I decided to finally see 2001: A Space Odyssey tonight. I know, I know, what kind of science fiction fan am I?
Well, for one I am the sort that takes 4 hours to watch a 2 hour and 20 minute movie. The pace of the movie was so heart-stoppingly slow I fell asleep more than a dozen times. It made Remains of the Day seem like Raiders of the Lost Ark. I don’t need to be fed a series of fast paced, shallow, action scenes while I drool and munch popcorn, but goddamn! that was ssslllloooowwwww!!!!!
When I first started the movie, I thought the picture on my television had gone out. Two and a half minutes of nothing. Then some music, then finally there is something on the screen. That is like a “musical” piece that has 5 minutes of silence. It is either artistic nihilism, or boorish snobbery.
Many times I hit the fast forward and it was still slow. The cinematography was beautiful at many points, but I don’t need 4 minutes to watch a pod land. Perhaps it was spellbinding to watch that slow back in 1968.
As for the story. The relation of the HAL storyline to the main “storyline” is unexplained. They are two separate stories. The HAL storyline is much better than the main story.
And as for that main story. It isn’t. I am not an enemy of ambiguity, but when any interpretation of a story’s ending is as good as any other, and nothing points either way, what you have is nothing profound or deep, what you have is ambiguity.
The only thing we know for sure is actually established over two hours earlier. An alien monolith jump-started our ancestor primates to intelligence. After that we have a computer that goes bad. And how that relates to what follows after he is defeated – I don’t know.
Thoyd, you’re smarter than this. Many film analysts have identified the work as a masterpiece. Are they all idiots or hoaxters? I don’t have time for a full rebuttal/review right now, but I’ll post some comments or questions to think about as they come to me. With enough of these, you’ll be able to connect the dots and see what you might have missed. Ideas are not always explicitly expressed in a work of art, but are there to be experienced, nonetheless. This is what makes art art. (By the way, ambiguity is a powerful and profound experience, worthy of artistic treatment — though I believe there may be less here than you think).
The movie, based on a short story called “The Sentinel,” came out in 1968 but the title is “2001.” The choice of the title is not arbitrary. What does it mean? Yes, “the future” to a 1968 audience, but why that year? It’s one of the keys to an understanding of the movie.
Musical Prelude: Atmosphères by György Ligeti
Does it have standard musical elements such as a recognizable melodic line or a rhythm? What is the effect? What might it represent? (Hint: remember, this is heard without light.)
More later…
Forgive the Socratic method here.
I may be smarter than this, but I did fall asleep over a dozen times watching it, so I am no genius.
The effect of Atmospheres was, for me, to fast forward my movie wondering it Netflix had goofed the picture with the sound, or if my 7 year old television had gone on the fritz.
Here is my serious interpretation of the movie.
The year 2001. I’ll guess it had to do with rebirth – although not religious since Clarke was a committed atheist (although a thorough mystic). I would also guess it followed Clarke’s familiar theme of man evolving into non-man, or post-man (but not here that delivers the mail, that’s a Costner film).
The problem I have is with the ending. The whole of the film is rather explicit (which is strange for Kubrick) until the very last acid trip. I would venture that the monoliths represented stepping stones of man’s so-called ascent. The first monolith was put at his feet, that gave him the brain to take him to the stars, the second was on the moon, the third around Jupiter – each one making man more a space-faring creature.
The room scene with him seeing older versions of himself (or being those versions can’t tell) is symbolic of man having shed the last skin – man dies. Then giant fetus watching earth is symbolic of man’s rebirth as non-man (Clarke was hard for this theme).
In this way the struggle with HAL was sort of like a litmus test, symbolic again, of man surpassing machine.
In my interpretation the movie makes sense. But I saw quote after quote from Kubrick saying the meaning was ambiguous. He was as big on ambiguity and scatology as Clarke was on the ending of man.
Also, I didn’t think anybody cared about this movie anymore outside of the references made to it in cartoons.
Your account reminds me of the Woody Allen joke about speed reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. “It’s about Russia.”
Are you responding to my original post or are you responding to my comment to your post?
