Mr Kubrick's masterpiece, in retrospect.
Viewpoints Page 3
Things you have said, since the last time you said them.
It is some months since I last updated any of the Visions / Viewpoints pages. In that time, I have continued to change and enhance the site, but comments arrive all the time and I try to catch up every so often by putting some of them on show. The "Viewpoints #1" and "Viewpoints #2" pages remain as they have been for some time, not least because they are already as big as I care to make them, and any additions would make them unwieldy.
Additional Viewpoints pages seem to be the logical way to go, so with future development in mind here is #3. It used to be called "Recent Viewpoints", but the definition of "recent" was becoming rather elastic. In the interests of economy on my own time and resources, the comments are reproduced here more or less as received, without being neatly categorised in the way of the previous two pages. But then, who said life had to be boring?
Incidentally, with regard to these viewpoints, I see my role in this as an objective reporter and passer- on of information. I have plenty of opportunity elsewhere in this site to make my own views known, so even where the opinions stated by others are clearly controversial or asking for a riposte I am happy to let them appear without comment. Just so long as you keep in mind that the Viewpoints pages do not necessarily represent my own ideas.
VIEWPOINTS PAGE 3: YOUR WORDS
Claudia kicks off
I once gave a short report on 2001 in a seminar called "Introduction to Film Analysis"...
The reviews were mixed, as I might have guessed, as it is pretty difficult to convey the power of an essentially "visual" film (well, all films have to be watched, but you know what I mean) through verbal means. Most of my fellow students... were bewildered at the bone- smashing scene and the "ballet méchanique" in orbit. But there were also a number among them who had not only seen and liked it before, but even one or two who would call it (one of) the best film(s) ever made.
Talking about the "circles" of contact I have about 2001, I must say that most people (usually students about my age, in their mid-twenties) have their problems with it, one of them complained that it (sic!) "doesn't have any message." After sitting down and taking some deep breaths I had regained enough strength to open a very stimulating discussion on this matter...
What I noticed from talking to others and from reading, say, Jerome Agel's "The Making of 2001" is that most
people who watched it and were spell- bound by it were in their teens, while "older generations" either hated it
or, even worse, were indifferent to it. I was seventeen when I first saw it - on a 17" TV screen - on New Year's
Day 1989, all by myself. The first questions I had were:
What does this strange film want from me?
What does the black slab mean? Where does it come from, whereto disappear?
Why this strange classical music?
What are the colors and images in the "trip"-sequence about? and
What does this film want from me???????
I had no clue, but nevertheless was spell- bound, and so, looking for answers, I bought the novel... From today's standpoint the wrongest thing to do because I think the book does not have half the strength of the film as it guides the reader along the lines of a one- thing- one- solution- paradigm, but back then I had at least some idea of the plot (mind you, the broadcasting started around midnight, and the previous night, New Year's Eve, had not been a very "restful" one) and could then further explore on my own. I do not recall whether I "bought" Clarke's explanation of some alien overlords as the masters of man's fate - or as Bowman's "hosts" in the White Room / Hotel Room / Louis- seize Room, for that matter.
Looking back I think I started by trying to connect the images or themes as they appeared, like the bone-
smashing scene accompanied by the Zarathustra- motif as an analogy of man's evolution, or the elements of
the classical odyssey (the title, Bowman as 3rd-century Odysseus etc.). When I started reading Thomas Nelson's
chapter on 2001 in his Kubrick biography / filmography, more and more pieces were coming in place. But only
after I had found an explanation of the Room (the "great mystery") could I really understand what the whole
film was about - on a personal level: in short my reasoning went like this:
Louis-seize-interior
=> last king of the Ancien regime, the absolutist form of rule before the French Revolution
=> Ancien regime = ancient / archaic form of rule
=> archaic = referring back to Moon-Watcher?
