Happy Monday! Especially if you are George H. Universal, head of the studio that released The Odyssey. Speaking of . . .

For the better part of a week now—oh, let’s be honest; longer than that—I have been glued to a particularly stupid, ghoulish corner of twitter. Though I had been “For You”-free for months, I was recently lured back onto that tab by the siren call of losers freaking out over the casting of The Odyssey, which they then tried to expand into a more high-minded critique of how the film adapts a classical text, one that they claim to read for fun all the time. It’s all the same shit repeated in slightly different ways, probably half of it from bots. But the other half is, I think, real people, from various parts of the globe but mostly America, who are passing their time by fashioning themselves as warriors in a great and important cultural struggle. 

They are, of course, just idiots posting on a website that most of the world does not read nor care about. I am well aware of that fact. And yet I got sucked in anyway. On occasion it’s been funny to see these fools dunked on, but mostly the sensation I feel is scratching an itch until it hurts. It’s a harmful addiction, one I had weaned myself off of for a long time (I abandoned twitter for a whole year not too long ago!). But now I am back, grimly fascinated by such stupid nastiness, boggled to realize (yet again, yet again) that there are people out there who live such ideologically different lives than my own. 

It is heartening, then, to be reminded that, of course, this is just one back alleyway where particularly unwell people like to scream. This is a fact glaringly reflected by the opening weekend box office of The Odyssey, which broke a record for director Christopher Nolan and was the highest tally of any live-action movie this year. Money does not mean quality, I know, but it’s something. The movie is a big, bouncing hit that earned an A in audience exit polling and ought to have long legs as it strides like a colossus across the rest of the summer. 

That’s cheering news, even if I am not always a happy passenger on the Nolan train. A serious, long, grown-up movie that rumbles with political urgency attracted millions of audience members across the world, and they left the theater singing its praises. And thus we’ve yet another bit of evidence—for those of us idiots who still need it, I guess—that rancid online discourse does not always, if ever, reflect true reality. Of course, we do have rancid online discoursers currently running the United States government, so we’re not shielded from all that stuff where it really counts. But at least in the arena of popular culture, their impact is minimal. 

And it’s all so specific to twitter; I went on Reels (from the good, well-intentioned people at Instagram) and saw much sunnier Odyssey content, from people who acknowledged the “controversy” but expressed their excitement and delight nonetheless. Normally, Reels primary function is as a portal into the world of younger, skinnier, richer gay men than I, a terrible Snow White mirror that keeps giving me bad news about my place in the sociosexual hierarchy. But in this one instance, I was grateful to whatever algorithmic gods exist, for showing me a world far more utopian than what I saw in the twitter gutter. 

And so, my optimism about culture has been marginally restored, and I vow to never wade into the bile and misery again. Though, really, what upcoming movie could possibly engender a similar kind of ginned-up blowback? The Odyssey presents a perfect storm of DEI hysteria, supposed betrayal by a “one of us” director (there is an argument to be made that Nolan has made some conservative movies, including The Odyssey), and an imagined violation of classical literature, which is often jealously clutched as a pseudo-academic prop by men who naively pine for the days of war and honor and masculine supremacy. No other film on the schedule this year, as far as I’m aware, seems likely to re-stir that noxious potion of triggers. So, we’re done for now. Phew.

But, I really should just get off twitter, huh? Data shows me that the click-through rate on these here letters is really low on that site (Bluesky is, intriguingly, way better), so there’s not really any professional utility to posting on there anymore. I guess I am simply clinging to a ghost, remembering the fun (and usefulness!) of the app from a time long ago. Perhaps I have been something of an Odysseus myself, weary and haunted and miserable as I try to return to something that may be lost forever. 

The trouble is, in all its horror and cruelty, twitter is still way more narcotically engaging than the other apps—in its depravity, yes, but also its humor. (There are still plenty of funny people on the site, for whatever that’s worth.) Perhaps, then, there is a bigger addiction at work here! Not to twitter itself, but to feeds in general. Beautiful, horrible feeds. Probably the only healthy-ish one I engage with these days is YouTube Shorts, which mostly offers me a sampling of cooking videos, home design, Drag Race, clips from comedy podcasts (specifically Caleb Hearon; he lives inside a podcast studio, right?), and the occasional dashcam car accident video. 

Anyway, I’m not saying anything new here, I realize. But I am relieved that the worst of the Odyssey wars has blown through, the movie won, and now we can start talking about its Oscar chances! Which is all that really matters! I’m not necessarily rooting for the movie in that regard, but I’d certainly think its technicals will do very well, it’s definitely penciled into the best picture ten right now (alongside Project Hail Mary and maybe that’s it), and there are some actors—Matt Damon, Samantha Morton, Anne Hathaway—who could find their way into the mix. 

Actually, wait, let’s move off of The Odyssey and do some early Oscar predictions.