A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey opened in 1968 as an immediate box office success. While some spectators admittedly left theaters in confusion, others eulogized the film as a life changing, almost spiritual experience. This was especially the case with young counter-culture audiences that tended to view the film repeatedly. Critical reception of 2001 was also largely positive despite some early negative reviews following the New York premiere. Renata Adler of the New York Times, for example, judged the film to be ‘somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring’ (Schwam 2000: 147). Yet, by the early 1970s, 2001 was widely recognized by film critics as an extraordinary cinematic achievement (Krämer 2010: 93). Such wide-ranging responses to 2001 were enabled by Kubrick’s

persistent refusal to explain the film. As he said early in his career, ‘I think for a movie or a play to say anything really truthful about life, it has to do so very obliquely, so as to avoid all pat conclusions and neatly tied-up ideas’ (Nelson 2000: 9). He deliberately constructed 2001 as an open narrative that would require spectators to fill in gaps as they subjectively react to the interplay between image and sound. Thus, it is designed to provoke and sustain countless interpretations. The film avoids the expository style of the novel by the same title

that was produced concurrently by Kubrick’s co-writer, Arthur C. Clarke. Kubrick omitted an extensive voiceover narration that had been intended for the film, as well as a ten-minute prologue in which scientists and religious leaders discussed the origins of life, the future prospects of humanity, and the implications of extra-terrestrials and machine intelligence. Questions that the novel explains – such as the origin and purpose of monoliths – the film leaves unanswered. Thwarting accepted conventions of Hollywood storytelling, Kubrick’s

film calls attention to elements of form that are usually hidden. 2001 leaps over time and space to follow three disparate storylines without providing explicit connections. Kubrick tests the patience of his audience by lingering over shots that do not contribute to narrative progression. The film provides no clear protagonist(s) with whom

audiences may identify. Dialogue is extremely curtailed. So little attention is paid to character development that the film’s most human character is a computer. All of these very deliberate choices advance the artistic vision of a

director known for meticulous attention to the smallest details. Kubrick’s intention was to create a nonverbal cinematic experience that – much like a monolith – might subconsciously exert a transformative effect on its viewers (Krämer 2010: 50-52). To that end, his film places in conversation motifs drawn from the Bible, Nietzschean philosophy, Darwinian evolution, Homeric mythology, and science fiction speculation about extra-terrestrial life. The film’s opening sequences evoke the Bible’s first creation story

(Gen. 1:1-2:4a). Against the ‘formless void’ of a dark screen, György Ligeti’s Atmosphères provides an eerie three-minute overture, which fades into a silent darkness interrupted only briefly by the MGM logo. With the first bars of Also Sprach Zarathustra (Richard Strauss’s 1896 musical homage to Nietzsche’s epic of the same title), we look from the barren surface of the moon toward the rising earth, which in turn is capped and illuminated by a rising sun. This alignment of celestial bodies suggests form and order within the cosmos. The subjective camera angle in this scene directs our attention to what we will soon learn is the beginning of life on earth. Whose perspective this camera has adopted is left unexplained. Are we observing earth through the eyes of a heavenly Creator? This visual suggestion is undercut by the musical reference to Nietzsche’s poem, which challenges and redefines onscreen images by proclaiming the death of God. In the next sequence, rather pretentiously entitled ‘The Dawn of

Man’, we see another sunrise – this time viewed from a more familiar earth-bound perspective. In several successive shots, we encounter the sound of wind, dry land, and an absence of vegetation that might suggest the beginning of the third day of creation (Gen. 1:9-13). But that notion is again disrupted by a distant birdcall and the presence of bleached bones (animal and hominid) that introduce an element of potential danger. Blending biblical and Darwinian accounts of origins, Kubrick intro-

duces a tribe of ape-like hominids grazing the barren landscape, falling prey to a leopard, and vying unsuccessfully with another tribe over rights to a small waterhole. High-angle shots diminish the hominids in relation to their environment and convey their vulnerability. Huddling together in a rocky hollow during the night, they apprehensively track the sounds of a leopard prowling in the darkness. Primitive humanity clearly does not hold dominion over this creation (cf. Gen. 1:26),

