christopher nolan's odyssey comes down HARD against war crimes
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i'm not even saying as like a technicality there is no ambiguity whatsoever about how the trojan horse contravened a higher law than war
@hipsterelectron you know, the ancient literature nerd in me was annoyed by the fact that it missed quite a few marks in the original story, but I have to salute how principled and powerful it was in its reframing. for the record though, the original is just as powerful with respect to investigating cruelty and its consequences. there's a reason it's so timeless.
@somebody what's your favorite example of this from homer
@hipsterelectron I'm going to have to go with the classic moment, the blinding of Polyphemus. Polyphemus is a mythical giant and cares little for humans, and eats a few of Odysseus's men. It seems justified that they should kill him or do anything necessary to escape. But what Odysseus does is at first cowardly and cruel, and then prideful and boastful, having the aspect of what Melanie Klein (a very good psychoanalyst) would call contempt and triumph, qua the manic defenses.
He tricks Polyphemus in to getting blackout drunk, then he and his men drive a hot poker into his eye, blinding him. To add insult to injury, he reveals his true name to the giant, boasting "I did this to you and hear this is my name!" Before this, he'd said his name was "nobody", to protect himself (because, in the Greek civic and religious schematic, much like ours, knowing a person's name gives you the power to affect their legal person), but he decided "I'm so much better than you that I don't need protection from your crippled ass" basically.
Of course, Polyphemus, now knowing his name, pled for the gods to retaliate on his behalf, so even though Odysseus was able to escape with his men, this brought a terrible curse on them. The reason I like this so much is because it directly connects pathological contempt with not only hubris, but also shows how it connects and completes the cycle of violence. "And I'm not sorry!" While they were treated as food, an animal need, they treated him with hatred, and that hatred, being abstract had the memetic power to reproduce itself as a neverending cycle of further violence. This haunts him and his men for the rest of the story!
@hipsterelectron One detail of this that resonates with me really intensely is that relationship between legal names and harm qua the violence of the society or the state being sussed out and examined. Because Polyphemus was given the name "nobody" initially, when he was being stabbed in the eye, he cries out "nobody is killing me!" Nobody is killing me! Lord that line gives me chills. The meaning in that!
@hipsterelectron Now that I'm really thinking about it, I think the thing that makes me love the original's pacing and framing of things is that, the modern theatrical adaptations focus far more on the grand scale of violence at the civilizational level for the most part, or the major events, and to an extent, there is an at least implicit formulation of the great man hypothesis in that. In some sense, this is kind of necessary for a screen adaptation, because it is such a long text. But the thing that I think makes the writing so special is the way it fixates and ruminates on the individual moments of despair, greed, contempt, and hate, but they do so in a way that deliberately avoids being obvious before the fact about the total global impact of these moments.
This is essential in my view, because it encodes the way we never know the true scale of the consequences until it is far too late, like campers abandoning a single ember without stamping it out. It shows how in every moment of meanness and spite we build that violent and heartless world, a single misdeed and reactionary impulse at a time, without ever really knowing the complete wicked design into which we are duped.
This resonates strongly with the Greek mythology of their pagan gods, and it's a credit to their collective philosophical and theosophical approach. Their gods are as facets of the human follies, each representing some particular configuration of excess, contempt, despair, triumph, conceit, and so on. All the infantile and yet timeless and perfect qualities of God are spread across many characters, which intercede in the affairs of man to multiply the pettiness of the human deeds, and this gives rise to a schematic representation of the manner in which civilization both produces and mitigates its expressions violence in a single stroke, as above, so below. The Greek gods are to people as type raising operators defined by external automorphisms are model theoretically to formal objects of theories.
I also had a similar complaint regarding the apparent miscalibration of scale about the otherwise very good recent film adaptations of Dune (I think Lynch's Dune does this right even if he hated it), that they were so focused on the epic scale of global conflict that those scenes unduly overshadowed these seemingly small and petty moments ("my lord, please, let me! This is a Harkonen animal!" "I will kill you! I will kill you! Now you taste... my blade..."), when the entire point was that the material systematic pressures are actually completely abstract without those deeply personal moments that connect them at the smallest scale to the actual and immediate events of the soul.
A murder of passion by a best friend who feels betrayed. An act of pure spite between two individuals that spills over in to a gang war. A landlord evicting a tenant with a hungry child. That child becomes the most notorious gangster in the world. A scorned ruler becomes a genocideer over a lost lover, in resentful or jealous fit. A little person becomes the woe of a million! This is the essence of The Odyssey. In my little journey on earth, the determinations of my little soul are forgotten in the confines of the inner world; yet the world turns in my iron fist, the world shakes at my tender touch. You are somebody. The finite, by the singular miracle of being, becomes absolutely infinite!
