Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse

'The Odyssey' is the political movie of the decade. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This column read was produced by Marie Cascione, Claire Gordon and Emma Kehlbeck. Fact-checking by Jack McCordick and Rollin Hu. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. Cinematography by Kyle Kelley. Video editing by Jan Kobal. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, and Marina King. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:30Ezra Klein?

  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's 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.

• 1:12Ezra Klein?

  A man who yearns for his wife, but can't seem to stop bedding 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 Lupita and Yango 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.

• 1:55Ezra Klein?

  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've spent a few years now quietly obsessed with the archetype of the trickster. The trickster is Loki in Norse mythology, Eshu in the Yerubis 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."

• 2:40Ezra Klein?

  "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.

• 3:22Ezra Klein?

  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 trixy. 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?

• 4:07Ezra Klein?

  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 years since, that our society had become too rule-bound and bureaucratized,

• 4:49Ezra Klein?

  that too much had become unsayable, that there was too little openness to real transgression and invention. But today, there's little that can no longer be said. The ideas and morals upon which the best of our culture was built have been more than disrupted, they've been desecrated. The question now is whether that disruption can be met with creativity and renewal, or whether it'll simply bring us ruin. This is the central question of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. Nolan's Odyssey hinges on Zeus's law. "Treat the beggar and the stranger as you would want to be treated." But as a horde of classicists have now pointed out, that is not Zeus's law, at least not in antiquity.

• 5:34Ezra Klein?

  Zeus's law is narrower. It's more a demand for hospitality towards a guest or the stranger, with the admonition that there could be punishment, because anybody could be a god in disguise. It's not a law of compassion, not of reciprocity. And so here we find Nolan's central trick. Nolan has smuggled the core of Judeo-Christian ethics into the center of the Odyssey. Zeus's law in Nolan's Odyssey echoes Leviticus 1934. "The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you are foreigners in Egypt." Notice that "love them as yourself."

• 6:17Ezra Klein?

  It echoes Rabbi Hillel, who said, "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary." It echoes Matthew 7:12, when Jesus says, "In everything do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the law and the prophets." Such an ethic is demanding. Few of us truly live up to it. But the problem with the modern right is not that they don't live up to it, it's that they detest it. To treat the foreigner residing among us as well as we treat our native-born, to love them, is derided as suicidal empathy.

• 6:59Ezra Klein?

  The Trump administration glorifies cruelty towards the immigrant, towards a stranger, towards the weak, the poor. Takes money from Medicaid to cut taxes for the rich. It threatens the destruction of whole civilizations. It is built on the logic of tribute, not compassion, or love, or even reciprocity. Stephen Miller put it perfectly to CNN's Jake Tapper.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.

• 7:42Ezra Klein?

  But wasn't the iron law replaced by the golden rule? Isn't that at the heart of what we believe has led our society to progress, to become something better and grander than what preceded it? When Odysseus concocts the trick of the Trojan horse, when he takes advantage of Troy's veneration, of the same gods he worships, takes advantage of the commonality between them, to sack the city, to make its streets run with blood, to burn it to the ground. Is he a hero or a villain? Was that a trick or a crime? To Homer, he was a hero.

• 8:26Ezra Klein?

  To Nolan, he is a soul in need of redemption. Between Homer's time and our own came a revolution in civilizational values, an upending of what it means to be civilized. We have human rights law. We have laws governing war. They did not. Which side of that divide are we on now? The modern right believes that Western civilization has lost the appetite for strength and dominance and hierarchy, and I would say cruelty, that built it in the first place. There's a reason a theorist named Bronze Age Pervert, of all things, became required reading for young Trumpists. A reason right-wing intellectuals like Curtis Yarvin and Michael Anton muse about the need

• 9:11Ezra Klein?

  for an American Caesar. A reason the Trump administration is obsessed with Roman-style architecture. They are circling this era for a reason. A recent exchange Elon Musk had on X reveals how far this thinking has gone. A user told Musk, "It was time to wise up, to abandon liberalism, because universal suffrage leads to universal suffering." Musk's reply, "I have wised up."