=> the paradox of " revolution": the word means "something dramatically new" but etymologically signifies
repetition (Latin revolvere = to move in circles)
=> "The more something changes, the more it stays the same"
=> one huge circle closing from end back to beginning reveals many smaller circles hidden in repetitive actions
and (round, circular) images.
A few semesters ago I... attended a seminar titled "Blue Highways - Travels through America and the idea of Travelling." From there it was only one step to the topic of my paper: "The Voyage Motif as a symbol of Man's Development."
There I found a number of analogies with American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau and his center work "Walden - or life in the Woods." And next semester there will be a seminar on Melville's "Moby Dick" - guess what analogies I have found while pre-reading so far...
Well, the odyssey goes on.
So one could say that while 2001 might mot be the absolute center of my life, I have found myself in a number of situations where I could see parallels to 2001. (the commercial for a German beer brand copying 2001 aesthetics, accompanied by the Zarathustra- motif being a very obvious example...)
All right, this message was not so brief after all ;-)
Bye for now, Claudia.
Mike Jackson has some interesting thoughts about Hal, which I have quoted here in full.
I finally had some time to read through your takes on both the movies and I found something interesting in the things you didn't point out.
One of the themes was about whether or not HAL was just plain erratic or was testing his human crew mates with the AE-35 antenna failure and what Kubrick really meant by this.
The first thing that one has to look at is the theme that runs through Kubrick movies is that people in charge are usually idiots. All one has to do is look to "Dr. Strangelove", where he asked us to laugh and be sobered by the idea. Even a schlock effort at butchering Stephen King's "The Shining" points this out. The best part he left is the fact that the hotel manager always chose badly in his choice of caretakers. "Full Metal Jacket" gave us the stereotype of the uncaring, unfeeling Army brass that couldn't be trusted to know it's ass from a hole in the ground from the doomed drill sgt. to the officers in Vietnam... Could any of these be a more popular view? Our leaders as megalomaniacs. What does that say about our favorite director?
Whether or not HAL was testing Frank & Dave, and I do believe your theory, the fundamental lesson overlooked by the average person is the poor approach to problem solving by our doomed human characters...
Without more that the quick sketch of character development given to us we can't really know what was going on in those heads, but even a person who's tried to track down an extension conflict in his own desktop computer knows that the sort of question, answer and assumptions that went on were pretty pitiful to say the least.
When HAL boasts of his perfect operational record, no one reminds him of who made him in the first place. Fallible humans. Neither Frank nor Dave ever assumes that HAL, or suggests to him, that while he is correct in his assumption of infallibility, there remains the strong possibility that some calculation, some sensor, some algorithmic formula, or short circuit somewhere is responsible. Now if you feared that HAL did have an ego that was capable of being bruised or not, it still would have been prudent to say, "Look, somewhere, something is wrong. We believe you are truthful in your assessment of the problem and will continue to believe so until we have evidence to believe otherwise. It's most likely that the cause of this conflict is outside of the things we know. Human error is certainly to blame, and human error is strongly to blame when you HAL make what seems an error. Somewhere something does not match up to the specifications or the parameters that you use to detect a fault. This technically means you have made no error, but that human error has crept in somewhere else. Therefore if the AE-35 unit is fine, we have a fault somewhere else. Now lets go down the list of possible places this could be occurring one by one..."
As a teenager the first time I saw the movie, this maddened me. Why do Frank & Dave start jumping to conclusions? The best explanation is that they have resented HAL all along and are looking to this as an opportunity to get rid of him and bring the focus of their TV audience back home away from the gee wiz computer and back to them. It's not hard to imagine how a career minded astronaut might blanch to find himself demoted to a computer deemed near omnipotent by its manufacturer... I hope that our real astronauts, be they US or Russian are not so frail of ego, but it was the lasting impression that the movie gave me.
