The Ricochet Podcast - Homer Bound

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

Christopher Nolan has another blockbuster hit in theaters and has set off the pop culture controversy of the year with his rendition of The Odyssey. To move beyond the visual spectacle and online hysterics, James, Steve and Charles are joined by Titus Techera for a discussion on the Homeric epic, the visionary Nolan, and the thunderous debate over ancient and modern morality.Plus, the trio stay on theme to consider a couple of beloved 20th-century directors and the sci-fi military tech that's become a reality on the battlefield in Eastern Europe. This week’s opening sound: Lupita Nyong’o on playing Helen of Troy (courtesy of Discussing Film) and Victor Davis Hanson on the role on the Daily SignalBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ricochet-podcast--5817275/support.

Helen of Troy is quite responsibility to play, right? There's a lot of expectations that comes with playing a character like that that is so well-known, well-loved, and has been depicted in so many different ways. It's the Rickusay Podcast. I'm James Lillich with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Hayward. Today we talk to Tito's Tecera about the Odyssey, the Morality, and also some really fun stuff about movies. So let's have ourselves a podcast.

So when I hear this actress and she says that she has never read it, well, that's okay. But then she starts opining on what's wrong with it. And she says that it doesn't have enough feminist characters. Welcome to the Ruricey podcast, episode number 800. And that's what I'll be saying next week. Right now is number 799. Unuspicious number nevertheless. I'm James Lillax here in Sunny Edina, Minnesota, joined by Stephen Hayward somewhere in the world.

Charles C.W. Cook in Florida. Gentlemen, how are you? Wow. Good, good, good to hear it. Stephen was just on a Prague rock cruise and met his idol, so we'll talk about that musically at the end of the show. But it is a cultural episode.

We're going to go right to our guest, who is Titus Tecara. We've had him on the show before. It's been a long time. He's the executive director of the American Cinema Foundation. Researcher at the European Center of Political Philosophy at Matthias Corvinius Collegium,

distinguished fellow in American culture for Hillsdale College and a prolific writer on art and politics. You can find his work at the Pomo Conn's substack. And on Twitter, of course, you can check Rikoset for all the details and the URLs to go to. Tidos, it's great to have you back. How you been? It's great.

I'm glad to be on the show. Thanks for the invitation. Well, it's nice to take a break from politics and talk about art, like specifically Odysseus and the Odyssey, which, of course, has been the subject of a lot of discourse. You have written for years that Christopher Nolan is actually the centuries, this century, 21st, great filmmaker who was deserving of the popular critical acclaim that he's enjoyed. Let's make that case here and whether or not you think his latest work is deserving, enforces his reputation or heightens it or damages it or what?

Give us your Nolan bit. So I think, yeah, he is the great one. Partly it's how unusual his intention as an artist is. So even this new one, Odyssey had a huge opening. It looks like it's going to be maybe 500 million in America, a billion worldwide. It's going to be bigger than Oppenheimer. And that show somehow that this guy gets it. One thing, a lot of young people.

Half the audience is Zoomers, which is not easy now. But also the demographic split, something like 60% male. that's where Nolan has always been, right? It's the Dark Night or Inception or Interstellar. All of these are male movies in a situation where everything is going the other way. So Star Wars is somehow about women,

but Superman is supposed to be about women or, you know, whatever. Like Marvel heroes become heroines. We've all seen that somehow ended very badly. But he started early down this other path, make movies that are hyper-technological, just obsess over IMAX, try to get young men who are into tech interested. And also, you know, superheroes. He was very early to that genre.

Batman begins and the Dark Night trilogy is really the definitive thing. But it was the first time these things were really making money. And then making a kind of impact on the culture, of course. But then he made all of these sci-fi movies, when sci-fi again was kind of a dying genre, if you think about it, and it's still actually a dying genre. Interstellarine inception were the really big things, and they all somehow set the stage for Odyssey, for trying to make some kind of civilizational statement, but also do something more than comic book, Batman fantasy, try to, or more than merely fictional sci-fi stuff.

like could you get the protagonist that people feel is somehow known to us part of our heritage in some sense. So although this, you know, he's a futurist and this time he's going back to the origins, there is a kind of continuity. There's a question that runs through all of these Nolan movies. What does America, really, the 21st century, look like after we run out of heroes? You know, it's just super troubled times. What are you going to do? And this is the thing that he has noticed about the Odyssey,

that Homer wants to show you, what does the world look like when you can no longer be on a hotline to God? Right? In the Iliad, all of these heroes are heroes, not because somebody thinks they're nice or the advanced social cause,

like in the press nowadays. They are heroes because dad or mom is a god or goddess. That's what makes them heroes. And that means that they can always be on a hotline to God. I would like to change the way of things. And they're all dead in Troy. And what does the world look like after that? What is even the relationship between the human and divine going to look like?

The first man fit for that is odysseus. And so that's what he saw. That's what he's so interested in. And that's how it fits in the line of his stories that are always somehow about that. We can't even get up in the morning, so to speak, without having heroes, but we've run out of heroes. So what now? That seems to be why young people, guys especially are so interested. And by the way, the way you judge that is not the Oscars.

It's not even the box office. It's the IMDB top 250 list. This one is going to make it as well, Odyssey. And that makes nine of his 12 movies are on the list. No other director is close. Because a lot of guys just, you know, smash that vote button. They like this guy. They feel about him in a way in which young men only feel about, say, computer games.

