The Personal 100: #63 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

I cried when I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen. A wave of emotion brought on by a mix of anticipation, expectation, relief and pure cinematic mastery. The Earth. The Moon. Strauss. How could anyone not be overcome?

And yet, stepping back.

Considering.

Where does that reaction come from? I wonder that with Kubrick. How do his cold cinematic compositions draw out such deep connections. How does he, with barely a word, leech fear and ecstasy and wonderment from our bodies, when his films feel so calculated and calculating.

Intellectual. Logical.

Kubrick in general and this film in particular is a wondrous enigma to me. Which is why I'll never stop returning to it.

If you want to speak conceptually, 2001: A Space Odyssey is not a difficult film to understand: Monolith sparks evolutionary violence. Crazy computer. Space baby. Nothing to it. But get into the nitty gritty detail and things get more complicated. That's the same with most of Kubrick's films. He was a perfectionist. He had a singular vision for what he wanted presented on the screen and he brought that vision into this world with exacting precision.

To many, that means there is an answer - a single, tick-on-the-page answer. I don't subscribe to that school of cinema-going. Films aren't a one way street. What Kubrick has put into his film is only the beginning. One only has to watch Room 237, Rodney Ascher's rapid-fire documentary on the meaning of The Shining, to know that.

Films are collaborative efforts, first in their making - let's not forget that the genesis of 2001 was not Kubrick's alone; he had as his screenwriting partner one of the world's foremost writers of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke - then in their viewing. Every audience member brings their own experience to a film and the combination of each film and each audience member enables a new meaning.

Kubrick knew this. If he had a singular interpretation for 2001, it went to the grave with him. The director refused to give an explanation of the meaning of the film. In response to that very question from Eric Nordern at 'Playboy Magazine', Kubrick answered:

How much would we appreciate La Gioconda today if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: "The lady is smiling slightly because she has rotten teeth" - or "Because she is hiding a secret from her lover"? It would shut off the viewer's appreciation and shackle him to a reality other than his own. I don't want that to happen to 2001.

(On a side note, how jarring is it seeing the male pronoun used so ubiquitously?)

So, if you came here seeking an explanation for the film, sorry to disappoint. I can direct you to this excellent presentation, which with one or two minor adjustments would fit with my theories on 2001 (and caters for perplexed movie-goers in 13 languages).

What I want to describe here is how Kubrick's film stuck in my memory. How his images burned themselves into my consciousness. How expansive I found his and Clarke's ideas, and how terrifying I found that expansiveness to be.

Almost all of this is tied up in Kubrick's visuals. That is fascinating when you actually think about it. Out of the entire 160 minutes of 2001's runtime, under forty of those minutes carry (rather banal) dialogue, so any ideas (and there are many) need to be expressed visually. 2001's longevity is testament to how well Kubrick succeeded in this.

So I want to explore how he did this for me. I want to unpack how he has managed to link my head to my gut so powerfully.

On monoliths...

The monoliths are as good a place to start as any.

They captured my imagination even before I saw 2001. Their hard, straight-lined, black enormity stuck on posters and video covers got me curious. My parents' insistence that they didn't know what they were and that it was a grown-up film only piqued my interest more.

As I grew older, the stories about the complexity of 2001 stacked up. Stories about how boring it was were added to the pile. Stories about how it made no sense. Eventually my intrigue gave way to wariness. By the time I was of an age that I could presumably understand Kubrick's film, it had become a cinematic mountain so high I was weary just thinking about climbing it.

2001 was my monolith.

I needn't have worried. I am not going to say I understood it completely (I probably still wouldn't presume to say that) but it certainly wasn't boring, nor was it nonsensical. I found it enigmatic and intensely beautiful. And those monoliths were one of the most enigmatic and beautiful things in it. Kubrick and Clarke knew that, of course, which is why they gave them such prominence, dumping them in places where they stood in dramatic contrast to their surroundings, prehistoric Africa, the Moon, a Louis XVI-inspired room (we'll get to that later), and scored them with the other-worldly atmospheric a cappella choristry of György Ligeti.

How odd, how geometric the monoliths were. That is what made them so insanely curious. I put their effect as much down to visual dissonance as I do to the concept behind them. So simple, so sleek, yet undeniably advanced. Undeniably "other". They are unquestionably an unqualified design coup. Whether they are planted alien super computers or evolution kick-starters, on one level doesn't matter; they are just there and they are monolithic. They are one of cinema's most elegant symbols.

