Poucos romances parecem tão inseparáveis da imaginação de seus leitores quanto "Cem Anos de Solidão".
Na segunda metade da série adaptada do livro, que estreia agora na
Netflix, os acontecimentos importam menos do que a sensação de que o
tempo passou a girar sobre si mesmo e a repetir-se.
Os muitos José Arcadios e Aurelianos não confundem apenas quem lê.
Eles existem para lembrar que cada geração acredita inaugurar uma
história nova quando, na verdade, revive paixões, erros e desejos
herdados das anteriores.
É essa segunda metade do romance, mais filosófica, mais política e
também a mais difícil de adaptar, que chegou agora ao streaming,
encerrando a produção baseada na obra máxima do Nobel colombiano Gabriel García Márquez
(1927-2014). Após a primeira leva de oito episódios em 2024, mais sete
foram liberados. O oitavo e último dessa segunda parte estará disponível
em 26 de agosto.
O ator colombiano Claudio Cataño, que interpreta o coronel
Aureliano Buendía na adaptação de "Cem Anos de Solidão", produzida pela
Netflix
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Mauro González/Netflix
Depois da fundação de Macondo, a cidade em que se passa a
história, e da ascensão dos Buendía, acompanhamos a lenta decomposição
da família, um dos finais mais extraordinários da literatura do século
20.
A responsabilidade de adaptar essa etapa da história também foi
sentida pelo elenco. "Nunca me imaginei trabalhando numa série como
essa. Me cobrei muito porque essa passagem de geração dos Buendía é
muito significativa", diz Moreno Borja, intérprete do mago Melquíades,
personagem que acompanha a trajetória da família do início ao fim e
funciona como uma espécie de guardião da memória de Macondo.
García Márquez resistiu por muito tempo à ideia de vender os direitos do romance
ou de autorizar adaptações para outros formatos. Não por capricho, mas
sim pela certeza de que certos livros existem justamente porque cada
leitor os imagina de modo diferente. Macondo nunca foi apenas uma
cidade. Foi sempre a cidade que cada um construiu dentro da própria
cabeça.
A decisão de adaptar o livro para uma série de TV foi tomada pelos
filhos do escritor, Gonzalo e Rodrigo, como uma forma de também celebrar
o centenário de nascimento de Gabo, que se completa no ano que vem.
O crítico americano A. O. Scott, do New York Times, chegou
a defender que "Cem Anos de Solidão" talvez nunca devesse ser
transposto para cinema ou TV. Em vez de enfrentar Macondo, dizia ele,
seria mais razoável adaptar o livro "Notícia de um Sequestro" (1996),
grande reportagem de García Márquez cuja estrutura jornalística
encontraria uma tradução muito mais natural na linguagem audiovisual.
Adaptações anteriores de livros de Gabo não provocaram entusiasmo. Nem "Crônica de uma Morte Anunciada" nem "O Amor nos Tempos do Cólera"
conseguiram preservar nas telas aquilo que fazia dos romances
experiências literárias únicas. Pareciam confirmar que García Márquez
pertencia à família de escritores cuja obra simplesmente resiste à
imagem.
Ou seja, a série acerta mais do que erra justamente porque parece
compreender seus próprios limites. Em nenhum momento tentou competir com
García Márquez. Procurou construir uma interpretação visual de um
romance que continuará pertencendo, antes de tudo, à literatura.
A mudança de tom nas duas partes da série acompanha de perto a arquitetura do romance.
Se a primeira metade de "Cem Anos de Solidão" era quase um gênesis latino-americano, acompanhando a invenção de Macondo,
a chegada dos ciganos, do gelo, das guerras civis e das primeiras
descobertas, a segunda passa a narrar outra história: a do desgaste do
tempo.
Macondo deixa de ser um lugar onde tudo nasce. Passa a ser um lugar
onde tudo retorna. O futuro deixa de apontar para a descoberta e passa a
repetir, com pequenas variações, aquilo que parecia já ter acontecido.
É nesse momento que entram em cena os gêmeos José Arcadio Segundo e
Aureliano Segundo. Laura Mora, que dirige cinco dos sete episódios
finais e falou por videoconferência com a Folha, define esta nova
etapa como "a mais política" da narrativa. Também a resume numa
expressão particularmente feliz: "é o fim da utopia".
A frase ajuda a compreender o movimento do livro.
Os vários José Arcadios e Aurelianos não constituem apenas um recurso
narrativo. São a expressão mais visível de um romance em que a história
parece condenada a repetir os próprios ciclos. Os Buendía tentam
escapar do destino. Quase nunca conseguem. Essa repetição não é apenas
familiar, mas também histórica.
Na segunda metade do romance, a história dos Buendía deixa de bastar a
si mesma. Macondo passa a condensar boa parte da experiência
latino-americana do século 20.
A chegada da ferrovia, celebrada inicialmente como sinal de
progresso, abre caminho para uma empresa multinacional que
comercializava frutas tropicais,
sobretudo bananas. E com ela vem também um novo tipo de poder: o do
capital estrangeiro, da exploração econômica e da violência
institucional.
Nesse trecho García Márquez recria literariamente um episódio
traumático da história colombiana —o massacre dos trabalhadores da United Fruit Company, em 1928— e faz dele um dos momentos mais devastadores da literatura latino-americana.
O massacre marca o momento em que o romance deixa de ser apenas a
saga de uma família extraordinária para dialogar diretamente com a
história da América Latina. Macondo passa a representar um continente
atravessado por interesses estrangeiros, modernizações impostas de cima
para baixo e sucessivos ciclos de autoritarismo, desigualdade e
apagamento da memória.
A diretora Laura Mora demonstra
compreender essa dimensão histórica. Para reconstruir a chegada da
empresa bananeira, a produção optou por filmar exatamente na região
colombiana em que a United Fruit se instalou, reconstruindo inclusive o
bairro destinado aos funcionários americanos.
