Uh … didn’t that year happen already?
Are they going to update the movie so that it’s accurate?
Seriously? You mean I’m supposed to watch some movie that includes a bunch of mistaken predictions? At least when Prince wrote “1999,” he didn’t fill the lyrics with a bunch of mistaken predictions about the year 1999. I think Zager & Evans might have had the best strategy out of anybody. “In the Year 2525.” No one’s going to be complaining about that one any time soon.
*****
In my junior year of high school, only a few years before the arrival of the actual year 2001 rendered this film instantly worthless, I taped a broadcast of 2001: A Space Odyssey off the television (having seen it twice already), and passed it along at lunchtime to a friend, with a simple request: “Just tell me what you think.”
Two days later, fishing the black VHS monolith out of his backpack (possibly to the sound of deafening, polyphonic vocalizing) and returning it to me, he offered the following feedback:
“So the first few minutes, you know, there were a bunch of apes running around, hitting each other and stuff, and I thought, ‘OK, this is cool.’ And then this weird black rectangle shows up, and then the ape throws a bone in the air, and I thought, “Whoa, this is cool,” and then we’re in space, and all these spaceships are flying around, with music playing, no dialogue or anything, and I was really into it, and then they show these astronauts on the ship, and suddenly the astronauts started talking to each other, and I thought, ‘Oh, you mean now there’s gonna actually be people talking in this movie? Lame.’ So … I turned it off.”
Well, you can’t please everybody.
*****
During my own first viewing of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a few years prior to that TV taping, I have to say, I continued to watch after the humans began talking.
Given that I viewed it at an even younger, more finicky age, my initial reaction could have easily resembled my friend’s, but I held in my being a desire my school pal clearly lacked: a desire to increase my cultural literacy. See, I wanted to view 2001: A Space Odyssey not so much to experience a compelling work of art, but so that I could claim that I “got the references.”
Because man, did this movie get referenced. Some fast food commercial would feature a kid throwing a french fry in the air with “Also Sprach Zarathustra” playing in the background, and somehow I knew: 2001: A Space Odyssey. Some Saturday morning cartoon would feature a damaged, smoke-emitting robot singing “Daisy, Daisy …” in an abnormally slow voice, and somehow I knew: 2001: A Space Odyssey.
No one told me this information. Through general media osmosis, I became familiar with specific shots, lines of dialog, and musical motifs. Like an infant reading emotional cues from his parents, I figured it out. Perhaps the aliens had placed a black monolith beside my crib, instilling within me this knowledge while I was in a pre-cognitive state.
But one day, perusing the titles in the video store during a relatively uneventful mid-1990s summer, and with the encouragement of my father, I figured, well, a little context might be nice. That was probably my first mistake: assuming that a full viewing of 2001: A Space Odyssey would give me “context.”
To give credit where credit is due, although he had failed to appreciate another lengthy, controversial, boundary-pushing release from 1968 (the White Album), my father had been on board with 2001: A Space Odyssey from day one. As he informed me on the drive home from the video store: “Man, I remember taking the bus to downtown Cleveland, on one of those hot summer days, and I went to see this in Cinerama. You know what Cinerama is? The screen would curve around the audience. And it was one of the few places in Cleveland in the summertime that was air-conditioned … man, it was really something. That’s the way to see 2001. You should really watch a letterboxed copy, but, this is probably better than nothing.”
Having no idea what my father was talking about, I happily ignored him.
(Today, with a mature understanding of aspect ratios, I can only imagine that if the ghost of Stanley Kubrick ever learned that my first viewing of his meticulously crafted science fiction opus was through a crappy pan-and-scan VHS version, it would elicit within him a level of emotional torture akin to being tied to a chair with his eyes plied open by metal clamps and being forced to stare at films of human atrocities as Beethoven’s 9th blared from hidden speakers.)
Frankly, as I shoved the tape into my family’s run-down VCR, I went into it with the same attitude I might have gone into as if I were about to watch Wayne’s World or Speed. This was just another movie, and I was going to watch it.
Well.
I have heard many cinemagoers, be they friends or strangers, refer to 2001: A Space Odyssey as being a tad “slow.” And at that age, I had certainly not developed the patience for slow films that I’ve developed since. But let me tell you something.
I completely lost track of time.
Oh sure, the movie’s running time had been listed on the back of the box, but come on, like I ever bothered to look at crap like that. So I had not realized, nor cared, that the film would be 2 ½ hours long. All I knew is that the movie kept tossing out weird, enigmatic plot twist after weird, enigmatic plot twist, but I was going with it every step of the way, and by the time the giant space baby was floating over the earth as “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (the version with the extra juicy organ at the end) came blasting back in for an encore, I thought to myself, “All right! Now this movie is getting interesting.” You know, like “Let’s see how they explain this.” I assumed there was going to be more movie, as if the ending were merely the intermission (even though there had already … been an intermission). Here was one viewer who was ready for Part II.
Before I knew it, the screen cut to black, and up popped the words, “THIS FILM WAS DIRECTED AND PRODUCED BY STANLEY KUBRICK.”
“But … but … but what about the … and how about the …?”
That was it? That couldn’t possibly be it. I’d been taken. I’d been swindled. I’d been had.
And yet, on some perverse, masochistic level, I got off on it.