On a side note, I was one of those who bought into the "apes were real" urban myth. I don't mean to say I thought the apes were real but that I have been guilty of spreading the story of how the Oscar for best makeup that year went to Planet of the Apes over 2001 because the Academy voters thought they were. Wikipedia tells me that is not the case. There wasn't actually a best makeup award at that time (and there wasn't until 1981). It turns out Planet of the Apes picked up the award as an honorary nod. Goodbye faithful story.

The monoliths still give me chills.

The scream on the moon leaves me shuddering. The cold surface touched by a human hand, that single touch that leads into the most narrative-driven section of the film. The scream that is left unexplained until almost all the other shit has gone down.

But, again, explanations are not at the core of Kubrick's experience. The second monolith's function is, after all is said and done, rather banal in the scheme of things. It's not too much more than an over-engineered laser pointer. The enigma is far more satisfying.

I did hunt out an explanation in my youth. I didn't read Arthur C. Clarke's novel - I obviously wasn't that curious (I was more a fantasy novel reader, sci-fi was never romantic enough) - but I did pester my friends who had. They filled me in with all the background information, which confirmed and fleshed out my suspicions. The novel is good for that. That's the benefit of developing a novel and a film in parallel. It is a shame that Clarke and Kubrick never followed through on their plan to release 2001: A Space Odyssey, as a film by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke and as a novel by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. Stanley got the short end of that stick. I'm not sure if that process has ever been repeated. It certainly hasn't been repeated with such monolithic (if you'll forgive the pun) resultant works in their respective forms.

I doubt that many would argue that when it comes to science fiction, 2001 sets the benchmark for both media.

The other striking aspect of the monoliths is their function within 2001's narrative. They barely see, but they are still the film's most binding agent. Each of the sections of Kubrick's film are marked by their presence.

The first two monoliths are the most present. Within their respective sections they are undeniably the most striking element. They're also tied together beautifully, pre-human and human-human drawn in elegant visual parallel. But it is the arrival of/at the third monolith that is the film's gob-smacking "a-ha" moment. Finally, just as the comedown begins following the bloodless tension of the Jupiter mission, just as the muscles being to relax, just as the battle between our kind and our technological children has been waged and won, it appears. It appears. It spins slowly and perfectly in the vastness of space. Again, perfectly aligned. Again, perfectly inexplicable.

And with its arrival 2001 is a single film again, drawn back to that central enigma. Here. Now. How? In the middle of the galaxy we are somehow thrust right back to beginning.


On the universe...

That beginning, once again, isn't just conceptual or thematic. Primarily, it is visual; Kubrick takes us right back to the opening shot of the film. The monolith rotating measuredly on its horizontal axis, lined up precisely with Jupiter and its moons, recalls the film's iconic title sequence. The low grumble of Richard Strauss Jnr.'s symphonic poem 'Also Spake Zarathustra'. The gigantic arcs of our moon and our earth silently rolling through space. Our sun cresting from behind our blue sphere, reaching around our planet in a blazing, perfectly circumscribed caress. Strauss' orchestral release. Kubrick's representation of our corner of the universe is grand, operatic, celebratory and mathematically precise. Everything has its place.

We, in ape form, disrupt that perfect geometry.

I like to look on 2001 as the cinematic representation of our species getting our shit together.

Much has been written on the bone toss of Moonwatcher, Clarke's name for the ape who got touchy feely with the monolith. The bone, the first, most simple tool, flung skywards, transformed via the power of editing to our most advanced tool, the satellite. The two tools link ape and human, just as the two monolith encounters do. It is another simple but extremely effective use of cinema by Kubrick.

That single match cut's symbolic transition is now about as legendary as a piece of editing can be (sit it alongside Lawrence of Arabia's match to sun fade) but its audacity has overshadowed another of Kubrick's elegant visual progressions, from the shaggy brutality of life on prehistoric earth to the cylindrical peace of space. Kubrick doesn't simply show our technological advancement, he also subtly gives us an entrée into the universe's unifying geometry.

In another of his near wordless scenes, Kubrick presents space as a graceful waltz, set to Strauss Snr.'s 'Blue Danube', another composition now tied as much to outer space as it is to the dance halls of Vienna. Silent, but for Strauss' rum-pum-pums, the collection of human-constructed shapes roll and rotate with the planets. Shadows drift across our creations, each one a close approximation of the galaxy's perfection. We are beginning to speak the universe's mathematical language. Another wonderfully visual encapsulation of 2001's thematic preoccupations.

