For both films, the Odyssey served essentially as a source of material, from which the scriptwriters mined a hero with a classical name and a treasure trove of adventures. Both films are adventure stories, which dutifully run their hero through the chief adventures of his Homeric predecessor, while trying to make those adventures accessible to an audience unfamiliar with Homer. To these ends, both directors radically pare down the adventures, add material, and remodel Odysseus’ character to suit contemporary tastes. In both films, the Cyclops episode is the one with the fewest departures from the original. However, abridgement of this episode occurs both in the action and at the structural level. In both films, the story includes the Greeks’ entry into the cave, their entrapment by Polyphemus, their getting him drunk and blinding him; Polyphemus’ display of consternation and confusion after his blinding, and Odysseus’ taunting Polyphemus from the safety of his ship. Both films omit Odysseus’ trick using the sheep, however. They show the men leaving the cave with the sheep, but not Odysseus binding three sheep together so that each threesome can carry out a man without the blind Polyphemus being able to feel them exit. Nor does Odysseus leave the cave clinging to the underbelly of Polyphemus’ favourite ram. Originally, I thought that this omission was to save precious film time. But, since both films add other material to the episode, I soon realized the purpose was to simplify: to remove a complicated action with questionable appeal to modern urban audiences. The attention that Homer pays to Cyclops’ husbandry is similarly removed.
The additions are similarly aimed at making the episode more accessible to audiences. In the 1955 film, most of the episode is taken up with a lengthy display of Ulysses and his men trampling on grapes to make more wine for the thirsty monster. This rather bizarre insertion serves as yet another of the many illustrations of Ulysses’ cleverness, continually outsmarting the stupid monster. Advancing neither characterization nor plot, it endows the episode with a spurious sense of familiarity by exploiting the stereotype of Greek peasants trampling on grapes. Whether the 1950s audience realized that wine requires time to ferment and that Polyphemus was shown falling into a drunken torpor on grape juice, we cannot know. This addition does not appear in the NBC version, produced half a century later. Maybe the assumption was that modern audiences are familiar with the manufacture of alcoholic beverages.
At the structural level, it is noteworthy that both films remove the framing and ritual repetitions of the episode in Homer’s Odyssey. There the Cyclops incident is one of a number of fantastic stories that Odysseus tells to entertain and impress his Phaeacian hosts. Neither film includes this conscious frame. In the 1955 film, the episode is shown as a flashback, the first of the incidents that Ulysses recalls as he stands on the Phaeacian shore. In the 1997 film, Odysseus narrates the episode directly to the outer audience as part of his chronological account of his leaving and return to his home in Ithaca. The removal of the framing may seem rather technical. But it has tremendous ramifications.
Homer’s framing device served a number of functions. One was to direct the audience to consider Odysseus’ recital not as absolute truth, but in the context of his visit with the Phaeacians. Judging from the sketchy information that Odysseus receives about his hosts from various sources - from Nausicaa, from the girl who leads him to Alcinous’ palace (Athena), from the words of Alcinous in his addresses to the Phaeacians, and from his own observations (6.199-210, 262-72, 300-15; 7.30-132, 186-206, 317-28; 8.557-69) - Odysseus has some sense of his hosts and what they believe about themselves and the world. They see themselves as close to the gods, as possessing magic ships, as on a par with the Cyclops and the Giants, to whom they are cousins. They see (or at least portray) themselves as a quasimythical people who still enjoy intimate discourse and a close relationship with gods. Such people will be obliged to accept stories set in the dimension they claim themselves, and Odysseus tries to make his adventure with the Cyclops acceptable and satisfying to the audience he is addressing (Ahl and Roisman 1996: 92-121). In this narrative, Odysseus locates himself in a world that the Phaeacians are familiar with and tailors his story to their perceptions (Roisman 2001).
Odysseus uses the story to intimate to his audience how resourceful and dangerous he is even to sons of gods, and thus indirectly to assure his safe departure from their island. He tells how he overcame the Cyclops, from whom the Phaeacians had fled. He elaborates on his capacity for dissembling, letting his hosts know that he lied to Polyphemus by telling him that his ship had been destroyed when it had not, and thus warns the Phaeacians that if they think they have him at their mercy, he is as capable of concealing a ship from them as well. In case they want to keep him, he lets them know that he is able to break out of places. His story straddles the worlds of ‘fiction’ and ‘history’, in a way that makes them impossible to tell apart (Ahl and Roisman 1996: 109-15).