Não se trata apenas de um detalhe de produção. É uma maneira de
lembrar que o romance está profundamente enraizado na história da
Colômbia.
Também chama a atenção no projeto o novo lugar ocupado por Úrsula
Iguarán. Marleyda Soto, uma das atrizes que interpretam a personagem em
diferentes fases da vida, diz que o maior desafio foi construir, em
conjunto com as demais intérpretes, uma mulher de traços tão marcantes.
Laura Mora afirma que quis "reconectá-la" ao destino de Macondo. Aos
104 anos, Úrsula deixa de ser apenas a matriarca da família. Torna-se
quase a memória viva da cidade, a personagem que assiste, impotente, ao
desmoronamento do mundo que ajudou a construir.
Trata-se de uma escolha que altera discretamente a hierarquia do
romance. Em García Márquez, Úrsula permanece o verdadeiro eixo da
narrativa: matriarca, consciência moral da família e a única personagem
capaz de atravessar quase toda a história de Macondo sem perder a
lucidez diante da repetição dos destinos.
Talvez seja esse o maior desafio da adaptação: deixar de lado o
realismo mágico —convertido, ao longo das décadas, quase numa caricatura
pelas inúmeras imitações que inspirou— e transmitir essa estranha
sensação de que tudo já aconteceu antes e, ainda assim, continua
acontecendo diante de nossos olhos.
Nesse sentido, a série demonstra compreender algo essencial:
Macondo nunca foi apenas um lugar fantástico. É também uma interpretação
da Colômbia e da América Latina, além de uma reflexão sobre a
incapacidade humana de escapar ao tempo histórico que lhe coube viver.
A boa notícia é que a série não compete com o livro. Cada qual segue
as regras de seu gênero. Se conseguir levar uma nova geração de leitores
ao romance, terá realizado algo que poucas adaptações conseguem,
devolver-nos ao texto que lhes deu origem.
I’ll
admit I’m a little late weighing in on “The Odyssey.” Chalk it up to
having young kids. I don’t make it to the movies much. But what a trick
its director, Christopher Nolan, has pulled off. Elon Musk did not
understand what this movie was. But this movie understands what Musk is.
It understands who we are becoming and who we have become, and it
points a way out.
Tricks
are central to “The Odyssey.” In myth, Odysseus is a trickster. He is
described, in the first line of the story, as the man of many ways or of
many wiles or of many turns. He is, depending on the translator, an
ingenious man, a cunning man, a complicated man. He is a man of
appetites and contradictions, a man who wants nothing more than to go
home but keeps choosing to stay abroad, a man who yearns for his wife
but cannot stop bedding goddesses. Odysseus is never one thing; he is
always many things.
Matt
Damon is no trickster. I thought he was going to be the problem with
Nolan’s “Odyssey.” Amid the right-wing outcry over the casting of Lupita
Nyong’o and Elliot Page, it was Damon’s casting as Odysseus that I
couldn’t reconcile with “The Odyssey.” Damon often seems to me like a
man of a single way, a man who wakes up early and keeps to a clean diet
and rarely has more than one glass of wine before bed. That’s not
Odysseus.
But Nolan wasn’t looking for a trickster. His Odysseus is something else. That, you can say, was Nolan’s first trick.
I want to stop here
and say a bit about tricksters, because I have spent the past few years
quietly obsessed with the archetype. The trickster is Loki in Norse
mythology, Eshu in Yoruban stories, Coyote or Raven in Native American
tales, Maui in Polynesia and Hermes and Odysseus among the ancient
Greeks.
The
function of the trickster, writes Lewis Hyde in his wonderful book
“Trickster Makes This World,” is “to uncover and disrupt the very things
that a culture depends on.” The trickster dances across customs and
taboos, says what may not be said, does what should not be done. The
trickster injects disorder into order, renders visible what is
ordinarily hidden. The trickster causes the damage that makes growth
possible. But a happy ending is never guaranteed. The trickster can be
regenerative or ruinous. Coyote brings fire; Raven brings the sun; Loki
brings Ragnarok.
Hyde’s
argument is that tricksters are both necessary and dangerous. They
represent a tension every society must grapple with. A culture that
cannot meet disruption with creativity cannot survive change. A culture
that cannot protect its core values will be consumed by corruption. Too
much order leads to paralysis; too much chaos invites collapse.
We
are living in an age of chaos. We have been living in an age of
tricksters. Musk, President Trump, Tucker Carlson, Andrew Tate, Nick
Fuentes — the grammar of the modern right is tricksy. What is serious,
and what is not? What is a provocation, and what is a promise? Why did
they say that, and how did they get away with it? I am not saying these
men are only tricksters. They are not the culture makers Hyde prefers to
focus on. But I am saying that the dominant personalities of the age
have gathered power by bulldozing customs and taboos, by saying what may
not be said, by doing what should not be done.
Hyde
said that Americans love a trickster “because he embodies things that
are actually true about America but cannot be openly declared.” That
might have been true in 1998, when Hyde published his book. And I can
see the argument that American institutions and mores ossified in the
years since — that our society had become too rulebound and
bureaucratized, that too much had become unsayable, that there was too
little openness to transgression and invention.
But
today there is little that may no longer be said. The ideas and morals
upon which the best of our culture was built have been disrupted and
desecrated. The question now is whether that disruption can be met with
creativity and renewal.
This is the central question
of Nolan’s “Odyssey.” This “Odyssey” ostensibly hinges on Zeus’ law:
Treat the beggar and the stranger as you would want to be treated. But
as a horde of classicists have pointed out,
that is not the law of Zeus, which is narrower: It demands hospitality
toward the guest or the stranger, recognizing that anyone could be a god
in disguise. It is not an ethic of compassion or even reciprocity.
