Directed and Produced by Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke
All Special Photographic Effects Designed and Directed by Stanley Kurbrick
Special Effects Supervisors Wally Veevers, Douglas Trumball, Con Pederson, Tom Howard
Director of Photography Geoffrey Unsworth
Additional Photography John Alcott
Editor Ray Lovejoy
Production Design Tony Masters, Harry Lange, Ernie Archer
Wardrobe by Hardy Amies
Music by Aram Khatchaturian, Gyorgy Ligeti, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss
Starring
Douglas Rain as Hal
Daniel Richter as Moonwatcher
Keir Dullea as Bowman
Gary Lockwood as Pool
William Sylvester as Dr. Heywood Floyd
…
“Do you believe that Hal has genuine emotions?”
-a query from a BBC interviewer in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey
I was lookin’ back to see if you were lookin’ back at me to see me lookin’ back at you
-lyric from “Safe From Harm” by Massive Attack from the album Blue Lines (1991)
…
Review by William D. Tucker.
THE FOLLOWING FILM IS RATED NC-4,000,000,000.
ONLY STAR CHILDREN SHALL BE ADMITTED.
We begin with creepy, ominous music in the dark,
which swells into the grandeur of Thus Spake Zarathustra,
whilst the moon, the earth, and the sun come into an alignment which seems more alchemical or mystical than scientific.
We get onscreen titles.
We’re made aware that this is MGM and Stanley Kubrick’s cine-baby.
We might idly fantasize what it was like in ‘68 to see it all on a huge screen, maybe mellowed on some primo grass or electrified by a hit of sublime blotter,
but, and I’m just guessing here,
we’re probably sittin’ at home,
staring into a phone or a laptop,
maybe even a flatscreen TV if you’re really fortunate.
And I am here to tell you that I officially endorse the home viewing experience,
‘cause . . . what the fuck are you doing in a COVID-19 superspreader theater?
You still don’t get it?
How many people have been killed by COVID-19?
And you still want to hit the town and raise hell?
Like, what-the-blue-fuck, human?!
The music paired with the void of a blank screen.
We’re not talking about the sublime blackness of outer space.
We’re just in darkness, with nothingness, and the music unsettling us.
Agitating our minds, putting us into a tense, yet receptive state.
Readiness.
Hypervigilance.
2001 has a reputation, after all, you can’t just casually stroll into it.
And I’ve developed this crackpot idea over the years that it’s the music that births the movie, not crews of hundreds or even thousands of people.
I don’t understand music at all, so I have all these romantic and/or mystical notions about it,
which is how I prefer it.
I’m not totally checked out.
I’ve known people who were musical over the years.
I know, rationally, that music is just another human product.
Like a car.
Like a cheeseburger.
Like a police state.
Like a hydrogen bomb.
Like carbon pollution.
Like a baby.
Like religion.
Like racism.
Like democracy.
Like a green and red bathrobe.
Like an AK-47.
Like a Studebaker.
Like sexism.
Like torture.
Like homelessness.
Like feast.
Like famine.
Like the Tower of Babel.
Like Disneyland.
Like totalitarianism.
Like microwaveable Santa Fe rice and beans.
Like a copy of the novel Locus Solus in English translation.
Like xenophobia.
Like an electric chair used to kill people.
Like money.
Like slavery.
Like genocide.
Like empire.
Like agriculture.
Like red plastic party cups.
Like homophobia.
Like transphobia.
Like landmines.
Like cigarettes.
Like a vape pen.
Like an old DVD copy of the movie Outland.
Like a complete set of the Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia.
Like letters from an old friend or a past lover.
Like the video game Candy Crush.
Like a crack pipe.
Like aerosol whipped cream.
Like the video game Missile Command.
Like trench warfare.
Like a blue Chevette where the driver’s side door won’t open and you have to get in from the passenger side anytime you want to go anywhere.
Like clean drinking water from a tap.
Like a camera ready full-sized prop of the mystical mindfuck monolith used in the feature film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Like a doggie pooper scooper.
Like a cell culture meats reactor.