Who was the man responsible for this brazen throwing down of the gauntlet? “Directed and Produced by Stanley Kubrick,” eh? Despite having heard the phrase 2001: A Space Odyssey almost since birth, it was the first time I had ever come across this particular individual’s name. I began to wonder if he had created any other works of note. He had presented his name to me at such an unexpected moment.
*****
I don’t know if I can name another director who understood the value of a well-placed colon in a film’s title better than Stanley Kubrick did. I mean, Dr Strangelove? Not bad. But Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb? Now we’re talking. The colon is everything.
And so it is with 2001: A Space Odyssey. “2001”? That sounds like some lame science fiction movie for twelve-year-olds – I think I’ll pass. But “2001: A Space Odyssey”? That sounds … mythical, fantastical, almost … Homeric. I’m going to have to check that one out.
And just as I always make sure to refer to David Bowie’s breakthrough album as The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and never simply as “Ziggy Stardust,” whenever I discuss 2001: A Space Odyssey in conversation, I always make sure to refer to it as 2001: A Space Odyssey, and never simply as “2001.” The “A Space Odyssey” isn’t some sort of irrelevant, optional subtitle. It’s the rug that ties the whole room together. (However, I do respect the frequent shortening of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb to Dr. Strangelove, for practical reasons.)
The intriguing wink of the title is, I suspect, the first sign that Kubrick might have had more than somber grandiosity up his sleeve. See, when people write about 2001: A Space Odyssey, they’re supposed to do it in a certain way. They’re supposed to talk about the quantum leap it represented in terms of depicting science fiction themes more maturely on film, or how the plot’s incomprehensibility was initially seen as a flaw but has since been embraced as a virtue, or what a counterintuitive and yet surprisingly spot-on decision it was to marry sequences of spaceships and half-silhouetted planets to the sounds of 19th century classical music.
I don’t feel like doing any of that crap. You want some of that? Here, let me just paste a couple of excerpts from Roger Ebert and save myself the effort:
[Alex] North’s score, which is available on a recording, is a good job of film composition, but would have been wrong for 2001 because, like all scores, it attempts to underline the action — to give us emotional cues. The classical music chosen by Kubrick exists outside the action. It uplifts. It wants to be sublime; it brings a seriousness and transcendence to the visuals …
Only a few films are transcendent, and work upon our minds and imaginations like music or prayer or a vast belittling landscape. Most movies are about characters with a goal in mind, who obtain it after difficulties either comic or dramatic. 2001: A Space Odyssey is not about a goal but about a quest, a need.
Yeah, fine, 2001: A Space Odyssey is “bold,” “daring, “profound,” “provocative,” “thought-provoking,” blah blah blah. I think it’s also just plain fun. If you’re watching 2001: A Space Odyssey and you’re not having any fun, I feel like you’re doing it wrong. Frankly, given its sparse dialog, 2001: A Space Odyssey practically begs for the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment. Play it at a late-night party surrounded by your wittiest, cattiest friends and see what you can come up with.
Which is not to denigrate it, or declare it “flawed,” or suggest that Kubrick was reaching for a level of depth that was beyond his grasp, but rather to suggest that the film need not be viewed in a spirit of holy reverence. In other words, while I think Kubrick “pulled it off,” I wonder if he also made a film that, at times, one might consider campy, overwrought, or unintentionally comical. I think he wanted me to laugh a little bit, but probably not as much as I do. Sometimes, as an artist, you’ve just got to go for it. And I find the transcendence and the silliness somehow coexisting without disturbing each other, sort of like on an early King Crimson or Black Sabbath album. In lesser hands, it could have been merely ridiculous, but it’s too powerful to be diminished by its elements of ridiculousness. Which doesn’t mean that it’s not also slightly ridiculous.
Admit it, the opening “Dawn of Man” sequence is particularly ripe for the picking. Take this shot of five apes, pre-monolith, munching on what appear to be leaves (?) in a cave. I love the one ape, second from the right, thrusting his fingers into the other ape’s face, nagging him for that one extra leaf bite. They’re like two seniors at a Florida rest home who’ve sat down for way too many meals together.
Then for contrast, we’ve got the blissful, post-bone discovery scene of contentment.
And check out this guy, apparently the Sly Stallone of the group.
Seriously, who do you think delivers the best dialogue here? On initial viewings, I used to be partial toward Ape #5, with his gritty enunciation of “Grah!” and “Huurr!,” but these days, I’ve found myself gravitating more toward Ape #11, with her breathy intonations of “Crahhh!” and “Mrrf!” It’s a toss-up. One doesn’t even have to wait until the “Dawn of Man” sequence to start cracking jokes. Take a look at the title shot:
Awe-inspiring, but … what’s all that crap at the bottom that says “MCMMLXVIII by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. All rights in this Motion Picture Reserved Under blah blah blah …”? You know what I think happened? I think the MGM lawyers told Kubrick he needed to include that text under the title, whether it ruined the finely crafted compositional majesty of his shot or not, and, annoyed by their demands, he decided to stick it in there using the tiniest font possible.
Hold on, I have another theory. Perhaps the key to this film’s inscrutable plot has been nestled within that one illegible sentence the entire time, and no one has ever noticed!
