The Odyssey and the Fall of Man

 

Over my trip back to the East Coast, I went to see Christopher Nolan's Odyssey with my friend, Lionel Spiegel. For a film about Greek mythology, it is remarkably biblical. This should not surprise readers of classical literature as there is a long-running tradition of reading Greek mythology in Christian terms. This is important for understanding C. S. Lewis' project, made quite explicit in Till We Have Faces. Lewis was a Christianized pagan, who saw mythology as an essential part of the Christian story. Whether Nolan is a Christian or a post-Christian, telling a Christian story that he no longer personally believes in, is difficult to determine and irrelevant for our purposes. We can ask similar questions about J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter or Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. In both cases, regardless of the authors' personal beliefs, these are deeply Christian stories. 

Like The Passion of the Christ, The Odyssey is an incredibly violent film, beyond conventional R-rated action movies. This is violence meant to make viewers uncomfortable, but this does not mean that the violence is gratuitous; on the contrary, it is meant to horrify the viewer and make them feel as if they are the ones committing the violence. In the case of The Passion, we are meant to be aghast at the death of Jesus but also at the sin that made his death necessary. We are meant to feel that we are the Roman soldiers beating Jesus and putting nails into his hands. 

The Odyssey can be read as a retelling of the Fall of Man in Genesis. Odysseus is an Augustinian villain. For Augustine, Adam and Eve seem like innocent children who ignored a seemingly pointless command. In truth, they consciously chose to rebel against God, despite God giving them everything, and tainted the entire world, including their descendants, with sin. Similarly, we like Odysseus as a person; he is a good husband, father, and king to his people. Because of this, we are inclined to minimize the nature of his sin. He was forced to go to war, but he figured out a way to eventually bring it to an end. In reality, he chose to ally himself with Agamemnon, a man who murdered his own daughter and put her spine on his helmet. In service to this satanic being, Odysseus spends ten years raiding the Eastern Mediterranean around Troy before putting the entire city to the sword. This destroyed the entire network of trade that his Bronze Age civilization relied upon.  

On top of the physical crime is the spiritual crime. Odysseus violated the "Law of Zeus" to treat strangers as if they might be gods. The Trojan Horse is an act of religious sacrilege. Odysseus relied on the fact that the Trojans would not reject something that had been sanctified as a gift for Athena and not examine it too closely. Here is where the subplot with Sinon becomes important. Sinon, the innocent kid who should never have been sent to war in the first place, revered the gods and trusted in Odysseus' decency. Odysseus used that innocence to manipulate him and ultimately fool the Trojans. In Nolan's telling, Sinon is not a trickster. He honestly believes that the horse is an offering to the gods. The Trojans believe him, because he is so clearly genuine. 

The publicity of this trick through bards telling the story, as we see in the beginning of the film, is now destroying belief in the gods in a Nietzschean "God is dead" sense. Just as modernity robs people of the ability to truly believe, even as they still go through the motions of religion, the Trojan Horse story is making it impossible to truly revere the gods as beings that one could never contemplate blaspheming. Note that Nolan, unlike Homer, never gives the gods the opportunity to punish the Greeks and reaffirm their power. For Nolan, bad things happen to the Greeks; what else can you expect from a world in which people have not only lost their material prosperity, but also the reverence for the gods that made their lives meaningful?  

Our willingness to identify with Odysseus comes to work against us as the true extent of his crimes is slowly revealed and the excuses that we have been making for him are stripped away. By the end of the film, we have become complicit in Odysseus' bloody deeds and his actions become ours. We are good people who would never hack apart an unarmed woman. The fact that our world seems to be falling apart cannot be our fault. What if we are wrong; what if we are the barbarians who have irrevocably torn down the material and spiritual foundations of our civilization? 

Odysseus can be thought of as Cain. There are two sides to Cain's character. He is a murderer who kills his own brother out of simple jealousy. On the other hand, perhaps because of the extraordinary nature of his crime, Cain is the first person to repent, declaring: "my sin is too great to bear." (Genesis 4:13) By contrast, we never hear Adam or Eve repent, but only their excuses. Despite this repentance, Cain is never allowed to find redemption, but is forced to wander the world until he is killed by his own descendant.  

