Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Election Protection for the Midterms, plus ‘The Odyssey’ for Filmgoers

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Election Protection for the Midterms, plus ‘The Odyssey’ for Filmgoers · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: From the nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm John Weiner, later in the hour, Elon Musk calls Christopher Nolan's film The Odyssey, part of a left wing claim to destroy Western civilization.
• 0:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: John Powers has a different view.
• 0:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: His critic at large on MPR's fresh air with Terry Gross was with him later in the show.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: But first, election protection.
• 0:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sky Perryman will comment in a minute.
• 0:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's less than 100 days to the midterms where Trump has various plans to undermine democratic voting.
• 0:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: To talk about election protection, we turn to Sky Perimen.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's president CEO of Democracy Forward, a leading election protection legal group.
• 0:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: After starting out at Midway High School in Waco, Texas, now we read about our work in the New York Times, the Washington Post, we see our frequently on MSNow and CNN.
• 1:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: The news last week was that she had met with Chuck Schumer and other legal experts who were members of the Senate Democrats' election protection task force.
• 1:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sky Perryman, welcome to the program.
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: great to be with you.
• 1:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, let's start with that Senate task force.
• 1:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Who else is on it?
• 1:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: What did you do at your meeting with Schumer last week?
• 1:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a task force that's comprised of a range of members of the Senate as well as election protection experts and lawyers and senior government officials, nonprofit and nonpartisan leaders, lawyers who have spent their careers defending the right to vote.
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: People like Mark Elias are in the room.
• 1:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: to make sure that people in this country are going to be able to vote and that their votes are counted because unlike in prior elections right now, our federal government, our executive branch, our president, his allies, are actively working to undermine the ability of people to vote.
• 2:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Trump, of course, has been working hard at attacking democratic voting.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: And just to review his record here, he's had only one really big victory.
• 2:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that was when the
• 2:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Supreme Court justices he nominated, eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, which led to the creation of more Republican house districts.
• 2:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: But aside from that, Trump has been mostly failing, mostly losing.
• 2:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: The courts have blocked his efforts to enlist the postal service in undermining voting by mail.
• 2:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: That was on appeal's court ruling just last Friday.
• 2:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: The courts have also blocked his efforts to force states to
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: hand over their voter rolls so that he can check them.
• 2:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's lost all 17 voter roll cases, decided by district courts.
• 2:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: No judge has ordered a state to provide an unredacted voter list to trump in his people.
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: And of course, he's failed in his efforts to get the Senate to pass his save act.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: restricting voting by imposing ID requirements.
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: So what do you think his next move will be after this string of losses?
• 3:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: What are his next moves that are the most threatening?
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: For some of our friends, they think he'll declare a national emergency
• 3:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: as a basis for sending ice agents, or maybe the military to blue polling places on election day to intimidate voters there under the pretext of preventing fraud.
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: I imagine you and your group have thought about that one.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: We have.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, let me just start by saying you're absolutely right that the administration continues to lose across the board in the courts.
• 3:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And even this U.S. Supreme Court, you saw Amy Coney Barrett in a decision this last term being very clear that the United States Constitution does not provide a role for the president in our election.
• 3:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that's the background.
• 3:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: on which all of this is happening.
• 3:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we believe he could try to do a variety of things.
• 3:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Many people are worried about a national emergency.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: The thing I will say about that.
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: is that the president would have to have a lawful basis for declaring one, and this is an administration that has made a range of announcements that have been bought by the courts because often, they're arbitrary.
• 4:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: The president would have to carry out his plans through federal agencies.
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Those federal agencies are losing in court.
• 4:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're held accountable through our civil system.
• 4:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so that's not to, we don't want everyone to
• 4:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: The naive here are be particularly relaxed, but we do need to focus on people voting, making sure they're registering to vote, making a plan to vote and understanding the lawyers will be able.
• 4:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: to bring cases against these things.
• 4:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned the military, and I want to be very clear that federal law spells out and could not be more clear that the military cannot be engaged in and around polling places or in elections.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: There is an express federal law against that.
• 4:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: There is an express federal law that criminalizes.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: criminalizes any federal officer that tries to intimidate people with respect to voting, which could become very relevant with respect to ICE.
