Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse
episodePreviously titled “Christopher Nolan Stared Into Elon Musk’s Soul” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The New York Times app has all this stuff that you may not have seen. The way the tabs are at the top with all of the different sections. I can immediately navigate to something that matches what I'm feeling. I go to games always. Doing the mini, doing the wordle. I loved how much content it exposed me to. Things that I never would have thought to turn to a news app for. This app is essential. The New York Times app. All of the times, all in one place. Download it now at nytimes.com slash app.
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. A man who yearns for his wife, but can't seem to stop betting 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 Yongo 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. 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 Yoruba 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. 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. 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 tricksy.
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? 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.
How does Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey reinterpret the mythic trickster archetype?
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.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–4:55
2
How does Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey reinterpret the mythic trickster archetype?
4:55–10:19
3
Why does the host argue Nolan’s Odysseus is not the traditional trickster?
10:19–14:44
4
What role does Lewis Hyde’s concept of the trickster play in analyzing modern politics?
14:44–16:09