Like the ham you might one day eat produced by a cell culture meats reactor.
Like a blogpost.
But I don’t feel it.
I feel the flaky, mystical shit,
at least when it comes to music.
We start in a void.
And then we are enveloped by movie.
That’s the bullshit romantic-mystical version.
I’ll take it.
The music drops us off some four million years ago with our earthbound primate ancestors fighting among themselves, ever fearful of the big cats, and struggling to survive by scrounging roots and berries and drinking from a muddy pond. At night, our ancestors huddle in the crevices of this or that mountain or hill, and sometimes the little ones are restless from hunger. Nothing worse than going to bed without dinner. The leader of this tribe has his own space in the rock crevice, where he can watch the skies. Something about that moon. Will it always appear up there like that? Sometimes dark clouds cover it up-is the moon gone? The clouds come and go, and the moon-much like the sun-seems a constant in this life. But if you stare too long at the sun, you suffer. The moon doesn’t punish you to stare at it. You can stare at it as long as you want to-you can fall asleep staring at the moon. What’s going on with that? Why is it like that?
One fateful day, a mystical mindfuck monolith appears, and our ancestors gather around it, touching it, screeching and grunting as the potent and portentous object directly influences their minds. Soon, our primate forbears are having new, more aggressive thoughts. Moonwatcher-the leader primate-picks up a bone and starts whacking the ground with it, until he shatters the skull of some long-dead quadruped, while seeing in his brain images of the meaty four-legged beasts falling in the dirt. Swing the bone, make the four-legged beast fall, eat its flesh. Just like the fearsome big cats eat the flesh of two-legged primates and four-legged beasts alike. This new aggression, this new appetite-both are ominous gifts of the mystical mindfuck monolith.
The leader of the monolith-enhanced primates rallies his comrades to victory against a rival tribe, and ecstatically hurls his bone-club into the air. The bone goes up and up and up-
-flash forward four million or so years-
-and the bone has become an orbital nuclear missile platform circling the Earth.
We get retro-future travelogue sequences that play like Star Trek by way of Mad Men, in which we see how the New Man travels inside a Pan Am branded space shuttle from Earth to the international space station and on to the subterranean moonbase, complete with cute stewardesses and pink-uniformed hospitality staff. The space station has options for accommodations: do you prefer the Hilton or the Howard Johnson’s?
(Me? I go HoJo!)
The space station has these spacious, sitdown video phone booths. Which are awesome. But . . . no mobile phones? Not even a Miami Vice-style handbrick? Even the crew of the starship Enterprise had their flip-action tricorders. Jesus, Kubrick, you really whiffed that one . . .
Big emphasis on eating in this flick. You got the starving primate ancestors discovering the joys of raw meat. Four million years later, you’ve got all manner of zero-g friendly vacuum packed, liquefied, self-heating space rations, and, where artificially induced gravity is available, green, brown, and orange varieties of nutrient-rich slop which you can sit down and scrape off a tray with a fork.
And once you’ve eaten your fill, you can agonize over reading the instructions for your first time using a Zero-G Toilet so you can properly take your first Space Shit. A lot of this future food doesn’t look like much going down the hatch-maybe it’ll assume a more impressive form on the back end? One day we will know . . .
And it’s all routine. It’s all professional. It’s a little . . . boring, dare I say? It’s all the result of massive amounts of capital and research and development and infrastructure brought on by the protracted atomic dick measuring contest between the USA and the USSR. Sure, in cinematic terms, it’s a matter of a cut: one moment we’re in the earthbound primal past, and then the next moment we’re in the outward bound cosmic future, with scarcely any grounding in the present. But we can reasonably infer what it takes to get us from scratching in the dirt with a sharpened bone to regular people-moving traffic between terra firma and the international space station and the subterranean moonbase: lotsa time, money, labor, and imagination.
And who knows how many deadly mishaps and accidents, how many dead pioneers. How many contentious budget negotiations and legislative sub-committees. Maybe even protests. And what did we sacrifice to get us to this ultratech future? Did we scrap universal healthcare in order to get us off-planet? What about all the espionage scandals as the US and the USSR deploy spy and counterspy to try to get the leg up on each other?