And the difference is computer games are low status in America. You're trash if you're into computer games, however big the industry. is nobody will talk about it in public. But movies are still sort of, you know, as they say, high status. Now, one of the things that have been said about Nolan's latest is that if we really got full-strength Greek stories and Greek morality, we would be appalled. I've always thought the whole thing about killing everybody hanging around the palace was a little bit too much and then hanging the maids afterwards. But that was then. People have been saying, I think it's Ben Shapiro who said, that actually what Nolan did was to sort of supplant the Greek morality.

with a vaguely Christian morality in which there is regret for carnage, regret for war. And while I would expect that in a movie made in the 1970s, you know, Chris Christofferson plays with Dissus. He comes home. Jane Fonda, his wife, berates him for taking part in the military pre-industrial complex. Now it's different. Do you think that that's accurate that Nolan is actually trying to scrape together the remnants of a cultural morality that he believes is not superior to those that have come before and remind us of the heritage

that we have and where we've gotten. That's a rather indistinct question, but I think you know what I mean. I made a somewhat similar argument to Shapiro. You know, the criticism you get of the Trojan war is basically the criticism Augustine makes in the city of God, which, you know, just read the book for chapter four, right? What are kingdoms but big thieveries? What are thieveries but little kingdoms? All war is injustice.

You know, the full text, the title, by the way, of the city of God is the city of God against the pagans. For example, these Greeks with their, you know, warmaking. So, yeah, there's some truth to that. And this idea of Xenia that a stranger should be treated as a guest and you should therefore become a host. That human neediness is a great trouble and the only way to deal with it is to try to beautify it by helping out somebody you see in need who comes to you as a supplicant, because in some sense you see your own humanity in them. That Nolan transforms it into basically the golden rule.

It's Christ speaking in Matthew, you know, do unto others as you would have them do on to you. That is the summation of the law and the prophets, right? So that is true as far as it goes. But what Shapiro doesn't seem to get, or maybe he just wants to hide that to spare his audience, is that this is a deeply progressive, you know, anti-Christian movie. The point is that all of these kinds of things are, have been exploded. The necessity of the war has destroyed this morality. People may whine about it, but there it is.

And so what does, how does it cash out, Xenia, you know, this like a stranger duty, host duty? It's a massacre in a temple. That's what happens with the Trojan horse. And then, you know, to make it clear, there's another slaughter in a temple. Another desecration happens in Pilos, which is completely added by Nolan. This does not happen in the Odyssey. It's not a Virgilian thing from the N.Aid. It's just Nolan.

And that's the part that conservatives don't want to face that. He's basically saying, again, that audience of young people, these are basically what people call post-Christian. Steve Hayward, great to see you again. You're maybe my favorite film critic, or at least of a certain kind, who wants to go deep as we've already seen, of the philosophical depth of things. And I get accused by some of my friends of being,

as one person puts it, an eternal infernal optimist. And so I haven't seen a film yet, and so I'll just go on the record of saying, my favorite adaptation is still, oh, brother, where art thou, but I'm an admirer of, I'm an admirer of no one but have a lot of particular criticisms, which maybe we can take up.

But here's why I can say I'm an optimist. I mean, I've been reading the back and forth between my playwright pal Jonathan Leif in New York has also picked up on what you and Ben Shapiro did, that he sort of imported some Christian motifs to the whole thing. And then it does frustrate me when any filmmaker takes great liberties with a classic story or a true story.

But on the other hand, I walk by bookstores right now and they're all displaying all the translations of the Odyssey in the front windows. And I'm thinking, you know what? A lot of people are going to now pick up the Odyssey that they haven't read. Hopefully it will get the Latimore translation and not Emily Wilson. That's a story for another day. But the point is, that can't be a bad thing. And I, and, you know, a lot of them won't finish it, of course. But I think it's going to read to

maybe a rebirth of interest, not just in Homer, but it may spill over to other classics. And so whatever the flaws in the movie may be, maybe this is still a great moment, not just for cinema, but for culture more generally. Am I being too infernally, eternally optimistic? No, I actually completely agree with you. I think that in a sense, you know, this is a movie about the end of civilization. It's all collapsing. This is how people feel now in some sense.

We live in the ruins. Yeah. But it's also true that just check Amazon. These books are flying off the virtual shelves and they're climbing through the rankings. And I think that's going to make a difference. So, you know, my big criticism such as it is, it's not of Nolan.

It's of critics and humanists. These people are, in my view, despicable. There was a huge opportunity, because it was so predictable that this guy's going to be selling books, that the whole summer of 26 should have been a big celebration of, you know, again, Homer, Virgil, whatever epic you want. There's a huge opportunity that has largely been missed and that people will have to somehow pick up, you know, let's hope for a great second effort. There's no big effort to guide all of these people who are buying all these books. it's not nothing. And, you know, my own institution, Hillsdale, they're doing something great.

They've put out a Hillsdale course and they have a huge audience. And so a lot of these people who are watching the movie, buying the book, they can also get a good college level course about this. But I had hoped for more reflection from humanists. Again, these are these drab ghosts like in Hadith in the case of Odyssey. And this is your chance to drink that blood and come back to life for a second. Just try to save the humanities. Just tell people the most intelligent things you can come up with.

What have you really noticed that really struck you? Why are you even in the humanities? And instead, you get this kind of insane criticisms that are pro or against that are somehow defending the creative liberty of Nolan or of artists in a TikTok world. And they're all doing it on social media. How do you not realize you live in a world post-criticism, post-academia? Effectively, it's post-literate. It's like, again, ghosts playing out some kind of conflict about artists or censorship or creativity from decades back, maybe generations back.

Like, again, it's like maybe people who think that Emily Wilson has finally beat Latimore. She's a mediocrity. Latimore was quite poetic, you know. I have my quibbles with him because, you know, he doesn't say the word, you know. He mistranslates the Greek. Right. But that's a small quibble, you know. He's quite powerful.

he's quite powerful, this is something you can fall in love with. And again, if you, it's a digital world, just get the audiobook. You know, you'll fall in love with it. It'll get you because the story is so well told that you see that power Homer has to spin you all through this. You don't ask yourself, how long is book four? Why is this so long? Just hear Manalas and Helen talk about their lives and think, okay, this I want to listen. It's amazing. So you have all of these things, as you're saying, Steve, going for us. And what you'd have to say is like, what do you have to offer about Homer? Nolan thinks it's timely.

