There’s More to The Odyssey’s Cyclops Than Meets the Eye

Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

Much has been made of the grand reveal of The Odyssey, that the presence Odysseus has been calling Athena throughout the film has the same face as a woman he saw beheaded at the siege of Troy. Has she been a PTSD ghost the whole time? Did Athena take the Trojan woman’s form as a little “fuck you” to her favorite mortal? Or did a Greek soldier really kill a disguised Athena, breaking Zeus’s law in its most primal form? There doesn’t need to be a “right” answer to those questions, because the result is the same: Man’s inhumanity to man is laid bare, and the trust between Hellenic nation-states is broken for centuries.

It’s literally a Greek tragedy. And just like all Greek tragedies, it’s heavily foreshadowed in the first act. You would know that Odysseus isn’t all that reliable of a narrator if you had paid more attention to the cyclops and his cheese. 

Let’s roll the IMAX film back a few reels. Speak, memory of the first supernatural experience in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. When Matt Damon and his boys land ashore and spot a sheep, Odysseus infers that where there are sheep, there’s a shepherd, and where there’s a shepherd, there’s someone to offer hospitality in accordance with Zeus’s law. The landing party follows the sheep to a cave, where Odysseus notices this shepherd has been making cheese. The camera pans up, showing that the cheese bags go really high up the cave walls. Behold, the shepherd is a giant cyclops. He appears to be an unthinking monster, eating any Greek that wanders into his limited eyesight, so the landing party blinds the cyclops and the men disguise themselves as sheep in order to get out of the cave. Some of the soldiers swear they hear the cyclops calling out for its father (Poseidon). From then on, they think they’re cursed.

In the OG poem, the cyclops’s name is Polyphemus; he is for sure Poseidon’s son; and he is also fully sentient and verbal. He and Odysseus have a whole pun-filled back-and-forth before the blinding incident. But Nolan makes the episode a lot more vague, presenting the unnamed cyclops more like an unthinking animal or inscrutable alien than anything that could be reasoned with, and in doing so leaves a big, nagging, Cinema Sins–style question dangling like so many bags of cheese: How does a giant cyclops milk sheep?

For real, how can a giant with fingers the size of a human leg manipulate teeny-tiny sheep teats to produce milk? How’d he sew those bags in which to make the cheese, and why were they people-size instead of giant cyclops-size? A little more cogitation on these seemingly stupid questions could have saved Odysseus a lot of grief. 

There are three possible explanations for the cheese: 

1. Polyphemus (we’re going to use his Christian Hellenic name for the sake of brevity) delicately milked each sheep himself. Maybe using tree branches as chopsticks or just his pinkies. Point is, he got it done.
2. Polyphemus had connections with humans, who did the milking and shearing and other human-size tasks. All the cyclops had to do was protect the flock.
3. Odysseus is a more unreliable narrator than we believed. If Zendaya’s Athena is a projection by Odysseus’s psyche and not a goddess, what else in the film is way less fantastical than it originally seemed? Are the Laestrygonians really Iron Age giants, or was that Ody trying to make sense of a technologically advanced foreign civilization? Did he get Sinon’s lot from the underworld, or had he kept it on his person since the whole crew left Ithaca? Was there ever a cyclops, or did the crew kill a random shepherd, then inflate him in their memory after the fact?

Answer No. 3 is perhaps unsatisfying. “It was all in his mind” plots are seen as a cop-out, because they ask you to buy into a story only to go “psych!” and make you feel stupid. But even the most fantastical explanation — that a giant cyclops has the dexterity and gentle nature to milk and shear (and probably read mystery novels to) a whole flock of sheep — indicates Odysseus and his men fucked up royally by treating this guy like a monster. It’s needlessly cruel, especially when Odysseus gets one more arrow in Polyphemus’s eye at the end. Like Circe says, this isn’t a curse but a truth. It exposes Odysseus and his men as the terrifying invading Sea People they are.

Alone and scared, Polyphemus cries for his father. You know who else does that in this movie? Soft-boy hero Telemachus. The Odyssey is, in a way, a three-hour version of the That Mitchell and Webb sketch in which the two Nazis realize they’re the bad guys in World War II. And Odysseus could have figured that out a decade or so sooner if he’d given some thought to how a giant could milk a sheep.