Who’d have thought Americans could get so hopped up about ancient literature? English teachers and internet historians are having an improbable field day.
Symbol readers, too, have caught Odyssey fever. Movies are to modern society what myths were to the ancients: they present big, timely themes the mass mind is struggling to process. They publicize eternal truths, which deserve to be reiterated every few millennia.
Such as: Human beings are complicated. And great civilizations are destroyed by hubris.
Movies as mirror
For astrologers, transits are like Delphic oracles. This summer’s extraordinary configurations were our heads-up that something was due to explode into visibility. We didn’t know it would take the form of a Hollywood blockbuster, but it makes sense that it did. 
Movies give us the license to suspend disbelief, as do myths (a term we use to mean not real.) Audiences don’t have to take the events literally, so our mental censors can relax. The lessons hidden in the stories can sneak into our minds unobstructed.
Great fiction does this, too. Such as King Lear, which a lot of people have been invoking lately, given the sobering parallels between that mad king and our own.
Shakespeare gave us a demented old monarch wandering around on a bleak, stormy moor. MAGA gave us a malignant old narcissist ranting and raving on social media through the wee small hours of the night.
Macho men
The Odyssey has a lot to say about masculine arrogance. It’s kind of an inescapable theme in literature, though it doesn’t seem the MAGA men have read any of those books.
Testosterone is the world’s most powerful brain solvent. It destroys brain cells. – David Rothkopf
Instead, these guys get their lessons in manliness from Hegseth and Bobby Junior, of T-level and gym-rat fame. Or Nick Fuentes, the patron saint of incels, hero to wounded boys who watch violent porn in darkened dens.
Calling Dr Freud
Most modern people are pretty savvy about the underlying motivations of performative machismo. We’ve been introduced by Freud to the concept of overcompensation. Phrases like Napoleon complex and small dick energy have entered the vernacular.
But the MAGA men seem to have skipped Psych 101. Even the billionaires in Trump World seem not to realize that their behavior broadcasts not prowess, but insecurity. Consider Bezos, bullied in youth, sticking it to his tormentors years later by building penis rockets. And Elon, with his phallic chainsaw and compulsive sperm spreading.
Size matters
Trump’s crazy preoccupation with bigness says it all. The inflated crowd numbers, the oversized bunker, the jerry-rigged chairs for visiting dignitaries that make them seem shorter than himself. The monster battle ships he wants to build. No dinky little drones for him.
It’s been suggested that his fixation with magnitude is one reason he sides with Putin in the war in Ukraine.
Russia is big, a huge country, and he wants to go with the big. — Michael Wolf
His obsession must reverberate within the psyche of every insecure teenage boy. Imagine what a curse it must be, to subscribe to the simplistic, literalistic idea that size is all that matters. You’d be terrified, all your life, of not measuring up.
Men are not okay
If we consider the aspects of Nolan’s movie that caused the most offense, we can learn a lot about this Men Are Not Okay moment.
Much of the umbrage is rooted in straight-up racism, of course: outrage that a Kenyan actor was cast as Helen of Troy. Hell hath no fury like a white supremacist condemning a mythical character for not being historically accurate.
Santa is white. He just is. — Megyn Kelly objecting to African American shopping-mall Santa Clauses
The bros were also majorly pissed off that Nolan used a Homer translation written by a woman.
Then there were the Bronze-Age cultists who went into a righteous snit about the costumes. These lads, less the scholarly-nerd type than the ComicCon-nerd type, gather online to admire studded leather and other rape-&-pillage accoutrements. The kind worn 
by real men, back in, like, real history.
PTSD is woke
How telling it was that some men were triggered by the movie’s portrayal of Odysseus’s remorse. The idea that a hero would be haunted by the horrors he unleashed deeply unsettled them.
This calls to mind the way many in British society reacted to traumatized young soldiers coming back from the trenches of WWI. Sufferers from “shell shock” were expected to just suck it up and carry on. Nowadays, we see this approach as bone-headedly ignorant and cruel. That is, most of us do.
Perhaps not the dudes who’ve grown up with video games, in which mass death is portrayed by pixels on a screen. For them, like their president, war may be simplified to the click of a button, to see something go Boom.
Xenia
How do we call the country to moral attention? — M. Wolf
“The Odyssey” makes reference to xenia, the ancient Greeks’ version of our Golden Rule. You were supposed to treat foreigners with respect, because 
you never knew if they might turn out to be a god. The Christian reiteration of this idea was that all humans were made in the image of God, so you treat your neighbor as yourself.
It’s no mystery why this part of the movie didn’t make sense to MAGA. Despite many of them being nominally and hyperbolically Christian, these guys have sworn an oath not to God’s law but to Miller-&-Rubio’s law. Welcome foreigners? Are you kidding? The goal is to expel them to a torture prison in El Salvador.
The men rallying around the Goebbels-like Miller, the belligerently stupid Alex Jones and the depraved misogynistic Tate brothers are following a sad old script, one that has been followed since patriarchy was a twinkle in the sky-god’s eye. You abuse those beneath you on the social ladder, to distract yourself from your own sense of weakness.
And you don’t like it one bit when you go to a movie about a big, strong warrior and he’s shown experiencing shame.
Dignified by time
It’s hard to sympathize with our red-hatted, left-behind brethren, as they try to cobble together a cultural identity out of self-pity and animosity. It isn’t easy to forgive them for supporting this vile regime, even now, despite all the suffering being inflicted — how bitter this irony — even to themselves.
But they too are “complicated men.” They are, like all of us, Homer’s flawed-but-human humans.
If we were not so close to the atrocities, ongoing and daily compounded, perhaps we could imagine bards of the future depicting our patch of history as a tragic epic. A collective story, our story, dignified by the blessing of time.