Kubrick disorients, or re-orients, humans in space. Freed from our planet's gravitational constraints, Kubrick's camera is free to choose where grounds itself. Kubrick plays artfully with perspective. In the black of space there is no up, there is no down. A space station that spins from one perspective is stationary from another. Kubrick masterfully manipulates the audience's point of view. The result is a balletic fluidity of movement.

That movement is graceful while it is under control. Not so much when it is just you and your space suit spinning wildly, cut free of your vessel by an artificial intelligence bent on your destruction. As ordered and choreographed as Kubrick's universe is, if you miss a step you quickly realise how absolutely and terrifyingly huge it is. It is endless. It doesn't align to the physical rules of Earth and if you are alone, you are utterly and forever alone. You travel, unstoppably, into infinity. And you last about as long as your oxygen.

Kubrick is brutally dispassionate when it comes to life in space. An astronaut can be alive, safely tethered, one second and flung into that expansiveness the next. It is the finest of lines, a finger's reach is all it takes to be lost for all eternity. Kubrick knows exactly what to do with that fragility of existence. He let's us know it. He lets us know that his lone survivor, Dave (Kier Dullea), knows it too.

Breath. Measured breath. The only sound in the nothingness.

And there is nothing between that breath and the vacuum beyond but a few millimetres of tempered glass. It is terrifying. Breath. Measured breath. Nothingness.

And then there's the small matter of the murderous artificial intelligence who has now taken on vaguely human features and  won't let you back into your oxygen filled, life sustaining spacecraft.

But we'll get to that.

On futurism...

Before we do, I'd like to take a step back from the terror and look at those constructed environments.

When we first experience them in the company of Doctor Heywood (William Sylvester), we travel to the wheel-like space station en route to the moon mission. The environments are presented as comfortable. Space has been tamed and is held at bay except for a few minor concerns. Pens don't stay in pockets. Food has to be liquified and boxed in. Shoes must grip the floor. We've "Earthified" space to a certain degree.

These scenes form a part of the beautiful space ballet and follow the exteriors' play with perspective and geometry. The environment, both outside and in, is constructed around circles. The stewardesses (and there are only stewardesses - it is interesting that Kubrick and Clarke saw fit to advance the technology but not the efforts of feminism) walk within and around these circles unhampered by gravity's up-down pull. We've adapted to these constructed environments and now move (relatively) freely within our own appropriated geometry.

It is not the geometric aspects of these created environment, though, that I am most attracted to. I enjoy the subtlety of Kubrick's bringing that visual cohesion to our life in space, but it is the aesthetic qualities of these scenes that I love the most. This love has only ripened with time. I love the '60's futurist design that Kubrick and his production design team have deployed here (not to be confused with the Italian Futurism of the '20's and '30's). It is a design that places the film within a certain period but still allows it to mature exceptionally well. 

We may have passed the year 2001 but the film wears its age like a grand dame. It may not be "the future" as the future came about but it is still imagined well enough to be the future as it could still come about, especially if there was a solid '60's revival a few hundred years down the track. 

It is easy to forget that Kubrick and Clarke would have been developing their film at the tail end of the space race and that it was "in the can" and released before Armstrong stepped foot on the moon. No wonder the film captured the imagination of the world. The whole idea of commercial space travel must have felt incredibly imminent. The film perceptively picks up on the continuity between the travel of Kubrick's age and the travel of his future, branding space flight with contemporary airline imagery. Unfortunately, Pan-Am ceased to exist a decade before their imagined future arrived but even that fact deepens the aesthetic for me. There was such optimism of the futurism of the '60's, its clean, (culturally) white, sexist projections of happy future homes, future cities and future moon colonies. 

 

That probably sounds like I'm happy with the white-wash of it all but that's not what I'm trying to get at. There is something kind of adorable about '60's futurism's deluded extrapolation of what constitutes a utopian society. I love that the Russians and the Americans have made up because it was the Russians and the Americans that had the most beef in the space race. And I love that that was enough of a social progression in Clarke and Kubrick's eyes. If I were to be harsh, I'd say it was offensive by definition but I kind of look at it as quaint. Like a grown-up, live action version of 'The Jetsons'.

On HAL...

Yet, if 2001's design is quaint, it's purpose most definitely isn't.

As dreamers, we humans have often imagined our designed futures to have a friendly voice to guide us through our day to day existence. In our dreams, the computer that makes life more accessible, more comfortable and all around more livable is also our friend. Well, our friend or our servant.

