#111: The Odyssey was made for our nation of idiots
Christopher Nolan thinks we're all dumb. And he's right!!!!
Every week I try to not start one of these emails with an update on the weather, and then BAM: NYC is under a tornado watch. It’s like Zeus is daring me to ignore him (I got very Zeus-pilled at The Odyssey this weekend — more on that below). So, I’m writing to you while crouched in a stairwell, covering my head like we did in elementary school tornado drills, while my neighbors look at me, confused, as they head out to their dinner reservations. Once again I am realizing I’m a meteorologist trapped in a civilian’s body, and I can’t help but to be continually monitoring the weather situation at all times. Stay safe out there!!!!
This week: I thrilled at The Odyssey bringing woke back, I loved my favorite historian begging for more Odysseus sex scenes, I bought a new shirt that’s getting me a lot of attention, I watched two kind of stupid movies, and I was triggered by a novel about a guy who hates his job (which happens to also be my job).
The Odyssey (2026) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park
The primary audience for a Christopher Nolan film is dorks and virgins. The types of people who famously love to get extremely loud and mad online about two primary topics: Black people and/or women in movies, and “historical inaccuracy.” Which makes The Odyssey a great, big, glorious fuck you to his incel nerd fanbase, who spent the past year spiraling about Lupita’s casting as Helen of Troy, or Anne Hathaway’s botox (which looked fine, for the record! Her forehead moved!), or the fact that the men are wearing Roman leather skirts, rather than dressing like a gigantic dildo, which would have been historically accurate.
As an — ahem — former ancient history major, I would be remiss if I didn’t call out the incongruities in the film. For one, and probably most egregiously, the gods are almost completely absent from this version of The Odyssey. Rather than the playful, sexual, meddling gods of Ancient Greece, the only on-screen representation we get is a sad-eyed Zendaya playing Athena. Even weirder, nearly everyone speaks in a neutral American accent, even the Brits. And, yes, a lot of the dialogue is borderline embarrassing: every time Tom Holland’s Telemachus yells, “Dad!” a historian has an aneurysm. Even worse, the dialogue repeatedly hits us over the head with the film’s themes. If I have to hear the phrase “Zeus’s law” one more time I will personally kill the next person to visit my home, and my jaw dropped at the way we’re informed this film is set at the end of the Bronze Age: someone just literally says, “Our age of bronze is ending”………… k.
I can’t fight any of these complaints; they’re all valid. And yet — I don’t care! The Odyssey is such an enormous, thrilling spectacle that I simply didn’t care about any of the issues throughout. Not only that, I found myself rationalizing the issues. Their accents are American, and the dialogue is so obvious, because Christopher Nolan knows we are a nation of IDIOTS, so if he wanted his message to get across, he was going to have to hit us over the head with it. And he was right to do so! We Americans are dumb as shit; we have earned the contempt of the artists we worship. Everyone in The Odyssey is a half-second away from looking directly at the IMAX camera and saying, “This movie is about xenophobia, and how the erosion of norms leads to cultural collapse,” and if that’s the price we have to pay to make sure none of those groyper soyboys can willfully misinterpret the film’s success for their own evil purposes, then SO BE IT.
Dumbed down or not, it’s genuinely heartening to see an ancient piece of literature turned into what will likely be the biggest movie of the year. Disney’s weird live-action Moana remake already flopped, and even the Marvel bros seem exhausted by the same old bullshit in the new Avengers trailer that just came out. Which means: we’re entering the era of ancient blockbusters! Obviously, we’ll need an Iliad adaptation, and since this movie already introduced us to Agamemnon, why not adapt the Oresteia into a trilogy? And there’s no need to stop there — give us an adaptation of Dante’s Divine Comedy! Adapt some of Ovid’s weird-ass poems! I bet some Gen Z lesbian out there is dying to somehow adapt the poetry of Sappho for the big screen! I’ll take a Canterbury Tales HBOMax series, too! If Hollywood truly has any juice left in it to squeeze, there’s a bidding war on right now for the rights to that carbonized scroll from Pompeii they just managed to decipher.
After the excruciating hell of FLOPPENHEIMER, I was just so happy to have an exciting Christopher Nolan film again. It’s 3 hours long, and yet I truly could have gone for another hour at least! I was so engrossed, my body completely forgot it even had a bladder. This movie is a victory for so many of us: ancient history freaks, anti-Marvel radicals, Samantha Morton stans, IMAX corporate executives. This is the first real sign that woke is back. Christopher Nolan….. welcome to the resistance. The more money The Odyssey makes, the more confidence I have that JD Vance’s days in public office are numbered.
