You Can't Go Home Again: Nolan's Odyssey and the Dilemma of Modernity | MTS #15
The latest episode of the MTS Podcast is out, and it might be my favorite discussion we’ve ever had.
I can’t overemphasize how much I enjoyed hashing it out with my best bud Kale Zelden yesterday about The Odyssey. I’m a total neophyte to the story, so I love that he’s taught it for many years. I got to make newb observations and he could draw from long reflection and deep knowledge, and it made for such a great give and take on this powerful saga.
From the show description:
Steve and Kale discuss Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" and try to work out why the story landed with such unexpected force.
Kale comes at the film as a longtime teacher of Homer. Steve comes at it as someone who had never read Homer's original poem and encountered the story first through Nolan's version. The result is a wide-ranging conversation about adaptation, myth, war, guilt, hospitality, the longing for home, and why a 3,000-year-old story still seems to know exactly where modern people hurt.
They talk about Odysseus as a trickster versus Odysseus as a wounded modern hero, Penelope and Calypso, the law of hospitality, Nolan's use of historical myth to speak to the present, the loss of third places, the loneliness of app-mediated life, and the strange human need to recover enchantment in a world that keeps turning everything into process, optimization, and abstraction.
By the end, the conversation turns from movies and mythology toward the deeper question underneath so much of the show: what does it mean to find the way home when home itself has been broken, scattered, or lost?
As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.
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