Christopher Nolan Stared Into Elon Musk’s Soul

A BetterHelp ad. After my session and talking to my therapist and really feeling seen and heard for the first time, I just felt like a weight just was lifted off of my shoulders, and I felt like it was a good match from the first time we talked. I could tell people from lived experience that they should try therapy. I could really be myself again, and I have this continued support with BetterHelp. Wherever you are, that's where BetterHelp begins. Visit betterhelp.com/newyorktimes to get started. Paid testimonials. Results may vary. 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 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 gonna 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 …