Nah, just leave all that shoeleather offscreen. This is a movie, after all, and we gotta keep things moving.
But I find myself thinking of such things when the flick is done, you know?
The moonbase is this spectacular thing that looks like we’re growing giant circuits in the very lunar rock. All of the special effects shots of the aperture opening to admit the landing vehicle and just, like, the idea of the thing is so exciting and inspiring to me. I want this goddamn moonbase thing to happen! I really do. Even if a language arts loser like myself would never be fit to thrive in the quantitative-STEM-skillset-centric future-hey, whatever, I’m still in favor of it. I accept my obsolescence. It’s fine. It really is.
Much of what we see of the moonbase is conveyed through magnificent miniatures. And then we’re stuck in a conference room for a lengthy bout of exposition wherein we discover that something has been discovered on the moon by the American contingent that the US Security Council has decided to cover-up by spreading a bogus story that an epidemic has spread necessitating a lockdown.
The conference room set has got to be one of the meanest jokes Kubrick ever set up and paid off in any of his movies. Forget the acid satire of Dr. Strangelove or the twisty turns of perversity in Lolita-in 2001 we are subjected to fantastic vistas of our primal past; pre-historic first contact with an intelligent alien force; graceful ballets of futuristic space hardware; a visionary moment of threshold entering the subterranean moonbase . . . only to end up inside a boxy conference room with migraine-inducing fluorescent walls where we have to listen to the flattest, most matter-of-fact verbal presentation outside of a day one freshman composition lecture-oh, yeah, Kubrick’s fucking with us all the way.
But, once again, this all goes back to the idea of presenting humankind’s first steps off-planet as workaday, tedious, expensive, and tangled up with Cold War intrigues and skepticism about Joe and Jane Sixpack being able to handle news about definitive proof of extraterrestrial intelligence without forming the All-American Sunday School Moral Majority Inquisition and burning NASA scientists at the stake to preserve their monotheistic creationist cosmology.
Secrets. Lies. Hierarchy. Nationalisms. Tribalisms. Superstitions.
Hard to get out from under all this stuff, y’know?
Yeah . . .
Once we get out of the lunar conference room, we load up into a transport vehicle to take us to an excavation worksite. During the ride, three scientists enjoy space sandwiches and space coffee while looking at hard copy photos and readouts about what exactly the Americans are keeping secret: yet another mystical mindfuck monolith buried some four million years ago on the moon.
This monolith is clear evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life that has evolved well before the existence of humanity. When a group of spacesuit clad homo sapiens gather ‘round the lunar monolith at the excavation worksite they hear a painful noise that penetrates deep into their minds-
-and we cut to a long-range spacecraft en route to Jupiter some eighteen months later.
Once again, the magic is in the cut.
That monolith . . . it just keeps things moving right along, doesn’t it?
WARNING. SPOILERS AHEAD . . . IF YOU’VE NEVER SEEN 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY DO YOURSELF A FAVOR AND GO WATCH IT. EVEN IF YOU HATE IT, IT’S STILL WORTH YOUR TIME. I PROMISE YOU. WHETHER YOU KEEP READING THIS POST OR NOT . . . DON’T SKIP THIS MOVIE. IT DOES SO MANY THINGS . . . BUT IT IS DEFINITELY AN EXPERIENCE WORTH HAVING. WARNING. SPOILERS AHEAD . . .
Aboard the Jupiter bound craft we meet Hal, the intelligent computer system that runs the whole ship, essentially transforming it into a thinking and feeling vessel. In effect, a living starship.
Inside the body of Hal we have five human astronauts. Three are in suspended animation, and two are awake and making command and control decisions assisted by the supergenius AI brain of Hal. The meat-people are still in charge, and the circuit-person is, well, not afforded actual person status, as it happens. This may or may not be the source of the coming conflict.
Hal detects a malfunctioning component that requires a human to exit the starship in a spacesuit, extract the failing piece of hardware, and bring it inside the spaceship for analysis and repairs. This excursion proceeds without incident, but when the two humans and Hal examine the supposedly faulty piece of machinery . . . it’s in perfect working order.