And finally, this has nothing to do with the actual film, but our theatrical experience was bookended by two extremely New York moments, which I would like to tell you about:
Before the movie we grabbed a drink outside, and our conversation was interrupted by a bald man driving a Corvette, which he absolutely screeched to a halt next to us, stopping all traffic behind him. He pointed his finger at us and aggressively yelled, “You ready? You ready?!” Before we had time to ask, “Ready for what?” or to grab a weapon, the man cranked the stereo on his car to blast the chorus of………. the 1961 classic “Runaround Sue”. He started singing along and all of us patrons were immediately swept up in it and sang along too. For the entirety of the song! Have you ever seen such a thing? A full bar patio having an impromptu singalong forced by a bald man in a Corvette? As the song faded away the man turned the radio down, yelled, “You see? You had a thousand things on your mind, but I bet none of them were Runaround Sue!” and sped off into the evening. A blessing!
And after the movie, in a more grotesque display of only-in-New-York: Justin and I were biking home, when without warning a gigantic rat darted out of a trash bag on the curb. With Justin biking a couple feet ahead of me, I had a front row seat to what happened next. The rat sprinted head-first directly into the rim of Justin’s wheel, narrowly missing being crushed to death by a matter of millimeters. Upon impact it did a full somersault, SQUEAKED, and then turned and sprinted back into the garbage bag, as if embarrassed. I have never seen anything like it, nor I will never forget the sight as long as I live. What a city! What a film! We are all so lucky to be alive!
“Mary Beard on The Odyssey” — in The Times
Words can’t describe how much I love Mary Beard, THE head bitch of all ancient historians, so post-Odyssey I am absolutely thrilled that she’s been on a mini media blitz talking about it (in addition to the article above, she also made a fun Guardian podcast appearance!). Even better, she seems to have liked the movie, but has one major complaint: WHY ISN’T IT SEXY? As she writes:
Overall, the erotic dimension of the poem, and its nuances, is consistently underplayed. We are not encouraged to follow Homer and to wonder quite how emotionally faithful to Penelope Odysseus really is. And while Nolan’s Circe (Samantha Morton, on great form) is a tremendous force of nature, the film has managed to obscure the sex in her relationship with Odysseus far more effectively than my teacher did. Homer’s Circe, as I realised years ago even as I struggled with the Greek, is a sexual rival to Penelope back in Ithaca, not the well-scrubbed near-parody of a 1970s feminist of this movie version. This is an Odyssey without the sex.
This is why I will travel across the sea and murder hundreds of men for Mary Beard, if she asked me to do so — she’s not whining about historical inaccuracies (in fact, she says she likes that Telemachus calls Odysseus “Dad!” though she admits she’s probably alone in that). She just wants Odysseus to fuck!
A T-shirt featuring Carmela Soprano — from the HBO shop
The hottest store in town, it turns out, is the HBO MERCH SHOP. I discovered it (I’m using “discovered” here in the Christopher Columbus sense, to mean “learned about its longtime existence and am now taking credit for it”) after my friend Zoe texted that she saw someone wearing a hat with the logo for SternTao, the disastrous hedge fund at the center of the latest season of Industry (is it a hedge fund??? I still don’t even know what a hedge fund is, actually, and I don’t want to know). When I googled the hat and stumbled onto the HBO Shop, I felt like Aladdin going into that bigass tiger mouth in the desert.
I mean, just look at all these hidden treasures!
I’m too Millennial to wear a bucket hat, but this is the first time I’ve considered it:
The “I’m a Charlotte!” mug is practically being given away for free at this point :(
Sorry, babe, the Real Time with Bill Maher shirt stays ON:
I won’t tell you I’m having a mental breakdown but there WILL be signs:
Okay, but I literally, actually DID buy this sweatshirt featuring the logo of Valerie Cherish’s AI-written sitcom on the last season of The Comeback, and I am very very excited for my first chance to wear it:
But my favorite purchase was THIS GORGEOUS CARMELA SOPRANO SHIRT:
Can you even imagine a better shirt? You can’t! It’s perfect. It features not one, not two, but three photos of Carmela, with two of them seemingly chosen at random. It wisely emphasizes “Carmela,” while de-emphasizing her husband’s last name Soprano, because it is a FEMINIST shirt. It hides the HBO logo inside the shirt, because it’s tasteful and anticapitalist. And it is the perfect conversation starter, because even if you don’t know who Carmela Soprano is, it helpfully gives you FOUR WHOLE PARAGRAPHS OF BACKSTORY, including updates on the spec house she’s building!!!!!!