Do you think it's timely in what way? What is the substantive thing? What really matters here? If you're going to grab people by the heart. Yeah, well, I want Chase after that. Let me ask you one more general question about Nolan in filmmaking, which is, as you know, Nolan is extraordinarily ambitious to take on these projects in the way he does them, right? He doesn't like CGI.

You know, it was his inception. He actually bought a whole seven-four. 47 airplane to destroy it. And he films on old-fashioned celluloid. But more importantly, as you mentioned, this is going to set box office records. And the great motif about film lately is it theater cinema is dead, right? And suddenly the stock for the AMC theater chain is way up because they think, oh, maybe it's not dead.

Well, one person's rescuing it, it looks like. And we'll see if it carries over to others. I think our other filmmakers are going to try and match his ambition and vision? that seems doubtful to me, but it does remind me, and here's my question, I do see a parallel of sorts with the past. You know, people thought the movie theaters were dying in the 60s because television was expanding so fast. And then you had that whole new generation of younger filmmakers that Peter Biscan book, whose title, I can't remember, tells the story very well. You know, Francis Ford Coppola comes along. By the way, it celebrates the anti-heroes in many cases, like, right?

You know, Midnight Cowboy and Coppola with the Godfather, obviously. but the revolution cinema saved movies in the late 60s and through the 70s into the 80s and we got, okay. The long point is, is I wonder, I mean, is it really, again, my eternal infernal optimism, is Nolan going to single-handly turn around Hollywood movie-making and movie-going? You know, I think there's something to that because Hollywood has this feeling about it of, you know, it's really a last man standing game now. Yeah. a couple of months back, Spilberg opened the movie.

It opened at number one. He used to do that a lot. This is his 18th or 19th Spielbergs, but everybody's forgotten about it already. It meant nothing. Most of the players are no longer playing. This guy is still playing, and he seems to have some new things to say,

some different things to say, while continuing the same massive move of, you know, everything is turning into this kind of Nolan cinema that's all about immersive experience. And if you listen to him, talk and he's on the one hand educated on the other hand has experience he'll just tell you up front i don't compose my shots like this you know me but that but that is not composed this way it's just about where you stand to the character and the motion so that it's immersive that's what he wants

out of this huge thing he would like to bring people close to the story the image again and he's incredibly successful so i think uh you know at one high end he does that but cinema is also the low and turning into the same thing with horror movies. All of the, you know, Hollywood genres and so on. I mean nothing. Horror movies do well, and some of these are breakout successes like happen this spring with obsession and backrooms that are both about, you know, America nowadays. And they're very cheap to make, as you know.

Yeah. And exactly. Those are obviously this high end, super expensive as well, full of stars. That's very low and incredibly cheap. You basically don't have actors in obsession. But it's done quite well. and it has the same immersive quality. And maybe most of the mid-range is dead,

but actually the attracting talent and attracting audiences, getting people from YouTube and TikTok to the movies works. Hollywood is not going to do it, these sorts of studio exercises, they're going to fail, have been failing. But there are new things developing that are already huge blockbusters. The, you know, and only is just, it's a businessman, okay? or Zendaya is in this movie for three minutes and change, okay? But she was in the movie and he treated her with respect and she likes the event.

She gets the issue and so she was a big part of the advertising. It's just TikTok and YouTube videos and Instagram reels to get people into the theater. It's just business and it works. So Hollywood is dead. Nolan's Hollywood isn't dead. Horror Hollywood isn't dead. Okay, those things are going to do very well. They're sitting on a lot of money.

It's just a lot of reallocation. of capital and of ideas and of genres. But again, if you look at the horror side of it, that's the other shocking thing, because horror is an almost exclusively male genre. Like the thing that liberals hate young men, especially God forbid young white men, that's where the future is. And people bet on that and they're winning big and a lot of people bet against it and they're losing big.

And so, you know, like we're going to have a reshuffling of the board. Cinema isn't over, but it is going to work on a partnership with TikTok, YouTube now, because YouTube is where all the young men of America are, if they're not straight on console games. As Charles Cook here, so I want to ask you about or perhaps push you on this contention that the movie is progressive or even anti-Christian. The movie is clearly not Homer's Odyssey. It doesn't import the Homeric Morse.

and there are elements of it that would be completely foreign to Homer, not just inaccurate. But I didn't quite see it the way you did. If you look at Odysseus, he pops up all over Western literature. Virgil treats him as a villain because Virgil's writing for the Romans, and they're trying to claim the Trojans as their own. Shakespeare, I think, really does take out Odysseus or Ulysses' heroism. I mean, if you look at Troilus and Cressida, that actually is, it's not so much anti-Christian, but that turns all of those characters,

Ajax, Achilles, Helen, and so forth, into almost a joke. But if you take Dante, Dante Christianizes Odysseus or Ulysses in a way that I recognized in the movie. Dante says, look, the problem with the sacking of Troy was that it was fraudulent. He calls Ulysses a fraudulent counselor, and he condemns him to the eighth circle of hell. And that is what Odysseus in this movie is the most worried about. is the deception. Now, I saw some people say, okay, but there's an inconsistency because Odysseus then goes home and he murders all of the suitors. I'm not quite sure it's as simple as that.

I mean, he murders all of the suitors after they have explicitly rejected Zinia. There's this great scene where they spit at him, they deprive him of food, and they say openly, this guy couldn't possibly be a god. He then twangs his bow to a alert them to the fact that he's about to open fire, and it kills them all. I think in the moral universe of the movie, that's consistent. So the way I read it, and I'd be interested in your take on this, is this is a Dantean version of Odysseus, except that the moral tribunal to which Odysseus is subjected is internalized. It's not just that Dante is looking at him and saying, from the outside, you are sinful within the medieval Christian worldview for your deception.