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that is not to provide people cold comfort, but it is to provide everyone the facts to understand that I believe this president will continue to hit obstacles if he tries to use the executive branch in that way.
• 5:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Another possibility our friends worry about is the day after Republicans lose the election.
• 5:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Trump will claim fraud and then would call on mega groups to stage big protests in front of state capitals and swing states to stop the certification of test results sort of a mini-January sixth and various states, what do you think about that?
• 5:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: is deeply unpopular with the vast majority of the American people, including people that may not support progressive or democratic causes.
• 5:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I think it's important that we not give the president more power in our minds than he really has.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a French
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: uh, type of movement that he is seeking to aid in a bed and strengthen, but this is a deeply unpopular movement.
• 6:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: In a world where people were really seeking to deprive the American people of their choice, uh, through staging these types of protests through, um,
• 6:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: through trying to endanger certification, I think that you have to look at what happened with his off cycle redistricting.
• 6:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: It turns out that too can tango.
• 6:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so if that is the type of thing that MAGA groups might do in red states, I think you could expect that there wouldn't be a reason for
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Republican that won if this is in fact the kind of fire that the president wants to play with there.
• 6:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't have inside knowledge on that, but that is my suspicion and that is what we have seen happen with respect to off-cycle redistricting.
• 6:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: He tried to do this at complete off-cycle redistricting and you saw blue states say, well we can do that too and the United States Supreme Court, by the way, did not intervene to stop California's new map.
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I do think that this is something
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: White messy for the president, if he tries to engage like this.
• 7:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: The biggest danger is probably in the blue cities in the red states where Republican governors and Republican state attorneys general will cooperate with whatever Trump wants to do to reduce democratic voting.
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: For example, your home state of Texas, the governor's Greg Abbott, the state of
• 7:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: But this is a place where Kamala Harris got 800,000 votes in 2024 in Dallas, 500,000 votes in Houston, 400,000 votes in Austin.
• 7:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of Democratic votes in Texas, but the Republican governor in the Republican state attorney general, I doubt they're going to be like, you know, Brad Raffinsberger in Georgia, defying Trump in 2020.
• 8:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: What do you say to that?
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: First of all, I think we do have to see how this plays out.
• 8:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you've already seen the Secretary of State in Texas raised deep concerns about the accuracy of the information that's coming from the federal government.
• 8:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that is not a person that is aligned with democratic or progressive causes, but this is so deeply unpopular with people including in states that are red, even though there in Texas there are a lot of people that don't vote, red, and states that are more known as being red.
• 8:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the other thing that's important for people to understand is that the state and local governments do have a lot of authority.
• 8:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you have in Texas strong places, like Harris County, which is for Houston, Texas, is that are led by people that want to make sure that their citizens are able to vote.
• 8:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they're not going to stand idily by while the president or the governor or anyone else tries to undermine those votes.
• 8:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that type of action could look like legal action, depending on what happens, and depending on what mechanisms
• 9:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: It could look like blue states across the country also saying, you know, look, if this is how red state governors are going to act about blue cities, we can act that way about red cities.
• 9:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have that in California.
• 9:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have a number of places in California that are more red than blue, even though California is known as a blue state, same with New York.
• 9:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: So again, I think that this is gonna require a multi-pronged effort for all people first of all that makes for their voting, make sure they're registered to vote and to vote and to turn out, for the lawyers to be ready to bring the action that needs to happen, and for political actors, for people that hold these positions to not given to a voter suppression agenda.
• 9:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: That may mean doing what happened in Georgia, where Republicans did defy the president, but it also may mean blue states having to step up and say,
• 9:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, we're not going to allow the red states to try to cheat the American people out of an election.
• 9:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: We have some power here too, and I think you'll see all of that, and I think we have seen all of that.
• 9:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Over the course of the last year, I think off-cycle the redistricting remains a really good example.
• 10:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Of course, there's a lot of groups working on election protection.
• 10:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: In many ways, the lead over the past years been taken by the Blue State Attorney's General, led by, you know, Tiss James in New York, Rob Bonta in California.
• 10:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: They sued Trump every week, and they've been planning this since before he was elected.
