ABSTRACT
The architectural metaphors that accumulate around the virtual have as their origin not only theme parks but films as well, especially those films that have been constructed not as linear answers to an initial scenario but as a series of puzzles whose answers continue to unfold in numerous directions. While obviously any number of films could be said to fit this pattern, and the very notion of cultural studies as an interpretive model makes these interpretations nearly infinite with the death of the author's intentions and the birth of the audience's desires, the work of directors like Stanley Kubrick suggests the prefiguring of a postmodern cinema that is constructed as a series of alternate possibilities—a series of ambiguities that mirror the different narrative possibilities that one might take in a video game. Steven Spielberg, for example, has spoken of Kubrick's films as an immersive experience in which the audience enters a world parallel to their own, one that is perhaps more intense and meaningful for some than reality itself. 1 If so, this effect is perhaps first promulgated in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), whose special effects create a profound sense of being in a futuristic version of the present that is solid and believable. The seemingly linear narrative of the film—one gigantic timeline that stretches for four million years—actually breaks down when one gets to the center of the film, to the year 2001 itself. At this point, interpretation inevitably multiplies and the film seems to offer a plethora of competing possibilities: Is HAL malfunctioning or simply carrying out orders? What, exactly, does he know, or what does he suspect? Why do the two astronauts on board his ship not know what the purpose of their mission is? Why does Heywood Floyd lie when he does, and to whom? Angela Nidalianis terms this sort of multiple narrative displacement the “neo-baroque,” which connects especially with theme parks and film, both of whose “special-effects technology is similarly intent on immersing the spectator in the fantasy induced by the effects by highlighting intense sensory experiences that often seek to collapse the representational frame perceptually. Unlike their small screen companions, however, the sheer size of the cinema screen and theme park attraction invites the dual sensation of the audience's immersion into the alternate world and the impression of the entry of this world into the space of the audience.” 2 This effect is compounded by Kubrick's filming 2001 with 70-millimeter film. For an audience seeing the movie in that format in a technically-appropriate theater, the film experience would have been a genuine journey. Much like the effect of seeing James Cameron's Avatar in IMAX 3-D (2009), 2001 would have been as close to a trip through space, a sense of leaving the Earth, as film audiences could have hoped.