But it’s during the “ape with bone” scene where the delicate dichotomy between silliness and transcendence arguably hits its zenith. On the one hand, we’re witnessing the moment where a particularly insightful primate realizes what a good, strong bone can do to all the stuff that he thinks is worthy of being smashed. On the other hand, we’re witnessing some presumably diminutive, chain-smoking B-movie hanger-on who has a wife and kids, dressed in an ape costume, twirling a prop bone on a set in London. I am aware of this, and I chuckle.
And yet, despite the preposterously mundane ingredients, in Kubrick’s hands, against all reason and common sense, slow-motion shots of some dude in a grungy black rug become a breath-taking depiction of the most significant moment in the history of the human race. That close-up of the arm in particular gives me Grover from Sesame Street vibes, but you know what? I’m in. By the time Kubrick quickens the pace of the editing and shows that same pig’s skull being rendered to bits from six different angles, I mean, I am feeling it. You smash that skull, random dude in the grungy black rug, you smash it with everything you’ve got.
Yeah. That’s the face I wanna see. Just imagine Kubrick’s off-camera direction here: “More snarl. I need more snarl. Give me that lusty, orgasmic, skull-smashing snarl. I want that ape face of supreme carnal ecstasy! Harder! Harder!” Other questions and concerns:
- Before the whole monolith/bone epiphany, we’re shown a leopard jumping on top of some poor, oblivious soul being clawed into oblivion. So, if leopards could eat apes any old time they felt like it, wouldn’t they have just … eaten all the apes? Or did they only eat apes on Tuesdays?
- Likewise, before the monolith makes its presence known to these know-nothing Neanderthals, we’re shown a fight where … everyone just sort of stands around and makes noises? Is this what ape fights were like before anyone figured out what bones could do? They just flailed their arms and grunted at each other? Didn’t that get old? Maybe the team that flailed its arms the most would “win”?
- Call it a hunch, but I suspect the ape who discovered mankind’s first “tool” didn’t hear the piercing brass of Richard Strauss’s modernist tone poem emanating from the heavens above as he smashed that boar’s skull. He probably just heard some lizards croaking – but was I there?
- The inevitable “replay” of the initial ape fight, but this time, things are gonna be different. Those other suckers don’t even know what’s coming. “Hey Bob, you see that white stick-like thing he’s got in his hand? You know what that is?” “Nope, never seen it before, probably just a good luck charm. I’m sure we’ll kick his ass anyway, I mean, we always do.”
An arrogant ape’s famous last words. I have to say, Kubrick really got that “bone smacking against primate flesh” sound just right. There’s a hollowness and yet a fluffiness to it, like a shoe pounding a car seat.
But if you think the abrupt switch to space would sap the absurdity out of the room, well think again. Let me see if I can keep riffing here.
*****
All kidding aside: how did Kubrick even make this movie?
Here is one piece of information regarding 2001: A Space Odyssey that I am going to share with you. This piece of information, while seemingly obvious, often surprises me. Are you ready for this riveting factoid? Here is it:
Not one single shot of 2001: A Space Odyssey was actually filmed in outer space.
Not one!
Oh sure, the part of my brain that understands filmmaking logistics, budgetary limitations, special effects techniques, and set design trickery knows this. But the part of my brain that watches the movie is inclined to say, in a thick New Jersey accent, “Get outta here.”
They sure fooled me.
For anyone who would like to learn how Kubrick made this movie, from the sources who truly know, I suspect CinemaTyler’s YouTube series on the topic would be hard to beat. Between being informed that the crew made moon craters by “pouring plaster and then taking a 6-inch brush and flicking it with water as it set,” that they filmed various models using “an f/stop of 128 at ten-minute intervals,” and that the rotating centrifuge set (AKA the front of the Discovery space ship) was built by Vickers Engineering Group, stood over 70 feet tall, weighed over 90 tons, rotated at an approximate speed of three miles an hour, and cost roughly $300,000 to build, one can also pick up less technical tidbits like these:
- The dead “zebra” that the leopard nibbles on in the desert was actually a dead horse painted to look like a zebra (well right – where are you going to find a dead zebra in London at that time of night?)
- Earlier I slandered the actors in the ape suits as “B movie hangers-on.” Forgive me: they were mimes.
- During the audition for the PanAm hostess role, one of the actresses showed up high on painkillers and couldn’t walk straight. Given that this is precisely what Kubrick was looking for, she got the part.
- While the production stretched on for over two years, and most of the actors involved were required to spend day after grueling day on the set, Douglas Rain, the actor who voiced HAL (the character who arguably looms the largest) wrapped his part in about ten hours. I think I’ve had sneezes that lasted longer.
- Much of the breathing on the soundtrack that supposedly comes from Dave in his space suit was performed by Kubrick himself. When they talk about a director “bringing you into his head,” I doubt this is what they mean?
So yes, to call it an impressive technical achievement would be like calling the Pyramids an impressive pile of bricks, but if it were merely a “technical achievement” alone, would it sniff my top ten? What I admire is that Kubrick employed special effects in the service of artistry, imagination, and visual pizzaz. He didn’t simply use models to create believable images of planets; he used models to create believable and really cool-looking images of planets:
To paraphrase Ed Exley in L.A. Confidential: These shots don’t merely look like outer space; they look better than outer space.