It's Odysseus himself who is worried about that. Now, that's not Homer, as I say. And for the record, I don't like Emily Wilson either. But I can't see how that's progressive or un-Christian. Why am I wrong? So I agree in part and disagreeing part. I think Shakespeare's Strollis is great. and Troilus and Christend, and I don't think it's as comical as that, although there is indeed a huge element of, there's an attack on the heroes,

but there is also, you know, the ladder of degree, if you remember, it actually is all about the relationship between psychology and politics and hierarchy. Yeah. But you're right about the, you know, Dante, to some extent, following Virgil, really gives you a different version of Ulysses.

But, you know, his being in the eighth circle of hell among the, you know, these great deceivers that somehow announces, right, like in the mouths of the devil in the bottom of hell are betrayers. And the betrayers of Caesar, two. Yeah. And the betrayer of Christ, one. Like, you know, that's, you could say, forced on him as a presupposition. that is to say the Dante vision is based on the idea that the earth by Caesar and, you know, Caesar is in the heavens in paradise, and also the heavens by Christ were unified. On the basis of that presupposition, unification, it is no longer possible to excuse what Ulysses did. Or if you put it like, leave the morality aside, just look at the, you know, just the action for a second.

what Homer tells you about Odysseus is that he went around the world and saw the cities of men and knew their minds. If the world has been unified by Caesar and Christ, that's not possible anymore. It's just the same, same everywhere. So there's no more room in the world for him and he ends up in this bad situation. This would be, you know, Steve would sort of like say, okay, this is your Harry Jaffa interpretation. And yeah, like there's some of that. There's some truth to that. But I would say that that is the presupposition of the Dante presentation.

I disagree with you about Virgil. I think Virgil is actually joking. Like, he's not seriously anti. And I think you can see that from the fact that the shield of Vulcan made for ENAAS shows you the battle of Action. And, you know, Ennis looks at it and he loves it. And he understands nothing. Like, what does this mean? It's a joke.

Like there is this side of, you know, a. a relation to the Greeks through Troy through Homer. And then there's the relation to the Rome, Battle of Axiom, Augustus, the end of Rome. And the fit is never there. Virgil is not serious about this. And that's true to some extent about Homer. I would challenge that aspect as well. Actually, Nolan seems to have read Homer and to have understood that a lot of what Homer is saying is critical of what people take Homeric ethics to be.

there's, you know, Homer is not out there justifying, you know, like, whatever one might call Bronze Age morality. Yeah. And his odysseus himself is not just not, you know, he's not a moral man by standards today or the standards of Dante, but he's not a moral man by the standards of his time. It is of the essence of odysseus that he's not that interested in morality. And to the extent to which he's interested, it's not that he's in on it. He's interested on morality from an exterior point of view. He does stuff that is deeply immoral because he doesn't care that much. And some stuff he does indifferent to morality because he's just curious.

A lot of the, so the Odyssey shows you a world where no more heroes, there's no hotline to God. But on the other hand, the Olympians, you know, you learn from the pro and want to spread their rule to the level of theodicy. Zeus says he's sick and tired of people blaming him. And Athena says to him, I think I can fix this problem for you, basically. And then they go about doing that. The relationship between the Olympians and the humans changes. And Odysseus is a partly unwilling agent of it. He is actually tasked eventually to say, look, like you'll go to the end of the world,

these people nobody ever heard of, and tell them to worship Poseidon and give them like an ore. These people don't know the taste of salt and have never seen the sea. On what basis are they supposed to worship an Olympian god of the sea, Poseidon? It's like, say so. Contrary-wise, it means that the Olympians want to rule everywhere, and it's not going to be a matter of, I will show you, like, I manifest in some way, or it's even a command that issues from a divine thing. It's not even going to be like Zeus sent you a thunder.

Listen, you know, it's just going to be somebody told you and you should do it. So it's going to be complete Olympian rule, but there's also this weird guy in it who doesn't really believe in it. That is what the Odyssey is strangely about, a guy who just does some of this stuff for the sake of knowledge. And no one seems to get some of this. There's a lot of what you would call cynicism or no respect for, you know, Bronze Age morality in Homer.

And so he insists on all of the ugly stuff that Homer also shows you. And other stuff is just like he completely flinches on. Yeah, he does. He does. The slaughter of the suitors is not, like, you can't justify it. And who shows you that you can't. But like it has to be done. This guy would like his son to inherit even though he usurped his own father.

That is the basis of justice in Ithaca, okay? Well, so first of, I think he does justify it. I mean, Odysseus does not slaughter all of the suitors. He spares the ones who kneel. And the ones that he kills are the ones who violated the principle of Xenia. So within the internal moral universe of the film, I think he does. But what I'm getting at is, so if you take Dante, as you say, Dante essentially says, right, we now live in a monotheistic universe and God is real and Christianity is the principle. And so we're going to judge everyone by those standards.

And the Nolan version of The Odyssey seems to me to be post-Dantean. So if the criticism of it is that it, it's a... it's non-Homeric. That's fine. What I don't understand is why people have said it's progressive or it's anti-Christian. I think that Nolan is adopting the same, what you might call Christian imperialism in interpreting the movie. I think he probably is conscious of it because he's, or was Catholic. But even if he's not, he's such a cultural Christian that he has filtered Homer through that cultural presumption. But that's a good criticism if you don't want to see a movie that departs from Homer. But I don't understand why people who are more conservative or Christian think that's a

problem. To me, I would look at it and say, well, the Christians have won. Right. Right. I don't think that's true. And I think all of these people who are, you know, the getting a little even hysterical have noticed the basic thing. One thing is that like, if you think that, if you think that Odysseus is some sense is sinful, all the movie teaches you he gets away with it. That's all it is. This guy just gets away with everything and there is no moral meaning or content to anything he does.

