Elon Musk did not understand Christopher

Nolan's Odyssey at all.

>> [music]

>> I'll admit I'm a little late weighing in

on the Odyssey.

Chalk it up to having young kids, I

don't make it to the movies as much as I

would like.

But my god, what a trick Christopher

Nolan pulled off here.

>> [music]

>> Musk did not understand what the Odyssey

was about.

But this movie sure understood who Elon

Musk is.

>> [music]

>> Who Donald Trump is, who we have become.

And I really believe that it points a

way out. [music]

Tricks are essential to the Odyssey.

Odysseus is in myth a trickster. [music]

He's described in that famed first line

of the story as the man of many ways

[music] or of many wiles or of many

turns.

He is, depending on the translation you

read, an ingenious [music] man, a

cunning man,

a complicated man.

Odysseus [music] is a man of appetites

and contradictions.

A man wants nothing more than to go home

but chooses again and again

>> [music]

>> to stay abroad. A man who yearns

desperately for his wife

but can't seem to stop bedding

goddesses.

Odysseus is never one thing.

>> [music]

>> He is always many things. But Matt Damon

is no trickster.

I like Matt Damon but I thought he was

going to be the problem with Nolan's

Odyssey. Amid this right-wing [music]

outcry over casting Lupita Nyong'o and

Elliot Page,

it was Damon who I couldn't reconcile

with the Odyssey because Damon always

seems to me like a man of a single way.

A man who wakes up early, keeps to a

clean diet, rarely has more than one

glass of wine before bed.

That's admirable but it's not Odysseus.

But Nolan wasn't looking for a

trickster.

Nolan's Odyssey is something else and

that I think you can say was [music]

Nolan's first trick.

I have spent a few years now quietly

obsessed with the archetype of the

trickster.

>> [bell]

>> The trickster is Loki in Norse

mythology,

Eshu in the Yoruba stories,

Coyote or Raven in indigenous tales,

Maui in Polynesia, Hermes and Odysseus

among the ancient Greeks.

The trickster plays a crucial function,

writes Lewis Hyde in his really

wonderful book Trickster Makes This

World.

That function is to uncover and disrupt

the very things that a culture depends

on.

The trickster dances across customs and

taboos, says what cannot be said, does

what should not have been done.

The trickster injects disorder into

order,

renders visible what is ordinarily

hidden.

The trickster causes profound damage

that makes new growth possible.

But the happy ending is never

guaranteed.

The trickster can be regenerative or

ruinous.

Coyote brings fire.

Raven brings [music] the sun.

Loki brings Armageddon.

Hyde's argument is that tricksters are

for cultures, both necessary and

dangerous.

They represent a tension every culture

has to grapple with.

Because a culture, a society that cannot

meet disruption and change with

creativity

cannot survive change.

A culture that cannot protect its core

values, however, will eventually be

consumed by corruption.

We are living in an age of chaos.

We are living in an age of tricksters.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk and Tucker

Carlson and Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes

and Bronze Age Pervert, the grammar of

the modern right is trickster.

What is serious and what is not?

>> The chains of bureaucracy.

>> I was one of the OG nut jobs.

>> Why did they say that? And how did they

get away with it?

The dominant personalities of the age

have gathered power by bulldozing

customs and taboos.

>> [cheering]

>> By saying what cannot be said.

>> Why is it we only take people from

[ __ ] countries?

>> By doing what should not be done.

Hyde said that Americans [music] love a

trickster.

They love a con man.

Because he embodies things that are

actually true about America, but cannot

be openly declared.

That may have been true in 1998 when

Hyde wrote his book. I can see the

argument that American institutions and

American culture

had ossified in some ways in the years

since. That our society become too

rule-bound and bureaucratized. That too

much had become unsayable. That there

was too little openness to real

transgression and invention.

But today

today there's little that can no longer

be said. The ideas and morals upon which

the best of our culture was built

have been more than disrupted. They've

been desecrated. The question now is

whether that disruption can be met with

creativity and renewal or whether it'll

simply bring us ruin. This is the

central question of Christopher [music]

Nolan's Odyssey.