When people mention films with great cinematography, I suspect they often leave out 2001: A Space Odyssey, the thinking probably going: “Well, does it count as great cinematography if you can so thoroughly manipulate the environment you’re filming in?” Whatever. Give someone else these same models and artificial backdrops and see if they come up with anything remotely as arresting. I think Kubrick really put his photography background to good use on this one. (And let’s give some props to cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth while we’re at it.)
This isn’t to say that I would enjoy the film if it happened to sport the same ideas, themes, and structure but if the special effects were shitty. If that were the case, the illusion wouldn’t be complete, I wouldn’t be able to transport myself into the narrative, and thus I wouldn’t be able to let my mind wander and meditate on the pathetic insignificance of the human race. If I didn’t believe I was watching astronauts genuinely floating in space, then I wouldn’t be able to think things like “Damn, the universe is so barren and harsh and isolating.” Some movies just aren’t “punk rock” movies. Would Dark Side of the Moon have worked if it had been performed by the Ramones? I suppose we do have the “low-budget” version of 2001: A Space Odyssey: Tarkovsky’s Solaris. If you prefer that one, then more power to you.
Frankly, even though this film is more than 50 years old, I find its images of astronauts in zero gravity to be more believable and less distracting than a lot of the CGI effects I see today. True, while watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, I may not be looking at footage of ships traveling through actual outer space, but at least I know I’m looking at a physical thing traveling through an actual physical environment, not just some animated, formless collection of digital code straight out of a Pixar movie, bound by nothing tangible.
I’m glad Douglas Trumbull and company were forced to invent 800 ways to make a miniature pod land with a credible bounce. Ironically, if they’d tried to make 2001 in the year 2001, it probably would have looked worse.
*****
And then, approximately one hour into the film, we meet the star.
Didn’t your mother teach you it’s not polite to stare?
(Side note: Doesn’t his eye kind of look like a nipple?)
Ah, the HAL 9000. Nobody likes a perfectionist.
Perhaps here would be the ideal opportunity for me to examine how the film’s depiction of HAL raises pertinent questions surrounding the intention, creation, and broader implementation of artificial intelligence in contemporary society, or to analyze this narratively self-contained section as Kubrick’s pre-Shining dalliance with the horror genre. But I’ll let somebody else do that.
No, I view the central segment of 2001: A Space Odyssey as a bravura example of Kubrick’s flair for capturing a certain darkly comedic, passive-aggressive aspect of interpersonal communication. Think of it as Kubrick’s commentary on the standard dysfunctional marriage.
Two astronauts and a supercomputer stuck together in a small space, for months at a time, with no one else around. What could go wrong?
Seriously, who decided this was a good idea? “I know, let’s give a vast amount of authority … to the computer. And we’ll give him this the needling, pushy, overly-calculated conversational style that the astronauts will have to endure 24 hours a day. It’ll be great!”
At first glance, all is quiet on the western front as Kubrick shows Dave and Frank watching a broadcast of a pre-recorded BBC interview in which HAL and the two of them play nice and civil and the whole gang seems to resemble the perfect all-American family. But does this arrangement strike anyone else as a rather, shall we say, tenuous situation? Maybe it’s just me, but the more “normal” HAL attempts to sound, the creepier he gets. Three examples:
- After sharing a pre-recorded video birthday greeting from Frank’s boisterous, guileless, and extremely human parents, HAL waits a few seconds before adding, in a comparatively lifeless and subdued manner, “Happy Birthday, Frank.” Awww. Coming from a manufactured non-human like you, HAL, that really means something.
- Upon vanquishing Dave at chess, he comments, “Thank you for a very enjoyable game.” As if HAL being a perfectionist wasn’t annoying enough, Dave has to deal with a smarmy winner too?
- When Dave shows him some sketches, HAL attempts to offer some otherwise mundane compliments: “I think you’ve improved a great deal.” Oh, quit blowing sunshine up everybody’s ass, will you? HAL is like that kid in school who’s transparently trying so hard to fit in that he’s only encouraging further mockery.
Here’s what I see percolating beneath Dave’s placid veneer:
He finds HAL annoying. Really, really annoying.
He kind of wants to take a sharp screwdriver and poke out every single one of his omnipresent “eyeballs” with it. Every interaction he has with HAL is one more reminder that the big shots at Mission Control didn’t have enough faith in their own astronauts to carry out the voyage without attaching an obsequious, all-seeing chaperone to tag along with them.
Dave and HAL are what, these days, we might call “frenemies.” They are both fully aware that neither one of them trusts the other, and yet, neither one of them dares to hint at the slightest friction. Does Dave ever utter a cross word in HAL’s direction? Does HAL ever utter a cross word in Dave’s? Then what’s the problem? In Kubrick Land, no one means what they say, and yet you kind of know what they’re saying. To paraphrase Colonel Kilgore, “I love the smell of slow-simmering hostility in the morning.” Barry Lyndon is like three hours of this.
Here’s a tip: whenever a computer starts a conversation with the words, “By the way, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?,” that’s probably a bad sign.
“Well, forgive me for being so inquisitive, but during the past few weeks I’ve wondered whether you might be having some second thoughts about the mission.”