He confesses, though. He confesses through a screen to Penelope, and that's a Christian act. And then he gets away with it. It's like, you know, one way, so what I'm saying is, like, one way to put it is, like, he's confessing through a screen. Another way of putting it is that one more time, this guy gets what he wants.

But we don't know if he gets away with it, Titas. We don't know that because he doesn't die in the movie. And if you look at the... Right. But right now, I could go out and murder a whole bunch of people and then confess through a screen. And I would be judged under Christian ethics at the point of my death, right? So we don't know that he gets away with it from a Christian perspective. We know that he isn't caught by the police.

But I don't know how you can conclude. that we leave the movie and say, well, I mean, obviously it's not Christian movie. This is the criticism is that it's supposed to be Homeric, and I share that criticism. But if you take the Dante in view, no, you wouldn't say he gets away with it. He ends up in the eighth circle of hell. We see him before that. You know, there's the thing that the whole point is like in Dante, you just see him in hell. In the movie, you just see him succeed.

In your mind, you can put them together, and I'm not necessarily against that. But I'm saying, you know, look at the difference. So this guy eventually gives his wife what she wants. She says early in the movie, hey, why don't we just sail out there in the West, abandon everything? You know, we could get away with it. And he eventually does. It was like, we could get away with it, which, you know, I guess you could in some sense. It's a grand scam and it somehow speaks to a really demoralized age,

where there's seen in a sense to be no rules for anything. And one way you can look at that is, you know, like every, it's like this movie is constructed like a series of steps. and every time you step up, the step behind you vanishes. Like, if you ever stop and ask yourself, does this make at all sense? Suddenly you realize, oh, it's insane. So, like, you know, we can take Homer's view of Menelaus and Helen. And, you know, to Homer, this is super important.

It's like the longest book. That's Delta Book 4. What is it like for Nolan? Somehow it becomes both ugly and meaningless. Manilaus is just, you know, he, again, he gets that Manilaus is a book. Brut. You see that in Homer. So Menelaus says to Telemachus, the son of Odisseus, you know how much I loved your dad? I loved him so much, A, like I cry over him because I don't know what happened to him.

The uncertainty is getting to me. And B, I promised him, I wanted to destroy an entire city so that I would just like bring him and all his people here and we'd be best buddies forever. Like, he is a brute. Nolan gets that. And I think that's true of most of the episode. Like he's clearly thought about this, not just in terms of Odyssey is long, movie has to be short at three hours, just like what scenes make it and how. It's not just a selection of scenes like a series of stepping stones that get to a finale.

And do you stick the landing or not? He's thought about what is involved as well. He's trying to give you the characters. But his kind of progressive moralism won't let him. Like Helen is profoundly immoral and incredibly smart. the way it shakes out in the Odyssey is like there's Athena, then there's Odisseaus, then there is Helen, and maybe below there is Penelope. Helen is super smart.

And in the movie, she just comes out as a somewhat aggrieved lady. And, you know, there are Hemingway words for this, but this is a family show. We can't talk that way. And aside from this weird hysteria, you end up in a situation where he told you, A, the whole war was just a scam for trade route access, blah, blah, blah, imperialism, but B, Manilaus actually took this lady back. For what? It's meaningless.

It's insane to think. In the Odyssey, he's crazy in love with her for reasons that you could think about it a bit. But in the movie of the Odyssey, there was no reason for Manilaus to take her back. And this is a fake war. It's all a scam. It's also shown not just because Odysseus was actually saying. says this to Penelope, and it seems to be borne out by the depiction of the war.

But it's also in the fact that the choice of having Lupita Nongo played the double role, Helen, Plit, and Nestra, she was like, there was never a most beautiful woman, you know, who was so important. They're identical. Like, she's not even special in that sense. Not just she's not at all smart, she's just hysterical, but also she's not the most beautiful. She's just a twin. All of these collapses suddenly, and you're stuck with these ladies there, meaninglessly talking about Penelope, whom she would, to have telemahos, and she wouldn't even be able to know

Penelope. But why is she even there? Why did Manilaus take her back? It makes no sense. It's like, okay, this is a crazy story. But it does, you know, crazy stories it is. It's supposed to achieve something. At the end of it, this guy's supposed to get away with it.

He's supposed to run off literally into the sunset and show you that nothing, you know, like maybe it's community. People are right. Talk about that. It's meaningless. Or you could talk about his son. He doesn't care. he's leaving.

And again, part of this is true to Homer. Homer also has him leave. But the, or homecoming, like I've seen people get sentimental about that, like the historian, Tom Holland. This guy seems completely clueless. There's no homecoming. This guy is leaving the next scene. It's over. You know?

But that's what you're supposed to achieve. That's the only thing that matters. Any part of the scenario that you look back behind you completely collapses. But that thing sticks with you. Well, Titus, it sounds like we can mark you down as undecided then about the movie. All of these things are fantastic. None of them put butts in the seats. I mean, you can say, you know, you've never seen Theodosy like this.

What people want from a Nolan movie is extremely well-executed spectacle. And if there's something else behind it, then that's great. And that's one of the reasons that he's respected in love because there is heft, there is thought, there is intelligence. But one of the reasons that people were upset about the movie before it came out, was a couple of things in casting, as you mentioned. It was Helen of Troy was going to be played by a black woman, and I think Achilles was going to be played by a transgender Elliott Page.

And what people were saying about this was, once again, we're having things changed for the point of just shoving it down our throats and saying, you can't have your culture. You can't have it. We're not going to give it to you because we enjoy the pain and the agony of watching you complain that you can have your culture.

That's what it was in the beginning. And that's what a lot of people don't want when they go to movies. And that's maybe one of the reasons some of the movies have fallen off because people think they're going to be lectured by people who believe that they're idiots who need to be instructed. If you go back and look at the daily newspaper movie ads from the summer of 1983, you will find an astonishing amount of diversity. You will find a sex comedy, 18 sex comedy.