• 10:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And of course, there's the ACLU, the Brennan Center, the legal defense fund of the MWACP, they've been planning election defense since Trump was elected.
• 10:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then there's the organizations whose leaders work with you on that Senate task force you mentioned.
• 10:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Mark Elias of the Democracy Docket.
• 10:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's also, you know, Vanita Gupta of NYU, Ian Basin, Protect Democracy, Norm Eisen of Democracy Defenders.
• 10:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: How does your group, how does the Senate task force coordinate this big array of very talented groups of very talented people?
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a range of coordination, there's a range of wonderful task force.
• 11:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's wonderful that the Senate task force has gotten some attention publicly.
• 11:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's also been public reports and we've been engaged with the House of Representatives that have been running scenarios.
• 11:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are a number of election protection tables and organizations.
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: So people are in really close contact.
• 11:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a multi-pronged effort because you have threats to our elections that are coming in an unprecedented fashion from our president, and there's a play that has to be run to defend against those threats.
• 11:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: You also have threats that have always existed in American society people.
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: across the country and some of these areas that do not want individuals to be able to vote that want to try to intimidate.
• 11:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: There have been voter protection hotlines run by civil rights and provoting organizations for years and so those organizations are strengthening their efforts.
• 11:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And don't forget that there's also the candidates.
• 11:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, we don't do a lot of candidate work at democracy for it because we're nonpartisan and we are just we're about everybody.
• 11:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: But when you look at someone like a Mark Elias, I mean, he typically represents a lot of candidates who, if someone is going to mess with their election results, they're going to be lawyer it up and they're going to bring cases against that as well.
• 12:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so the candidates and the parties are another piece of this, even if they have to exist in a separate sort of orbit or ecosystem then.
• 12:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: the provoting and nonprofit organization group.
• 12:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this has been an incredibly coordinated effort.
• 12:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: So far you've seen an incredible amount of coordination that a democracy forward we've been able to drive against the Trump administration's other actions across the board.
• 12:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think you're going to see the lawyers be very coordinated this time as well.
• 12:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: What I asked specifically about democracy for our way to your group, our FK Jr. co-authored in op-ed in the Wall Street Journal recently, complaining about you.
• 12:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: He said that in 2025, your organization filed more than 150 lawsuits and took more than 400 legal actions against the Trump administration and launched more than 250 public records investigations.
• 13:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Is there any truth to these charges?
• 13:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I mean, you know, we're proud of, we're proud of that record.
• 13:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're disappointed that this moment of history requires that amount of litigation against the federal government, which is a government that is supposed to be serving the people.
• 13:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so we're very disappointed any time we have to sue.
• 13:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: federal or state or local government that for us that means that there are people in communities across this country that are being failed by their government and that have to take legal action.
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: So in that way it is disappointing, but we do assure, you know, we said this right out back in our response to the Wall Street Journal.
• 13:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, we are, you know, we are very proud of our record to represent people and communities in the court.
• 13:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that particular op that he was complaining about litigation that our, um, organization is maintaining on behalf of cities and nonprofit organizations to defend the Affordable Care Act and healthcare for over 2.2 million.
• 13:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: people in the country right after he came out with his op ed.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: We want a big court order stopping the administration from undermining the ACA.
• 14:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: He was trying to pretend as if somehow the administration was protecting the ACA.
• 14:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was just a bit bonkers.
• 14:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we're very proud of that record and and stand by those numbers.
• 14:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: You've launched a project called a hundred days of action for the rest of between now and election day.
• 14:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Tell us about that.
• 14:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this is really the most important thing I think that people and communities can do before election day.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: There is the doom scrolling.
• 14:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: There is thinking about all the different ways the election could be rigged or that the president could try to overtake the election.
• 14:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And people and communities have to know that the lawyers are going to be there.
• 14:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: The president is going to continue to lose in court.
• 14:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that we are all going to have to be in together to make sure that our elections do occur.
• 14:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: and that people are able to vote and that their votes are counted.
• 14:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: The most important thing, however, is not to get all drawn up in the every way the election could go wrong or to wonder about what type of legal action the lawyers are filed guess what we're all going to file them to be there.