The frame also furthers the thematization of the episode. The audience may notice Odysseus’ assertion that when he landed on the Cyclops’ island, he was interested in finding out whether its inhabitants were violent and savage and not just, or hospitable and with a godly mind (9.175-6). This assertion echoes the narrator’s description of Odysseus’ thoughts in book six (120-1), when he landed on the Phaeacians’ island. Similarly, when Odysseus addresses Polyphemus as a suppliant and begs him to show hospitality and respect for the gods by treating him and his men well and giving them gifts (9.259-71), the audience may recall the warm reception and many gifts that Odysseus had received from the Phaeacians in books seven and eight. These repetitions raise the contrast between civilization and barbarity that appears in the Cyclops episode to the level of a theme and make hospitality and gift-giving the criteria of civilized conduct.
This thematization is much weaker in the films. First, since the framing is removed, the rhetorical astuteness of the hero is also absent, and whatever fictional quality the story may have is lost. Thus ironically, what is presented in the epic as fiction turns into a ‘reality’ in the two films - as if one-eyed giants existed, and Odysseus indeed met one of them (cf. Lucian, True History 1.3). Second, instead of a more implicit notion of the importance of hospitality, both films draw a stark contrast between the ugly and barbaric Cyclops and the good-looking Greeks, and in both the hero preaches the related values of piety and hospitality to Polyphemus. Without the contextualization and recurrence permitted by framing, the contrast remains largely visual, the speeches remain largely behaviours, and the ideas behind them do not resound as they do in Homer.
Homer’s framing also makes the Cyclops episode, like the others that Odysseus tells the Phaeacians, a poetic activity and Odysseus a storyteller-poet. The conception of hero as artist was possible because speech and action, counsel and fighting, were complementary functions of equal importance in the world of Homer’s epics (Roisman 2005b). Neither film could conceive of Odysseus as a poet. The 1955 film presents him mainly as a macho warrior and inveterate adventurer, the 1997 film as a wise doer. Both characterizations reflect the dichotomization of art and action in the modern world and a view of artists as weak. Making Odysseus a storyteller allows him to relate both literal and figurative truth. It thus makes verisimilitude unnecessary. Indeed, Odysseus’ tale has a stylized, ritualistic quality about it. Polyphemus enacts his cannibalism over three consecutive occasions, eating two men on the Greeks’ first night in the cave (9.232-306, esp. 287-90), two more the next morning (9.307-17), and another two that evening (9.336-44). With this ritualization, the Cyclops’ one-eyed monstrosity becomes emblematic of his cruel inhumanity, and the episode becomes a parable in which good vanquishes evil, and culture, brains and civilization, represented by Odysseus, overcome the primitive brute strength represented by the Cyclops.
This does not happen in the films. Both films are literalistic and strive to convey an impression of realism, despite the obviously fantastic quality of the episode. Both films thus remove the ritualistic, fairy-tale element of Homer’s original, compacting the episode into a few hours in the cave, with a single occurrence of cannibalism. This saves film time and keeps the action moving, but it also leaches out Homer’s parabolic meanings. Instead, both films try to rationalize the action by ascribing to Cyclops and Greeks alike rather concrete motives that are not present in Homer’s original. Both films send the Greeks to the Cyclops’ cave in search of food, while Homer had directed them there to satisfy Odysseus’ curiosity about the nature of the island’s inhabitants. This material motive, one might guess, would be more convincing to modern audiences, and an easier one to convey than elaborating on Odysseus’ character to include so many intense and contradictory passions. In addition, both films provide explanations for Odysseus’ misfortune in landing at the Cyclops’ island and for the Cyclops’ cruelties. Both films follow Homer’s lead in relating that Odysseus offended Poseidon (or Neptune), and both films suggest that the Cyclops shares his father’s resentment and anger. In the Homeric text, however, the offence occurs when Odysseus blinds the Cyclops; the text does not provide a reason for the Cyclops’ behaviour (1.68-75; 9.517-35; 11.100-3). The films’ motivation for the action replaces the awesome mystery of evil and the painful reality of uncaused suffering and misfortune found in the Homeric text with a settled and comprehensible world order.
With respect to characterization, both film heroes share with Homer’s Odysseus his reputed good looks (if we disregard, of course, Polyphemus’ words in 9.51316), his curiosity, his fearlessness, his bravado and, above all, his ability to think on his feet, together with an unflinching readiness to use violence where necessary - all features that are essential either to the unfolding of the Cyclops episode or to the hero’s audience appeal. Beyond this, however, each film finds ways to remodel Homer’s hero to suit contemporary tastes.
