The Cyclops sequence is, without question, the most contentious of the liberties Christopher Nolan has exercised in his version of The Odyssey. With an auteur’s touch, Nolan has put his own spin on Homer’s epic, paring down the narrative and any hint of the divine to present an Odysseus who is less a mythic ideal and more a veteran buckling under the burden of command.
But with Polyphemus, he has meddled with the one thing in the Homeric canon that is truly sacrosanct: the “Nobody” ruse.
Homer’s original is as precise as clockwork. When brute force is no answer, Odysseus makes of language a weapon. He lures the giant into calling him “Nobody,” puts out his eyes and then, when the Cyclops is in a panic, his neighbors are left with a paradox. There is no threat if “Nobody” is the aggressor. It is metis at its finest, but also the prelude to the hero’s undoing. From the safety of his vessel, Odysseus’ pride takes over; he reveals his name to the taunting of the Cyclops and in so doing draws the ire of Poseidon.
Nolan has done away with that kind of verbal sparring. As in Mario Camerini’s 1954 take, the wordplay is absent, replaced by something more visceral and stripped down.
One can expect purists to decry it. After all, “Nobody” is the defining set piece of the Odyssey. But there is a dramatic resonance in Nolan’s handling of the scene that is closer to the source than one might think. Here, Odysseus gets away with it only to do something wantonly provocative: he turns and looses an arrow into Polyphemus. There is no strategy to it, no need for it. It is a petty display of power. He does not have to say his name for the sin to be the same.
The man is simply unable to restrain himself.
There is more to the tragedy here than a trick. If you look past the surface of the Nolan film, the Polyphemus affair is not about some clever alias. That is merely the hook. In Book IX, the plan to hide beneath the sheep is executed perfectly. A prudent commander would let silence be his cover. But this is a king and a warrior, and from the deck of his ship he yields to arrogance, making of his survival a lesson in pride. By wanting credit he is signing his own warrant.
Nolan is content to let a single arrow do what a monologue would in the text. It is a harsher, quicker beat, fitting for a world where, as we see with the desecration of Athena’s statue, reason has given way to brutality. This is not the silver-tongued trickster of old, but a burnt-out type of officer who has brought the war home with him. The arrow is a psychological tell; he has won, yet feels the need to leave a mark.
At its heart the scene is still about hubris, the catastrophic overstepping of mortal bounds. Odysseus knows he is brilliant and that is his undoing. Where Homer has him speak his name, Nolan has him act on it. The final shot is an assertion of dominance by a man who wants the last word even after the fact.
As for why the pun was excised, Nolan was candid on The Daily Show (via THR). He cited the difficulty of moving a classic like “Outis” from ancient Greek to the screen. “In modern English ‘Nobody’ just sounds clunky and theatrical rather than tragic,” he said.
It is a fair point. You lose some of Homer’s fine commentary on the power of words, but in return you get a sudden violence that serves the same moral purpose. Some will argue that in cutting “Nobody” Nolan has thrown away a piece of Western literature. But to dismiss the scene is to miss the point entirely. His Odysseus is not undone by a forgotten name but by an inability to walk away. He may have the wits to best the monster, but he is not whole enough to put the war behind him.