• 15:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: it's to make sure that we all as individuals are doing our part to make our voices heard in this election.
• 15:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so what that looks like is taking individual actions that are in many instances they're very simple to take that do not take much time between now and the election.
• 15:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so we are encouraging people this week as part of the action plan.
• 15:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: to go check your voter registration.
• 15:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can do it online.
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can get some information, make sure your register to vote, talk to your community.
• 15:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: We want to make sure people are also being informed and so we have some great short, not long, but great reading material about how we got in to this and what do people need to understand?
• 15:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Our communities are really important.
• 15:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Democracy is the kitchen table issue and so the hundredth of action plan will include ways to take small steps within our individual communities to make sure that we're strengthening our
• 15:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: are having to come together in new ways.
• 16:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we've seen that over the past year, but we're really pleased to be able to help folks that we hear from every day who were saying, what can I do in this moment to really be able to help folks engage?
• 16:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: At one last thing, apparently the 400 legal actions you've taken against the Trump administration the last year didn't keep you busy because you also wrote a book.
• 16:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's being published August 25th.
• 16:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's called Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times, how to reclaim your power, fight for freedom and reimagined democracy, a guide for all of us.
• 16:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Briefly tell us what we're gonna find in this book when it's published.
• 16:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I hope you find everything you need about how to plug in and engage in this time.
• 16:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: At a time where history is going to look back, our kids are going to look back and ask, you know, what did those people do?
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: At a time when democracy, when the very existence of our communities were under attack, how did we come together and not just defend, not just try to restore old systems, but to reimagine and create something that truly serves everyone.
• 17:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this is a book.
• 17:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: It comes out in paperback.
• 17:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's available in audiobook, very accessible.
• 17:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: The proceeds from the book go to benefit the work of democracy forward.
• 17:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are seven action steps, checklist, tipsheets, very accessible, a website you can go to to get more information.
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's all about how people, what people can do in this time, I draw from the amazing stories of the cases that we have built on behalf of people in communities, the bravery we've seen.
• 17:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: in communities from ordinary people, as well as what our history has taught us about the role of ordinary people.
• 17:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: People forget changing this country has never come, never come from the top.
• 17:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's always come from the people, the people demanding more, and that's the kind of demand that people need to make in this time when we've all got to get to work.
• 17:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: You've said many times that in November we are going to have free and fair elections.
• 17:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: How come you're so confident about that?
• 18:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm confident in the American people.
• 18:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm confident in the American people's lawyers.
• 18:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm confident in the way this country has found.
• 18:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's way forward over the past year.
• 18:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: At a time when hope is really hard to find, when fear, simmer's everywhere.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: We have seen people in communities come together and truly extraordinary ways, hundreds of millions of people are disapproving of what's happening in this country.
• 18:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've seen millions of people on the streets.
• 18:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: and the no kings protest and demonstrations.
• 18:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: These are the largest, the largest single-day peaceful mobilizations of people in U.S. history.
• 18:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: More people in this country have been trained in nonviolent, nonviolent direct collective action in this time than ever we're trying even in the civil rights movement.
• 18:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the courts,
• 18:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: even with the Supreme Court, the courts have been serving as a guard role as well.
• 18:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so all of those things together make me know that we are going to have free and fair elections, but we're not going to have them automatically.
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're going to have them because of the actions and the work that individual people have to take every day.
• 19:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's why we're so excited to have this hundred days of action.
• 19:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm excited to be talking to you.
• 19:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: The book comes out to help people figure out how to engage, but we're going to be able to do it.
• 19:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sky Perryman of Democracy Forward.
• 19:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Her book coming out in August is ordinary people extraordinary times.
• 19:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sky, thanks for all your work.
• 19:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: If thanks for talking with us today.
• 19:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
• 19:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: The big movie this week, this month, this season, is Christopher Nolan's Odyssey.
• 19:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Elon Musk's view is that the film is part of a left-wing plan to destroy Western civilization, this is a quote, and everything that helped create it.
• 19:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: For our analysis, we turn to John Powers.
• 19:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's critic at large for fresh air with Terry Gross, where he has an audience of millions.