By your own theory, this would have satisfied HAL that his human crew mates were thoughtful and vigilant. HAL would certainly have to concede that he was... completely dependent on human engineering for his "intellect" to start with. We have all as humans come up against the dilemma of discovering facts that we depend on for decision making to be in error and the problems they cause. As a computer, no matter how revolutionary or different from his big iron or desktop ancestors, he would know that this is the fundamental problem all computers face. If HAL didn't, he couldn't really be called sentient. HAL certainly seemed to be, as magical as he was...
I believe that most fans who do not care for 2010 are correct in believing that it, unlike 2001, is not a work of art and is just a good movie. A good movie is not a work of art. 2001 is both. It is possible for even a good work of art to receive a dose of criticism. Where I would criticize 2001 is that it left some viewers with a reinforcement of the idea that computers can go nuts and make mistakes for no reason what so ever. The truth is that the fault lies in us. There are no achievements without mistakes or tragic consequences from time to time. Clearly we act often times as if this is not so, and it is a major reason that I'm often surprised that we ever get anything done at all.
I don't think Kubrick meant us to believe that the story was about how a computer can become homicidal, though the computer-phobics among us seem to. The fault of humans is that we don't always let cooler heads prevail. As cool as Dave may have looked, he clearly acted rashly.
Fans of 2001 often don't like Hyams revisionist theory about HAL, but it is for the most part exactly what Clarke wrote. In fairness, Clarke's theory is as good and reasonable as many of the others I've seen. I too saw room for so much more to have been done with the movie. Hyams never received much credit for making the US/Soviet dilemma over the Cold War so gripping. That was a wonderful invention to the script that the book didn't have and pushed into the realm of really good movie for me. To this day I fault Hyams for killing off Max and leaving out the Chinese, but that's a whole other argument...
I think we all wanted to see HAL not turn out to be a villain after all and know that at least somewhere on the other side of the Stargate, Dave had learned a thing or two so that his life had not been in vain or a waste. 2010 certainly did that.
We have such a love/hate relationship with our own computers that this is such a compelling subject. No matter how dumb they are, we do see them as heroes and villains, depending on whether they complete the tasks we need from them, or screw up our day when we can't open that desperately needed file. And the fault always lies in us, be it our latest fouling up of our system folder, an obscure, but deadly code error from the software or the box itself built by good old "infallible" humans...
When Dave said that HAL would just about be finished off for such a mistake as the AE-35 diagnosis, I shook my head. Who among us could have gotten past kindergarten, or our first day with a computer with that attitude?
For me, the best of science fiction, like all fiction, has at its core lessons for us; cautionary tales if you like, about how we deal with each other and the things we create. If we ever want to have a computer like HAL, when we get him, as DR. Chandra said, we need to treat him with the same respect we would expect in return. Otherwise, we shouldn't be surprised that he starts building cyborgs that look like Arnold to hunt us down. If we treat our children, and fundamentally that's what HAL was, like Frank and Dave did, we shouldn't be surprised to have raised the silicon equivalent of Lyle and Eric Menendez...
We love cinema, literature, art and lately our computers so much that it's not hard to understand why both films have endured. We feel so close to achieving the dream of HAL and yet I think we have so far to go. The next thirty years don't seem like a long enough time to me now sometimes for this to become a reality, but then look how far off Clarke and Kubrick were in some respects. How I long to be wrong!
When the year 2001 dawns, I fully expect that we'll all look over our champagne glasses to some corner where a computer sits and feel a bit melancholy that it doesn't have HAL stamped on its case somewhere, but HAL, like no other dream since perhaps that of to fly, spurs on our hopes and dreams. We are all glad for some reason or another that we met HAL if only there in the dark of the theater for a little while and will go on hoping til we meet his like for real. I just hope we learned something by then that we can pass on...