And
here we find Nolan’s central trick: Nolan has smuggled the core of
Judeo-Christian ethics into “The Odyssey.” Zeus’ law, in Nolan’s
“Odyssey,” echoes Leviticus 19:34: “The foreigner residing among you
must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were
foreigners in Egypt.” It echoes Rabbi Hillel, who said: “What is
hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the
rest is commentary.” It echoes Matthew 7:12, when Jesus says, “In
everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this
sums up the law and the prophets.”
Such
an ethic is demanding. Few of us live up to it. But the problem with
adherents of the modern right is not just that they don’t live up to it;
the issue is that they detest it. To treat the foreigner residing among
us as well as we treat our native-born is derided as suicidal empathy.The
Trump administration glorifies cruelty toward the immigrant, the
stranger, the weak and the poor. It takes money from Medicaid to cut
taxes for the rich. It threatens the destruction of whole civilizations.
The
modern right is built on the logic of tribute and dominance. “We live
in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that
is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Stephen Miller, a top
White House adviser, told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “These are the iron laws of
the world since the beginning of time.”
But
weren’t those iron laws replaced by the Golden Rule? When Odysseus
concocts the trick of the Trojan horse, taking advantage of Troy’s
veneration of the same gods he worships to sack the city and make its
streets run red with blood, is he a hero or a villain? Is it a trick or a
crime? To Homer, he was a hero. To Nolan, he is a soul in need of
redemption. Between Homer’s time and ours came a revolution in
civilizational values, an upending of what civilization even means.
Which side of that divide are we on?
The
modern right believes that Western civilization has lost the appetite
for strength and dominance and hierarchy that built it. There is a
reason a theorist like Bronze Age Pervert has become required reading
for young Trumpists. There is a reason right-wing intellectuals like
Curtis Yarvin and Michael Anton have mused about the need for an
American Caesar. There is a reason the Trump administration is obsessed
with Roman-style architecture. It is not an accident that they keep
circling this era, both intellectually and aesthetically.
A
recent exchange Musk had on X reveals how far this thinking has gone. A
user told Musk it was time to “wise up” and abandon classical
liberalism, because “universal suffrage leads to universal suffering.”
His reply: “I have wised up.”
Helen
of Troy, in Nolan’s “Odyssey,” is just an excuse for a war launched to
dominate routes of trade. It’s a telling choice during an administration
that is crashing into the global order in pursuit of more dominance
over trade flows.
In
the cry of protest by the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, against
this regime, he also reached back to Greece to describe what he saw
happening: “The strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer
what they must. And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as
inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting
itself.”
When
Nolan’s Odysseus recalls the sacking of Troy, he blanches at the memory
of 10 years of rage pouring into a city in a single night. It was hard
for me not to think, then, of the pent-up rage that Hamas poured into
Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and that Israel has poured into Gaza a
hundredfold in the years since. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu, now describes Israel’s future as “Athens and super-Sparta.”
Yuval
Noah Harari, the Israeli-born historian who wrote “Sapiens,” sees the
diminishment this foretells clearly. “A lot of the thinking, and also
the practice, about what it means to have freedom of thought, what it
means to be a powerless minority, was done by Jewish thinkers,” he told me. He added:
For
2,000 years, Jews all over the world saw studying and learning as the
highest spiritual activity. After 2,000 years, you ask them: What have
you learned? You have studied for 2,000 years. What have you learned?
And
then people like Netanyahu tell you: Oh, we have learned that you need
to be a Roman, that you need to be strong, that you need to build
legions, that you need to destroy cities. This is the only thing that
matters in life.
It’s
a legitimate value system. Rome had its usefulness. But if after 2,000
years, the Jews simply become the Romans, what was the point? Why did
you waste 2,000 years, then? You could have just become Roman back then.
This is Nolan’s finest trick:
to make one of our oldest moral rules sound new again. To turn the best
of Judeo-Christianity into the law of Zeus, so we can see why it might
matter and what it might still have to say to us.
What
Odysseus sees, eventually, is that his violations of the moral order
have brought ruin to all around him. Agamemnon, the king who launched
the war against Troy, is dead, his throat slit by his wife, who never
forgave him for sacrificing their daughter for fair winds. Troy is
destroyed. Ithaca, Odysseus’ home, is overrun by suitors who seek his
wife and land and think nothing of murdering his son in their pursuit.
Odysseus and his men were not fighting the barbarians; they were the
barbarians. And their actions led to more barbarity.
So,
too, has the political movement that rose promising to make Western
civilization great again betrayed its inheritance. The world now looks
at America and sees us as the barbarians: the country obliterating the
global order, the country that takes what it wants and demands tribute
from those who cannot resist.
And
what the political opposition has to do now is recognize what Nolan
recognized: That it is an affirmation of our civilizational values to
say that cruelty is a weakness. That only compassion and reciprocity
build a durable and decent society. That order is necessary but order
without ethics and restraint is perversion or authoritarianism. That
there is both beauty and wisdom in the injunction to avoid inflicting on
others what we would not see turned against us and in remembering that
we were strangers in the land of Egypt, too.
At
the end of his book, Hyde considers when the trickster’s tale ends in
ruin and when it ends in regeneration. His answer is that devastation
comes when you cannot rejoin the worlds. Loki is bound beneath the
earth, with poison dripped on him for eternity, and the end of the world
is the result. Hermes becomes a connector between our world and the
underworld, allowing Persephone, and spring, to return each year. In
other words, it is only when severed worlds can be bonded that cultures
can rediscover their strength.
I
do not want to make this too didactic, so I will just end here: Justice
in America has come, repeatedly, when those seeking progress realize
that the language of the Torah, of the New Testament and of the
Declaration of Independence can be wielded on behalf of a new world. It
has been some time since religion, liberalism and patriotism had a
comfortable relationship in this country.