• 20:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: John Powers, welcome back.
• 20:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm glad to be here, John.
• 20:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I understand you saw the Odyssey the way Christopher Nolan intended in real IMAX on a screen 101 feet wide 75 feet tall and of course three hours long bigger than anything previously known to movie goers.
• 20:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: What did you think was Elon Musk onto something when he said that Christopher Nolan's Odyssey was part of a left wing plan to destroy
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, that's probably extreme, but I actually know what he's saying.
• 20:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: The complaint is that it's a woke version of the Odyssey.
• 20:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there's kind of the dumb version of that, which is to look at a couple of the casting choices, like Lupita Nyango and say, but she was supposed to be white.
• 20:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: One, of course, the problem with casting hell and of Troy always is that she's never beautiful enough.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Charlize Theron and the film is an exceedingly beautiful woman, but if you made her hell and of Troy, she's not beautiful enough.
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: But by putting an African, a black African actress in the role, what you do is you make her different and exotic enough that you can believe the people there all think she's the most beautiful person in the world, perfectly reasonable casting, not some sort of woken nonsense.
• 21:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: The part that's true, I guess, in what he's saying, not that's destroying Western civilization.
• 21:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: is that the Odyssey had Greek values about winning and losing and conquest and slaves and kings.
• 21:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, all the sorts of things that one can imagine Elon Musk liking, because no doubt he in some sad yet grandiose way fancies himself are kind of Odysseus.
• 21:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: which is the person who's much smarter and deserves to rule because he's so much cleverer.
• 21:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: And here the Odysseus played by Matt Damon is kind of do awful and regretful of the things he's done in order to win, feeling that he's destroying civilization.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: So if you're Musk, you're thinking that this version is kind of the anti-Trump version, which is it's not about winning.
• 22:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's about feeling bad even though you won.
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, the way Maureen Dowd put that was he's an action hero who feels bad about being an action hero and it's striking that Christopher Nolan has pretty much the same character in most of his movies.
• 22:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: The last one invented the bomb to bring an immediate end to a war that had lasted way too long and then he himself suffered psychologically afterward when he realized the damage the bomb had done to ordinary Japanese women and children and Christopher Nolan's Odysseus,
• 22:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: invents the Trojan horse to end the war that had lasted way too long, but then he himself suffered psychologically when he realized the damage it had done to the women and children of Troy, who were, of course, raped and murdered by his own men.
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Christopher Nolan gives us two guys suffering from kind of PTSD 3,000 years apart.
• 23:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I guess if you're being nasty, you're saying they're all do awful.
• 23:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: If you are a fan, I'm not a particular Christopher Nolan fan, but if you give him credit for having an intention, his stories, including Batman, are all about people who set out to do things that are good and make the world safe and better and put together and wind up doing things that they wind up regretting because in fact, what looks like success.
• 23:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: always ends up being tinged with failure and loss.
• 23:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: And as a vision of the world, that's a perfectly reasonable vision of the world, better than rocky movies, better than lots of other things, probably politically at this moment in time.
• 23:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: better than the vision that says winning is all that matters, going and doing what you want.
• 23:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: So destroying Troy and feeling bad about it, when you realize your destroying civilization, that doesn't seem to me to be a contemptible vision of the world, to be offering, particularly at this point in history where it's clear that he, like many other people, feel that civilization is collapsing, that the norms of decency and responsibility are lost, that ideas of hospitality are being shattered, so that part of even I think some of the
• 24:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: which has been tacked for being like DEI casting is actually about making films hospitable to people who are different.
• 24:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: So for all of those things, I just think it's unfair to suggest it's just do awful.
• 24:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now it is do awful.
• 24:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: The disappointment for me in it is that I would want him to have all those regrets and still be the more charming, fun, clever, Odysseus that I loved
• 24:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: The people who read Homer have a lot of complaints.
• 24:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: In many ways, it's not the job of the filmmaker to make a quote accurate recreation of the book, but there are opportunities in the story that Homer tells
• 25:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: which Christopher Nolan chose to pass up.
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: One of the more interesting ones is that's been brought up by the Homer scholars is, there's no sex in this movie.
• 25:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Whereas in Greek mythology, there's a lot of sex.