I was interested to hear from Vina, who claimed that my Web site made him laugh! Understandably, I was a little concerned and asked for an explanation. It was a relief to find that Vina was amused by the things that are supposed to be amusing - he cited:
![]() | the little animated gif (showing the effect of) Arthur C Clarke's presence... on Heather Downham (tee-hee!) |
![]() | the crack about Chewbacca being a Muppet reject (I never thought of that - I always wondered what he was holding up with that belt if he had nothing on) |
![]() | the way you made it seem that the humans got to do the fun stuff |
![]() | the little alien dialogue, etc... |
I dunno, most of things in your essays struck me as funny and really interesting.
In case you are wondering about the Heather Downham animation, it used to be in a previous version of the 30 Years On home page. One day, I might dig it out again. Vina did have some other thoughts, too.
I borrowed Solaris from the library recently... it was pretty good... not really very slow... I found it a very sad movie though, which isn't bad. How did Kris's (Chris? The subtitles indicate that it's Chris) Dad get on the island? And I noticed this: Maybe it's because I've only seen about three foreign films, but it seems that the foreign films I've seen and heard have really beautiful cinematography. Solaris, IMHO, was really beautiful to look at, but if it were made into an American movie, it probably wouldn't look as good. Just an observation.
Karl Matsumoto has some intriguing thoughts on the closing scenes of 2001.
Couldn't help enjoying your home page and the commentary it has generated. I would like to offer my own theory of the ending of 2001.
First of all, when Dave Bowman finally arrives at the bedroom, he is quite a bit older. He has been travelling in space for 20 years perhaps, in a time warp. In his consciousness, only a few minutes has passed, but his body has aged 20 years. Where is he? He has arrived on the planet of the makers of the monolith. How far away is this planet? It is about 300 light years away from Earth. How do we know this? Because they have decorated the room with furnishings from the 1700s; the makers of the monolith have been looking at Earth with a gigantic telescope. On Earth it is 2001, but the light the Makers are seeing from their planet is from 1700's Earth.
The room is a cage for Bowman, an incubator to create the Star Child. The makers of the monolith have been waiting for eons for a human being to reach their world. He represents the end of human evolution. He spends the remainder of his life in isolation. The remainder of his life goes by in a few minutes in his consciousness. He has a meal when he is in his 80s. He knocks over the glass and sees himself close to death. Death is the final stage before rebirth as the Star Child. As he dies, he moves into next phase of human evolution - the Star Child. And then the Star Child goes back to earth millions of years in the future. It is beginning of a new Dawn of Man.
The last meal is significant. All throughout the movie, humans are eating. The apemen eat raw meat, Dr. Floyd (he eats on the Orion as well as on the moon Rocket Bus), the two astronauts on the Discovery eat their TV dinners, and finally Dave Bowman has his "Last Supper" in the cage. Food is the constant through the ages. The ability to procure and process food is the catalyst which forces evolution forward. The monolith provides it for the apemen when Moonwatcher starts killing swine with a bone. Each meal brings man closer to the Infinite. And so it does in all of our own lives.
Just some thoughts on one of the greatest films of all time.
Andrew Newstead has written to me before, and now has this thought.
I've been reading your interchange with Jason on Aliens (are they or aren't they responsible for the monoliths) and I would like to chip in something.
I agree with you that aliens are implicit in the book, especially if you look in 'The Lost Worlds of 2001'. As to why they gave us a boot towards sentience, how about loneliness. The Universe may be teeming with life but it may not be conducive to the development of sentience. It could be that the aliens explored and found no intelligence any where and so determined to spread and foster it in the Universe, we are just one of many with potential. 2010 tends to back this up with the Europans (the reason for firing Jupiter of course).
Ray Miller covers a range of subjects. The linkup he refers to sounds very much like the one that took place at Cyberfest - I do not know of any others involving both Clarke and Lockwood. Ray also asks about how this Web site is put together. For those of you who are interested, because it was started in the days before effective HTML generators, this entire site has been constructed by hand. Yes, every word, image and formatting character has been, and still is, created by manually entering the appropriate code. Gee, no wonder I don't have time for anything else... One day, I may get around to doing my own "reengineering" with something less labour- intensive... one day... OK, Ray, go ahead.