In Ulysses, the hero comes across as more brawn than brains. As has been already noted, he and his men are drawn to the cave by material motives, in search of food, not by the intellectual curiosity of Homer’s hero. Once in the cave, they are shown interested mainly in their stomachs: guzzling, roasting a kid or a lamb, and filching as much of the Cyclops’ cheese as they can. When Eurylochus urges Ulysses to leave the cave before its owner returns, he reminds him to think more about his stomach and not to leave any food behind. When Eurylochus tells the men to hurry and carry the goods out of the cave to the ship, Odysseus remarks mockingly: ‘Eurylochus, I know you are in a hurry, but please do not drop anything so precious as wine.’ With his men, Ulysses pulls rank and uses force. Until the Cyclops shows his cannibalism, he repeatedly scorns and minimizes their fears. He constantly yells at them and roughly shoves them around. He orders them to sharpen the spike to put out Polyphemus’ eye, but refuses to explain why. To be sure, he also offers himself as a sacrifice to Polyphemus, asking the giant whether he prefers to eat him boiled, grilled or roasted. But the offer sounds more like mockery of the Cyclops than a way of helping his men.
The 1997 Odysseus, created within the conventional demands of our own era, is portrayed as a ‘nice guy’ and psychologically adult leader. He is shown eating and revelling with his men in the Cyclops’ cave, but the scene is not over-elaborated. He does not shout or shove his men around or call the blinded Cyclops ‘stupid’ as does his counterpart in the 1955 version. Rather, he shows himself to be fair and diplomatic. When the Cyclops finds Odysseus and his men eating his food, the hero tries to placate the angry monster, apologizing and offering him wine in compensation. After the Cyclops eats one of his men, he appears more sincerely ready to sacrifice himself to save the others, suggesting to the Cyclops that he eat him next. He makes sure, however, that the Cyclops will not want to do this by threatening that in killing him, the Cyclops will lose all the magic in his head and kill all the secrets of the world. The warning looks clever and does not detract from his good-guy credentials. This offer, however, runs counter to the emphasis the Homeric text places on Odysseus’ determination to defeat his enemies by any means and on the value it accords his great ability for survival. After all, he is the only leader in the Homeric epics who lost all his troops, and not on the battlefield at Troy, but on the trip back home. The warning, however, helps to make the subsequent blinding, so hard to take in our squeamish age, acceptable to the audience: if such a nice guy was forced to this choice, it surely had to be done.
In each film, the character of the hero reflects the ideal masculinity of the age: rough-hewn in mid-century, more sensitive at the century’s close. In both, the major trade-off for that currency is the main quality of the Homeric prototype: his tremendous resourcefulness. The resourcefulness of the two film heroes is limited to their ability to think on their feet and to devise ways out of knotty situations. It does not include the purposefulness, planning, anticipation and deliberation of Homer’s Odysseus. As part of their plots, both film heroes come up with the idea of plying the Cyclops with wine and with the plan to put out his eye. In neither film, however, does the hero intentionally bring along the wine on his foray inland in anticipation that he might run into trouble and need it (9.196-215). In neither film is he shown deliberating on how to deal with the Cyclops (9.299-306). Homer’s Odysseus first decides to kill the Cyclops and then changes his mind to blinding him when he realizes that he needs him alive to remove the heavy boulder blocking the cave’s entrance. Ulysses skips over the first stage entirely. The 1997 Odysseus explains to one of his men why blinding the Cyclops is preferable to killing him. But neither is shown in the vital act of thinking through the implications of his moves and deciding between alternatives.
Now, of course, there is nothing wrong with adapting episodes and remodelling characters from the Classics. On the contrary, reinterpretation is vital to keeping the ancient text alive and relevant. The audience for these films, unfamiliar with Homer’s epic and distant in time and culture from the values that inform it, gets a fast-moving adventure story featuring a hero whose motives they can appreciate and whose character they can admire. For one steeped in Homer, though, a sense of loss is perhaps unavoidable. By way of contrast, one can take the example of Euripides’ satyr play, The Cyclops. Euripides introduced even greater changes than the filmmakers; he omitted the frame and the ritualism of the episode; and he also reduced the stature of the Homeric hero, making him a complacent, self-righteous windbag, who was neither clever nor brave, and whose blinding of the Cyclops comes across as both stupid and cruel (Roisman 2005a: 71-3). But he made these changes in a dialogue with Homer: as a way of saying ‘we don’t have heroes today and perhaps never really did, but only flawed and bumbling human beings’. He could do this because his audience could refer back to the original and thus appreciate his dialogue. The modern filmmaker cannot be expected to engage in this way.
World History