• 25:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: The gods are always having sex with each other.
• 25:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're jealous, Odysseus has been away from his wife Penelope, first for the 10 years of the war.
• 25:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then 10 years coming home,
• 25:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: In Homer's book, there's a lot of sex, for example, the critics talk about the Cersei part, she's the witch who turns his men into pigs.
• 25:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: In Homer's story, she kind of be witches Odysseus, it has sex with him every night for a year, and it's kind of a lot of fun, it's exciting.
• 25:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: In the movie, this is the character played by Samantha Morton, Mourine Dowd says, Samantha Morton plays this part like a vindictive feminist hippie making ceramic
• 26:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: Marine always being nasty, whereas I was actually thinking I was more accurately described.
• 26:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's winch thing that two of the people who've translated to the Odyssey, both Daniel Mendelssohn and Emily Wilson, both actually referred to as kind of earthy, rather than hippie.
• 26:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: She is given some slightly strident things to say, probably modern strident things to say.
• 26:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, let me just to underline that.
• 26:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: She says that she turned the man into pigs,
• 26:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: By the way, in kind of a horror movie scene where she kind of rips them their bodies and reshapes them, which is nothing like what happens in Homer and Homer.
• 26:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: She just taps them with her magic wand.
• 26:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then she tells Odysseus they raped and pillaged across the world for you, filthy soldiers with empty bellies and hot blood, look at them and know your own men.
• 26:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: She says pointing at the pigs.
• 26:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is pure crystal for Nolan.
• 27:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's nothing like that in Homer.
• 27:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: No, so pure crystal for Nolan because it's a big pop thing.
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: And in fact, is over-explicent has all sorts of failings that one would expect of a big pop spectacle.
• 27:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like there's too much action.
• 27:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: There is like the scene in the film, there's a scene where there's a great scene with the Cyclops played by Bill Orwin.
• 27:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think it's a very good.
• 27:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: I love good cyclops.
• 27:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, it's a good scene, but then there's a scene with with these kind of larger than life metal clad monsters, the Lestergonians, and it's just there, I think, for action, it's the one thing in the film, I mean, I think anything else in the film, I can understand why it's there, but that just seems like it's just there to have action and Christopher Nolan loves action.
• 27:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the film builds to the final showdown with Odysseus and the suitors, and I was joking with my girlfriend, you know, I had not realized that the Odysseus was also John Wick, because he kills so many people in such a confined space, so implausibly, with arrows in his back and all the rest.
• 28:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: That that really is...
• 28:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: absurd, they're those flaws, but maybe you think those are the flaws that allow you to tell this particular story at this point in history because there's the audience that will go for that and then learn and learn the Odyssey story.
• 28:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: And we'll actually learn maybe the lesson that he wants to impart about civilization and not just winning in all the rest.
• 28:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I mean, in defending it, if Christopher Nolan was bringing out his new translation,
• 28:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: of the Odyssey from Cambridge University Press that I could recently understand what Greek scholars would complain given that it's a blockbuster that has to make the money back that has to play in every country the world.
• 28:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: I would probably say even though it pains me to, he's done a really good job of doing that for for doing a mass market spectacle.
• 28:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: The biggest disappointment for me was not the absence of sex.
• 29:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was the sirens.
• 29:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was really looking forward to see what's he going to do with the sirens.
• 29:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, the most legendary girl group in Western civilization, Homer says they're sawing as irresistible to any man who hears it.
• 29:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so our man, Matt Damon, you know, has himself tied to the master, has
• 29:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: wax in the ears of his crew, so they won't be drawn to the sirens, and then we see his face and he's writhing in pain like he's being forced to listen to, I don't know, heavy metal at high volume or something like that, but we don't get to hear the sirens.
• 29:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: Let me ask you this.
• 29:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Can you think of a composer anywhere in the world capable of writing that music?
• 29:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, let me just say, there is a better version, which is strangely enough.
• 29:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: The con brothers, out of the movie of the Odyssey, oh brother, where art thou, they're seen with the sirens.
• 29:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: His Emmy Lou Harris, Allison Krauss, and Jillian Welch, singing some 19th century beautiful folk song in harmony.