But
the shape of the modern right has created space to do that work again.
Regeneration is hard. It requires seeing old values in new ways. It
requires recognizing that a moral inheritance that has collapsed into
cliché holds power in an age when it has been debased and forgotten. But
it can be done. It needs to be done.
Nolan’s
Odysseus is not a trickster. He is a man living in the ruins brought
about by tricksters. So, too, are we. This movie, and the reaction to
it, is a sign that the age of the trickster is ending.
If you go to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, you may
be able to purchase, for a mere $69.99, a plastic receptacle shaped as a
Trojan horse. The horse is used in the film as an image of moral
decline. But the repurposing of a sinister instrument of war into a
popcorn container hints at the malleability of the conceit: A Trojan
horse contains unexpected multitudes.
This mythical item has
always been a tricky symbol, used by generations of storytellers and
artists to map shifting perceptions of deception in war. The physical
design of Nolan’s version is striking and wildly out of keeping with
earlier representations, including ancient depictions and the pull-toy
design of the giant equine in Wolf Petersen’s fun 2004 blockbuster, Troy.
Nolan’s horse rears upright rather than standing on four hooves. The
unwieldy creature is discovered half-buried in the sand, and proves
almost impossible for the Trojans to lug into the city. This cinematic
prop is an extraordinary feat of engineering: It stands nearly 40 feet
tall and took hundreds of people to drag up the beach. The physical
horror of people being trapped inside as the seawater rises is
brilliantly and terrifyingly evoked.
But on a narrative level, Nolan’s horse is light as air. In comparison with other blockbusters—such as, say, the Die Hard films, also action-packed tales of one man’s dangerous journey back to his wife—TheOdyssey
contains far more pontificating about values and civilizational
decline, but much less coherence and less heart. It gestures at a
critique of xenophobia and violence, but it focuses primarily on the
perspective of the guilty, traumatized warrior rather than that of his
victims. Moreover, the movie’s devoted attention to mechanics, and its
heedless willingness to give us massacres as spectacle, undermines its
moralizing claims of caring about man’s inhumanity to man. Verbally, we
are told that people matter; visually, we are shown that they do not.
In
ancient myth, Troy was a wealthy, powerful city whose walls were built
by two gods, Apollo and Poseidon. Such walls could never be breached by
mere mortals. So when Greek warriors gathered to besiege the city and
retrieve the wife and wealth stolen from the Spartan king Menelaus by
the Trojan prince Paris, they found themselves at an impasse: The great
army, unable to break through Troy’s divinely constructed defenses,
remained immobilized on the beach for 10 years.
Things changed
only when Athena, the daughter of Zeus and goddess of military strategy,
put an idea into the mind of her favorite mortal, Odysseus: to instruct
the master craftsman Epeius to build a massive, hollow horse, inside
which Odysseus and the other Greeks could hide. Odysseus was, as Nolan
obviously recognizes, a mythical Robert Oppenheimer: a hero able to
devise the ultimate weapon that could end a seemingly unwinnable war.
We
do not know who first told the story of the Trojan horse, but it was in
circulation by at least the early seventh century B.C.E. The earliest
extant artistic depiction is on a large storage jar (in Greek called a pithos)
from the island of Mykonos. It features a long-legged horse that has
square cutout windows for the warriors to be seen through; outside the
horse, more fighters are enslaving terrified women and children. The
image is, like the popcorn-bucket horse, a joke: It would ruin the trick
if the horse had windows.
The Homeric Odyssey, along with TheIliad and the poems of Hesiod, were likely composed around roughly the same time as the making of the Trojan-horse pithos,
using the new technology that had become available in the
Greek-speaking world in the mid-eighth century B.C.E.: the alphabet.
This development enabled one or more composers—“Homer”—to create and
preserve monumental written poems based on the oral tales about the
great, lost days of heroes—characters who did extraordinary things and
were closer to the gods than any normal mortal. The myths included
partial, fictionalized folk memories of the earlier period of Greek
prosperity, when the Mycenaeans built palatial structures and formed
extensive trade routes across the eastern Mediterranean and beyond.
Homer’s Odyssey draws on many generations of preexisting myth but
reshapes the old stories for its own era—a time of migration,
colonization, urbanization, political and social diversity, and
technological change.
In TheOdyssey, Odysseus
repeatedly finds new ways to reenact his most famous trick of hiding
inside the horse (an assumed backstory not described in the main
narrative). He hides in the care of Calypso (whose name suggests
“hiding”), beneath the name of No Man, under the sheep of Polyphemus,
and in the guise of an old beggar. Eventually, he replicates his triumph
at Troy in his own house by technological mastery of another trick
involving a wooden weapon (this time, his bow). Odysseus’s mastery of
technology enables him to invade a heavily defended home in disguise,
achieve an impossible victory, and break an impasse, answering the
long-deferred question of which man will claim the household and
Penelope as his bride.
In one of only two extensive passages in
Homer that evoke the horse explicitly (a long episode that Nolan
excises), Odysseus, while enjoying the lavish hospitality of the
Phaeacians on Scheria, asks a blind poet to sing the story of the Trojan
horse. The poet complies, and Odysseus weeps at the story of his
greatest triumph. The narrator offers a surprising simile: Odysseus sobs
“as pitifully as a woman weeps” while watching her warrior husband die
in a failed attempt to defend his city and his children. The woman falls
desperately on her dying husband, but his killers are behind her,
hitting her with spears as they force her into a life of enslavement.
The simile suggests a connection between the victorious Odysseus and the
victims of his greatest success. We are not told whether Odysseus is
crying because he feels guilt and pity at the thought of those he has
killed, tricked, and enslaved, or because he is tormented to be trapped
so far away from either the battlefield or Ithaca—the spheres where he
can be honored and known. The scene is a memorable reminder that warfare
has victims as well as victors, and that it may sometimes be difficult
to tell which is which.
