Reflections on 2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey has inhabited a large part of my life and, de facto, must be the most important film to me.

I have seen it more times on the big screen than any other film. I've watched it more than twenty times on public television, cable, and video. I purchased the vinyl soundtrack three times during the last thirty-three years (now I own the latest CD version, which includes all of HAL the computer's dialogue), and have read Arthur C. Clarke's book three times as well as Jerome Agel's The Making of 2001.

I continue to read all of the English-language (and even some French and Spanish) criticism in books, magazines, and on the Internet dealing with the movie and/or Stanley Kubrick.  I have encouraged my family to screen the film continuously at my wake and funeral. 

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I first saw 2001 on Memorial Day 1968, but it was the second feature I had seen that day.  The Indianapolis 500 was being shown on live circuit in 2001's theater;  I didn't know that until I got there. I was 16, and having made the journey into Philadelphia, I decided to see another movie: Planet of the Apes. This might have been enough for one afternoon, yet I stayed into the evening to finally attend a showing of 2001. 

Both movies share superficial resemblances, especially in their speculation about evolution. One said that men would eventually succumb to apes in the future; the other, that the transition from ape to man was manipulated by an "outside" force.  Planet of the Apes was eventually rewarded with an Oscar for its ape outfits; I didn't understand why the apes of 2001 weren't, if only because those apes looked more like apes. Later, it occurred to me that the "Academy" voters had, like many viewers, including myself, believed Kubrick's apes WERE real!

The opening scene of 2001 is a testament to the realism of the film and the impact it has had on a generation of moviegoers who have returned to the film over and over. The realism supplied an impression, overwhelming at the time, that 2001 was a speculation on the nature of mankind. What had made man what he was? Was his evolution actually affected by aliens? What had made humans so violent? Was there any redemption for their violent nature? 

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In his book, Flying Saucers, Carl Jung notes that the belief in extraterrestrial life represents a search for a transcendent answer to life's complexities and mysteries. The decades of the 1960s and 1970s possessed a notable idealistic and even religious flair, and my initial response to 2001 was conditioned by that mystical element, especially in how the movie held back much information from the viewer. Unlike Planet of the Apes, there was no definite moment of revelation; no Statue of Liberty broken on a beach. Only if one knew how to look would one find an answer. I focused specifically on figuring out how 2001 settled these many issues.

In adapting the film, Kubrick reportedly cut out an allegedly slow-moving twelve to twenty minutes of footage, the appearance of images on the monoliths inside the apes' encampment, and suppressed any kind of narration that would explain the significance of these things to the audience. This story of evolution is not meant to resolve the identity of a missing link or a prime mover, be it alien, God, or an evolutionary force.

At age sixteen, I took this speculation to be the prime interest of the film and evaluated its theory with the facts. Who were the aliens? What did Kubrick and Clarke mean by the ending with the Louis XV styled room and the Star Child?  Did the aliens program humans? I assumed that the monolith was a teaching machine implanting information in the apes’ heads. How could this be proven? 

The monolith doesn't whisper into the ape's ear or provide instructions for making tools; no, the monolith simply appears. The ape commonly known as "Moonwatcher" touches the slab. An eerie, mystical track from Gorgi Ligieti fills this moment with near mystical importance. Later, amidst the bones of tapirs, the ape recalls this strange, unnatural shape of the monolith and uses the bone as a tool, and a weapon. That's it for the stimulus, but it's enough. The enemy apes at the waterhole are in for a big surprise.

My interest in this particular meaning didn’t last very long; neither did my interest in extraterrestrial life (maybe the 1969 moon landing did it: no signs of life there). But 2001 hooked me with its other themes, especially its critique of machines and technology.

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The same people I have told to play 2001 at my wake remotely if unseriously believed my views on technology resembled those of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. Ted and I share a major influence: Jacque Ellul’s book, The Technological Society, a massive critique of western society and its reliance on a single system of life. The central drama of 2001 reflects Ellul’s concerns in the commandeering of the Discovery ship by HAL the computer; man's technological expertise turns on him.

2001 has been branded “anti-technological” by no less a person than Ellul, who ironically complained about similar attacks on his own work. It surprises me that Ellul did not discern the nature of Kubrick’s critique of our technological civilization. The film is the result of an artistic confrontation with and not against technology. All the while, Kubrick shows in the scene with the ape and his bone-weapon that some of the finest achievements of mankind are indelibly linked with the horrible aspects of its nature. Even in the age of the height of these triumphs, the HAL 9000 computer has dulled and deadened the wonder and majesty of life in outer space. Astronaut Frank Poole's chess match with HAL and the birthday greeting he gets from his parents are sanitized interactions. On a broad comic level, Kubrick also succeeded in making the computer more human than humans.

This is precisely what impresses me most about the film. Carrying on from its realistic ape costumes, we get finally a realistic vision of space travel that depicts its psychological consequences on the space travelers themselves. No other film has had the courage to explore this in a dramatic fashion.

2001 skirts the “boredom” issue here, especially for a generation nurtured by Star Wars. Yet, what Kubrick manages to attain within the ethos that has deadened his 21^st century creatures is an incredible poetry of effects, motion, and music. In a sense, he pulls off the impossible by daring to put an audience to sleep.

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“This is the best part of the trip. The best part.”
--Jim Morrison “The Soft Parade”

1968 was the age of hippies and acid trips, and received wisdom said that the only way to see 2001 was to be high, preferably acid over marijuana or hash. Of course, one segment of the movie, fifteen minutes of lights and celestial visages of unknown dimension origin--aka, the psychedelic part--has reinforced this feeling. One movie poster capitalized on these sentiments, declaring 2001 "The Ultimate Trip." Many reviewers even accused Kubrick of pandering to a youth audience, who seemed to be the only ones tuned in and turned on to the film’s elliptical meaning.

Yet, if there were any film that made passive, or passively responding, viewership impossible, it’s 2001. The film demands intellectual as well as intuitive engagement. Kubrick sets up images and scenes that do not seem comprehensible, but neither does he ask us to retreat from understanding what’s happening on the screen. The infamous scene when Dave Bowman ends up in a white room, ages rapidly, and evolves into the Star Child makes little narrative sense unless we make an interpretative leap analogous to the kind Moonwatcher has made during the “Dawn of Man” sequence.

Many of the film’s Nietzschean allusions come to the fore at this point, especially the overwhelming presence of the musical motif of Thus Spake Zarathustra.  Especially relevant are Nietzsche’s quote, “man is something that must be overcome.” But less the dawn of a superman, 2001 marks the beginning of a new way of thinking: via Nietzsche, Kubrick demonstrates that man must overcome a nature that desires stasis and death.

The Star Child--the famous image of a floating fetus in deep space--represents the birth of a new way of thought: a radical subjectivity that (also in 1960s fashion) challenges authority--especially the critical authority that tries to tell you, the viewer of 2001, what the film is about.