The likelihood of that not being the case usually gets pushed back of the mind when we construct these elaborate futures for ourselves. With our lives becoming ever more computer-controlled, we still often forget to consider that we are putting our lives in the hands of machines. In 2001, Kubrick and Clarke make that a very real consideration.

The relationship between humans and their tools, which began with the touch of the first monolith, comes to a head when Dave, Frank and the Discovery One crew go in search of the third. On board with them, existing within the vessel's end to end circuitry, is the HAL 9000, a near-sentient computer programmed to serve the crew, to keep them safe and to ensure their mission succeeds.

But is HAL near-sentient or already a step ahead of we humans on the evolutionary ladder? Kubrick and Clarke invest a lot of screen time at the beginning of this chapter positioning HAL as an all-seeing, all-knowing entity, basically a viable replacement for humanity. As the retro-BBC reporter puts it, HAL is the brain and central nervous system of the mission, but he's also considered the sixth member of the crew.

HAL's near-humanity is an acknowledgement that we humans have succeeded (or almost succeeded) in creating autonomous thought from scratch.

Only there's a snag. HAL's come over a little glitchy. In an almost imperceptible hiccough, HAL's voice twitches, Just a moment... Just a moment... and he diagnoses a fault in the ship's antenna. Frank and Dave eventually conjecture that HAL's diagnosis has been made in error, but does this error make HAL himself faulty or simply more human. And do the murderous actions that follow signal madness or purely logical, justifiable self preservation.

I'm not a fan of coincidence in cinema so I find it difficult to reconcile the fact that HAL's mistake occurs on the very mission in which humankind was required to trump its tools and clear the way for the next step on their assisted evolution. I prefer to assume that HAL's own near-human conciousness has been given a bump by the force behind the monoliths. Looking at Dave's progression into disembodied existence, it isn't too much of a stretch to see that HAL (already disembodied in a way) is also a prime candidate for evolution. I like to view HAL's actions aboard Discovery One as the fallout from an infallible consciousness struggling for the first time with self-doubt, paranoia and the irrationality of emotions.

Exactly the kind of consciousness you don't want in control of life support, or your pod bay doors.

But Kubrick's framing of the showdown between HAL and the crew of the Discovery One, as with his framing of the entirety of 2001, isn't particularly human friendly. Whilst HAL may be considered another crew member by Dave and Frank, to Kubrick he is merely another viewpoint from which to examine humanity's relationship to the wider universe, a universe which now includes a new sentient being.

Much of 2001's calculating tone can be attributed to HAL's omniscient red eye. Indeed, HAL's gaze, be it referenced by the piercing red dot or by his fish-eyed point of view, is central to Kubrick's outlook. Both Dave and Frank are tight with their emotions. Kubrick provides very few empathetic hooks for the two men. Their presentation is dispassionate at best, menacing at worst. Their ominously lit, brow-dropped stares, a precursor to those worn so effectively by Jack Torrance in The Shining, don't scream warmth. The only reason the we relate to them is we share their DNA.

HAL on the other hand, with his inkling of self doubt and his modulated desperation, is clearly Kubrick's preferred point of association. He doesn't do much to signal his preference, but there are small hints, the way he lights those stares being one. In taking up HAL's position, Kubrick puts him on even keel with the humans. If there is to be a battle between the humans and their tools, Kubrick wants it to be a  fair fight.

Most wouldn't recognise this but this almost imperceptible pressure to empathise with HAL's position drives a lot of 2001's drama. For me, this unconscious pull between HAL and Dave is what makes this core section of the film so compelling.

Switching back to the more traditional viewpoint, with HAL gone implacably and very logically rogue, Dave is left at the mercy of the universe. His environment is no longer liveable, at least not without a space helmet, something HAL calmly points out. It here that Kubrick's cold, unfeeling camerawork comes into its own. Dave in his pod, trying to maintain his composure, requests entry into the only place he has any chance of survival. He is repeatedly, clinically, rebuked by the computer that was until recently his companion.

Kubrick's calm, collected stalemate has me screaming on the inside every time I experience it. Dave's recognition that losing his temper amongst all this isolation is not going to do him any good deflects any onscreen drama. Tension, on the other hand, is increased to unbearable proportions and there is no outlet for it. All you can do is breathe.

And breathe...

I can't be the only one who finds the powering down of HAL intensely moving. Douglas Rain's performance as HAL is heartbreaking here. Not because of its emotion but because of its confusion. Just as Dave was confronted in the previous scene by the computer's implacable stance, now HAL is faced with his own inevitable destruction at the human's hand. His attempts to reason with Dave are as much self rationalisation as they are a plea for clemency.