Although Dave’s official reply is “How do you mean?” I detect in his brow an expression that might be best translated as, “Wouldn’t it be nice if this computer’s horrible, bulbous eyes shriveled up into molten, glassy goo?”
“Perhaps I’m just projecting my own concern about it,” HAL continues, which raises the question: Who is the “I” here? How can a robot be “concerned”? This whole thing smells fishy. “You don’t mind talking about it, do you Dave?” And the Oscar for “Most Passive-Aggressive Robot” goes to … (opens envelope) … HAL 9000. “Sorry about this. I know it’s a bit silly.” Drop the self-flagellation and just give us the facts.
But then, right about here, things start to go … funny.
“Just a moment … just a moment … I have just picked up a fault in the AE-35 unit.”
“Would you say we have a reliable 72 hours until failure?,” Dave asks.
“Yes. That’s a completely reliable figure.” Mm-hmm. “It’s going to go 100 percent failure within 72 hours.” A wiser computer might have left a bit of wiggle room for himself, but perhaps HAL’s in what we might call his “Elon Musk” phase.
Now, the common interpretation of what follows is that HAL, this creature who has boasted of his “reliability” and “faultlessness,” makes a small error, and then, upon doing so, experiences the all-too-human emotion of shame, and it is his sense of shame that causes him to “crack” and retaliate against Dave and Frank. As Kubrick himself put it in a 1969 interview: “In the specific case of HAL, he had an acute emotional crisis because he could not accept evidence of his own fallibility.”
However.
One evening in college, back when film blogs were barely a boar’s skull on the outskirts of an ape’s watering hole, I stumbled across an essay on 2001: A Space Odyssey that presented a theory I’ve often considered equally plausible and equally compelling: Since HAL has been tasked with ensuring that the mission succeeds at all costs, he gets it into his “head” that the best way to ensure that the mission succeeds … is to eliminate those fallible humans. Therefore, he lies about the fault in the AE-35 unit in order to generate his chance to “off” those pesky, useless astronauts and take complete control of the mission.
Think about it. Is it a coincidence that HAL detects his “error” only moments after his conversation with Dave about the “oddness” of the mission? Hmm.
And HAL certainly proves himself quite capable of lying, such as when he pretends not to be able to “hear” what Dave and Frank are saying inside the supposed secrecy of the pod, even though he is reading their lips and could easily follow their commands if he’d wanted to, but, you know, he’d rather eavesdrop.
“We can certainly afford to be out of communication … for the short time it will take to replace it,” HAL suggests. Yes … “out of communication” with Mission Control … how convenient …
Then again, if HAL desired to do away with the astronauts, couldn’t he have done so any time he’d wanted to, by, say, cutting the oxygen, or letting a stray electrical cord dangle? Perhaps Wikipedia can rescue me from this horrid ambiguity?
[Co-screenwriter Arthur C.] Clarke has suggested in interviews, his original novel, and in a rough draft of the shooting script that HAL’s orders to lie to the astronauts (more specifically, concealing the true nature of the mission) drove him “insane”. The novel does include the phrase “He [HAL] had been living a lie”—a difficult situation for an entity programmed to be as reliable as possible. Or as desirable, given his programming to “only win 50% of the time” at chess, in order for the human astronauts to feel competitive. Clarke also gives an explanation of the ill-effects of HAL being ordered to lie in computer terms as well as psychological terms, stating HAL is caught in a “Mobius feedback loop.”
Oh. Right. All cleared up then.
But to riff on that semi-answer for a bit, I think whether HAL starts killing everyone because he can’t deal with the emotional repercussions of making an honest error, or whether he starts killing everyone in order to “save” the mission, is possibly beside the point. He simply hasn’t been playing for the same team as Dave and Frank have, and things were going to get ugly eventually.
But not before HAL rediscovers his knack for saying the exact thing that would make an already-irritating situation additionally irritating: “I hope the two of you are not concerned about this.”
Not that Mission Control is much help either: “Sorry about this little snag, fellas.” Oh, a supercomputer’s about to go Jack Torrance on our asses, while we’re millions of miles away from any potential assistance – literally millions – and you’re sorry?
Fortunately, Dave demonstrates some of those quick thinking skills that got him this far up the astronaut food chain: “Oh Frank, I’m having trouble with my transmitter in C pod, I wonder if you’d come down and take a look at it with me.” I’ve got to remember to use that one the next time I’m having an affair behind my wife’s back.
“What sort of trouble you been having, Dave?”
“I’ve been getting some interference in D channel.” God, tell me about it. That interference in D channel is a bitch.
“Hmm. We’ll have a look at it.” Oh yeah. Frank knows what’s up. Finally, in the false cocoon of C pod, presumably free from the ever-present ears of their antagonist, the real Frank Poole comes out. “I’ve got a bad feeling about it.”
Pragmatically, Dave clings to the science: “You know of course, though, he’s right about the 9000 Series having a perfect operational record. They do.”
“Unfortunately that sounds a little like famous last words.” Is it just me, or would Frank be the astronaut you’d want to party with? Seriously, I’d do shots with Frank any time. “Look, Dave, I can’t put my finger on it but I sense something strange about him.” You mean the canned, deadpan, pseudo-reassuring vocal tones and omnipresent glass spheres weren’t giving you the creeps already?
