately, he’s not ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ in
this film. The Odysseus of the Greek poem is complicated.”
Nolan
did not want his Odysseus betraying Penelope and enjoying his sojourns
with other women. The director completely cut out the young princess
Nausicaa, whom Homer’s Odysseus has a flirtation with, and neuters the
text’s sexual encounters with Circe and Calypso.
In
Homer, Odysseus sails to Aeaea, the island home of the enchanting
sorceress Circe, “the nymph with the lovely braids.” (I named my kitten
after that Circe.) When Circe drugs Odysseus’s crew and taps the men with her wand, turning them into swine, it’s witchy foreplay.
The
messenger god, Hermes, also a trickster, comes down from Olympus to
give Odysseus an antidote for when Circe tries to use her magic on him.
Hermes also advises Odysseus: “Don’t refuse the goddess’s bed,” because
that’s really what Circe wants in return for turning the swine back to
men. Under no spell, Odysseus says, “I mounted Circe’s gorgeous bed.” He
was so smitten with “the lustrous goddess,” who doted on him with
“sides of meat and drafts of heady wine,” he didn’t leave for a year —
despite pleas from his homesick men.
Nolan’s
Circe, played by Samantha Morton, is like a vindictive feminist hippie
making ceramic pots in Vermont, except she’s sculpting pigs. Her romance
with Odysseus is scrubbed.
In Homer,
Odysseus lands on the island of another luminous goddess, Calypso, and
stays seven years. He’s imprisoned, but at the beginning at least, he
enjoyed himself, even as Penelope was fending off her boorish suitors
back home.
Nolan whitewashes
Odysseus’s infidelity here by turning Calypso — played by Charlize
Theron — into a fashionable beach therapist who gives him mood-altering
lotus flowers to help with his PTSD. In Homer, Odysseus has no need to
forget. He cries once over the human cost of the war when he hears a
song about Troy’s fall, but mostly he’s proud of his war exploits. And
the “scalawag,” as Calypso calls him, doesn’t partake in the lotus; his
men become addicted lotus-eaters on a different island.
In
the movie, Calypso graciously lets Odysseus go when he comes out of his
lotus fog and insists on returning home. In the book, Athena has to ask
Zeus to intervene to make Calypso give up her sex slave, and she
complains that there’s a double standard, because the male gods have
affairs with mortals but interfere when the female gods are similarly
romping.
Penelope, a mortal, is
expected to be faithful, no matter that Odysseus’s sexual liaisons have
added eight years to his 10-year voyage home.
When
Homer’s Odysseus finally gets home, there’s a charged scene where he is
outraged to learn that the marital bed he built, crafted out of an
olive tree that grew inside the palace, has been moved. It’s a test by
Penelope. Nolan dispensed with that, too.
The
director also sanitized Odysseus’s character by skipping the scene near
the end when the hero orders his son to round up the 12 female servants
who slept with suitors and hack them to death with a sword. Telemachus
persuades his father that the women should be hanged instead.
Nolan’s
IMAX Odysseus gives up the crown for his son and goes into exile with
Penelope to redeem his actions during the war. Homer’s hero? No way!
Homer
did not portray a world turning against violence. He limned a
profoundly martial universe — interspersed with lots of magic and sex
and cavorting, conniving immortals. If you smooth it out and modernize
it too much, you lose what made it so important to begin with. And
you’re just left with a guy finding his way home.
The Places Where the Bombs Have Rarely Stopped Falling in Iran
“I
would like the world to know that ordinary people have never wanted
this war and are not on either side of it,” he said. “Yet they are the
ones paying the highest price.”
In
the early hours of that day, an enormous explosion rocked the island,
rattling walls and windows like an earthquake. When neighbors and rescue
workers arrived at the scene of the blast, they found a modest family
house of mud bricks reduced to a pile of debris and a family of five
trapped under the rubble. The bomb had created a giant crater.
A New York Times visual investigation
found that the U.S. had dropped a 2,000-pound bomb, one of the most
powerful weapons used in this war, on the house, located in a densely
populated residential area in the village of Chah-Tangou. There were no
military facilities in its vicinity."