If the latter – come on, that is a little extreme. The equivalent of “It’s about Russia” would be “It’s about space” and leave out the apes because the person in Allen’s summation left out the French.
I don’t know anything about the relation of Atmospheres to anything else. I only had a 24 hour rental of $3.99 and it is expired. I fast forwarded past it. I suspect you may have seen it when it came out and didn’t have the option to fast forward it. Possible you would have done the same as I? I thought my television was broke for Pete’s sake. How the hell was I supposed to know it purposely started with some 3 minutes of blank screen!? How many freaking movies start that way? [I'm laughing now btw, this is fun. You probably are not, but you should as most would agree with you that I'm the idiot!]
I did listen to the piece on YouTube. What might it represent? Here is my hazard of a guess. The almost three minutes of blank screen with only Atmospheres in the background represents the space of time before the story of man began. That is a guess.
Did I just say “it’s about Russia”, again?
I am downloading The Sentinel right now. I have not read it as Clarke turns me cold. But authors do not usually change their stripes, and I know Clarke enough to bet I am not off the mark too far.
That was fruitless… mostly. As Clarke himself said, The Sentinel has the relationship to the movie as an acorn does to the oak.
But the examples he gives are of trivial details; the spot the monolith was found on the moon was different in the two stories, and the monolith in the short story was more of a pyramid than the black obelisk of the movie.
The Sentinel contains no HAL, no primates, no aliens giving human sentience to primates. The Sentinel is more a melancholy tale of galactic loneliness, and a hint of threat.
There is little relation to the two stories.
Some relation to my interpretation of 2001 and The Sentinel exists. Particularly the part of the monolith being put on the moon so the aliens would know an intelligent, star-faring race was there. But this is contradicted in the movie by the fact that the monolith actually gives the primates human sentience. Why would they need the sentinel on the moon if they gave them intelligence in the first place? Perhaps to tell them that they (us) had indeed made it?
I loved The Sentinel – good, solid story – with ambiguity too! I really don’t know now what it was I watched the other night…
It seems, at least according to Stanley Kubrick, that I wasn’t too far off. Although I missed the human-jail thing entirely, I did not know what was really going on at that point. Although giant-fetus as a progression past man, a superman, I appear to have pegged exactly. That’s just a Clarke motif.
Some more odds and ends:
Plot is one aspect of traditional story-based media and I certainly don’t mean to trivialize it. But it is not all there is — especially in this movie. 2001 is more a poetic treatment of large themes than a character-centric storyline. I think this is why Kubrick tended to shun explanations. As MacLeish said, “A poem should not mean / But be.”
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The fact that the prelude music lasts as long as it does indicates that it has some greater significance than a cursory introduction to the movie. For one thing, it is there; that is, it’s not just silence. But its “existence” is inchoate, formless. Form is conventionally associated with the concept of division, an identifiable, regularized separation of parts which reveals an order. Music is, at its basic level, a function of sound and time. The lack of meter in Atmospheres suggests timelessness. While setting a mood, it also suggests that time plays a role in the movie as well as space. Compare the effect of the prelude music with the Strauss waltz that accompanies the first space sequence. All is now harmonious, orderly, civilized. (But is it?)
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The Dawn of Man section is pretty straightforward and it’s obvious that the shot of the bone thrown into the air and the quick cut to the man-made objects in space make the statement that this intelligent consciousness is realized in large part through the development of technology. Which brings up the question: what is technology in a broad sense? My answer would be along the lines of “the manipulation of external materials/forces in the service of some intended purpose.” The intended purpose part sets up a relationship between the internal and the external with intelligent consciousness being the mediate connection.
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The next question is: where does man fit into the technological world that has been developed? We carried the first technologies, now they carry us. What does it say about man’s place in “the manipulation of external materials/forces” when some astronauts are put into a suspended animation state for “some intended purpose”?
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(Side note: I think Kubrick overtly employed sexual imagery in the space hardware: the ship which penetrates the center of the rotating space station with a Strauss waltz accompaniment, the sperm shape and color of the Discovery spaceship. There are also a number of birthday’s alluded to in the movie. The government official’s little girl, the astronaut’s, and, of course, the creation of the “star child” — by the way, I don’t see this as a “giant fetus”; it’s just being seen in close-up — maybe I’m wrong.)