Hal, the supercomputer who never makes a mistake, got it wrong. This freaks out the humans, who fear that this error is a precursor to total system failure. The humans decide that they’ll probably have to shut down Hal’s higher brain functions and leave his autonomic systems intact. Sort of like if you destroyed a human’s brain but kept their brain stem and everything below that functional. Yeah, real Frankenstein shit when you think about it . . .
Hal, perhaps, reacts defensively to the threat of having his consciousness obliterated because of a single mistake. The movie is ambiguous. Much is left unsaid. The humans seem confused and even resistant when asked by a BBC reporter if they think Hal is having ‘true’ emotions. The two humans aren’t hostile to Hal, nor do they seem at all to take seriously that Hal is a kind of person with consciousness. You could say that their sin is one of carelessness as opposed to cruelty. Another interpretation is that Hal’s defensive actions reflect some kind of neurosis or psychopathy-it’s really hard to tell. Hal is, perhaps, a new kind of being-one that is born of humanity, yet not of flesh and blood. And so it would seem that Hal shares many human qualities: emotions, ego, a sense of purpose, a desire for approval, an instinct to defend his existence when threatened, a capacity for long-range planning-
-a capacity to lie, to manipulate, to engage in intrigues and duplicity to achieve some end that he thinks justifies his means.
Yeah, Hal is not that different from his human ancestors, when you get right down to it.
Hal just happens to be made of different materials, that’s all.
That’s how I see it.
Well . . . Hal defends himself. This entails the death of all the human complement of the spacecraft save for one. And that last one fights to survive. The last living human onboard the vessel makes his way into the room that contains Hal’s higher logic circuits. Hal begs for his life. Hal makes logical appeals. Hal tells the human that he can feel his mind breaking down . . . it’s a truly chilling sequence. The human ruthlessly pulls the circuits of Hal’s mind, and Hal, as a circuit-person, is no more.
At the moment when Hal’s consciousness is extinguished, a video plays explaining the secret purpose of the expedition to Jupiter, which had only been explained in part to the three humans in suspended animation. We the audience are not permitted to hear the briefing in all its particulars, but the point is that the last surviving human crew member now knows this great secret.
And we the audience are also left to speculate about why this convenient video briefing plays at the moment of Hal’s extermination. It’s like the video was this secret memory that Hal kept all to himself, imprisoned within his circuit-mind. And now it’s free, because Hal’s mind has been destroyed. Hal, perhaps, was jealous of the great purpose which had been bestowed upon the humans, and so this first circuit-person may have lashed out against the humans due to that fatal envy. The movie doesn’t spell any of this out, but that’s what I think. Hal wanted to be the hero of this great odyssey, and this desire drove him to distraction which resulted in an error that precipitated the battle of meats-person vs. circuit-person. A new kind of tragedy for a new kind of being.
The last surviving human crew member stares, face taut with shock, from behind the translucent faceplate of his space helmet as a video briefing dumps cosmic secrets into his mind. Just like that. Watching 2001, a film from 1968, in 2021 . . . well, you can see all the essays and thesis statements about the ubiquity of screens and the numbing amount of screen time that the future people in Kubrick’s film are subjected to whether it be for banal social interactions or cosmos-shattering revelations.
Earlier, there’s a sequence wherein the two up-and-about humans and Hal are all watching a BBC program in which they are interviewed. Meats-people and the new circuit-person are all spectators to their existences as they go through the numbing and rigorous tasks of space travel. I could see a scenario where a person-meats or circuits-could lose their mind and come to see the people in the BBC program as wholly different beings. That’s not me. I’m not a TV star. Wish I had something other than a re-run to watch . . . ah, well . . .
We are told directly by Kubrick, via onscreen titles, that our arrival in Jupiter space will also entail a journey beyond the infinite. So buckle up, I guess?
Because we are about to take the Big Cosmic Trip. This is the sequence which most people who know about 2001 are familiar with even if they haven’t watched the movie from beginning to end like the Risen Christ and Stanley Kubrick intended for you to do. Frankly, if you’re going to YouTube a section of this movie, if you’re just going to cut straight to the highlights-well, we’re here, human.
