Zoe Beyer מרים לאה

Professional hot take haver | Diaspora Fetishist | UNC '22

[Zoe Beyer מרים לאה @ZoeBeye]

I'm back on Substack!

https://t.co/FhK9iQNxBM

[Dr. Alex Zawacki @achillghost]

They didn’t do that either. “There is no evidence that the majority of those accused were healers and midwives; in England and also in some parts of the Continent, midwives were more likely to be found helping witch-hunters.”

[sam parker @samprkr]

alright fess up who broke zeus's law

[Alain Astruc @alainastruc]

Christopher Nolan had to go to China for us to finally have a pertinent interview. He answers honestly, and that honours him, allowing us, I think, to close the debate.

His attitude is mostly one of arrogance.

The gods. His ideas about how the Greeks viewed their gods are simplistic and typical of a kind of scientific arrogance that thinks religion was there simply to answer what science could not. Entirely wrong.

Xenia. His version of Zeus’s law is absolutely a vision informed by Christianity and the Golden Rule, as if the Greeks had no morality and were waiting for Christianity to educate them, again.

Guilt. Again, Nolan treats the absence of guilt and atonement as something needing to be fixed by Christianity or post-Christian liberal guilt, as if the Greeks were too stupid to have their own set of morals.

Greatness. Maybe the most frightening part. For him, in a democracy, the great man has to be humiliated in some way and atone for his greatness, at the risk of being shunned by others. An awful message for all people of great ability: do not be yourselves, act like NPCs.

Odysseus. He is not allowed to be Odysseus. He is not an exceptionally clever and complex human being, but the hero of a boomer film about American veterans, a decent dad who was dragged against his will into a dirty war.

Hollywood. Nolan clearly states that the audiovisual language of the world is that of Hollywood, something to which I am strongly opposed, obviously.

Critics. Again, Nolan takes people for idiots and thinks they criticise his films because they recognise tropes. People at this level of analysis are usually his own fans. The distinction he makes between professional and amateur critics shows clearly that he should get an email address and a cell phone and start realising that we are no longer in 1985.

Bronze Age collapse. I am not a specialist, but it is not difficult to see that he simply put the structure of Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb onto Odysseus and the Trojan Horse. It makes for a particularly sad film.

What he did was adapt the story beats and the characters into a pure Hollywood Nolan film.

He made an adaptation of The Odyssey that ultimately denies the universe of The Odyssey. He refuses to immerse us in the strangeness of that ancient world. Federico Fellini adapted the Satyricon as science fiction, searching for a cinematic equivalent to the strangeness of the ancient world.

Nolan chose to do the exact opposite. He forced Antiquity to conform to Hollywood tropes and to his own obsessions. The result is a completely Nolanian film: grey and beige, falsely complex, arrogant, sad, humourless, filled with empty display.

Thank you @ZhugeYY for this great questions.

[Josh Billinson @jbillinson]

gentrification is when trash goes in trash cans

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

A New Yorker's guide to DC. (Springfield, VA is Staten Island)

[Antonius Tetrax @AntoniusTetrax]

Amazing to hear Nolan admit that storytellers today need to "apologize for greatness" so that the audience does not reject it. We need more grad students in political theory to interview filmmakers

[vivian @vivian39_]

I’m so dupont pilled. top 10 neighborhoods in the us tbh

[Maddie @maddiewhittle]

Kinda wild that FOUR WEDDINGS & A FUNERAL is celebrated as a fizzy romcom classic when it’s actually a melancholic & unsparing critique of a hetero culture that callously took the institution of marriage for granted while queer people were losing their would-be-spouses to AIDS

[Three-Eyed Raisin @GulagJamun_]

Chinese interview: The concept of atonement didn’t really exist in Ancient Greece and it didn’t exist in Homer’s Odyssey. It exists in your Odyssey. Did you Christianize the Odyssey?

American interview: spin the snack wheel and then read these thirst tweets they called you zaddy

[Touchline Tips @TouchlineRc]

I learnt this is one of the central moral questions at the end of the Odyssey, and Homer doesn’t ignore it.

Odysseus restored order to his own household by killing the suitors, who had broken the sacred laws of hospitality (xenia), plotted to murder Telemachus, and tried to seize his throne. In Homer, their deaths are presented as an act of justice rather than simple revenge. However, that justice came at a price. The suitors were sons of Ithaca’s leading families, and after the massacre their fathers and relatives armed themselves to avenge them. A new blood feud was already beginning.

