Helen was just a pretext – a critique of Western militarism in Nolan's OdysseyBy Piyama RaduAs anyone can see, the film directed by Nolan has nothing of the spirit of Homer's work. Starting with Christian guilt, totally absent in the Homeric poem. The gods are also absent, and the fantastic creatures seem to be merely a product of Odysseus's imagination.In fact, Nolan's Odyssey uses the mask of the Odyssey to talk about how Western militarism is throwing the world into the abyss.Helen was just a pretext – The real motives for the war.From the beginning, the film makes it clear: Helen only has peripheral relevance to the war. Yes, Paris kidnapped her from the Spartan royal house. But Nolan's Odysseus realizes that Agamemnon only uses her as a pretext. In reality, everything revolves around the wealth of Troy and its trade routes. Helen provides the moral justification for a war of plunder.Does this sound familiar? Of course! States like to morally justify their wars. But the real reasons for war are usually different.Nolan's film deals precisely with this hypocrisy. It shows what is lost when agreements and rules are just words.The film centers on a concept that Nolan calls the "Law of Zeus": the right of hospitality, the xenia of Homer's work. The idea is: whoever knocks on your door receives food and protection. It doesn't matter who it is. Because any stranger could be a god in disguise.In Nolan's film, the sacred and inviolable law of Greek civilization is the right of hospitality. For, in a world of scattered islands, without central power and without police, this law is the only thing that prevents strangers from killing each other.
The right of hospitality can be interpreted as a set of rules governing relations between strangers – so that the law of the strongest does not prevail, but rather common rules. Whoever violates it does not merely violate a norm. They destroy the entire rule-based order.But it is the Greeks themselves who break this right of hospitality with the Trojan Horse. In Nolan's Odyssey, it is not a brilliant trick. A trick, but a perversion of hospitality.Odysseus transforms a gift – the most sacred act of his culture – into a weapon. The Trojans accept the horse because their rules demand it. And it is precisely this that seals their fate.What follows is a massacre. The Greeks sack and destroy an entire city. Later, Odysseus says about this violation of the taboo that the Greeks committed: "everything that was once sacred among people has been violated."He realizes that, with this trick, he won a war, but poisoned an entire civilization in the process. Because he showed that rules are worthless. These [barriers] can be broken if you are strong enough.And force and violence as the pillars upon which politics must rest is the very structure of fascism.The coldness of this trick is demonstrated by the figure of Sinon, played by Elliot Page. This character, as the one who delivers the horse to the Trojans, is not present in Homer's Odyssey, but rather in Virgil's Aeneid.However, while in Virgil's work Sinon knows it is a trick by the Achaeans to win the war and lies about having been mistreated and abandoned by his companions, in the Nolanseia, the common soldier delivers the horse to the Trojans believing it to be a genuine gift.To him, the Achaeans told the same lie they told the enemy so that the poor soldier would sell it in a more credible way.Sinon dies believing he is on the side of the righteous. Thus, the Achaeans lie not only to their enemies, but also to their own people.
tldr
At the beginning of the film, a threat is mentioned, causing fear in everyone: the Sea Peoples. Marauding bands that attack coastal cities. No one knows who they are. Telemachus dismisses them as sailors' tales, while Sparta arms itself against them.Soon after their first stop after Troy, as in Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus' men sack a defenseless village. The village elders consider them Sea Peoples.Eurylochus, Odysseus' second-in-command, dismisses this observation from the elders with disdain: we are Greeks, not barbarians, not Sea Peoples. He could also have said: We are the West. We are the good guys.What men truly are, only one character in the film speaks openly about: the sorceress Circe.She transforms the soldiers into pigs for their war crimes. "Do you think your orders would have changed their nature?" she asks Odysseus. "They have always been pigs."At the end of the film, it is revealed that there is no alien power. The Sea Peoples are the Greek soldiers themselves, who roam the Mediterranean after the fall of Troy, unleashing violence there.They are the ones everyone fears. In the film's crucial scene, Odysseus, disguised as a foreigner, sits before Penelope and must admit this bitter truth to himself. "To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the whole world," he says.The so-called West has also been telling itself the story of its own civilization as a model of moral progress for decades – and, in doing so, ignores how often it has broken the very rules it claims to uphold.The list of war crimes and violations of international law by the US and its Western allies is long.
Are the gods merely a hallucination? – Athena as Odysseus's guilty conscience.Throughout the film, Odysseus seems to already have a vague idea of his atrocities. This is personified by Athena, the goddess of wisdom, played by Zendaya. She accompanies Odysseus throughout the film – silently observing, sometimes with disapproval. In doing so, Athena could also be just a hallucination of Odysseus.Because, near the end, we see the murder of a priestess in Troy in a flashback. She is also played by Zendaya. What Odysseus thought was divine help for years may be the memory of a murdered woman. His guilty conscience, haunting him disguised as a goddess. Matt Damon describes the character in an interview as: "She is the result of what he did and lives in his mind, as his conscience."Obviously, this concept of internal guilt does not exist in Homer's work, because, in the epic poem, the highest value is honor and how to maintain it.We can point out that, unlike the Iliad, where the pursuit of glory is paramount, in the Odyssey, Achilles laments in the underworld for having died so young in pursuit of it. We see Ajax driven mad by not having obtained the weapons of Achilles and other fallen heroes.But there is no guilt in the characters' consciences.In any case, anyone watching the film – while the West once again bombs a foreign country, supplies weapons to the entire world, and debates the legitimacy of its wars – will find it difficult to shake off one question: What if the barbarians that Westerners fear are themselves?
>>223429583I read all of this
Take your meds schizo
>>223430264Vai chupar um pinto. Olavista