There was a TV programme... about Arthur C. Apparently he's suffering from "Post-Polio Syndrome", but he's still engaging to listen to.
There was footage shown of an auditorium-based Internet linkup to celebrate the publishing of 3001, with Arthur as guest of honour. Maybe you were involved? One of the guests at this event was Gary Lockwood. Gary also had short sound- bites during the rest of the programme, recollecting his role in 2001. Boy... I know age can change people, but if his name not been up as a caption I wouldn't have guessed it was him...
I must confess I've always been intrigued by Keir Dullea with his striking looks and unfeasibly sculptured chin. Eat your heart out, Kirk Douglas. I have surfed for information on Keir in the present and learned that he's in the American theatre somewhat and flits between the US and the UK and Ireland. Like others, I'm sure, I wonder why he never had a higher profile after 2001. Maybe 2001 blighted his career by making him synonymous with David Bowman the way that "Hoover" is shorthand for "vacuum cleaner" or... perhaps he's never been the Hollywood type. You may know the reason, but I suspect it's the latter: a serious, craftsman actor, not a fame seeker. It always disappointed me that we didn't see more of Keir over the years... I found an American theatre Website that showed him in a period-piece play. There was a fuzzy picture of him with a beard posing with the cast. I gather he's involved in educating actors, I'm not sure.
One last thing for now. Your Website is a credit because it conveys good information and stimulates discussion, as opposed to overdoing the production angle with applets blinking and squawking all over the shop. I wondered though, do you do all the Web page coding yourself? I've avoided learning about Website programming in detail and I do wonder how much rocket science really is featured in Web page writing. My IT skills tend to revolve around system admin, shell, C and UNIX internals, ie the core stuff, not so much the sexy stuff that company directors latch on to.
KuroKar is another person who has lived with the influence of 2001 since first seeing it years ago.
When I was 11 or 12 years old I saw the movie 2001 and it fascinated me throughout my life. Over the years I watched it over and over again yet I did not fully understand the ending of this complex movie. Perhaps the genius director Stanley Kubrick intended the movie to be not fully understood by the public. I recently finished reading the book 2001 by A.C Clarke and it did help me understand more about it. My personal feeling is that the story somehow relates to Plato's Allegory of the Cave where man has to ascend from his cave, where everything around him is not reality, and ascend towards the "light", which in sense is the higher reality.
P.S. great Web Page!!!
Larry Klaes asks a question that many have also asked.
I just read the post on Carl Sagan "designing" the aliens in 2001 by not showing them at all. But I remember in Agel's book on 2001 that the revolving diamond objects hovering over one Stargate landscape were indeed the very aliens who built the Monoliths. It was even mentioned again in the new MIT book on HAL. So what is the verdict on this? And please, what did the Russians scientists say after Floyd left them on the space station? Thanks!
Well, in answer to Larry and all those other people who have always wondered about that Russian dialogue, my understanding is that the scientists were merely remarking on Floyd's caginess in not revealing the truth about the "Clavius epidemic".
Bruce Thompson was concerned about a remark in my "Legacy" page about not understanding how the "floating pen" scene was filmed. I might perhaps say that I do now know how it was done; my comment was to the effect that back in 1968 it was very baffling to a generation accustomed to string puppets and space ships on wires. However, Bruce goes on to make some further interesting points about this and other scenes.
The pen was lightly stuck to (a) piece of glass which was rotated slowly to give the impression of a drifting pen. The stewardess simply picked the pen off the glass and put it back in Floyd's pocket. Simple, eh? I read that years ago in "The Making of 2001", or something with a similar title. It detailed all the clever things they did to make the film.
