There’s an idiom in Bangla (my first language), which translates as something like, “to shit in a jilipi shape” (jilipi is the Bangla name of an Indian street sweet which is shaped like a flat spiral coil; imagine the rest.) It’s used as an exasperated description of an attempt to make something interesting or noteworthy out of something irredeemably banal, possibly even disgusting. But do we know that, when we shake our ass and make said jilipi, the shit we’re making it with isn’t losing its shit? Wouldn’t it be absolutely worth it to watch such shit lose its shit? What’s more cunning than to exact such a revenge on what disgusts you? What could disgust it more?
I came across this piece on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey while scrolling on YouTube. It basically consists in explaining why its target of criticism is reactionary, bogus, and, therefore, ought not to be considered as a worthwhile piece of media. I want to make a case here that this commentary is running out of jilipis.
I want to begin by stating what I think is the driving force of this commentary. Its author wants — legitimately and righteously — a change, something new, something redeeming. Because he is — we all are — devastated, torn apart, bleeding; we want relief. This is a most sublime passion, what gets anything done in this world. But can we ask if this is taking us anywhere nearer to the beginning of whatever doing is? Or are there possible beginnings of such doings that it’s leaving unexplored, to its own detriment?
The contention of the author of the piece I came across is hardly a contention in 2026: Odysseus is a conqueror, a brutalizer, an imperialist; so, isn’t Nolan foregrounding a “bad guy,” a “villain,” his trauma and sufferings, and erasing and downplaying those of the downtrodden? And wouldn’t one be even more justified in making such claims especially if they’re familiar with Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy?
My disappointment lies — not in why pieces of media like The Odyssey come out, which seems to be paining the author of that piece — but why he couldn’t find himself in a position to say that he doesn’t care what Nolan is or wants or thinks, because his project is to de-Nolan the shit out of Nolan. Especially because he apparently has the intellectual and academic tools, expertise, and exposure to do this.
So, what would it mean to de-Nolan the shit out of Nolan? Consider this jilipi now. Odysseus tries to return home. In this attempt, he comes across many life-threatening obstacles, beings that try to prey on him and that he preys on. People he plunders and kills keep telling him he is the “barbarian,” and he insists he isn’t. In the end, he realizes that, he is indeed the “barbarian”: just like Oedipus’s attempts to avoid sleeping with his mother led him to doing just that, Odysseus’s attempts to restore “civilization” and “order” become indistinguishable from “barbarism.” The sirens tell him that he doesn’t really want to go home — all the killings, all the destruction he partakes of in returning to, in fact, creating, the home, are not really about going home, they’re just about being able to kill and destroy even more in the name of “the home.” Of course, he finds it unbearable then, but he surrenders to it in the end: that home is not at home, home is in messianic1 exile, not being able to return is the only return available to him — or anyone, deferral is the only immediacy. His palintonos had known this all along: it works only when it’s inverted, inside out, when it’s made to betray itself.
I’m not claiming that Nolan has all of this in mind. I’m saying that, if you think that Nolan comes nowhere near articulating any of this, then can you see what fun it would be to make him balk at what I just said, and isn’t this fun precisely what makes revolutionary praxis joyful? Of course, bluntly saying that The Odyssey is “anti-war” is naïve, but isn’t there something you should take it upon yourself to mobilize in that naïveté? And, perhaps more importantly, when I make Nolan balk, am I accepting, or capitulating to, his edifice? Does the crawler accept, or capitulate to, the stairs in front of them? Or do they shame it? That is, I’m not asking the author of the piece I came across to identify Nolan’s The Odyssey as having intended to embody this spirit. On the contrary, I’m saying: precisely because he thinks it doesn’t, doesn’t the creative responsibility fall on him, the critic, to make the text of the film cringe in disgust by writing the preceding paragraph, because it compromises what he claims can only be interpreted and denounced as the lionization of a violent figure? And doesn’t he become a new enemy of what he seeks, by refusing to see in what is, to him, its current enemy, anything other than said enemy? When one runs out of their staple Ray or Fellini — as the author seems to have in his encounter with The Odyssey — what is the more powerful thing to do? To say, “Look, those great things exist, but this other thing that exists isn’t so great; what a shame!” Or “I decide whether the not-so-great things that exist can be used, co-opted, sabotaged, for what I think is great”? If we want to remind people of the violent context of a text, then isn’t this most cunningly executed on the pretext of that very text? Has the author forgotten that Ray’s Aparna herself in Aranyer Dinratri pretended to forget the names in the memory game to allow Asim to win, which is precisely what kept him intensely unsettled throughout, eventually contributing to his “surrender” to her? Would Ray have made a better film if he had had Aparna say to Asim, “I see what you’re doing. It’s only making you look pathetic”?
Neither Homer nor Nolan is the only one to have ever existed. I exist, my jilipi-producing ass exists. I, by existing, will change what Homer or Nolan — or whoever has been — have been, are, and will be.
I know this doesn’t exactly feel revolutionary. But I’m pleading you to ask yourself: why doesn’t it? Doesn’t it not sound revolutionary because of the very thing you want a revolution against? Because that thing has been telling you since time immemorial what is or isn’t a revolution? In a world paralyzed by certainty, wouldn’t a little bit of ambivalence for the sake of the only certainty that matters to you do us all some good? Because “there is no innocence, only the navigations of ambivalence, since it seems to be impossible to be persecuted without at once being or becoming the persecutor as well.”2
Anyway, more shit-jilipis for everyone on me!
August 15, 2026
Leave a Reply