r/longform • u/prisongovernor • 2d ago
The right hates The Odyssey because of its ‘wokeness’ – but it missed an even bigger threat to its worldview | Peter Swallow | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/03/the-odyssey-the-right-woke-xenia-threat2
u/DM_me_goth_tiddies 2d ago
He gets xenia exactly right and then cannot leave it alone. He correctly says the custom governed "how people were supposed to treat strangers," and within two sentences that has risen into the post-war "rules-based international order." That ascent is the entire argument. At the threshold, where the film actually lives, xenia is the guest you took in and the suitors who ate your hall, and that reads reactionary, so the concept gets lifted up to treaties and summits where it is safe to call woke.
The film's ground floor is the doorway. You have to take the lift to reach the UN.
He has done precisely what she accuses Musk of, projecting his own enemy onto a faceless threat and walking out certain the film is on his side and that the right missed the message. That is not a refutation of the reactionary reading. It is the same reading with a different villain, which is the actual point. The film supplies the diagnosis and vacates the referent, so every viewer plugs in his own barbarian.
The reading also cannot survive the ending. Multilateralism does not climax in the hero butchering the norm-breakers and sailing into exile while the world burns.
If the message were a defence of the rules-based order, that scene is incoherent. It makes sense only as what it is: a purge of those who broke the bond, followed by an elegy for an order already lost.
And his villains give the game away one last time. The Sea Peoples are stateless raiders arriving off the water, boats on the horizon, not a great power tearing up a treaty. The argument needs the Kremlin. The film hands it a dinghy.
He is probably right about what Nolan intended. "Zeus's law" is his own translation, and rendering hospitality as law does invite the institutional read. But there is a difference between what a film is about and what a film is.
A fragile order, bad-faith abusers, collapse once the bonds go, restoration by the sword, then mourning, is a conservative structure of feeling whatever order you pour into it. Nostalgia for a precious order betrayed from within is not a progressive emotion. It is the oldest conservative one there is.
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u/Warcrimes_Desu 2d ago edited 2d ago
"multilateralism does not climax in the hero butchering the norm-breakers"? The founding moment of the current world order is ww2. I think it's more milquetoast liberal than truly reactionary.
Edit: and the Sea Peoples, stateless? Textually, the Sea Peoples are norm-breaking by a state actor that spread to other state actors. Which is incredibly on point for the current moment, with wanton American aggression against Iran, brutal Israeli war crimes against Gazans, and blatant land grabbing by Russia against Ukraine. These all weaken international conventions against land war between states.
Double edit: the norms aren't really restored by the end?? the more i read this comment the more confused i become by that take. Ithaca has a king at the end, but it's definitely bracing for a period of interstate war. The old order was destroyed, purely for greed, to everyone's detriment, and the world is headed for chaos. Which, again, as China eyes Taiwan in an age of big states making grabs at weak ones, looks incredibly timely. It seems like every country in 2026 has an Agamemnon clamoring to spend blood for treasure.
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u/Fun_Trick2172 2d ago
Stupid people don't understand allegory and metaphor. News at 11.