Did Platner fail as a Senate candidate because he’s authentically-horrible or because he’s fake-populist?
Before you answer that, keep in mind that for at least the past 200 years, the authorities’ favorite scam throughout the Western world and beyond has been to offer the masses two horrible options, and then let them fight over which one will be imposed on everyone. In this case, Platner would be terrible if he were a callous sexist everyman indifferent to Nazi symbolism, and he’s really a rich poseur with bad leftist-Democrat ideas, and he’d be awful if he were really some sort of Trumpian/Sandersite populist to boot. Bad in all directions.
But to add to the reasons to find the whole episode annoying and demeaning, and to reach back even farther into history: in terms borrowed from Plato’s Republic (one of three works by ancient Greeks I find going through my mind this month), you can sense that despite all the populism talk, the self-appointed “guardians” remain in charge, slightly outside and above such electoral conflicts, and decide in high-minded, elite fashion how you grubby masses should react to Platner and any other political stimulus (one of the Platner-picking Democrat advisors is from Brown University, naturally). This elitism is now more prevalent among the Democrats, for good or ill, since they still covet the mantle of expertise and respectability that the Trump-era Republicans laugh off.
In the end, victory in Maine may belong to Troy—Troy Jackson, that is, the until-recently pro-life Democrat who might be the replacement candidate for the dropped-out Platner. At a time when Maine’s reeling from another fatal I.C.E. shooting, it shouldn’t be too hard to find a sane person who can eloquently criticize Republicans (even criticize moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins), but lately politics keeps finding new ways to fail. Just as well, perhaps.
But speaking of Troy and ancient Greeks: Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey is in cinemas this week. At almost three hours long, it may well be deemed boring by most normal audiences, but it’s an important story, almost the origin story for Western civilization. Shortcut-seeking literature classes are sure to watch it, perhaps even get assigned to compare-and-contrast it with “modern classics” such as, well, The Dark Knight. Don’t rule out the possibility of a crossover story. Zack Snyder’s Frank Miller adaptation 300 comes pretty close, come to think of it.
Nolan’s film is at least a crossover with Virgil’s Aeneid, since it’s from that work that he borrowed the character Sinon, the young warrior played by Elliot (nee Ellen) Page, who has earlier played a character able to transition from one room to another by passing her atoms right through walls (Kitty Pryde in X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men: Days of Future Past) and a character who transitions from female to male (merely because the actor did at the time) but misses a golden opportunity to retain her coincidentally-already-male-sounding name, Vanya (in the X-Men- and Doom Patrol-influenced superhero TV show Umbrella Academy).
But I think the gender-bender whose reaction to The Odyssey people would most like to hear right now is Lindsey Graham. Homer’s tale may glorify warriors, but it made war look like Hell (or Hades, I should say) in the process, in particular because it depicts extracting one’s army from enemy territory as a miserable process that may take a couple of decades. That sounds all too familiar lately.
The most inherently Nolan-like thing about Homer’s Odyssey, though, is that it sort of starts at the end of a story (namely, Homer’s Iliad, which depicts the Trojan War itself in more detail), and then shows a protagonist moving backwards, that is, trying to find his way back home to liberate his household from his patient wife’s unruly suitors. Shades of Nolan’s half-backwards movie Tenet (itself inspired by an anagram-poem created by the Greeks’ frenemies the Romans)!
Another puzzle-like ancient story, for which we’re indebted to both Greek myth and Roman poetry, is Ovid’s account of the hero Theseus using string to trace his way through the otherwise hopelessly confounding labyrinth in which dwelt the monstrous minotaur. This tactic is redeployed for modern times by the baffled protagonist in the low-budget, big-box-office horror movie hit Backrooms, based on the simple (and essentially public-domain and often-memed) concept, which you may have seen in prior TV shows or videogames, that there’s a rarely-glimpsed, spooky, underlying layer of reality—resembling florescent-lit, bland, inexplicable, endless, near-empty corridors like something out of an unused hospital wing—a basement-like realm glimpsed on occasion by lost souls who wander in for some reason.
It’s a liminal space unsettling less because of the occasional physical danger it contains and more because it offers no answers and leads nowhere. It’s nothing yet it’s unnerving. Fittingly, in an in-between way, this film version of the concept is both the work of fledgling director Kane Parsons and a project with big-name horror producers involved, including James Wan, Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins (respectively involved before this in creating Saw, Stranger Things, and the serial killer film Longlegs).
It’s interesting that so much creative talent combined yields a story that’s so close to nothingness. I don’t say that as an insult. It’s an effective film, bearing more than a little resemblance to those scenes in Stranger Things in which scientists in hazmat suits probe supernatural chambers coated in utter blackness (which in turn resembled moments in the indie horror film Under the Skin). If Backrooms is the modern successor to the scary Greek tale of the minotaur’s maze, think of the film’s characters as still lost, after over 2000 years of intervening rational civilization, in a baffling Ovid Void.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
