"oh shit, everyone, these models are really scary! i guess... if you gave us more state surveillance power and control... we would reluctantly accept total control of these world-ending monsters, to uh, protect you. but only because the situation is so serious, and scary!"
So basically what happened is a senator told a journalist that the head of the NSA said Mythos βbroke into almost all of our classified systemsβ and the journalist thought βwhat a cool quote that fits my narrative, better not actually check any of thatβ so here we are
the public is being fed half-assed misinformation, drip-by-drip
it's like kabuki theater combined with chinese water torture
we already know what the trump admin wants. we already know what the safetyists want. we already know what dario wants. we already know what sam wants.
@8teAPi all regimes need to solve the legitimacy problem. even in non-democracies. it isn't optional. the decision-making is where people believe it is.
so far, technologists have taken the musk and thiel approach: bypass, ignore, or aid corruption. buy your way in. wrong approach.
You buy a German anvil. It contains 83 moving parts and requires winding twice a day. It's forged from excellent steel, holds tolerances across all three striking faces to within three microns, includes a beautifully indexed horn-adjustment mechanism nobody asked for, and requires a proprietary 11-point spanner should you need to replace the rebound calibration bushing. It runs flawlessly for years, but one day it starts up in limp mode because the onboard anvil-management system detects that it's overdue for its 50,000-strike inspection.
You search AliExpress for a Chinese anvil, and are presented with a multitude of offerings from such household-name brands as DUKXJYIBF, HDBTGMXI, AND UEJQIP. They're all priced to within a few pennies of each other, appear completely identical except for the nameplate, and obviously all came out of the same factory. You text your blacksmith friend to ask if they're legit. He tells you he got one like that from KIXJBU a few years ago, and that it's been great and a terrific deal. You thank him, but KIXJBU seems to have folded so you buy the one from UEJQIP. When it arrives, it feels suspiciously light. You scratch it and realize it's iron-plated aluminum.
You buy an American anvil. It's five times the price of the competition, but it comes from a brand that your great-grandfather used to love. It comes boxed with a warranty registration postcard, twenty pages of safety instructions, assay certificate, and a regulatory slip which lists its FCC certification and ITAR registration. It looks just like your friend's KIXJBU. There's a "Made In China" sticker on the bottom.
You buy a Russian anvil. It arrives coated in cosmoline, wrapped in newspaper from 1974, and weighing 40% more than advertised. The finish looks like it was machined with a shovel. The face is not flat, but somehow this does not matter. You drop it off a truck, accidentally leave it outside for six winters, and use it to straighten a bulldozer blade. It's fine.
You buy a Swedish anvil. It comes flat-packed in a long cardboard box with cheerful Neo-Grotesk lettering and a line drawing of a smiling man assembling it with an Allen key. The instructions contain no words, only pictograms showing the anvil face, horn, waist, feet, and 112 identical-looking fasteners. Halfway through assembly, you discover that the pritchel hole was installed upside down, but only because you used peg B17 where you should have used peg B71. Once assembled, it is clean, stable, and works better than it has any right to. You immediately wonder whether you should have bought two.
You buy a Japanese anvil. It arrives wrapped in rice paper inside a paulownia box, accompanied by a certificate bearing three generations of signatures and a photograph of the first production example being presented to the Emperor. The face has been hand-polished by a seventy-eight-year-old master whose family has made striking surfaces since the Muromachi period. You are given detailed instructions for oiling it with a cloth folded in a specific way. It is the most beautiful object you own. You never quite work up the nerve to strike it.
The only thing epic here is the aesthetic catastrophe.
Nolan is a cerebral director of the global anglo world, all his intelligence put to industrial ends. Grey matter for a grey world. Nothing in this trailer is Greek. Nothing is Mediterranean. No olive groves and no white stone burning under the sun and no salt and no pine and no sea-glare. A deracinated Odyssey, made for imaginary nobodies from nowhere.
The script feels like it's going to be the work of a diligent student who took down the events of the Odyssey one by one, forgetting that this is not a novel but an archaic poem, from a time when men and women lived each word as a heartbeat, who sang the soul and flesh of a people and of a world at once real and supernatural. A poem in which Telemachus does not say "my dad is coming home."
The Odyssey deserved a Parajanov or a Fellini or a Welles, someone larger than life, a Dionysian ogre, someone hungry, someone who could make a film that smells of figs and raw wool and roasting meat and tar and blood. Monsters that are actually monstrous and seductive witches with real venom and golden shields catching real light and banquets going on for days.
And the women of the poem, who are everywhere in Homer and seem so cold and dull here. Circe in her smoke and Calypso in her cave and Penelope at her loom, the sensuality of witches and the rigid loyalty of wives, all replaced by a fashion-armor Athena and a Penelope played as a strong American woman.
And then there is what the Odysseus of the trailer says: "No one can stand between me and home, not even the gods". The cunning sufferer who knew how to bow to divine forces turned into a defiant individualist who bows to no one. Greek cunning replaced by American autonomy. The poem's central lesson reversed in a single line of dialogue.
I usually don't mind Hollywood slop, but this has made me weirdly angry, and the film isn't even out yet. I feel as if a red line has been crossed, some hubris that has gone too far. The gods have been angered. How could they not be, with the decapitation of that statue at the end of the trailer? An iconoclastic gesture absent from Homer, usual with the monotheistic traditions that have spent centuries smashing pagan images.
Nietzsche said he would believe only in a god who knew how to dance. Apollo without Dionysus produces exactly this: cerebral, cold, unambiguous. I cannot trust a filmmaker who is not hungry enough to banquet with the gods.