You'll find a franchise movie, perhaps. you'll find a big sci-fi movie. You'll find an action movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger. You will find two or three other movies that have come along that made a little pop and splash and then faded. It's astonishing how much. You can't choose. If you look at the newspaper movie ads from the 40s,

it's even better. But there's not so many franchises. There's just more genres, more pictures, more stars. It's amazing. And in each one of these instances, you would go to those movies. And you probably might get a little bit of talking to you in the form of a message,

because Hollywood always has a message, or even if they don't, they're liberal and it seeps through. But you didn't get the sense that you were going to go see something that was going to punish you. You weren't going to see some ridiculous girl boss archetype. You were there to see a story. And so today what we have are the rise of horror movies, right, which at least have a story and at least have a moral structure and somebody's going to get out alive at the end of it. We have A24s, which you generally believe are going to be probably pretty good.

And then you have Nolan and to a much less. to the extent you have Cameron, who is just wasting his talent completely on these Smurf movies. So do you think that's part of it that until Hollywood goes back to its more pure form of entertainment backed by a trust and faith in the culture from which it comes, people are not going to flock back to the movie theaters. They're just simply going to treat their television as a second screen on which a movie plays while they do marot and scroll and the rest of it on their phones. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me, but I would add a few things. For example, Netflix has had the horrible dropping in the markets just now because it couldn't make earnings.

So maybe, you know, TV isn't doing that great either. And for very similar reasons to the ones you were outlining. And I would say, you know, if you look, I happen to think that the old 30s, 40s cinema was the best, not just that Hollywood was competitive with the world, but it was the best in Hollywood history. Yes. I could see, okay, like maybe, you know, Coppola in the 70s and a bunch of guys from New Hollywood, maybe that was competitive.

I see the argument. I love those movies as well, but I favor even much older things. But any era you'd look at, you'd see that when Hollywood was striving, when entertainment was striving, it's because you had a lot of people in the business who had, you know, they were kind of weird people in America, but they did have these two, so to speak, outline qualities. They tended to have, in a way, more education than most people. and on the other hand, they had a lively awareness, partly because they were weirdos,

of what America is like, and they liked it. The stars that were created by writers and directors and occasionally producers, they were archetypes of Americans. You know, everybody knows why America is, on the one hand, John Wynn, but on the other hand, Jimmy Stewart, you know? And often as the point has been made, they were outsiders. I just watched back-to-back a couple of Fritz-Lang movies.

watch what Fritz Lang did in Germany for UFA. It's incredibly inventive, the cinematography, the play, it's just an amazing stuff. They bring him to Hollywood and they sort of do a John Wu on him where he's kind of doing studio products and now and then we'll get a great shot in. But at the same time, they are distinctly American movies. They got Eddie G. in them. They got Dan Derry.

They're just great American products. They're noir. They're not. Scarlet Street. Exactly. And Fritz Lang is a crowd. But he came over here and he got it because the system helped him. And that was the thing into which he was plugged.

And it works. It works. Exactly. And there were people who brought that kind of sophistication. Like, Long is great, but I think, you know, Ernst Lubich and Billy Wilder on the comedy side were even greater. And they fit much better.

They mesh better with Hollywood, both as a system and with, you know, America. And, you know, before Woody Allen, Billy Wilder was the most Oscar-nominated guys. And since it's only the writer who can really get a dozen awards. nominations or whatever. So they fit right in because they brought a superior European sophistication, but they really looked at American life and saw its power, its virtues, what makes it interesting. And they were only looking to say, look, I get things better than you,

but we're looking at the same things. These aspects of American life, to a lot of extent, you know, cinema was just like, why is America even working? If you look at the kinds of people we love and the kinds of, trouble they get themselves into but they can get out of. You can say, okay, this is why America works. I get it. There's a lot of drama in our lives, but we're not clueless.

America is basically anti-tragic. You have to kind of have a happy end. But it doesn't make people stupid. They're really interested in conflict and they're really interested in those kinds of larger-than-life people, as they say. They wanted to see people who are really achieving. If we put it to the test, are we really going to come up with something? there's a kind of expectation, maybe even a demand for success,

but you need competent artists to show you how real the conflict is and how straight the path, so to speak, how difficult it is to get to success, but not impossible. And so there was a huge demand to say, look, the stories are serious, this isn't trash, but also people will love it. And that means it's got to be sort of recognizable, but you've got to figure out something that people can't ordinarily figure out, to get you to a happy ending.

There was a huge pressure, therefore, to defend America and to say, okay, tough, difficult, but not insoluble, difficult but not impossible. And that has largely dropped out. So I would say that there's a lot of moral contempt, especially liberals have for most Americans. But I would say that if you look at the back of that, it's primarily self-contempt. Liberals kind of realize that they're stupid people, that they can't come up with anything very intelligent. And I'm not saying something like, can you make America love you or they'll make something that I will love. I'm saying like, can they come up with anything they love? And there's just

not really anything. And that is the problem. People don't set themselves a problem as big as America. And therefore, it doesn't create ambition. Well, Titus, we all have to discuss that in another matter. I would love to sit down and discuss Philip Marlow and all of his incarnations of what I'd said about the time and the era. But that's another podcast. We thank you for dropping by today. and at least we'll talk to you the next time Nolan has one out. We hope we don't have to wait as long as we have for this one. Thank you, Tito's Deckerah. Thanks for the invite.

Take care. Bye-bye. I was serious about lamenting James Cameron's descent into these ridiculous avatar movies, which make a ton of money. The guys just apparently love them. I don't know anybody who's seen them. I know that sounds very Pauline Kale of me. And incidentally, I think our good friend, Kyle Smith, over at the Wall Street Journal,

made a Pauline Kale reference the other day. We're talking about it. Odyssey and was excoriated on Twitter for being an elitist. That apparently the person thought that the mention of Pauline Kale in film circles in a film discussion was proof that you are an elitist. I don't even... Wasn't he accusing them of being Pauline Kale too? I mean, that's the irony of it.