After many misadventures, and eight years
in the beds of two different goddesses, Odysseus makes it home from
eastern Troy to western Ithaca. He is able to move from what Homer’s
contemporary Hesiod calls the brutal “age of bronze” and the glorious
“age of heroes” into the conflict-ridden “age of iron,” because he has
mastered not only warfare with bronze weapons but also the more social
skills of rhetoric, cunning, and technology—skills that enable him to
survive and win eternal glory, even when he is far from the battlefield.
Homer’s Odysseus specializes in clever scheming—in Greek, mētis—and the narrator does not invite us to moralize against a flexible relationship with the truth.
Many centuries later, Virgil set his Roman epic, TheAeneid, in the aftermath of the Trojan War, and modeled its narrative on both TheOdyssey and TheIliad.
The protagonist, Aeneas, is like Odysseus in that he is a warrior on a
journey from Troy to his western homeland. But whereas Odysseus returns
to his original home, Aeneas is a migrant Trojan, fleeing his fallen
city for a new homeland to which he has never been: Italy, where he will
begin the historical process that is fated, one day, to lead to the
foundation of the glorious city of Rome. Virgil reinvents the story of
Odysseus in a double way. Homer’s hero becomes both the pious refugee,
Aeneas, and the cruel liar, Ulysses (the Roman name for Odysseus), who
destroys a city through his unscrupulous wiles.
Homer
leaves the Trojans to decide for themselves whether to take the horse
into the city. But Virgil adds a character who persuades them to do so:
Sinon, a cousin of “cruel Ulysses,” who shares his penchant for lies.
Sinon, whose name means “harmer,” is found bound and alone after the
Greeks pretend to sail away. He tells the Trojans a pitiful story about
how he barely escaped being sacrificed by Ulysses, claiming that the
horse is an offering specifically for Athena (Minerva in Latin), who
will ensure the city’s salvation if they take the horse inside. Yielding
to their pious respect for the gods, and their eagerness to show mercy
toward vulnerable suppliants, the Trojans free Sinon from his bonds and
take the deadly horse inside their city. Aeneas, who narrates the story
to the Carthaginian queen Dido, comments (in the translation by Scott
McGill and Susannah Wright):
His tactics and the tears he falsely shed
now captured us—we who had not been beaten
by Tydides, Thessalian Achilles,
ten years of warfare, or a thousand ships.
The
addition of Sinon makes it clear that deception happens not primarily
through inanimate mechanical objects but through people deliberately
using rhetoric to manipulate audiences, and through the choices of those
audiences about what and whom to believe. With the Sinon episode,
Virgil asks his readers to consider whether cities and civilizations may
fall for noble motives rather than because of moral failures.
Virgil’s
version of the Trojan-horse episode was written in the time of the
first Roman emperor, Augustus. The new leader was a canny manipulator of
words and imagery who presented his revolutionary autocratic regime as
if it were in line with Roman tradition. Virgil showcases the dangers of
deception and offers an account of how easily good people can be
deceived. The scene offers an ambivalent reflection on the culture and
politics of its time. We might read Sinon’s deceptions in light of his
Greekness: Perhaps the future Roman people need fear no such schemes, as
long as they hold fast to their own identity and maintain suspicion of
all foreigners, especially Greeks. But we can also see a dark shadow in
Augustus’s manipulation of the Roman people through clever storytelling
that disguised and enabled the destruction of the old Republic and the
slide into one-man rule.
Where Virgil’s Ulysses is cruel and
predatory, and his mendacious instrument, Sinon, is unambiguously a bad
guy, Nolan re-creates Sinon as his film’s sinless moral center. The
focus on “sin” is presumably the reason for the odd but consistent
pronunciation of the name: More normally pronounced by English-speakers
as Sigh-non or See-non—echoing the long i of the Latin—in Nolan’s film, it’s always Sin-none
as if to reinforce the Christlike innocence of Elliot Page’s version of
the classical “harmer.” Nolan’s Sinon is not a trickster but a poor
innocent to whom Odysseus has lied by omission, in failing to tell him
about the trick with the horse. The episode is a cautionary fable about a
director who fails to trust an actor to play his part: Odysseus lies so
that Sinon will give the most convincing possible performance when he
falsely tells the Trojans, with his dying breath, that the horse is a
gift.
The film’s oft-invoked “Zeus’s law” is explained as a
version of the Golden Rule: We must host beggars and strangers kindly,
to “do as we would be done by,” and because they could be gods in
disguise (a quite different point). The unkindness of Penelope’s suitors
to Odysseus’s poor dog Argos and to the blind Eumaeus is a clear
violation of this principle. Yet the film also suggests that the law of
Zeus is concerned with a quite different moral problem: deception. The
horse is presented as the ultimate violation of the law of Zeus, because
it entails wielding a weapon of mass destruction disguised as a gift.
The Homeric Zeus is a cunning schemer, whereas Nolan’s Zeus takes a
particularly hard line on deceit, especially in relationships between
hosts and guests. The film’s arch-villain, the lead suitor, Antinous,
proves his villainy by being a bad guest, and a bad host, and an
entertainingly weaselly liar. The horse is presented as breaking
“civilization” because it represents the moment when the good guy,
Odysseus, echoes the behavior of the bad guy by being a deceitful,
ungrateful guest. But the film does not explain what “hospitality” has
to do with a narrative situation in which the Greeks have been besieging
Troy for 10 years already; the Trojans are not their hosts but their
enemies in war. If the war is bad, it is nonsensical to suggest that the
most important turning point is the use of the horse rather than
Agamemnon’s choice to invade Troy in the first place and Odysseus’s
choice to yield to the empire’s demands. The visually impressive
spectacle of the horse on a stunning stretch of pristine beach (shot in
Essaouira, Morocco)contributes to the narrative muddle: The
Greeks have supposedly been encamped there for the past decade, yet it
shows no sign of human habitation.