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Is HAL sentient? It doesn’t really matter; the point is that the lines have been blurred. In the world of “2001,” man can create machines that can (apparently) make choices that include deception and manipulation of materials/forces that have consequences inimical to human well-being.
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[Tai, read last sentence before you go through this babble.]
Oh, I was not trying to say that at all. Although I would say it is the main means of conveying meaning, it is not the only method for the medium we are discussing. There are sequences, that are not plot but occurrences that have significance. There is setting, sound, music, position, juxtaposition, lighting (which can affect mood) pacing and on and on.
There are equivalent tools in literary expression.
I found, earlier, the following site kubrick2001 that goes through the movie’s meaning. I entirely missed the baby food reference, and the toilet training references’ significance in the film.
Since this film was a collaboration (the screenplay and story that is) between Kubrick and Clarke, I think I understood the Clarke influence all too easily, while Kubrick flew over my head.
Perhaps I am just too used to modern cinema. You got to admit most of it requires very little attention. Perhaps the less the better.
There is a fine line to draw between being representational, abstract, poetic, and having a linear progression. Right now, in cinema, we are at one extreme, what I call the Michael Bay era. I am utterly unused to looking for anything approaching subtext, abstract meaning, double meaning, and any ambiguity that most movies contain now are not ambiguity but poor craftsmanship – plot holes they call them.
The Clarke part still turns my stomach, but that is not an aesthetic judgement.
I’ll print a retraction and watch the film again sometime in the future (this does not mean I am picking up Finnegans Wake, I still maintain my position on that guy!).
More odds and ends:
Your initial complaints are precisely the ones made by many of the first critics of the film. 2001 is not like the standard Hollywood fare and it was derided by some when it came out as being pretentious and boring. While some wannabe artists go for “anything different” just to stand out, I don’t think Kubrick fits this description.
While there is not much conventional action in the movie, many viewers were spellbound by the pacing, music, and effects. The sum of it evokes a dreamlike, floating state that enhances the movie’s allegorical resonances and the feeling of really being in space; remember that 2001 was released in the spring of 1968 and the first manned lunar mission (not landing) occurred months later in December of that year
While I don’t think Kubrick wanted to belabor the point, the Greek mythological associations exist in more than the “Odyssey” title. Recall that NASA used many mythological designations, “Mercury, Apollo, etc.”
Odysseus defeated the cyclops (remind you of anyone in the movie?) and was ultimately the sole survivor of his crew. While I don’t recall him being referred to by Homer as “the bowman,” he does reveal his identity in the end by being the only one strong enough to string his bow and shoot it accurately. The concept of an Odyssey is also larger than just a journey home. It conforms to a crucial precept of Greek thought: the righting of a condition that is inharmonious, unbalanced, unjust, etc.
Some final thoughts:
Acknowledging that 2001 has a dreamlike quality and much symbolic content, one might take a further leap and address the subject of the “alien” presence in the movie.
First, a bit about symbolism. Symbols do not have to have a one-to-one correspondence with the thing being represented. They are somewhat fluid in this respect and this causes nightmares for English teachers, paranoids, and critics of Freudian analysis (even Freud said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”).
I recall that some Star War fans were upset when Lucas identified the scientific foundation for “the Force” in one of his later sequels. It stripped it of it’s mystery, it’s power. The magician had pulled back the curtain and the trick lost its emotional impact. In the same way, words create a disconnect between things experienced and representations of those things which are boxed up and catalogued in the mind. Language is a technology (!!!) that in some ways alienates (!!!) the perceiver (subject) from the object. (Note how this relates to Kubrick’s technique).