He said, you're being Pauline Kale and they said, Pauline Kale. Wow, how out of touch. I know. I know, it's beautiful. But, you know, I can understand why Cameron wanted to go into the world. world that he did, I suppose, when you've got that much money and that much power, why not do precisely what you wanted to do? A lesser filmmaker might have made Titanic to the sequel. I don't know why they never, why do they never make a sequel to Titan? There's another ship

right there. As a matter of fact, there's two other ships, and there's one that sunk four years after the Titanic. You're telling me that you couldn't make a, you know, and I think Lightholler, who was one of the heroes of the first sinking, was actually on the Britannic as well, I think. And at Dunkirk. And it's what? And at Dunkirk, I believe. He took the boat over to, so there's Christopher Nolan unification

movie here as well. We could get, we could have done, he could have done a trilogy ending with the Lucitaine. I would. Rose gets on the Lucitaine. Don't I wish. Don't I wish. Well, probably the Lusitania is a movie is that it went over in about 17 seconds. Oh, there are 17 minutes. I mean, it was really fast.

It took one and then it rolled over and went down pretty fast. Titanic. It was leisurely enough so that you had all of these incredible stories. And I guess there's another Titanic television show coming up. There's another, the other day I think I saw on television a show called Hitler and the Nazis. And I thought, well, that's interesting. I've always thought there was a connection. And apparently the guy who plays Loki in the Marvel movies has got something about Pompeii,

which I'm quite keen to see, because there's another great movie that could have been made that was absolutely screwed up when they did it. So one of the reasons I just don't go to the movies anymore is I'm so continuously disappointed by the products that they do. And that doesn't mean that everything of the past was great. I just watched a Paul Newman Private Eye movie from the late 60s. And that's fun to watch. You can't figure out any of it, really, at the end of it.

It's got Lauren Bacall, which is a wonderful callback when you think about it. Usually she's the beautiful femme fatale in a noir movie here. She is the crippled woman sitting in a, Solarium giving orders to the detective, that whole rich genre. Anyway, shouldn't have gotten on that point here. Maybe I should. I think, Stephen, you were going to say something about John Ford. And I can't think of John Ford movies without thinking of David Lynch playing him in that Stephen Spielberg movie and giving the wonderful advice.

That's absolutely true. Yeah. Well, I mean, well, I think what, Titas says, what, Cameron, sorry, Nolan's the greatest director of our century so far. I think, and I think Tetus may agree that, for, is the greatest director of the 20th century. And I like to listen to Tetus talk about, I haven't heard it for a long time, but I have arguments of people about which is the greatest Ford movie

from sort of a moral political point of view. And I think it's the man who shot Liberty Valance. Other people say it's the searchers. Stephen Spielberg, John Ford was Spielberg's initial inspiration to go into filmmaking. And Spielberg will talk a lot about details of John Ford movies, which I think is interesting. So we don't normally connect those two in our minds.

because I don't like a lot of Spielberg, but we sort of very well done, but especially that sort of anti-suburban vibe he had going for so many years back in the 70s and 80s, right? Suburbers were always stupid and the kids were smart. I'm not sure I agree with that. I think one of the things that he got was the way that suburbs actually felt and looked, something that, you know, that stranger things would catch on later. The people who think that are the thing, I mean, he got it in a way that didn't, I never picked up contempt from it. I picked up understanding from it, a sort of inhabited world that he, I mean, it was a great, great, great setting.

What was it exactly about the suburban world in close encounters that you felt was demeaning? I didn't know. Oh, that, that was not so much, but the funny thing is that Spielberg is kind of repudiated that movie. He said, oh, if I made that movie today, I wouldn't have some father going off and abandoning his wife and kids. That was, you know, very boozy, right? I am, well, it happened to him. And I am so in agreement here with James. And this is perhaps just the product of my over romanticization of America,

which is something I've done since I was a child. But to me, there are two directors whose depictions of the suburbs I grew up on and made me love America and want to move there. One is Spielberg. I think E.T. is probably the perfect example. of it. And the other is John Hughes. I mean, John Hughes is depiction of American suburbs.

I find extremely romantic. The Stranger Things homage to it is one reason I like the show despite myself, because I can't abide horror or anything like that. It's just, it's not that I think it is

low brow or, it's just that I don't, I don't have any tolerance for it. Some people don't like roller coasters. I love roller coasters. I can't handle horror movies in the way some people can't handle roller coasters. I'm just not brave enough. But I love Stranger Things. It's one of my favorite TV shows of all time because I love that 1980s vibe. So I'm with you, James. The movies, on the other hand, would do the American beauty, Pleasantville, all the rest of it, this tiresome idea that, you know, when you really look at

the suburbs, that's where the perversity is. That's where you'll find the curdled heart of the American dream and this goes back to you know, tiresome boomer children's songs about the tickey tucky suburbs and hating Levittown and all the rest of it without realizing that this is actually an expression of America that says a lot of good things, a lot of wonderful things about us.

They just believe that it's somehow romantic to be living in a cold water four walk up, four stair, walk up brownstone in Brooklyn, which it isn't, which is why their parents left. So yes, I mean, when you get something that you feel is, I mean, I love film noir, which is very moral but also amoral in a way and has eventually, you hope,

the punishment for the people who step outside the moral framework. But at the same time, it's just chocka block with anti-heroes. This gun for hire, for example, Alan Ladd is short for one thing. But he's not a good guy. But at the same time, there's a sort of moral compelling nature to his journey. Yeah, that's a whole different other podcast, perhaps. Is there any sort of, is there any news that we should give to applying about? I mean, there's plenty of news, but.