Nolan shot the Calypso episodes
in the disputed Moroccan-occupied territory of Western Sahara without
the consent of the Indigenous Sahrawi people. The choice underlines the
lack of seriousness in Nolan’s thinking about his themes: the ethical
and cultural costs of entering other people’s homes uninvited, for the
purpose of extracting resources without respect for an unwilling host.
In Homer, deception
is relatively benign. In Virgil, it is evil. But in both poems, we
learn directly about how the Greeks enacted their schemes, as well as
the decision-making process of the pious, thoughtful Trojans. In Nolan,
we never see Odysseus planning the construction of the horse or lying to
the innocent Sinon, and his Trojans take mere seconds to make up their
minds. The film is not interested in the social or psychological
questions of how people deceive and are deceived. Deception is a fait
accompli: The horse appears on the beach in the opening sequence as if
deposited there by helicopter, and Sinon does not know that he is not
telling the truth. What matters cinematically are the logistics: the
rolling of the horse uphill and the claustrophobic, waterlogged
interior. Once the ambush of the Trojans begins, the camera lingers
repeatedly not on the human actors but on the enflamed, toppling
buildings and the great gates of the city, whose slow-moving mechanism
is observed at great length. The script tells us loudly that people
matter, but the camera shows us that what matters is the mechanical
challenge of moving objects through space.
Nolan’s Odysseus goes
to war to protect his biological son, Telemachus, but in so doing
betrays his quasi-son, Sinon—an irony whose emotional impact is dulled
by the film’s frenetic pacing. Page is a luminous, heartbreaking
presence on-screen, whereas the Trojans are mostly masked nonentities.
Odysseus’s moral development is retold in miniature on the island of
Circe, where he shoots what he thinks is an animal but then realizes was
actually a human being. Yet neither Odysseus nor the film itself seems
to move beyond the occasional moment or two of noticing the humanity of
all humans. The face of the slaughtered deer-man is not shown, and the
film’s narrative rushes on. The final massacre of the cartoonishly
bestial suitors inside Odysseus’s house is presented with thrilling
exuberance, and the camera does not linger on the pain and humanity of
those who die or allow for the possibility that they, too, should be
mourned. Instead, the long, repetitive final fight sequence fixates,
again, on logistics: how the weapons are hidden, and how they descend
from the storeroom through a hole in the ceiling. The film’s primary
fascination with maneuvering objects creates a mismatch between what we
see and what we are being told to think and feel. We see inside the
horse, but we do not see inside the characters or their world.
In the final sequence of the movie, Odysseus leaves home for yet another journey. It draws heavily on Alfred Tennyson’s poem Ulysses,
whose narrator abandons his “agèd wife” and leaves his son, Telemachus,
on the throne of Ithaca, while he departs for the “untravell’d world”
“to follow knowledge like a sinking star.” Matt Damon as Odysseus
likewise embarks in a boat toward the sunset, although he gets to take
his wife (played by Anne Hathaway) along for the ride. The self-imposed
exile of Odysseus enables his son (Tom Holland) to rule over the
Ithacans who survive. The camera depicts the newly becrowned prince as a
sunlit golden boy, who can receive the power and wealth won by his
father’s bloody hands without having to taint his own—although we have
been given no reason to believe that Telemachus is ready for the role,
or that the concentration of power and wealth in one man is beneficial
for anyone.
The final goal of Nolan’s Odysseus is not infinite
knowledge but redemption: He is at last awake from his amnesia and
intends to bury the comrades left uninterred on his journeys. Yet the
waking vision of the protagonist, and hence also of the film, remains
extraordinarily narrow. There is no suggestion that he will offer burial
to the Trojans, or the suitors, or the various foreigners killed during
his journey. Despite Odysseus’s spiritual awakening, the dead remain as
dead as ever. But there is a spectacular sunset and yet another lavish
display of a large vehicle grandly making its way through space, across
churning waves.
Nolan’s Odyssey is itself a kind of Trojan
horse. The script grandly insists on the importance of human kindness,
while the camera shows us an entirely different set of values. In these
times of hatred and misinformation, we need more than the “apparent
magic” of deceptive images. We need art that is truthful about the costs
and the necessity of compassion, and that recognizes that a sense of
spiritual superiority may not protect us from lies. These lessons are
legible in Homer and Virgil, but are elided by Nolan’s visually
stunning, emotionally empty film.
The
C.I.A. has secretly established a Cuba task force, setting in motion
plans for a more concerted campaign to pressure the Cuban government to
make the economic, political and leadership changes demanded by
President Trump, according to people briefed on the action.
The
creation of the task force will allow the agency to quickly direct more
financial, human and technical resources at Cuba, they said.
The
task force has begun adding case officers who recruit and manage spies,
intelligence analysts, officers who conduct cyberoperations and
officers who specialize in covert influence operations, the people said.
In
1960, the C.I.A. established an earlier Cuba task force, whose members
oversaw the failed, agency-backed invasion of Cuba the next year known
as the Bay of Pigs.
The
people briefed on the new task force said its mandate is more limited:
to create fissures among the Cuban political elite, in hope of
pressuring the Cubans to replace perceived anti-American hard-liners
with more practical leaders more amenable to Mr. Trump’s demands.
Image
Arms
that belonged to the Cuban and American mercenary soldiers who landed
at the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro were seized
in 1961.Credit...Keystone-France
The C.I.A. declined to comment.
“The
intentions here are no surprise, since Cuba has long been the target of
the C.I.A.’s efforts at espionage, subversion and destabilization,
including terrorism,” Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernández de Cossío,
said in a statement to The Times. “And yet the State Department has the
audacity to call Cuba a threat for exercising its right to legitimate
self-defense.”
