The article "The Path to Ithaca" is a reflection by Pedro门将 on Christopher Nolan's film "The Odyssey," which the author watched in August in a full theater. The analysis begins with the central question: what happens to a man and a society after victory? The author refuses to debate the film's controversies, mentioning only that translator Emily Wilson said she was ashamed to have written any part of that screenplay, although flattered that Nolan had at least read the first line of her translation.
The reflection connects the figure of Ulysses, presented by Homer as a man of many turnings, cunning and contradictory, with contemporary politics. The author identifies a class of politicians who change position without changing tone, transform exceptions into principles, and present each retreat as strategy. Ezra Klein wrote in the New York Times that "The Odyssey" is the political film of the decade, reading it through the figure of the trickster, the transgressor who crosses borders and disrupts what a culture depends on, necessary but dangerous.
The author argues that the true political center of the film is not Ulysses's cunning, but the law of hospitality, which among the Greeks was a sacred obligation. Using the Trojan horse as a metaphor, he warns that deception only works because trust exists, and when someone uses that trust to destroy shared rules, the damage exceeds the victory. In Portugal, André Ventura is pointed out as an example of someone who understood that outrage circulates faster than explanation, but the author notes that this method has spread to almost all parties.
The article concludes that democracy needs both ambition and decency simultaneously, and that institutions only survive if they solve people's actual problems. The author refuses the notion that we need leaders with more ingenious horses, instead defending those who know how to recognize the limits of force, understand that the adversary is not an enemy, and that no electoral victory dispenses the obligation to govern for everyone. Democracy, he concludes, does not need another Trojan horse, it needs to find the path to Ithaca.