“Well we wouldn’t have too many alternatives.”
“I don’t think we’d have any alternatives.” Uh-huh. Frank’s ready to rip HAL a new one. “If he were proven to be malfunctioning I don’t see how we would have any choice but disconnection.”
Gasp. The one word every robot fears.
“Well as far as I know, no 9000 computer has ever been disconnected.”
“Well no 9000 computer has ever fouled up before.” I’m telling you, a real straight shooter, that Frank.
And yet Dave, with expert foreshadowing, gets in the ominous last word: “That’s not what I mean. Well I’m not so sure what he’d think about it.”
A few minutes later, we find out exactly what HAL thinks about it.
Perhaps the silver lining of HAL snapping Frank’s breathing tubes, causing his limbs to flail desperately as he careers off into the matter-less void, is that at least Dave doesn’t have to try so hard to pretend to like HAL anymore. Although he does bother to still say “please.”
“Open the pod bay doors please, HAL.” The man is a gentleman to the core. But get a load of Dave’s “Now the gloves come off” face:
“What’s the problem?”
“I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, HAL.” In space, no one can hear you insinuate.
But HAL senses that he has the upper hand. “Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.”
Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. Oh no you don’t.
Fortunately for Dave, and for the rest of the fate of human evolution, there’s a narratively convenient “emergency air lock” that he manages to safely propel himself into, even while denied his space helmet (which always seemed scientifically iffy to me but which, according to those who know better than I, is apparently quite possible).
And then, let the robot back-pedaling begin.
“I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently.”
Uh-huh. You’re going to have to come up with something a little more persuasive than that.
I would like to declare, I assume without much protest, the death of HAL 9000 to be the best “Villain’s Death That Unexpectedly Evokes Pity” since the death of the Wicked Witch of the West. Despite being a loquacious loudmouth to the bitter end, as he regresses into the supercomputer version of an infantile state, I can’t help but feel like he never wavered from his own twisted understanding of the mission, never quite possessed his own agency, and is mostly being punished for “doing his job.” I almost want to give the guy a break.
Extra points for the sound of Dave’s (Kubrick’s?) frantic, ever-present space helmet breathing as he unscrews HAL’s “brain,” an element of sonic atmosphere that presumably adds more tension and claustrophobia than any music could have. But speaking of music: not having bothered to so much as acknowledge HAL during his whimpering death throes, once the computer’s deeply repressed “introductory recording” kicks in, at least Dave grants HAL permission to sing, like a warden granting a condemned prisoner’s last request.
“Yes, I’d like to hear it, HAL. Sing it for me.” It’s the sci-fi version of “Tell me about the rabbits, George.”
“I’m half-crazy/All for the love of you.”
I’ll hand him this: he got the “half-crazy” part right. Is there another director who employed inanely chipper Tin Pan Alley showtunes to more uneasily ironic effect than Stanley Kubrick? (Perhaps we can consider his usage of “Singin’ in the Rain” in A Clockwork Orange to be this scene’s companion piece?). It’s the vaudevillian gaiety and sheer innocuousness of “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)” that I think really puts the cherry on top of the sundae.
I said it before, I’ll say it again: putting the computer in charge of the spaceship just seemed like a bad idea.
*****
And then, beyond Jupiter, apparently films aren’t allowed to have dialogue?
I pity the team responsible for the closed captioning of the last twenty minutes of this film. How, precisely, does one describe this?
Actually, that kind of looks like my high school gym teacher.
You know what this is? I think this is pretty much my bathroom sink every time it gets clogged. My personal tip: Drano Max Gel. That usually gets the job done.
At least I think I know what this is. That’s Jupiter and … I want to say … Neptune? One of Jupiter’s moons? Do you think Google Street View could help me?
That’s the sun way in the background, I presume, but what are those tiny crescent thingies in the foreground?
Not sure what this entails for Dave’s astrology chart?
Who knew that, among his many numerous other innovations, Kubrick could also lay claim to having invented the bad ‘80s album cover? I swear this must have graced a Flock of Seagulls release at some point, or possibly Yngwie Malmsteen.
Kind of a shame that my high school buddy never made it this far, isn’t it?
I think the lesson here is that a director can get away with passing off tinted aerial footage of Arctic fjords and Himalayan peaks, or colored dye being dropped into petri dishes, as mysterious intergalactic realms as long as he pairs it with some abstract mid-20th century classical composition written by someone with umlauts in his name. Yes, part of me knows I’m only looking at the coast of Scotland through a red filter, but damn it, as the unsettling tones of György Ligeti’s “Atmospheres” give my ears the impression that I’m hearing the voices of every human being who’s lived and died in the last million years all being condensed into one sonic collage, I feel like I’m being hurtled along with Dave through the cosmic unknown, my fragile biological form being tested to the limit. (Or I can sync up this segment with Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” and marvel at how much better that works than syncing up Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz).
I’m only making wisecracks about the Stargate sequence because I feel like this is one sequence that’s tough enough to handle it.
Or perhaps I’m puncturing the mood with humor because I’m scared. In other words, you’re witnessing a man writing funny captions to screen shots of 2001: A Space Odyssey in order to avoid discussing the larger implications of its themes, but like dealing with a renegade HAL 9000, this tactic can only work for so long.