In the traditional version of the story, Odysseus is forced to wander the ocean and is kept from returning home for ten years because he blinded the son of Poseidon, the cyclops Polyphemus. In Nolan's retelling, Odysseus is someone overwhelmed by the enormity of the crime that he knows he is guilty of. As with Dr. Ernst Janning in Judgment at Nuremberg, it is a fair question whether his awareness serves to justify forgiving him or if it makes his actions worse. One can argue that Odysseus, as the Greek leader who was not a moral monster, had a special responsibility for not stopping the Trojan War and bears ultimate guilt for the destruction of Troy. 

Overwhelmed by guilt, Odysseus is fed the lotus by Calypso to cause him to forget what he had done. As such, leaving Calypso, instead of being about the gods deciding to release Odysseus, becomes about Odysseus being willing to face his actions. For such a crime, there can be no atonement. Odysseus returning home does not rectify his actions. On the contrary, he allows himself to sink even further into blood by murdering the suitors. Here Odysseus becomes a scapegoat. He performs the sin, knowing that his soul is already damned beyond salvation so that his son, Telemachus, can rule untainted. In the end, like Cain, Odysseus goes into exile, though, in his case, he does get to take Penelope with him.   

Odysseus attempting to protect Telemachus is an interesting play on Machiavelli's essential dilemma. Every dynasty was founded on a crime at some point in the past. The advantage of established kingdoms is that they can pretend to be innocent even though their rule is ultimately just as tainted as the person who seizes power and personally has people killed. In the case of Telemachus, it is hardly clear that the families of the dead suitors really hold him blameless. Regardless of whether or not he personally fought, Telemachus' reign is still founded upon the violence of Odysseus and bears the stain of his sins. 

Nolan leaves us with an irredeemable world where individual heroism is incapable of holding up a civilization once the pillars have been brought down. Without a shared reverence for the gods to guarantee hospitality to strangers, there can be no trade. This is a culture that must now be allowed to collapse into a dark age, even to the point of losing writing, in the hope that a better one might one day arise. 

Judgment at Nuremberg: Where Are the Jews?

In an earlier post, I discussed Holocaust memory in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. I made the argument that, before the 1970s, popular culture cared little about the Holocaust. A useful example of this is the film Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), which can be seen as an example of the exception that proves the rule. The film deals with a fictionalized version of one of the later Nuremberg trials for judges. Spencer Tracy plays an American judge having to confront the question of the role of ordinary Germans in the crimes of the Nazis. 

 

For all of the film's excellent qualities, it is strange to watch Judgment at Nuremberg and see that it is not about the Jewish wartime experience. Jewish actors, such as a pre-Star Trek William Shatner and Werner Klemperer, are in the film. The Holocaust is discussed, including groundbreaking use of concentration camp footage. The film deserves a lot of credit for making it possible to produce Holocaust movies that centered the Jewish experience, but that is not the purpose of the film. 

Consider one of the key scenes in the film. Judy Garland plays a German woman, Irene Hoffman, who, as a teenager, went to prison for denying that she had a sexual relationship with a close family friend who was Jewish. She is brought in to testify because the judge in that case, Dr. Ernst Janning, is now on trial. Janning is an interesting character because he clearly recognizes his own guilt. This raises the question of whether is awareness makes him more sympathetic or not. He understood exactly what he was doing and the enormity of his crime, but did it anyway. That being said, Janning is not the villain of the film. Instead you have his defense attorney, Hans Rolfe, who uses the trial as a platform to defend German culture.  

I would consider this scene one of the finest courtroom dialogues in the history of film, right next to the "you can't handle the truth" scene in A Few Good Men. Garland was nominated for Best Supporting Actress and Maximilian Schell, who played Rolfe, won Best Actor. That being said, in a plotline about the Nazi persecution of Jews, we do not actually have any Jews. The Jewish friend is dead so he cannot be brought in to testify. Instead, we have the decent German woman who has to testify in his place. In essence, a story about Jewish victimhood becomes a story of Germans being victimized by the Nazis. 

Judgment at Nuremberg is a fantastic film that did a lot to advance the notion that Nazi Germany was such an evil that ordinary Germans became complicit in it simply by not having actively opposed it. By contrast, we do not blame ordinary Japanese people for the crimes of Imperial Japan. Similarly, today, we do not blame the ordinary Russian or North Korean for the crimes of their governments. We recognize that such people cannot be held responsible for the leaders who took charge and we excuse them for simply trying to get on with their lives. We may even be inclined to give a pass to people who may have been active supporters of these governments because they believed that they did not have any better options. This raises the question of why we treat Germans differently. 