Just as the movie’s space journey is representative of more than just a space journey, I suggest that the black monoliths might just be plot devices to drive the larger story (Hitchcock would collectively call them a McGuffin). But I think they carry more functional weight. It may be that they represent the epiphanies that initiate further development of the mind or, in other words, the evolution of consciousness. Animals live in the world (okay, I know, overgeneralization) while humans developed a sense of separation from the world, initially evoking a sense of wonder and awe — and power. But the wonder and awe subsided as the power grew — until man was confronted with a whole new environment of mystery: space. Now, as even that became routine, what next? — “Infinity and Beyond” [a transcendence of some kind, which can only be represented symbolically on this side of intelligibility].
In my “work week” rush off here so just a few strokes.
Freud never foresaw Clinton.
I’m not clear on what you mean by a one to one correspondence. Do you mean the mistake of seeing symbolism in everything? Or that symbolism does not necessarily have to have a referent within the movie itself?
Hell yes, we Star Wars fans were pissed. It was one of the biggest story guffaws ever or – a deliberate slap in the face. Totally destroyed the films in more ways than one.
I like how you managed to quote Buzz Lightyear without breaking the seriousness.
Buzz stole from Kubrick. The last segment of 2001 is titled “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite.”
Symbols are slippery. Red can symbolize love, but it can also symbolize anger, heat, danger, something else, or none of the above. A formal allegory employs a system of symbols that more or less correspond neatly with the things alluded to. But, in general, the use of symbols in a work of art can be much less exact. This gives nightmares to English teachers because some students perceive symbolic meanings with little evidence to back their claims (while often missing symbols that can be substantiated).
On the other hand, paranoids see connections everywhere, which gives them nightmares. And some zealous Freudians also see symbols everywhere, which dismays those who believe that not every product of the conscious human mind represents something else slithering down there in the subconscious.
A black monolith might represent an alien technology, a turning point (or doorway) in the development of consciousness, or the presence of God. Maybe it represents all three.
Recall that Judaism prohibits the name of God from being spoken and Muslims prohibit any pictorial representation of Allah. The strictures are to prevent man from putting a transcendent deity into an earthly, cognitive box — perhaps a rectilinear, black box.
Damn it. I just acquired some coherence and I can’t remember what I wanted to follow up on. One of these days I am going to use that thing called a notebook.
I do remember covering symbolism in reading class in the 7th or 8th grade. It was for the book Lord of the Flies. I have never made a formal study of it.
But I think of it as spice – just a pinch to accent the natural flavors.
I’ve also been thinking I would take the Open Yale Course INTRODUCTION TO THEORY OF LITERATURE. Although I am not certain it covers this sort of material or not. (I really, really shouldn’t have dropped out of the 9th grade!!!) The book for the course is a giant – The Critical Tradition, the current edition runs over 2000 pages.
Imagine how many pages it will be in its 1000th edition in 2798?
I ran across this review of the movie Prometheus and thought it might serve as an ancillary resource regarding the topics at hand: I have not seen that movie so I can’t comment on the review, but I can say that, judging by the website it comes from, its author’s point of view obviously skews heavily toward the conspiratorial.
There’s some interesting stuff on the site but one should tread carefully. Remember, Socrates was against art because it was twice removed from the light of truth: shadows of shadows, as it were. Plato was more lenient and through his writing artistry showed that shadows can help reveal the nature of light.
Prometheus Review
I’ve been out with a doozy of a cold (also quitting smoking cold turkey – AGAIN).
That is all in Prometheus. But it wasn’t as subtle as 2001, and Prometheus has some boneheaded parts to it. I say it wasn’t as subtle, but that may just be me. I am much more familiar with the themes in Prometheus since they are the very same themes with which I started that story you challenged me to begin several years ago. I even read the book of Enoch and the other passages and books.
Also the theme of God I figure on quite a bit. I find it amusing that you cannot get rid of God through scientific argument or discovery. Although I can on stuff I have no way of proving! But on the stuff you can point to as proven, no, doesn’t touch a God.
Prometheus you would probably like, the ending is really open ended. I still can’t tell if they meant for there to be a second part, a sequel, or not. Most of the questions are not answered, but just put in there – ponder this while these people get slaughtered, please. On the other hand, there are some really head slappers; like the crew, nobody would trust such a ship to a band of idiots like that!