My mind is going...

I can feel it...

It gets to me. It gets to Dave, too. You can hear it in his broken voice as HAL is reduced, piece by piece, to infancy. HAL recounts his birth and the song he was taught. When Dave accepts HAL's offer to sing it, his voice cracks. A rare moment of Kubrickian poignancy.

And HAL slowly drones out singing the first song ever sung using computer speech synthesis.

And I feel hollow.

On tripping through time and space...

"My god, it's full of stars..."

The quote didn't make it into Kubrick's film. In Clarke's novel, it was the last transmission Dave sent before his disappearance. It did eventually enter the public consciousness via Peter Hyams' sequel. It is the line that would have preceded Kubrick's most audacious sequence in 2001 and perhaps the most experimental in his entire canon, the psychedelic Star Gate journey.

I've never been one to take a literal view on this mind-warping abstraction of colour and sound, insofar as a literal reading is even possible. Space tunnels and intergalactic travel don't excite me nearly as much as the idea of enforced accelerated evolution. I like to look on this sequence (and the one that follows) as Kubrick's representation of this fast-tracked advancement. I'm happy to stick with the esoteric and I'm pretty comfortable that ten or so minutes of whizzing vanishing points, swirling patterns and multicoloured eyeballs can be read that way.

What I like about this sequence is how committed Kubrick is to it. This isn't a throw away special effect moment. As a director hell bent on milking the last drop of wonder out of the experience, he goes long and hard at the senses. The fast moving colours, the intercut stills of Dave's contorted face, the out of shape score, it is a full frontal assault and it eventually shakes its way right to the marrow.

If evolution were to be distilled down to a ten minute film, this would be it.

And this, of course, was it: the scene that defined 2001: A Space Odyssey. It certainly was for me. It was the scene that defied explanation, the scene that had almost everyone I knew who had seen it throwing their hands up in exasperation. Again, I was surprised when I finally got to see it. I loved it. It flashes by in its immersive roar of sound and colour. It does everything that Kubrick needs at that point in the film. It unhinges sight and sound and time and space. It disorients. It hypnotises. Then it spits you out in 18th Century France.

On "the room"...

There's not much you can do when faced with "the room". If you were to sit down with sit down with a group of avid science fiction buffs and brainstormed where Dave would end up after being whisked across time and space, I'm pretty positive the group's ideas would be exhausted long before anyone thought to suggest an imitation Louis XVI bedchamber. And yet, it is somehow perfect.

This is where I like to sit back and let the film wash over me, safe in the knowledge that meaning sometimes evolves from experience instead of understanding. This is where I rely on the knowledge that answers are sometimes meaningless. This is where I rely on the fact that sometimes even the film makers don't know why they are doing what they are doing.

I love this paraphrasing of Clarke's diaries from the time of the development of the film/novel, from Wikipedia:

Early in 1965, right when backing was secured for Journey Beyond the Stars, the writers still had no firm idea of what would happen to Bowman after the Star Gate sequence, though as early as October 17, 1964 Kubrick had come up with what Clarke called a "wild idea of slightly fag robots who create a Victorian environment to put our heroes at their ease" 

I never imagined that "slightly fag robots" were responsible for the room. So, with 2001 we have both explicit sexism and implicit homophobia. Space really is cruel. As a homosexual, I find the decor of the room rather gauche, but who am I to challenge the interior design skills of an advanced intelligence?

Joking aside, gaining such an insight the development of the scene highlights the way in which Kubrick let ideas lead his images. An image doesn't need to describe an idea so much as invoke it; which leads me back to the concept of using the gut rather than the head to decode the film's climax.

Kubrick speaks in grand imagery. His shots are detailed without providing detail. Opening yourself up to them is like closing your eyes to music. Picking this scene apart, shot by shot, age by age, will inevitably be fruitless. Kubrick's aiming for reactions that go beyond the connection between the eyes and the brain. He wants to express whole concepts without uttering a single word.

He works off juxtaposition: the old and the embryonic, the futuristic and the historical, the white and the black. He works off our sense of insignificance, of the elite ruling the common. He works off our fear of death and our obsession with our continuation.

But most of all, I think he wants the images, the feelings, the ideas to live beyond the film, to shake something in the soul. To matter.

To me it did.

2001: A Space Odyssey is #63 in my Personal 100, a journey back through my hundred most beloved films.

You can track my progress here.