• 30:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it is kind of wonderful and be wiching and you want to hear it again.
• 30:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, no, I understand, but is that recall over the word though, isn't set in ancient Greece, huh?
• 30:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, it's set in like Mississippi in the 30s.
• 30:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, right, exactly.
• 30:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: No, I think it's not a very good scene.
• 30:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: I agree with you.
• 30:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think you would probably need to have some music and you would have to find some way with the camera and the poetry of filmmaking to make it come more alive than it did, because I think that's just a disappointing scene.
• 30:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: I can imagine he got hours and hours of his, he has a very good composer.
• 30:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: His composer trying to do the thing.
• 30:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's very much like impressed with, you know, there's the tiny phrase that Swan loves in Swan's way and whenever they try to make movies of it, you're then always stuck with the fact that it's supposed to be this one little phrase of music that haunts you forever.
• 30:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's a hard thing to write.
• 31:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's easy to write.
• 31:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: an earworm, you know, you could get very manaloturated.
• 31:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, I was joking that, you know, that probably he wanted Taylor Swift to do the, yeah, to do the siren thing.
• 31:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there, I'm a huge number of critics, almost all of my friends, you know, think of him as like a great filmmaker.
• 31:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: And what I think he's, he's great at the certain things.
• 31:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think he's an excellent storyteller.
• 31:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think he's unbelievably good at weaving together
• 31:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: and braiding him so that you can always follow them.
• 31:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think he's actually good at playing with time.
• 31:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think he edits exceedingly well.
• 31:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think in terms of visually, I think it's dollar than I think it's going to be.
• 31:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's not as exciting.
• 31:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think there's some sort of level of poetry.
• 31:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: He can't quite get to.
• 31:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: And even in the action scenes, I don't think he's as good as.
• 31:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: say Katherine Biggillow.
• 31:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: I was thinking, if you gave Katherine Biggillow $250 million and said, really give us a scary scene with the sidelines.
• 31:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: She could do as well, although the sidelines with the Bill Urban thing is very, very good.
• 32:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I just don't think that somehow that sense of him as a genius filmmaker, if I can just add one more thought here, because this is part of the story, is that the reason why it's already made $650 million around the world,
• 32:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: is that Nolan has been singled out in a way perhaps like Stanley Kubrick earlier, as the guy who's the master of filmmaking.
• 32:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he has the loyal audience who will always go any year in advance.
• 32:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: by the IMAX 70 millimeter version.
• 32:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there's a weird fetish of the technique with him.
• 32:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, you know, what you also had with Kubrick, where people are saying Kubrick was such a perfectionist.
• 32:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's ever had to be perfect.
• 32:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: He said, yeah, except the shot in Vietnam in England.
• 32:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, except for that, it didn't look like Vietnam, except for that.
• 32:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's a perfectionist.
• 32:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the point is he, I think he is not a great, soaring filmmaker, but he's excellent in other things.
• 32:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: What did you think of the ending where Matt Damon gives the crown to his son and heads off into the sunset with Anne Hathaway, a kind of aging couple headed for a quiet retirement?
• 33:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's an article out in the Atlantic, now which I haven't read, but it's been mentioned to me about how it's a Christian movie, not a Greek movie.
• 33:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there is the huge atonement level of the confessional thing and being forgiven for your sins, and this is very much part of it.
• 33:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: And once again, this is part, you know, you can go, it's not, it's not just Elon Musk, although I will be happy to abuse him.
• 33:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: Everything can we can.
• 33:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: you know, if you go all the way back to say Nietzsche, perhaps Nietzsche's favorite character in all of the world is Odysseus, and he loved him for being a liar, and for being alive and being able to shift himself so much.
• 33:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Nietzsche and Musk would both think you have this guy who's charismatic and smart and a great warrior and a great thinker and all these sort of things, and he turns himself into a kind of woofled retiree, which of course he wouldn't have been,
• 34:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: They tend not to sail off and give it up, you know.
• 34:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: Joe Biden, who I think is a long way from Odysseus, did not get on the boat with Jill and go to the Western Islands.
• 34:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: On the Christian front, there's a similar argument made by the New York Times conservative political columnist David French in disagreeing with Musk.