Well, one thing made me kind of related to our topic is, so I'm over here in Europe and I read that just yesterday, the European Union has signed off on the paramount acquisition of, what is it, Warner Brothers, I think, which, what, 15 state attorney generals are trying to block because they hate Trump. So it's a rare day when the European Union is more friendly to corporate mergers than the United States of America is. Speaking of the European Union, I read a statistic this morning that is now true two years in a row, courtesy of marginal revolution. And that statistic is that the European Union brought in more money from fining American tech companies than from taxing European tech companies. Yeah. Yep. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. That's fun. Well, I love the fact that I think that off-com or whenever in England has been trying to sue 4chan for some time. And they just keep sending them back obscene letters telling them that, you know, silly which you have no power here.

Yeah, not exactly doing their best when it comes to innovation. Then again, innovation is not lost in the European continent if you want to include Ukraine, which seems to have done a marvelous job at developing a a drone army, the likes of which the world has never seen before. It just hasn't. St. Petersburg was hit yesterday. And if anybody thought five years after this war began, when they thought, oh, they'll be marching there in three days, that St. Petersburg would be going up in flames.

I find this absolutely fascinating. I really do. And if there's a mobilization, some people are saying, you're going to be hearing Swan Lake on the radio in December. What do you guys think? I'm always suspicious of the Putin's walls are closing in, The walls are closing it on Putin like the walls have been closing it on Trump. That said, it's entirely possible that you can't live forever.

It may die in the saddle, but at some point he's going to be gone. And will the war be over before that happens? What do you guys think is going to happen in the next six months of the war in Ukraine? Oh, gosh. I'll continue with a film motif of Sam Goldman, who supposedly, maybe it was Yogi Bear, who said never prophesy, especially about the future. I have no idea. I didn't expect this drone war.

warfare you bring up James to unfold the way it has. We should have, really, I think. But I think what you see both in the case of Iran, but also Cuba is putting massive pressure in these countries, and those regimes are showing their resiliency, because I think we underestimated both their will to survive, but also their capacity to oppress their own people that's very well organized. They're very determined about it. They're very ruthless about it. And so, you know, I think anyone who says, boy, rush is really on the ropes. I think all the objective markers say, yeah, that makes good sense. But on the other hand, six months from now, I bet they're going to still be standing if you really want me to go on the record with a prediction. Yeah, probably so. Even, I mean, what matters is whether or not there's food on the shelf and gas in the tank in Moscow and everybody else can hang fire. Well, before we go, we have to do that little video thing where I attempted to code what the pictures are on Charles shelf. He's put up some new albums here and I have to admit that I am stumped. So we have four. left to right. The one in the far right is easy. And you have to realize what a small screen I am looking at here. I'm looking at something that is about a quarter of the size of a postage stamp, but I'm pretty sure it's Venus and Mars.

Am I right? That is correct. By wings. Yes. Moving left, I have no idea. Moving left, it looks like some dandelion bloom or a nuclear explosion. And all the way to the left there, as far as I can tell, by looking at it, I believe, If I had to, I'd say it's a bearded singer-songwriter, and it's not a BG, it's probably Gordon Lightfoot. That's pretty good. Is that Gordon Lightfoot? Yes. Gordon Lightfoot's summertime dream. Well, done.

Well, what are the two in the middle that I missed? Abba Super Trooper. And? Queen a day at the races. Well, there you go. There you go. Should have gotten them, but I didn't. And again, I'm looking at some very tiny pictures.

No, I think that was pretty impressive. I doubt you're as big a fan of ABA as I am anyhow. I think Abba is one of the most perfect, perfect musical confections that you're going to find in pop music. Oh, good. Oh, really good. I do. I absolutely do. At one point, I went to the Snape Malting Center.

I was jet-lagged. I just arrived in England, and my friend took me to an Abba sing-along. And I just wanted to sleep with my daughter. And we are, so we go there. And the first act is just simply them singing the songs. and the second part where they pass out the music and you sing along. And even though I was tired and exhausted

and I wasn't really in the mood for an hour of Abba after doing this, I was lustily declaiming to the top of my lungs, I am a dancing queen. It is perfect, perfect music of a certain era. I really do love it. So yes, I mean, I'm ecumenical. It's the old, if it sounds good, it is good, which is one of the problems in living in this era

that we have today, which is just that music, pop music, is dreadful. I am lucky enough to be old enough to say that at a time when it is empirically true. It is absolutely objectively true that pop music is worth than it was before. I was listening to somebody tried to get me to listen to a song the other day. And I like, you know, I like techno. I like, you know, dance music, EMS. I like all the stuff. But the whole, the song, the bridge, the chorus, the modulations, it's gone. They just don't seem to need to modulate anymore. And the instrumental proficiency has been replaced by machines, and the quantity of AI slop out there is extraordinary.

And learning to discern the difference between what is AI and what is not is one of those challenges that we're going to have going forward. Unless you don't care and you just wanted to wash over you. And part of me feels guilty, for example, for listening sometimes to AI, easy listening sort of airplane music, elevator music, grocery store. And I thought, you know what, if anybody else was doing it, this, I'd listen, if any human beings were doing this, I'd listen to it, but they're not. They've just given up. But we're not giving up. We've got Rurccee 5.0 coming very soon, Charles.

Exactly. When are you going to flip the switch? September. September. September. Which is a great earthwind and fire song, by the way. Another great group. Back when men actually played instruments. See, that's how much. I remember when I used to play her own guitars. So Rickettsay 5.0 is coming. Five is the number of stars you should give us at Apple podcast or any place else you could rate us. Five is the number of times that you should go to the site today and try in vain to get into the member side because you're not a member, but you know, for just a few Lira, just a few francs, a few drachma, you can get in there and find the community you've been looking

for in the web all of your days. Gentlemen, it's been a pleasure. Have a great weekend. Everybody else and we'll see everyone in the comments at Rickishay 4. Something or other. Bye-bye.