Nolan's Odyssey hinges on Zeus's law.

Treat the beggar and the stranger as you

would want to be treated. But as a horde

of classicists have now pointed out that

is not Zeus's law, at least not in

antiquity. Zeus's law is narrower.

>> [music]

>> It's more a demand for hospitality

towards the guest or the stranger with

the admonition that there could be

punishment [music] because anybody could

be a god in disguise.

It's not a law of compassion. Not of

reciprocity.

And so here we find Nolan's central

trick.

Nolan has smuggled the core of

Judeo-Christian ethics

into the center of the Odyssey.

Zeus's law in Nolan's Odyssey

echoes Leviticus 19:34.

The foreigner residing among you must be

treated as your native born.

Love them as yourself,

for you were foreigners in Egypt. Notice

that, love them as yourself.

It echoes Rabbi Hillel, who said,

"What is hateful to you, do not do to

your fellow.

That is the whole Torah. The rest is

commentary." [music]

It echoes Matthew 7:12, when Jesus says,

"In everything,

do to others what you would have them do

to you.

For this sums up the law and the

prophets."

Such an ethic is demanding. [music]

Few of us truly live up to it.

But the wrong with the modern right is

not that they don't live up to it.

It's that they detest it.

To treat the foreigner residing among us

as well as we treat our native born,

>> [music]

>> to love them,

is derided as suicidal empathy.

The Trump [music] administration

glorifies cruelty towards the immigrant.

>> BACK UP.

BACK UP.

>> Towards the stranger, [music]

towards the weak, the poor.

Takes money from Medicaid to cut taxes

for the rich. It threatens [music] the

destruction of whole civilizations,

>> quote, "Never to be brought back."

>> It is built on the logic of tribute,

not compassion, or love, [music] or even

reciprocity.

Stephen Miller put it perfectly to CNN's

[music] Jake Tapper.

>> We live in a world, in the real world,

Jake, that is governed by

strength, that is governed by force,

that is governed by power. These are the

iron laws of the

>> But are you saying

>> since the beginning of time.

>> But wasn't the iron law replaced by the

golden rule?

Isn't [music] that at the heart of what

we believe has led our society to

progress to become something

better and grander

than what preceded it?

When Odysseus concocts the trick of the

Trojan horse,

when he takes advantage of Troy's

veneration

of the same gods worships,

takes advantage of the commonality

between them

to sack the city,

to make its streets run with blood, to

burn it to the ground. [music]

Is he

a hero or a villain?

Was that a trick or a crime?

To Homer, he was a hero.

To Nolan,

he is a soul in need of redemption.

Between Homer's time and our own came a

revolution in in civilizational values,

an upending of what it means to be

civilized.

We have

human rights law.

We have laws governing war. They did

not.

Which side of that divide are we on now?

The modern right believes [music] that

Western civilization has lost the

appetite for strength and dominance and

hierarchy and I would say [music]

cruelty

that built it in the first place.

There's a reason a theorist named Bronze

Age [music] Pervert, of all things,

became required reading for young

Trumpists.

A reason

right-wing intellectuals like Curtis

Yarvin and Michael Anton muse about the

need for an American Caesar. [music]

A reason the Trump administration is

obsessed with Roman-style architecture.

They are circling this era

for a reason.

A recent exchange Elon Musk had on X

reveals how far this thinking has gone.

A user told Musk it was time to wise up,

to abandon liberalism, because universal

suffrage leads to universal suffering.

Musk's reply,

"I have wised up."

Helen of Troy, in Nolan's Odyssey,

is not the reason for the war. She's an

excuse

for a war launched to dominate routes of

trade.

>> [applause]

>> It's a telling choice amidst an

administration that is crashing into the

global trading order because it seeks

more dominance over its flows.

When Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of

Canada, released his cry of protest at

Davos against regime. He also reached

back to an older age to describe what he

saw happening.