Part of what makes Rolfe such a fantastic villain is that on the surface he appears very reasonable. He argues that we need to distinguish between the genuine monsters of Nazi Germany and respectable people, like his client, who did the best they could under difficult circumstances. What he does, though, to Garland's character is to essentially put her back on trial, turning himself into her prosecutor. She may have hoped to find peace by being able to finally turn the tables on those who put her in prison, only to find the tables being turned right back again. Rolfe's defense of his client essentially amounts to saying that she really was guilty, as if prosecuting people who actually violated Nazi laws made someone less of a Nazi collaborator. 

The message here is that, despite the optics of Germany losing the war and being occupied by the Allies, the "real" Germany is going to survive and be back in charge in a few years. She was found guilty previously and she will be found guilty again, along with the further crime of aiding the persecutors of Germany. 

There is another scene where the defense attorney does something similar to a German victim of Nazi sterilization policy.

           

The film is certainly willing to deal with Nazi crimes in ways that would make viewers uncomfortable. That being said, this is not a movie about Jews. This is a film about Nazi Germany being so evil that ordinary Germans became tainted by association even as many Germans are recognized also as the victims of the Nazis. This served an important purpose at that time to forever taint Nazism and make its resurgence impossible. 

Keep in mind that it was hardly implausible, in the years immediately after the War, to imagine the Nazis and their enablers in Germany coming back to power once the Allied occupation ended. After the American Civil War, Union Soldiers occupied the South for more than a decade, but then went home, leaving the South in the hands of former secessionists. Since the South was never forced to truly acknowledge either the crimes of treason or of slavery, secessionists were able to take power under the banner of the Lost Cause that made themselves the victims and cast Northerners and blacks as the villains.  

In many respects, Judgment at Nuremberg is a fairly conservative film. It is a story of an American judge passing judgement on a corrupt German society who deserved to be bombed and conquered. Commemorating Jewish suffering had little to do with the film's aims. There is a certain irony here in that the film, in 1965, accidently played a role in the Civil Rights Movement when the film's showing on television was interrupted to show the Bloody Sunday attack on the Selma marchers.  

A film whose purpose was to exalt American righteousness at the expense of ordinary Germans now came to question that very American righteousness. If ordinary Germans could be held accountable for the Holocaust, why not hold ordinary Americans accountable for the crimes of segregation? Ordinary Germans at least had the excuse of Nazi crimes not being broadcast on television. Ordinary Americans had no such excuse. 

Was Charlie Kirk Murdered?

 

In writing my previous post, I asked Gemini to take a look to see if it could spot any mistakes. Among the things it pointed out was that I was incorrect in thinking that Charlie Kirk was murdered. 

To be fair, Gemini backed down on its claim when I challenged it. That being said, the fact that such a mistake like this could happen is cause for concern. 

I understand that Gemini is imperfect and that it is necessary to not take everything it says at face value, but this is frankly dangerous. We are dealing with one of the key political events of the past year, something whose consequences are going to be felt for years. On top of that, there are all kinds of conspiracy theories floating about. If I were Candace Owens and I saw this response from Gemini, I would certainly start "just asking questions" and "wondering" if, perhaps, Charlie Kirk was not really killed at all. Maybe, he is being held in a Mossad facility in order to brainwash him into helping them recruit teenage girls for Jewish Zionist Frankist Satanic orgies on Epstein Island.

Clearly, it is of the utmost importance that we can trust the information that we have. We need a stable set of facts to work from so that we can then offer some kind of interpretation and reach an understanding as to what Charlie Kirk's death means. By contrast, there would be little at stake if Gemini failed to realize that Sam Neill was dead. I am sure that he was a wonderful person and he was certainly a gifted actor. I will always maintain fond memories of his roles in Hunt for Red October and Jurassic Park. His death is presumably a tragedy for his family and they probably miss him greatly. That being said, the survival of this country does not depend on getting his death right. If you have never heard of Sam Neill or were unaware of his passing, I will not think any the less of you.   

You want 1984? AI already has us on almost constant surveillance in ways that go beyond telescreens. Now, it can also literally rewrite history. I am a simple person with a faulty memory and all kinds of biases. I never met Charlie Kirk and I was certainly not present for his assassination. I know about the same way I know the rest of the news, I read mainstream news outlets and assume that the basic outline of facts that I am given is mostly correct. If someone engineers Gemini to tell me that Charlie Kirk was not really murdered and that I am confusing this with something else as part of their plan to redesign the country, who am I to disagree. Individual human knowledge is deeply limited. We must rely on institutional knowledge such as written history. What happens, though, when those very same institutions are weaponized against us?