In a real shuttle, that pen could have wound up anywhere when the space craft fired its... thrusters. If, for example, the pen was floating beside Floyd and the shuttle accelerated along its main x-axis, it would have, in effect, left the pen behind, until the rear wall of the cabin caught up to it and brought it up to the same speed as the shuttle. But to Floyd, if he'd been awake and paying attention, his pen would have suddenly disappeared aft at the same acceleration as the shuttle.
Eventually, when passenger shuttles start operating, everyone is going to have to make very sure that all loose objects are stowed at all times, or someone could wind up with something unwanted where they did not want it.
I have always been sorry that Kubrick did not have his pretty stewardesses floating around in the Orion and Aries.
And yes, the EVA astronauts were hung from wires, but they were very well masked, weren't they? In the scene where Bowman recovered Poole's body, the action was actually filmed a lot slower than it appeared on the screen. It gave a more realistic final effect. During filming, the stunt man was rotating slowly as the pod was moved into him. A real live human was used, rather than a dummy, because a dummy could not accurately mimic a real live dead human body's movements as it collided with the pod's arms.
Next time you view the film, observe how the stunt man is rotating around an axis that is clear of the approaching pod arms - so that they won't snag the wire he's hanging from.
I only have an email name to identify the sender of this one: bakerds4.
Quickly because its late: Symbolism is beauty here.
1. | The monolith serves to represent innate ideas. Geometrical form is paramount here, perfect shapes are never found in nature, but have indubitably perfect properties in the mind (even a less than intelligent being can discern these properties - check out Menon in Plato's Great Dialogues.) Therefore, this is a statement about the mind and process of evolution. |
2. | Think about parts of the film as a attempt at causal proof of God's existence. |
3. | Focus less on the visual details of the "slower" scenes. Try a relationship between time and motion, time and futility, or time and minutiae. Then think about the dialogue - from animal to "talking head" - much like our politicians today. |
4. | View the visual effects as a trip back to the dawn of creation. You can have a philosophical field day. |
An email name for this one, too - bobinson - who suggests that 2001 can be viewed as a source of faith in human beings rather than machines.
In reading your analysis of 2001, I found many interesting points, but I was led to one major discrepancy. When discussing the scene during which the "murder" of Frank occurs, you state that HAL eventually lets David Bowman back into the ship. However, it is the fact that HAL will not let Bowman back into the ship which forces Dave to break the explosive bolts on the pod, sending him into the airlock (which Bowman himself opened) and allowing him to re-enter the Discovery. This event leads me to believe that HAL has not accounted for this possible solution to Bowman's "problem": it is a testament to the true ingenuity of man over machine, proving that man is capable of existing without the tools which he has been bound to for so many years (over 4,000,000 to be exact!).
This act of man over machine gives way to Kubrick's new "dawn of man", where the tools of society become useless as man moves into a new consciousness. If HAL had allowed Bowman back into the ship, he would have been aiding in his own destruction, which would have certainly jeopardized the mission. HAL knew (that) the consequence of allowing Bowman back in was his own disconnection, thereby ending the mission in his (HAL's) "eyes".
Scott Jason Zibble has the last word this time around. How much would a close inspection of Hal's eye have revealed?
I really believe Star Wars has its place. Although it is a "space opera", as many have said, it's science fiction as entertainment, not science fiction as art. 2010 falls into the same category, I believe... it was made much more for entertainment reasons than to continue the artistry left behind by 2001.
I think what you're saying, though, is still justifying the "evil computer" argument. Although HAL himself is not inherently evil, by having humans program him he has learned "evil." There is a very strong motif in the movie... that HAL should be feared, almost to the point you'd think Kubrick was a luddite. One of the images I can't get out of my head is the eerie moments when we stare into HAL's eye (for) longer than (we would look) at any single character... I'm sure if we looked at a human that long, we'd see them as a murderer right away... it's almost a convention in horror movies.
Thank you!
As always, my sincere thanks to everyone who takes the trouble to write. So long as 2001 is still being seen and remembered, I know the comments will continue to arrive.
All text: Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998 by Underman and writers identified.