*****
There are two reasons why I should admire 2001: A Space Odyssey less than I do.
Reason #1: Perhaps I’m about to rain on a lot of parades but … I am not someone who believes in the existence of aliens.
Did I hear a gasp? “Doesn’t it beggar belief that, in a universe this vast, a few billion mammals with two eyes and a butthole could be the only intelligent creatures in existence? Surely there must be something else out there?”
All I can say is: Where’s the proof?
Show me the proof. I have yet to see any halfway decent evidence of the existence of aliens. Crop circles, “eye witness” encounters, and grainy photographs of UFOs in the Weekly World News do not suffice. My thoughts on the matter, in one sentence:
If aliens existed, then wouldn’t they have shown up already?
Amusingly, despite his reputation as an unrelenting pessimist, Kubrick’s own beliefs on this subject appear to have been more idealistic than my own. From a 1968 interview with Playboy:
Given a planet in a stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the interaction of a sun’s energy on the planet’s chemicals, it’s fairly certain that life in one form or another will eventually emerge. It’s reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact, countless billions of such planets where biological life has arisen, and the odds of some proportion of such life developing intelligence are high. Now, the Sun is by no means an old star, and its planets are mere children in cosmic age, so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the universe not only where intelligent life is on a lower scale than man but other billions where it is approximately equal and others still where it is hundreds of thousands of millions of years in advance of us. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia — less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe — can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities — and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.
“Immortal machine entities”? Sounds like a good name for an industrial goth band. Anyway, I must admit that the man does not make an outlandish case, but … like he really knows? Until E.T. shows up at my door in a Halloween costume, call me a skeptic. Being more of a steely-eyed cynic than Stanley Kubrick is not a mantle I would have eagerly claimed, but there you have it. Besides, if, as Kubrick surmises, aliens might be so far advanced that humans can’t detect them … then does it even matter whether they exist or not?
Frankly, part of me hopes like hell that aliens don’t exist, because who’s to say that the ensuing encounter with us earthlings would be a pleasant one? Put me in Stephen Hawking’s camp: “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.” Amen, brother.
Overall, I can’t help but consider a deep obsession with the notion of extra-terrestrial life a sign of psychological immaturity – a convenient means for the developmentally arrested to avoid dealing with their own highly convoluted and yet more mundane troubles, and a mental rabbit hole barely more honorable to fall down into than religious cults or political conspiracies.
You know who I think the true aliens are? The true aliens are the aliens inside of us.
Reason #2: Given what we as a species learned in the late 20th century, I consider space travel in the present day to be a colossal waste of time.
Oh sure, it was a worthwhile idea to give it a try in the ‘50s and ‘60s, to boldly go where no taxpayer had gone before, to see what was out there, you know, feel the place out a little bit. But guess what:
There’s nothing there.
Zero. Nada. Zilch. We’re better off visiting Antarctica.
If anything, it’s worse than nothing – it’s an environment that’s actively attempting to kill us. If I’d sat around and tried to invent the most inhospitable environment that could have possibly existed for my species, I would have come up with outer space. The worst spot on Earth, in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, would be easier to live in than the nicest spot on Mars.
So sure, when we didn’t know this yet, was it valuable to engage in a little space sleuthing? Yeah, great. Let all those characters in Ray Bradbury stories, those dewy-eyed boys in overalls in their midwestern backyards, dream a thousand dreams. But now? I feel as though we’ve got better things to spend our money on, like, I don’t know, solving a couple of the problems we still have on Earth?
Many were the articles I came across, once the real year of 2001 rolled around, that discussed the specific “predictions” about the future that 2001: A Space Odyssey arguably ended up getting correct or incorrect – none of those articles suggesting, like the opening of my essay facetiously does, that any mistaken predictions somehow lessened the artistic merits of the film. But the most obviously “inaccurate” prediction – although to be sure, Kubrick and Clarke were not alone among their generation in making it – was the assumption surrounding the sheer frequency of space travel. You know why commonplace space travel, forgive the pun, never took off?
Money.
I think scientists in the ‘60s simply assumed that the costs associated with safely exiting and re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere, like the costs associated with, say, building an automobile or an airplane, would have inevitably grown cheaper once the basic innovations were established.
Never got cheaper.
Oh, we can still do it, but NASA might as well stuff the tank of a space shuttle with thick, puffy bags of $100,000 dollar bills, because that’s basically what’s happening every time one of those things takes off. Money money money. This means that, in addition to space being laughably inhospitable, it also costs boatloads of cash to even travel there in the first place. Think of it like California, but with less toxic air.
So yes, if NASA were looking for the perfect spokesman to reinvigorate the public’s flagging interest in space exploration, they probably shouldn’t hire me.
I give you these two reasons, and yet …
Outer space is still a big part of my life. Outer space still matters to me. And 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film which ostensibly explores “science fiction” themes such as alien life, interplanetary travel, artificial intelligence, and human evolution, happens to make me think about the mysteries I face here on Earth, during everyday living, in a way that only a handful of movies do.
For the record: if I had to choose between science vs. organized religion, I’d have to go with science. But do the general properties of the universe, as science presents them to me … make any sense?