The Odyssey makes it clear that Odysseus did not end the conflict by himself. As the two sides prepared to fight, Athena intervened on Zeus’ command, stopped the battle, and forced both sides to swear an oath of peace. Zeus ordered that the killings be forgotten and that Odysseus continue to rule Ithaca. Without the gods’ intervention, the cycle of vengeance would almost certainly have continued, giving the next generation every reason to hate Odysseus and his family.

So, in Greek mythology, Odysseus reclaimed his kingdom and restored his rightful rule, but lasting peace was achieved only because the gods imposed it. The ending suggests that human justice alone was not enough to heal the divisions left behind by the slaughter of the suitors.

So in a way way both seem to be true

[helmet girl @sbodrojan]

like holy fuck

[helmet girl @sbodrojan]

you have probably never heard of the movie CATHERINE CALLED BIRDY but it is a children's movie from 2022 directed by Lena Dunham and it contains one of the all-time monologues delivered by Andrew Scott at the eleventh hour. just thinking about it gets me misty-eyed

[Sturgeon's Law @Sturgeons_Law]

Beast mode

[♃ @Kismetse0nur]

Filmin en saçma sahnesiydi. Orijinal hikayede Odysseus mağarada tepegözle karşılaştığında onunla konuşur. Burada ne aradıklarını sorar. Troya’dan döndüklerini, ikram istediklerini söyler. Cyclops “burada Zeus’un kuralları geçmez” der. İki adamını yer. Uyur. Ertesi gün odysseus merhamet ister. Merhamet olarak en son onu yiyeceğini söyler. Odysseus ile şarap içmeye başlarlar.

Odysseus’a ismini sorar. O da kendini -Outis- yani “hiç kimse” olarak tanıtır. Dev çok sarhoş olup bayılır. Sahnedeki gibi kör edilir. Bağırmaya başlayınca diğer devler gelir. Ona kimin saldırdığını sorarlar. O da “hiç kimse” diye cevap verir. Böylece de mağaradan kurtulurlar.

Odysseus çok kibirli biri olduğu için bu işi kendinin yaptığının bilinmesini ister. Gemiye kadar onu takip eden tepegöze “Ben Odysseus” diyerek bağırır. Fakat devin Poseidon’un oğlu olduğunu bilmemektedir. Dev, babası Poseidon’a seslenir. “Oğlunu Odysseus kör etti. Ya ölsün, ya da evine geç dönsün. Her şeyini kaybetsin”

Böylece Odysseus’un evine geç dönüşünün tanrısal sebebi açıklanır.

Nolan maalesef en kilit bu noktayı işlemedi.

[Charles 🍉 @cargilethmighty]

Reminder this song has a canon prequel in this song which was written by the same fictional artist a decade earlier under a different alias and its actually the best shit ive ever heard in my life

[Gareth Harney @OptimoPrincipi]

Emily Wilson after watching the Odyssey:

‘The film presents an Odysseus who feels very bad about things that he's done in war, and is struggling to process them in a very modern, psychiatrised way – and needs drugs to do so! He seems to feel bad about being a warrior, and we never actually see him get to do much warrioring ... Nolan makes the protagonist a likeable, all-American hero; Homer's Odysseus wants glory, and he wants to get spoils from the sack of a city! I kept looking in vain for a sense that this was a film about glory. This is a film that has an interest in shame, but I don't think it has any interest in glory.’

[Laurie Elisheva @writtenbylaurie]

One of my favourite stories about the Herzog family is that Rabbi Yitzhak visited convents and orphanages around Europe after the war, asking, 'Where are all the Jewish children?' They would always respond, 'There are no Jewish children here.' Then Herzog would recite the Shema, and some of the hidden children, recognising the prayer, would stand up and cover their eyes or recite it with him. He would then take them with him.

[evan loves worf @esjesjesj]

A lot of people slept on Kyle Gordon doing a British rap where each word is another British reference

[Jia 🥕 @jiagrapher]

"There's a settlement named Memphis. It's on a crucial riverbank, filled with Egyptians, and has a pyramid."
"Oh yes, Herodotus wrote about the area extensively."
"I'm not talking about that Memphis."