• 34:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: He calls the movie, quote, one of the most conservative movies I've ever seen.
• 34:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: The moral of the movie is yes, there are universal moral laws, and this is what happens when prideful men believe they know more than God, close quote.
• 34:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, no it is.
• 34:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's true.
• 34:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: But in the movie, the God is Zeus, who is a little bit different from the Christian God.
• 34:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: But we are post Zeus.
• 34:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so now today's modern conservative believes in the Judeo Christian tradition and probably more likely than not the Christian tradition, rather than the Judeo Christian tradition.
• 35:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: Although they keep the Judeo's around.
• 35:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, the vengeful God works for them.
• 35:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the vengeful God works.
• 35:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, they like that part of it, but it is a strange thing.
• 35:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's it is both conservative and on the other hand, you could say it's kind of because many of the reviews I've read have talked about, you can you can see the destruction of Vietnam or other countries in what was going on in this.
• 35:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it is the Westerners who take their armies and their strategies to the east.
• 35:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: And destroy the east because of their hubris.
• 35:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, and women are then, although I think it's painfully explicit in the film, nevertheless, it is attempting to suggest that women are also among the colonized people.
• 35:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a funny thing.
• 35:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: I believe in the Emily Wilson review.
• 36:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: where she points out that there's a character played by John Legwizama, who's a swine herd, who is constantly being described as Odysseus's servant and kind of friendly servant.
• 36:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: And as Emily Wilson points out, the term is slave.
• 36:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: They keep calling them servants when in fact, yes, but you're a servant, but I do own you, but people would find that disturbing.
• 36:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's all the complexity of stuff.
• 36:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's the complexity of fact that we like Odysseus yet he does his men rape and murder and he's cool with that.
• 36:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: That he wants to be king, that he will he will kill all the suitors.
• 36:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: He does think up the Trojan Horton and yet the same then we like him, but he also likes to sleep with with with these attractive kind of witchy women.
• 36:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's just a Christopher Nolan, I guess, artistic blind spot.
• 36:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: There are just certain directors who, when they get around sex, even if they want to, they kind of freeze up and can't do it.
• 36:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I just have that feeling that he's good at lots of things, but when you go into that arena, he never feels particularly comfortable with it.
• 37:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: But hey, it's pretty fun to take drugs and have sex with the Charlize Theron, I think, I think huge parts of the audience, man, he's got it made.
• 37:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't mean there.
• 37:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: John, you're closing thoughts.
• 37:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: When you're reading certain critics, we're like experts in this.
• 37:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm reminded how there was a, I think maybe entertainment weekly, or maybe it was the L.A. times someplace, you used to run a thing where there'd be, if there was a movie about firemen, they'd get a firemen to review it.
• 37:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the firemen would always find eight million things that weren't accurate about it, and couldn't actually see what was going on.
• 37:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I feel with certain of that,
• 37:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: of the Greek experts, they seem not to realize that they are watching something that wasn't designed to be an attempt to recapture what Greek thought.
• 37:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's not a historical investigation, but it's an attempt to try to bring to life for an existing audience in a modern version, the same thing.
• 38:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: So that yes, many of the complaints are true, and there are things I don't like about the film, but I think the one thing that seems unfair is to suggest that Christopher Nolan didn't spend all this money to show us what Greeks actually thought in the time of an epic.
• 38:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's just a crazy thing to think.
• 38:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: John Powers, you can listen to his reviews at NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
• 38:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: John, thanks for talking with us today.
• 38:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: My pleasure.
• 38:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Start making sense.
• 38:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: A podcast from the Nation Magazine is recorded at our upstairs studio in Los Angeles.
• 38:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Renee Reynolds is our associate producer, Alan Minski is our producer.
• 38:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: Richie the Ambrose is executive producer, Boskarsun Kara is president of the nation, Katrina Van Nouvelle is editor and publisher of the nation.
• 39:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Our theme music is Barcelona Afrobeat, licensed by Creative Commons.
• 39:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can find out more about Start Making Sense at thenation.com and subscribe to Start Making Sense on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
• 39:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm John Weiner, thanks for listening.