Unlike
in the 1960s, when the earlier task force oversaw the training and
equipping of a partner force of Cubans that launched the Bay of Pigs
invasion, the current task force has no organized Cuban partners. Nor is
it allowed to enable lethal operations, though a task force at the
C.I.A., by nature, is flexible and the authorities under which it
operates can be changed at any time by the president.
The
creation of the task force shows the extent to which the agency is
preparing for what may be a protracted covert campaign against what has
long been one of its hardest targets.
The C.I.A.’s action coincides with stepped-up efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to get a better understanding of the situation on the ground inside Cuba.
Every
administration sets out its intelligence-collection priorities in a
document known as the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, or
NIPF.
The
Trump administration recently revised its version of the document to
designate Cuba a NIPF “Priority 1.” (Among the other Priority 1
countries are China, Iran and Russia.)
In
response, U.S. intelligence agencies, including the National Security
Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, among others,
have started turning more intelligence-collection assets, including
satellites, toward Cuba, people briefed on those activities said.
The
intelligence will help the U.S. military update its options for
potential military action against Cuba, if Mr. Trump opts to go that
route. Before the intelligence surge, U.S. military and intelligence
officers complained of having outdated information; the new intelligence
will give them a better sense of Cuban intentions, military
capabilities and defenses.
Officers
with the Cuba task force at the C.I.A. will, in turn, scour through the
newly available intelligence for inside information about the
activities of Cuba’s leaders and other members of the political elite,
in particular tracking shadowy money flows and business dealings on and
off the island. The agency could eventually release that information
publicly to try to influence the Cuban leadership and public opinion,
reprising a playbook that the C.I.A. has used against other adversaries,
including Russia.
Over
the years, the C.I.A. has played a multifaceted role in Cuba, as a spy
service that covertly operates against the Cuban government, and as an
occasional intermediary between Washington and Havana.
In
2015, toward the end of President Barack Obama’s second term, the
United States and Cuba formally re-established diplomatic relations. The
C.I.A. director at the time, John O. Brennan, flew to Havana to meet
with Alejandro Castro, the son of President Raúl Castro, and other Cuban
officialsto discuss increasing intelligence cooperation between the two countries.
Mr.
Brennan considered Cuba’s spy agencies the most capable in Latin
America, and hoped to work with them against drug cartels and terrorist
networks. But those discussions soon bogged down, with the sides blaming
each other for failing to follow through on proposed
confidence-building commitments.
This
May, with tensions boiling, Mr. Trump sent his C.I.A. director, John
Ratcliffe, to Havana to meet with Raúl G. Rodríguez Castro, known as
“Raulito” or “El Cangrejo” (the Crab), Raúl Castro’s grandson.
Mr.
Ratcliffe’s message to the Cubans was that the C.I.A. saw them as
worthy adversaries and potential future partners. But he also told the
Cubans that they were running out of time to make fundamental changes
sought by Mr. Trump, implying that if Cuba failed to seize the moment,
it could be the next Venezuela.
The
speed with which Mr. Trump successfully toppled one of Cuba’s closest
allies — Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s leader — and seized control of
Venezuela’s oil resources had led some of Mr. Trump’s hawkish advisers
to believe that the current Cuban government could be gone by the time
of the midterm election in the United States in November, people
familiar with the debate inside the administration said.
Image
Nicolás
Maduro, the Venezuelan leader who was captured by the United States in
January. President Trump’s C.I.A. director has implied that if Cuba
failed to seize the moment, it could be the next Venezuela.Credit...Vincent Alban/The New York Times
But
despite a crippling oil embargo imposed by the United States, the
Cubans have proved themselves to be resilient, and Mr. Trump’s drawn-out
war with Iran soaked up the administration’s limited resources and
attention. While the Cuba hawks advising Mr. Trump still think the
administration will eventually devote the resources and attention
necessary to bring down the Cuban government, they now acknowledge in
private that this is likely to happen only once the war in Iran has
finally concluded.
During
much of the Cold War, the C.I.A. maintained a relatively small station
at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, in part because the agency knew that the
Cubans were incredibly effective at surveilling the American officers
there. That made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for them to
recruit and meet with assets on the island.
The
U.S. government’s level of interest in Cuba diminished in the 2000s as
the C.I.A. was directed to focus its financial, human and technical
resources on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other suspected
terrorism havens.
Then,
during Mr. Trump’s first term, after a number of C.I.A. officers in
Havana reported being afflicted by a mystery illness, which later became
known as Havana syndrome, the agency completely shuttered its station
on the island.
The
C.I.A. station in Havana was re-established in 2024, toward the end of
the Biden administration, but the officers there still had a difficult
time operating because they were under near-constant surveillance and
their movements were restricted.
When
King Mohammed VI of Morocco addressed his people on Wednesday to
commemorate his 27th year on the throne, he spoke hopefully of his North
African nation’s future.
Morocco, he said, was safe and stable, with a growing economy making great strides in tourism, investment and manufacturing.
“This
is a pivotal moment in our nation’s development,” the 62-year-old
monarch said. “A time when confidence and optimism should prevail over
despair and frustration.”
Over
the next two days, however, tens of thousands of his citizens tried to
escape the country. Driven by a bleak sense of their prospects in
Morocco, they braved confrontations with the police and dangerous swims in the sea to reach the Spanish territory of Ceuta, hoping for better lives.
“I
tried to work and have a job and make a living, but there is nothing
for me here,” said Mohammed Kinani, a 21-year-old construction worker,
who had been forced back to Morocco. “If I don’t leave this country,
there is nothing that will save me.”
Mr. Kinani was part of a sudden exodus
that began on Thursday when 50,000 to 60,000 migrants began forcing
their way into Ceuta, a tiny Spanish territory on the North African
coast. By Saturday, many of the migrants had left, lacking food and
water, and the Spanish security forces expelled others, but not before
the crisis had given far-right politicians across Europe new ammunition to blast their opponents’ views on immigration.
