Christopher Nolan Stared Into Elon Musk’s Soul

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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.
Elon Musk did not understand this movie at all. But this movie sure understood who Elon Musk is, who Donald Trump is, who we have become. And I really believe that it points a way out. Tricks are central to The Odyssey. Odysseus is, in myth, a trickster. He is described in that famed first line of the story as the man of many ways, or of many wiles, or of many turns. He is, depending on the translation you read, an ingenious man, a cunning man, a complicated man, a man who yearns for his wife, but can't seem to stop betting goddesses. Odysseus is a man of appetites and contradictions, a man who wants nothing more than to go home but chooses again and again to stay abroad. Odysseus is never one thing. 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 outcry over casting Lepeda and Yongo 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 Odysseus is something else, and that I think you can say was Nolan's first trick.
I spent a few years now quietly obsessed with the archetype of the trickster. 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 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.
This is the tension. Too much order leads to paralysis. Too much chaos invites collapse.
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 tricksy. What is serious and what is not? What is a provocation and what is actually a promise? Why did they say that and how did they get away with it? I'm not saying these men are only tricksters, but I am saying, I am saying, that the dominant personalities of the age have gathered power by bulldozing customs and taboos, by saying what cannot be said, by doing what should not be done.
Hyde said that Americans 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 year 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, there is little that can no longer be said.