You know those photographs that come back from the Hubble Telescope, or the James Webb Telescope, or whatever the hell they’re using these days, where the astronomers behind the photos tell us that they deliberately pointed the apparatus at a spot in the night sky which they’d previously assumed was entirely devoid of any major stars, and then the photos from this absurdly high-powered telescope come back and somehow reveal … six million new galaxies sitting where they’d previously thought there was nothing?
Does that even make sense?
Ever listened to someone explain the Big Bang theory? Like, where the entire universe originated in a single point, and then expanded into what we have now? And this happened, oh … 13.8 billion years ago?
Does that even make sense?
Relax, I’m no science denier. All I’m saying is: going to the grocery store makes sense. The Niners beating the Cowboys on a Sunday afternoon makes sense. A description of the number of galaxies in the universe … doesn’t make any sense. Not in my gut. It’s so bizarre as to almost be meaningless.
Sometimes, I think about sleep. I fall asleep at night, my consciousness enters a realm composed of a nonsensical mishmash of personal memories mixed in with events that have never happened to me, and then I wake up, and then it takes my brain a good solid minute or two to remember who I am, where I am, and what day it is. And this is part of my routine.
Does that make any sense?
How can I be certain, upon waking up in the morning, that yesterday was even “yesterday”? Maybe the “actual” yesterday was May 15, 1996, and my brain simply made the adjustment? Maybe I’m Billy Pilgrim, and I’ve become unstuck in time?
My point is (if I have one): I don’t see 2001: A Space Odyssey as a film that is primarily about alien life, or primarily a piece of speculative fiction regarding the potential ease and frequency of space travel. If it were one of those two things, or even both, I suspect its appeal today would be limited.
No, for me at least, the main subject of 2001: A Space Odyssey isn’t all that other crap, but the mystery of the universe and our place in it. So, when we reach the point when we’ve finally solved the mystery of the universe and our place in it, then we can forget about this movie.
That’s why I can go along with some of the story elements that I don’t find especially plausible. Theorizing that invisible aliens, millions of years ago, planted a precisely symmetrical rectangular slab in the remote deserts of Africa, and then might do so again one day, in order to benevolently nudge our species into a newer, superior form … doesn’t make any sense. But how much less sense does it make than a contemporary, scientifically sanctioned description of the true dimensions of the galaxy as we know them? Or of what happens to us when we fall asleep?
Existence is a bit of a … mystery. And I think too many films try to ignore the mystery. Well, “mystery” is this movie’s middle name.
I don’t need to look very far outside my window for mystery either. Sure, traveling to Jupiter would be “the ultimate trip,” but wouldn’t you say that daily life is already “the ultimate trip,” and we’ve just grown jaded to it? Isn’t watching a sunset a trip, or staring at the ocean? Yes, there is a logic and a science behind these phenomena, but in another sense, I feel like the “world” in which we exist is kind of a raging mess. And maybe the more we can embrace the raging mess, the more in tune with the universe we can be.
This, perhaps, was HAL 9000’s greatest flaw – not pride or shame, but an inability to embrace the mess. Humans may stink at a lot of things, but perhaps one area where we have a leg up on computers is that we’re able to more freely grasp the illogical. Contradiction might drive a computer insane, but frankly, I deal with it every five minutes. Tell me, how would HAL interpret the final 20 minutes of this film? Would he start singing “A Bicycle Built for D987fdslGOJALvndasfnu&^*kjdsnj?” He wouldn’t know how to handle it. Whereas I, a wise, enlightened homo sapien, am able to make mature observations such as these:
Any film that tried to offer conventional “answers” to the types of questions Kubrick and Clarke pose here would probably be laughed out of the room. What answer do you want? Professor Plum, with the pipe, in the billiard room? No, this movie poses the big questions so that I can go off and write essays about those questions and tell sardonic jokes. This film explains nothing because … what explanation would suffice?
I think, with 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick did the world a big fat favor, by simply conjuring up the mystery of the universe, and letting us bask in our own insignificance for two hours and thirty minutes. I need that now and then. A film like 2001: A Space Odyssey renders my usual problems irrelevant. Everything from the dent on my windshield and my preferred breakfast cereal being out of stock at the supermarket to my ongoing frustration with national politics or climate crises … I tell you, there’s nothing like twirling tetrahedrons and dueling, split-screen plains of laser beams flying past my eyeballs to remind me how that other stuff is all kind of a fart in the wind of the cosmos.
I guess you could come away from this movie, and from my related thoughts on the pitiless void that is our universe, and conclude that human existence is meaningless, but I find the sensation of being reduced to a grain of celestial sand to be exciting in a way, and sort of a relief. On rough nights, sometimes I gaze up at the night sky, try to wrap my head around what I’m really looking at, and conclude, “What was I so worried about again?”
I’ll tell you when 2001: A Space Odyssey comes in handy. It comes in handy on nights when I long to step out of myself for a bit. Like on that night back in high school, when I taped the movie off a television broadcast, a teenager in no mood for the slightest hint of romance, or superficial suburban cheer, in that evening’s programming. Episodes of Friends or Seinfeld weren’t going to cut it. I needed something that could take me as far away from my species as I could conceivably get. I needed the hard stuff.
*****
But the real question I have is:
Who’s supposed to change the Star Child’s diapers?