Image
The border fence separating Ceuta and Morocco, as seen from Fnideq, Morocco, on Sunday.
The
Spanish authorities said on Sunday that they had recorded 72 deaths
during the crisis. The Moroccan government reported 11 deaths. Both
sides said most of the deaths were from drowning.
Before
the startling scenes of chaos at the border, the Moroccan government
had much to celebrate: investments in logistics and industry,
preparations to co-host the men’s World Cup in 2030, and strong
relations with President Trump, who has lavished the country of 38
million and its monarch with praise.
But
the Ceuta migration crisis exposed a deep dismay among its young
people, who, when faced with scant job opportunities, recurrent droughts
and frequent arrests of government critics, chose to vote with their
feet and get out.
“Do
you think if I had a job I would have gone?” snapped Ahlam al-Adnan,
22, when asked where she had worked before she set off for Ceuta. She
sat in the sun near the border on Sunday, looking exhausted.
She
had swum to the territory with her four siblings, including her
8-year-old brother, she said. In Ceuta, they hid in a forest but got
hungry, so she went to look for food, got detained and was sent back to
Morocco.
Image
Migrants
who returned from Ceuta near the crossing in Fnideq on Sunday, talking
to relatives of other migrants who went and were missing.
Over
the weekend, thousands of the returned migrants, most of them young
Moroccan men, wandered the streets of the Moroccan town of Fnideq,
resting on sidewalks and sleeping in open lots. Most wore shorts,
T-shirts and sandals, and carried few possessions, if any.
Teams
of policemen in black uniforms swept through town, pushing the migrants
out of public areas and bundling those who resisted into vans. Outside
of town, dozens of buses stood near a gas station, filling up with
captured migrants who would be ferried back to their home regions.
Anxious relatives of migrants who had set off for Ceuta and never returned sat along the road hoping for news.
When
groups of newly returned migrants walked by, the relatives would show
them photos of their missing loved ones, in case anyone had seen them.
Abdelkhalek Moumouh and his wife, Kawtar Alalej, asked about their eldest son Saad, 18.
He
had recently finished high school but had not been accepted to
university programs in engineering, aviation and architecture, his
father said. He wanted to study in Europe, but the family could not
afford it.
When
the family saw the news on social media that migrants were entering
Ceuta, the parents drove their son to the border, they said, hoping this
would be his chance. They hadn’t heard from him since.
“Other
people went to Europe and benefited from it,” said Mr. Moumouh, 50. “We
already wasted our lives in Morocco. We don’t want him to.”
Image
Moroccan border guard boats and police patrolled the coastline on the border on Sunday.
The
migrants’ determination to leave made it clear that Morocco, often
considered a North African success story, has failed to deliver hope for
many of its youth.
The country is politically stable, attractive to foreign investors and tourists, and a valued partner to the United States.
That relationship has deepened since Mr. Trump’s first term, when Morocco joined a small group of Arab states that established diplomatic relations with Israel. In tandem, the Trump administration endorsed Morocco’s claim of sovereignty over Western Sahara, a disputed territory.
Last month, King Mohammedinformed Mr. Trump that he was naming a 656-mile expressway through the territory the “Donald J. Trump Highway.”
In
recent years, the Moroccan government has showcased large investments
aimed at strengthening the economy, including in a port on the
Mediterranean and a high-speed train. It is spending lavishly on
stadiums for the 2030 World Cup, which it will be co-host of with Spain
and Portugal.
But
the government’s policies focus on large companies and big
infrastructure while creating too few lasting jobs, said Najib Akesbi,
an economist at the Institute of Agronomy in the capital, Rabat.
“The entire logic of the economic model is the showcase,” he said. “People visit Morocco and they find it beautiful.”
Many
of the investments, he said, turn out to be “white elephants” that
create construction work that disappears once the projects are complete,
not lasting employment.
“They are not concerned by the needs of the population, and the youth in particular,” he said.
Last year, the World Bank said
that over the last decade, Morocco’s working-age population had grown
by 11.4 percent, while employment had increased by only 1.5 percent.
Job creation remained “a fundamental challenge,” the bank said.
Overall
unemployment in Morocco is around 11 percent, according to government
statistics, but among people aged 15 to 24, it is nearly three times
higher.
Ceuta,
which is easily visible from the hills and coast of Fnideq, is a
perpetual draw for migrants. Per capita income in Morocco is $4,600,
according to the World Bank. In Spain, of which Ceuta is a part, it is $38,600.
The Moroccan government has shown little patience for citizens who make their discontent known.
Image
Migrants
sitting on an roadside overlooking Ceuta in Fnideq on Saturday. Over
the weekend, thousands of the returned migrants, most of them young
Moroccan men, wandered Fnideq’s streets.
Last
fall, youth-led demonstrations broke out in more than half a dozen
Moroccan cities. Organized through social media, the protests expressed
frustration over the soaring cost of living, youth unemployment and the
government’s economic priorities, including World Cup preparations.
The authorities responded with arrests and by prosecuting activists.
An
earlier wave of protests focused on economic hardship in rural areas
also ended with mass arrests and prison sentences for protest leaders.
On
a back street in Fnideq, Mohammed Said, 36, said he had come to the
coast with those headed for Ceuta. He had quit school after seventh
grade and worked in construction but had not found stable employment.
By
the time he reached the border, he said, chaos reigned, with cars on
fire and migrants clashing with the security forces. So he had hung
back.
He
had tried to swim to the territory twice last year, he said, but the
Moroccan authorities stopped him. This time, he had come prepared, with a
can of tuna, some crackers, a phone charger, comb, two extra T-shirts
and a plastic sleeve for his cellphone, all in a plastic bag.
