Mar

14

A Bone To Pick.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

March 14, 2007 |

ultimatetrip.jpg

“The ultimate trip.”–2001: A Space Odyssey advertising poster

The 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey splits people into two camps: those who love it and those who hate it. There’s no middle ground, so, even though I love it I’m not going to try and defend it. I just hope what I have to say about it will make the haters hate it a little less.

 

2001 is billed as a science fiction film, and director Stanley Kubrick collaborated on the script with science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke also wrote a novelization of the film, and although the short story “The Sentinel” gets credit for being the seed of 2001, he seems to have also based the plot at least partly on his 1953 novel Childhood’s End (Ballantine, 1953).

childhoodsend.jpg Childhood’s End is also about aliens who intercede in humankind’s affairs and nudge us along to the next stage in evolution, although the aliens in the earlier novel look like devils and intervene in present-day affairs, not at our origins. Like 2001, Childhood’s End includes trips to distant, alien worlds, most of them made by sleeping children. Both novels fall short of the film, though. Comparing Clarke’s novel to the film reveals how a film can be more complex and subtle than the book or story it’s based on because of the unique power of images. I’m not saying films are superior to books. I didn’t fully “get” 2001 until I read an analysis of it in the book Kubrick: Inside A Film Artist’s Maze (Indiana University Press, 1982) by Thomas Allen Nelson, which I finally dug up after repeatedly watching the film and finding it more incomprehensible every time. Pictures and words just work on different parts of our brains, and the fact that the bone thrown into the air by one of our ancestors becomes, in turn, a satellite, a pen, a spaceship, a glass, and is a synecdoche for all tools is poetic but difficult to grasp. How we use tools, and how our tools use us, is an idea Kubrick already explored in his previous film, Doctor Strangelove, Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, in which technology becomes a means for individuals to globalize their insanity, and he would explore it even further in A Clockwork Orange, where the individual is reduced to a machine. What makes 2001 stand out from the other two films is its expansiveness and ambiguity. While Doctor Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange are clearly dystopian, there’s a strong optimism running through 2001. Our tools got us where we are, but, even though the transition may be difficult, the next step in our development will be the abandonment of tools.

 

HAL 9000, the film’s villain, is the pinnacle of human technology, the ultimate “bone”. Just as the first bone club our ancestors picked up was used to kill so HAL becomes a killing machine, an extension of our aggressive tendencies. On the spaceship The Odyssey, HAL is described as being a member of the crew, and this is fitting because at least four of the crew—three sleeping scientists and astronaut Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood)–are practically machines. In one of the film’s banal, seemingly meaningless scenes Poole stretches out on a couch, catching some artificial rays. His eyes, covered with yellow glasses, show no emotion as he watches a taped birthday message from his parents. He only speaks to give short instructions to HAL to move, raise, and lower his couch. Fittingly Poole is HAL’s first victim, followed by the three hibernating scientists. While Poole at least struggles, his air supply leaking into the vacuum of space, the scientists go quietly into the night. Their lives are reduced to blips on a computer screen and their deaths are succinctly summed up with “LIFE FUNCTIONS TERMINATED”.

 

hal90001.jpg The only “true” human among the crew is astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea). Bowman plays chess, albeit with HAL, and sketches the sleeping scientists. When asked whether HAL has emotions, Bowman’s answer is a cagey, “Well, he acts like he has genuine emotions.” And in the end it’s Bowman who shuts down HAL. As a computer, HAL, of course, can be turned off but can’t die because it is a tool. HAL’s final words—the song “Daisy”—are merely a recording grinding to a halt. HAL could mimic and even extend human function, but never be truly human, or even alive.

As the film progresses toward its climax, it is also Bowman who leaves The Odyssey in one of the ship’s spherical pods with a large, round front window that’s almost, but not quite, a negative of HAL’s single red eye. Bowman is then transported by the film’s third black monolith through a series of strange and sometimes unrecognizable spacescapes. Travel broadens the mind, and Bowman is broadened beyond the infinite.

bowman.jpg

Then, just as suddenly and inexplicably as it all started, it stops, and Bowman is physically transformed, going from his present state to an older man in a smoking jacket and eating an elegant meal. When he accidentally knocks his wine glass off the table it is the moment that brings the film full circle: the bone thrown into the air has now come back down and shattered. This could be read as the twilight of the Industrial Revolution, but Kubrick was aiming at something even grander. As Bowman contemplates the now useless glass he becomes aware of another presence in the room and, again, it is him, now even older, lying in bed. We have, in only minutes, been given a summation of our history, growing from young animals with tools to old beings, now reaching out with empty hands to touch and grasp something new. Bowman is, like his ancestors, on the brink of death, and the black monolith, along with “Also Sprach Zarathustra”, reappears to perform yet another transformation. This time, however, the monolith’s gift is not the use of tools but something even more radical. Bowman is literally reborn, and this “Star Child” orbits its home, the Earth.

What exactly this ending means baffles even the film’s fans, but it’s a necessary ambiguity. We can’t predict how our descendents will regard us any more than we can predict the future of anything. We can make educated guesses and assumptions, but it’s impossible to really know what will come. That Kubrick sees a future in which humanity is radically transformed into something as different from our present selves as we are from apes is optimistic, especially given that the world’s precarious teetering on nuclear annihilation. It’s significant that, early on in the film, Doctor Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) sits down to chat with Russian friends. In Clarke’s novel the “Star Child” sets off the entire planet’s nuclear arsenal, which is a weak, unsatisfactory end to a thought-provoking story. Kubrick wasn’t interested in such a simplistic ending because he was concerned with something so far outside our current experience it’s indefinable. For Kubrick the next stage of our evolution will mean abandoning tools. Since we haven’t made that leap yet, and won’t for a very long time, it’s impossible to say what it will look like. What’s even stranger is the significance of the black monolith. It’s an alien artifact, and here is one point where the book’s narration is enlightening. The monolith’s dimensions are such that its width is four times its depth, and its length is nine times that. Since 1, 4, and 9 are 1, 2, and 3 squared, it’s obviously a manufactured object, not a natural occurrence. It instructs our ancestors in tool-making, signals our descendants to Jupiter, and then carries them beyond. Even though these powers are mysterious, it is just another tool, an alien bone. If tools are merely a step in evolution, then it follows that abandoning them means we might surpass even the aliens who pushed us along. Whether we do or not, evolution is more than just survival. It’s the ultimate trip.


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. Among The Stars. :: Just Write on March 20, 2008 1:00 am

    […] While in his fiction he seemed to think salvation for the human race would come in a sort of alien ex machina, in fact he believed in the human race’s ability to accomplish great things. He predicted […]

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Speak your mind

<< Post Navigation >>

« « Some People Read The Articles. | Animal Attraction. » »