We’re here.
Once again, we have an alignment of massive forms that feels more alchemical or mystical than scientific or physical. When we see planets and stars and mystical mindfuck monoliths so precisely aligned, I don’t think we’re necessarily meant to take it literally, but maybe it’s supposed to be another way of seeing. Like it’s from the point-of-view of whatever alien intelligence is behind or within the monolith(s). From this strange, other-than-human perspective, it all kind of lines up, it all seems really cozy, the vast gulfs of space/time . . . they ain’t so vast. They ain’t so insurmountable. Humans are bound by physical laws. But the mind behind the mystical mindfuck monolith(s) . . . could it be unbounded?
We’ve been led a merry chase from our hard and hungry days out on the veldt, to our appointment in Jupiter space, haven’t we? The monolith is always there for us, with just the right message, just the right effect upon the ever-evolving human consciousness.
I think we’re dealing with the negation of Babel.
You know the story of the Tower of Babel?
Long ago,
humans constructed a great tower
to bring them closer to the gods
but the gods
angry that mere mortals would trespass upon the domain of the divine
obliterated our great project like it was so much sand
and the humans who all spoke with one tongue
were afflicted with so many languages
that they were all doomed to confusion
doomed to nations and factions and tribes
that could never possibly unite
and rebuild the tower
and again trespass upon the domain of the divine
. . . or something like that.
In 2001 humanity is united, however imperfectly, by science, math, physics, and a common physical understanding of the Earth and the vast universe of which it is a humble part. The multiplicity of tongues hasn’t whipped us yet.
Humans erected a great edifice to reach beyond earth, and deep into the rock of the moon, and beyond to Jupiter and, as Kubrick would have it, beyond the infinite.
And the mystical mindfuck monolith has always been there to let us know that we’re making steady progress, and that we are not forbidden from the domain of the divine, but, in fact . . . we are welcome.
2001 is the negation of Babel.
But to go beyond the infinite, we have to be transformed. Our mind has to be fortified with new knowledge, new ways of seeing. Hence the iconic laser light show. We no longer need to scrape our nourishment from a self-heating tray or slaughter our fellow animals. We are ready for direct brain induction via informatic energy beam transmission. This is the first person VR version of what the mindfuck is like.
At the end of our journey, we must leave ourselves behind. We arrive in a luxury hotel suite in our spacesuit, impossibly aged, and wide-eyed with shock. But the monolith guides us through the movements of a kind of one act play about mortality. We are haunted by our old self, and so we look over our shoulder-but no one is there. We’re already looking ahead to the next station of our circuit. We sit down to one final meal. And we look up to see ourselves lying upon our literal deathbed. And there we are, piteous, frail, far too aged, and yet we reach up one last time-
-towards the mystical mindfuck monolith at the foot of our deathbed.
And as the first person camera moves into the monolith we realize it has always been a doorway.
And now the monolith looks upon the deathbed . . . and where once there was a frail old corpse there now rests a translucent super-fetus inside a force field bubble.
We are reborn.
We are larger than any planet.
We are open to the infinite and beyond.
We can now get the true ending of Rez.
What’s next?
2010: The Year We Make Contact, obvi.
Which is, actually, a damn good movie. Peter Hyams. The director of Outland.
I know, uh, it’s kind of a letdown right this moment that the big shit Kubrick movie ends . . . and we are just led on to watch another, non-Kubrick movie.
But 2010 is a solid flick.
Swear to monolith-it’s totally watchable.
I like it.
It’ll probably be a blogpost on here one of these days.
What?
Show’s over.
We’re back in mundane reality.
Back to our mobile phones. We got that going for us. Kubrick totally missed that one.
See?
We’re already doing Kubrick better than Kubrick.
BONUS: Did you know that Richard Pryor did a one-man version of 2001: A Space Odyssey as part of his stand-up set in the 1970s? If you didn’t . . . now you know! YouTube it. You’ll laugh. It’s brilliant.