>> The strong can do what they can and the

weak must suffer

what they must.

And this aphorism of Thucydides is

presented as inevitable.

As the natural logic of international

relations reasserting itself.

>> Is this the way

you build a prosperous

strong secure world?

When Nolan's Odysseus recalls sacking of

Troy, he blanches at the memory of 10

years of rage and fury pouring into a

city in a single night.

Sitting in that theater,

I found it hard not to think of the

built-up rage that Hamas poured into

Israel on October 7th

and then Israel's poured into Gaza a

hundredfold since.

Benjamin Netanyahu has described

Israel's future as Athens and Super

Sparta.

Athens and [music] Super Sparta.

Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli born

historian who wrote Sapiens, sees the

irony of this clearly.

>> Rome has its its its

usefulness.

But

if after 2,000 years the Jews simply

become the Romans, what was the point?

[music]

Why did you waste 2,000 years then?

You could have just become Roman back

then.

>> And this, [music] I think, is Nolan's

finest trick.

To make one of our oldest moral rules so

new again.

To turn the best of Judeo-Christianity

into the law of Zeus

so we can see why it might matter,

what it might still have to say to us.

What Odysseus sees eventually is that

his violations of the moral order have

brought ruin to all around him.

Agamemnon, the king who launched the war

against Troy, is dead. His throat slit

by his wife,

who never forgave him for sacrificing

their daughter for fair winds.

Troy is destroyed. Ithaca, Odysseus's

beloved home, is overrun by suitors who

seek his wife and his land

and think nothing of murdering his son

to get it.

Odysseus and his men were not fighting

the barbarians. They were the

barbarians, and their actions led to

more barbarity.

So, too, has the political movement in

our time that rose promising to make

Western civilization great again,

America great again,

betrayed its inheritance.

>> You're gambling with World War III. And

what you're doing is very disre-

disrespectful to the country, this

country.

>> The world looks at America now and sees

us as the barbarians.

We are the country obliterating the

global order. We are the country

that takes what we want and demands

tribute from those without the strength

to resist. And what

>> [music]

>> the political opposition has to do now

is to recognize

what Nolan recognized,

that it is actually an affirmation of

our core values to say cruelty is

weakness.

It is only compassion and reciprocity

that can build a durable and decent

society.

Order is necessary, but order without

[music] ethics and decency

is perversion

or authoritarianism.

There [music] is so much beauty and

wisdom

in the injunction to avoid inflicting on

others

what we would not see turned against us,

in remembering [music]

that we were strangers in the land of

Egypt.

At the end of his book,

Hyde considers when does a trickster's

tale end in ruin,

and when does it end in regeneration?

And his answer is when you cannot rejoin

the worlds.

Loki is bound beneath the earth, poison

dripped on him for an eternity.

And eventually Armageddon

is result. Ruin.

Hermes [music] in Greek mythology

becomes the connector between our world

and the underworld.

He is one who guides Persephone and

spring to return each year.

It is only when severed worlds can be

bonded

the cultures can rediscover

their strength.

I don't want [music] to make this too

didactic here at the end. So I'll just

say this.

Justice and progress in America have

come repeatedly [music]

when those seeking it realize that the

language of the Torah

of the Bible and of the Declaration of

Independence

>> [music]

>> can be wielded on behalf of a better

world. That they are agents for change,

not for the status quo.

I would say it has been some time

[music] since religion and liberalism

and patriotism had a comfortable

relationship in this [music] country.

Since they were tightly bonded. But the

shape of the modern right

>> [music]

>> has created space to do that work again.

Regeneration is hard.

It requires seeing old values in new

[music] ways.

It requires recognizing a moral

inheritance

that has collapsed into cliche can still

hold power in an age [music] when it has

been debased and forgotten.

No one's Odysseus is not a trickster.

He's a man living [music] in the ruins

brought about by tricksters.

So too are we. This movie, the hunger

for it

I think is a sign that the age of the

trickster is ending.

That is not what we need now. Now we

need those who would remake [music] this

world.

>> [music]