I was so pleased with this shirt I wore it out the very day after it arrived, and I was even more pleased to discover that the people LOVE this shirt. I had two separate people on the subway remove their headphones and signal me to remove mine so that they could tell me they loved my shirt. Can you imagine??? This shirt has already earned me two new friends! This shirt is creating COMMUNITY. And there were at least a few other people who I noticed on the sidewalk who glanced down at it, and then glanced up at me and smiled. Smiled! Passing on the street! In New York City! I felt like fucking Zohran Mamdani!!!!
This is exactly what corporations should be doing, and why I have been an HBO girly since I was in the womb. Instead of giving us AI slop, they’re giving us thoughtful, hand-crafted merch (made in beautiful Nicaragua! Where I’m sure everyone is paid very well and treated ethically??? Best not to ask).
Anyway, I wrote all this while snuggled under the LARRY DAVID EXTREME CLOSE-UP BLANKET:
The Fall (2006) — on Mubi
I’ve been meaning to watch The Fall for a while now, because every shot I’ve seen from it is absolutely gorgeous, and also Lee Pace is in it, who is absolutely gorgeous. But I didn’t expect this movie to be annoying as shit!!!!! In the film, Lee Pace’s character is a stuntman in the 1920s recovering in the hospital, who tells a little girl who’s also in the hospital a fantastical story, which plays out across some truly stunning sequences of incredible colors and location scouting. Unfortunately, the little girl is one of the most obnoxious children ever put on screen, and her incessant questions and pestering of Lee Pace throughout the story began to send me into a blind rage. The Fall is an incredible visual achievement, and a movie that should be watched on mute.
The Long Walk (2025) — on HBOMax
Bleak, bleak, bleak! I missed this movie when it was in theaters, and I feel like it was the correct decision, because this was not a fun ride. I was surprised by how much of this movie revolved around… the logistics of shitting? I guess that would be a big problem, if you were forced to walk endlessly at a certain pace, but considering this is a fictional problem we’re creating, I don’t know if we needed to get this in the weeds of how and where these boys were shitting! It’s like… we didn’t sit and watch Katniss dig a fucking hole in the woods in the middle of the Hunger Games, you know? It’s fine! We can fill in the blanks. Anyway, I love the two main boys — the guy from Industry season 1 and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son, though I suspect they both have names of their own — and think they have bright careers ahead of them, hopefully in movies with fewer shots of literal shit falling out of literal assholes.
The Copywriter, by Daniel Poppick (2026) — library ebook
I’ve grown tired of metafiction, so I was wary of even picking this up, but it got good reviews, and is about a copywriter whose name is presumably Daniel (it’s stylized “D_____” but we can literally fill in the blanks), and I have, in my lifetime, been a copywriter named Daniel so… I simply had to. And it is a clever little book about The Way Some Of Us Live Now, but I think it’s safe to say that most metafiction is not for me. The main character — so presumably the author as well — is a poet, so of course I was put in mind of Ben Lerner, the king of poets who became metafiction authors, and then was equally satisfied and irritated when the main character in this book points out that he’s kind of copying Ben Lerner. It’s meta on meta on meta. Where does it end!!!
Similarly, the observations about modern life are sometimes brilliant, sometimes irritating. At one point a character asks another, “Is your cocaine gluten free?” and my eyes did a full 360. But then there’d be a little section like the excerpt below, in which he perfectly captures the absurdity of doing our stupid pointless little jobs in the midst of all this hell:
Scrolling through the news on my laptop at the office, I read that a woman has been killed in the street by a white nationalist in Virginia—she’d been there protesting a mass gathering of torch-bearing Klansmen and neo-Nazis heartened by the rise of our fascist president, who goes on to lament that an event attended by “many fine people on both sides” was spoiled by this unfortunate incident.
A shiver slides through me—a feeling not quite rage, but just parallel to rage. Then, from a different part of my screen, I receive an email notification requesting a product description for an LED light box emblazoned with the phrase NAMASTE IN BED.
It really WAS like that! But: do I need to relive it? I mean, I literally was a copywriter (named D_____!) when Charlottesville happened, and now I’m reading a book about it, which feels like the most pointless form of masturbation ever invented. So, I didn’t love this, but I also recognize that’s a me problem. Sorry to D____!