• 9:39Ezra Klein?

  Helen of Troy in Nolan's Odyssey is not the reason for the war. She's an excuse for a war launched to dominate routes of trade. It's a telling choice made amidst an administration that is crashing into the global trading order because it seeks more dominance over its flows. When Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, released his cry of protest at Davos against this regime, he also reached back to an older age to describe what he saw happening.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  The strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must. And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.

• 10:23Ezra Klein?

  Is this the way you build a prosperous, strong, secure world? When Nolan's Odysseus recalls the sacking of Troy, he blanches at the memory of 10 years of rage and fury pouring into a city in a single night. Sitting in that theater, I found it hard not to think of the built-up rage that Hamas poured into Israel on October 7th and that Israel's poured into Gaza a hundredfold since. Benjamin Netanyahu has described Israel's future as Athens and Supersparta. Athens and Supersparta.

• 11:03Ezra Klein?

  You all know Harari, the Israeli-born historian with Sapiens, sees the irony of this clearly.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Rome has its usefulness, but if after 2,000 years, the Jews simply become the Romans, what was the point? Why did you waste 2,000 years then? You could have just become Roman back then.

• 11:30Ezra Klein?

  What was the point? And this, I think, is Nolan's finest trick: to make one of our oldest moral rules so new again, to turn the best of Judeo-Christianity into the law of Zeus, so we can see why it might matter, what it might still have to say to us. What Odysseus sees eventually is that his violations of the moral order have brought ruin to all around him. Agamemnon, the king who launched the war against Troy, is dead, his throat slit by his wife, who never forgave him for sacrificing their daughter for fair winds. Troy is destroyed.

• 12:10Ezra Klein?

  Ithaca, Odysseus's beloved home, is overrun by suitors who seek his wife and his land and think nothing of murdering his son to get it. Odysseus and his men were not fighting the barbarians. They were the barbarians, and their actions led to more barbarity. So too has the political movement in our time that rose promising to make Western civilization great again, America great again, betrayed its inheritance. The world looks at America now and sees us as the barbarians. We are the country obliterating the global order. We are the country that takes what we want and demands tribute from those without the strength to resist.

• 12:52Ezra Klein?

  And what the political opposition has to do now is to recognize what Nolan recognized: that it is actually an affirmation of our core values to say cruelty is weakness. It is only compassion and reciprocity that can build a durable and decent society. Order is necessary, but order without ethics and decency is perversion or authoritarianism. There is so much beauty and wisdom in the injunction to avoid inflicting on others what we would not see turned against us, in remembering that we were strangers in the land of Egypt.

• 13:40Ezra Klein?

  At the end of his book, Hyde considers, when does a trickster's tale end in ruin and when does it end in regeneration? And his answer is when you cannot rejoin the worlds. Loki is bound beneath the earth, poison dripped on him for an eternity, and eventually Armageddon is a result: ruin. Hermes, in Greek mythology, becomes the connector between our world and the underworld. He is one who guides Persephone in spring to return each year. It is only when severed worlds can be bonded that cultures can rediscover their strength.

• 14:20Ezra Klein?

  I don't want to make this too didactic here at the end, so I'll just say this: justice and progress in America have come repeatedly when those seeking it realize that the language of the Torah, of the Bible, and of the Declaration of Independence can be wielded on behalf of a better world, that they are agents for change, not for the status quo. I would say it has been some time since religion and liberalism and patriotism had a comfortable relationship in this country, since they were tightly bonded. But the shape of the modern right has created space to do that work again. Regeneration is hard.

• 15:01Ezra Klein?

  It requires seeing old values in new ways, requires recognizing a moral inheritance that has collapsed into cliché, can still hold power in an age when it has been debased and forgotten. Nolan's Odysseus is not a trickster. He's a man living in the ruins brought about by tricksters. So too are we. This movie, The Hunger for It, I think is a sign that the age of the trickster is ending. That is not what we need now. Now we need those who would remake this world.