nor can such a barren and hostile environment be described as a paradisiacal garden (cf. Gen. 2-3). At sunrise, we hear the otherworldly strains of Ligeti’s Requiem and

watch the wakening hominids react in fear to something outside of the camera’s frame. A sudden wide-angle shot reveals a rectangular black monolith, whose geometric perfection marks it as wholly ‘Other’, at odds with the irregularities of otherwise natural surroundings. Whereas Clarke’s novel explains monoliths as machines created by an advanced alien species to guide human evolution, Kubrick’s film allows multiple interpretations. Viewers can choose to understand monoliths as alien machines, the presence of God, or visual metaphors for human inspiration. As the music swells to drown out the screeching hominids, their leader

(named Moon-Watcher in Clarke’s novel) overcomes his fear sufficiently to extend a hand and touch the monolith in an iconic image echoing Michelangelo’s ‘Creation of Adam’ (1511; ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican). This impulse to touch recurs throughout the film in each monolith encounter. A reverential low-angle shot directs our attention to another magical alignment directly above the monolith as the sun rises beneath a crescent moon. This event later inspires an evolutionary leap forward as Moon-

Watcher crouches amidst tapir bones. After a subliminal shot recalling sunrise over the monolith, the hominid tilts his head in a universal thinking pose as again we hear the first strains of Also Sprach Zarathustra. At first awkwardly, Moon-Watcher uses a long bone to strike the skeleton. As the hominid gains confidence and the music crescendos, Kubrick adopts an extreme low-angle shot to capture a hairy arm wielding the bone in slow motion. Subsequent low-angle shots show Moon-Watcher enthusiastically smashing a skull as he imagines killing tapirs for meat. The monolith has functioned as a tree of knowledge (Gen.

2:16-17; 3), transforming primitive humans into tool-wielding carnivores. Like the biblical Garden of Eden story, this acquisition of knowledge may be read as both a fall and an ascent. Primitive humanity gains godlike creative potential that soon reveals a capacity for violence, when their tool becomes a weapon in the struggle for waterhole rights. Moon-Watcher leads his tribe in the bludgeoning murder of another hominid in a scene strongly reminiscent of Cain’s murder of Abel (Gen. 4). The camera tracks the tool/weapon as it is flung jubilantly into the heavens by an unrepentant Cain/Moon-Watcher. A match-cut replaces the falling bone with a nuclear weapon orbiting

Earth, visually equating these two human tools and their destructive

potential. The absence of a new title suggests that this space-age segment is still ‘The Dawn of Man’. Surprisingly, not much has changed in several million years despite humanity’s obvious technological advances. Like their hominid ancestors, twenty-first-century humans eat, sleep, and use the toilet with the added complication of zero gravity. Diplomatic posturing between American and Russian scientists at the Hilton Space Station recalls posturing over waterhole rights by rival hominid tribes. Although humans have developed speech, it is employed only in banal small talk and deception. In this way, Kubrick suggests that human evolution is essentially stalled in the early chapters of Genesis. Wide-angle interior shots of the spacecraftOrion (and later the Clavius

briefing room) create a sense of artificial enclosure, while contrasting exterior shots draw attention to the immeasurable vistas of space as ships and celestial bodies dance gracefully to Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz (1866). We eventually learn that theOrion’s sole passenger, Dr Heywood Floyd, is traveling to the American lunar colony to investigate the top-secret discovery of another monolith. Like MoonWatcher, Floyd is compelled to touch this mysterious object; as celestial bodies align, it emits a high-frequency signal. The next segment begins abruptly with the title ‘Jupiter Mission:

18 Months Later’. Kubrick again contrasts the vastness of space with the enclosed interior of the spaceship Discovery. And again human characters (David Bowman and Frank Poole) follow daily routines of exercising, eating, and sleeping without emotion or meaningful social interaction. They are nearly as insensible as the Discovery’s hibernating crewmembers. The most human character is ironically the HAL 9000 computer, which controls every aspect of the Jupiter mission. HAL is presented as the ultimate tool, supposedly ‘foolproof and

incapable of error’. Kubrick leaves open the question of whether the computer is actually sentient or simply following his programming. Likewise, when HAL begins to behave erratically and turns on Discovery’s crew, we do not know if this is due to a mechanical error or a psychological breakdown. It is tempting to read this segment of the film as another creation story – this time with humanity cast in the role of Creator. Like Moon-Watcher, human technology has reached a new evolutionary stage embodied by HAL. Created ‘in our image’ (Gen. 1:26-27), HAL shares humanity’s godlike potential (indeed, he is essentially omnipotent and omniscient aboard the Discovery) but also exhibits our flaws. HAL, like Moon-Watcher, reacts to a perceived threat with Cain-like violence in the murder of Frank Poole and the hibernating astronauts. Bowman is forced to abort

humanity’s technological creation, like Frankenstein’s misbegotten monster. HAL’s ‘death’ (or, more accurately, his forced devolution) inad-

vertently triggers a prerecorded message by Heywood Floyd that reveals the true reason for the Jupiter mission: the lunar monolith’s signal has been traced to Jupiter space. Following an intermission, we jump abruptly to the film’s final segment entitled ‘To Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite’. Again celestial bodies align, as a monolith drifts through space to Ligeti’s Requiem. Perhaps unintentionally, the monolith passes through this alignment at a perpendicular angle producing a cross-shape that lingers onscreen for several seconds. Bowman leaves Discovery in a space pod to be swept up into a star

gate indicated by a rush of colours and patterns. He reacts viscerally to this journey, suffering an apparent seizure, as the camera focuses increasingly on the colours reflected in his eye. The trip ends unexpectedly in a neoclassical bedroom where he lives out the rest of his days in a matter of minutes. Soon an extremely aged Bowman is confronted by another monolith that appears at the foot of his bed. Reaching a shaky finger toward it like Michelangelo’s Adam, he is transformed into the Star-child as the opening bars of Also Sprach Zarathustra sound once more. The film ends as the Star-child, floating freely in a transparent bubble, returns to earth completing the film’s Homeric odyssey. This last segment is perhaps the most confusing part of the film.

Clarke explains the bedroom as an observation tank where the godlike extra-terrestrials guiding human evolution use Bowman to initiate its next stage. In the novel, the Star-child returns to Earth in order to detonate orbiting nuclear weapons in an act of cosmic purification. But Kubrick, as usual, leaves open our interpretive options. We might read Bowman’s character in the final segment of the film as an inverted Christ figure whose passion in the stargate is followed by a lonely last supper and a transfiguration. However, given the film’s three-fold repetition of Also Sprach Zarathustra, it may be that Bowman (representing humanity) is merely an evolutionary bridge between ape and Übermensch. Recurrent birth imagery (birthdays, Bowman’s airless re-entry into the Discovery in a fetal position through a tunnel, the severed umbilical cord that trails from Poole’s body, and finally the Star-child) also reinforces the theme that semi-civilized humanity must now be reborn as something more to avoid the imminent threat of self-annihilation. This threat was very apparent to Kubrick and his audiences in the

midst of the Cold War and had recently been underlined by the

Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Kubrick’s gift as a director was his ability to translate the major cultural concerns of his day into commercially successful and critically acclaimed films. Like his previous release, Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001 addressed the imminent danger of nuclear devastation. In both films, Kubrick expressed modern fears that humans will lose control of our technology or that our Cain-like bent toward violence will inevitably turn science toward destructive ends. However, 2001 also visually celebrates the technology that would enable a manned moon landing only a year after the film’s release. In contrast to the unrelenting satire of Dr. Strangelove, which ends with nuclear detonation, 2001 articulates a hopeful vision of human transformation. Moreover, it affirms the possibility of a guiding force behind human evolution though not necessarily the god of traditional religion.