"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968)

                                                                               

“I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over.”  HAL, a computerized, artificial  intelligence, getting ready to assert control

“I have made some very poor decisions recently.”  HAL, sensing its doom

The disorientation that I sometimes feel these days, since the health crisis began, is similar to what I experience during the “light show” sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, “2001: A Space Odyssey”.  To those not easily bored, the sequence is astounding.  The effect is like living through the pandemic nightmare.  It comes with no warning nor explanation.  It is off-balancing.  It is overwhelming.  It puts one in a sense of contemplation, not just about what’s happening in front of us, but about its deeper meaning for humanity. There has never been anything like it.  It moves one rapidly and inevitably toward something fearsome and unknown.

“2001: A Space Odyssey” seems to have anticipated, fifty-two years after its release, an entire world on the brink of a seismic change.  Are we, with our preoccupation with technology, about to experience a rebirth?  Or are we, as technology grows beyond our control, about to regress into another Dark Age?   

All of it is told with supreme skill and detail by Kubrick and his crew.  Everything is open-ended; nothing is spelled out. With the anxiety of the new virus holding humanity in its grip, this movie, with all of its ambiguity and slow grandeur, hits us now with a new clarity.  This is a rare example of pure poetry on film, a beautifully meticulous blend of sound and image that carries profound mystery and meaning.

It is one of the most brilliantly designed movies I have ever seen, which goes unappreciated because it is cold, symmetrical, and foreign to us.  But the patterns Kubrick captures with Geoffrey Unsworth’s camera, the wide angles and sharp lighting, and the attention to the most minute detail, have an unprecedented, strange beauty.    Moreover, even to my limited understanding of the properties of physics, the film is the most convincing depiction of a weightless existence I have ever seen.

The film chronicles the history of mankind’s development, from prehistoric days before tools, to humankind’s highest artistic and scientific achievements: space exploration, scored to the heavenly bombast of Richard and Johann Strauss.   It is divided roughly into three parts.

Part One is The Dawn of Man.  Early, ape-like humans, surviving on plants, unable to defend themselves against predators or aggressors, are visited by a strange rectangular slab that appears out of nowhere.  After they contemplate this monolith, they create tools and weapons out of the bones of deceased animals.  They learn to use them for survival and destruction.  When a bone that was used as a weapon is tossed into the air, it becomes a space vehicle, millions of years later, in one of the most celebrated cuts in all of cinema. 

Riding in the space vehicle is Dr. Haywood Floyd, on a mission to a lunar space station to observe a momentous discovery:  scientists have excavated the same monolith.  To preserve secrecy, since the implications of the discovery would be earth-shattering, they create a “cover story” in which an epidemic has swept through the lunar station.  

When I saw the film before, I accepted this “cover story” about an epidemic as a contrived, throwaway plot point.  Now, the scene seems chillingly visionary, like fodder for conspiracy theorists today who are certain that the Covid-19 is a hoax.

Part Two is Jupiter Mission, 18 Months Later.  Two space scientists, Dave (Kier Dullea) and Frank (Gary Lockwood) are on a lengthy mission toward Jupiter, to follow up on strange radio signals being transmitted from the planet.  (We never find out what happened to Dr. Floyd and his team after their hair-raising encounter with the monolith.) This is the longest and most technically stunning section of the film, and also foreshadows the monotony and boredom of the lengthy quarantines so many have had to endure for the last few months. 

These men will be on the ship for a very long time, alone with only each other for human companionship, They stay fit by jogging on a circular walkway, eat processed meals that require pictures of the food they represent, watch TV programs transmitted from earth (with an eight-minute delay), and play chess with HAL. 

HAL is the infamous artificial intelligence computer, programmed to speak to the men, as well as carry out every function of the mission.  HAL speaks in a soft human voice, which is, ironically, more expressive than the actual humans who interact with it.  (He even sings a song, the only music in the film beyond the background score.) 

Suspense is introduced, when HAL claims that a system is about to fail, endangering the two men who venture out to examine it, but which turns out to be false.  Is HAL able to function on his own, and sabotage the mission?  HAL, like the early tools and weapons created by early Man, has become both a means of survival and a means of destruction.

Dave, after his final confrontation with HAL, pursues the mission to Jupiter on his own in Part Three, Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite.  This final thirty minutes has no dialogue, but is the most important section of the film.  It is initially a confusing sequence, but on a deeper level it is the most beautiful, troubling, and profound.

Dave aims his space pod toward the monolith, which is floating in space, and suddenly gets caught up in a blinding vortex of light and sound.  We see cuts to Dave’s expression of anguish as he is hurled rapidly through space and time to an unknown destination.  At one point, his pod assumes the appearance of a sperm-like projectile speeding toward a gigantic, sparkling light.  Geometric shapes divide and revolve like DNA.  Dave passes over strange and brightly colored landscapes, often looking like Peter Max’s psychedelic paintings of the Grand Canyon, or of one of the oceans. 

(It’s no surprise that “2001: A Space Odyssey” was a favorite of young people experimenting with drugs in the late 1960s; MGM studio, savvy to this fact, used an advertising tagline that read: “The Ultimate Trip”.)

The pod lands inside of a strange chamber.  Dave has visibly aged.  The chamber is filled with art and artifacts from Earth: sculptures, lace tablecloths, knitted bedspreads, Renaissance paintings, fine china and glassware.  Suddenly, all of this which is familiar to the viewer seems so strange.  In the rest of the film, design and art were solely functional.  This is the first time that we see art used as decorative, aesthetic, and pleasing. 

It hit me that what made the rest of the film so cold was the fact that art held no importance, beyond the austere beauty of the detailed sets.  Suddenly, we feel at home, because of the familiarities of color, texture, and adornment.  In a world of overwhelming technology, art still matters.  We must not lose sight of that, or move thoughtlessly away from a world without art. 

Dave moves through the chamber and observes himself getting older, in a place where time moves differently.  The eerie echoes of sound are of strange voices, resembling something like a group of people inside of an enclosed zoo exhibit.

Now extremely aged, Dave is in the bed, as the monolith appears before him.  He reaches his hand out as if to touch it with his finger.  The religious overtone is obvious, like the painting on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, of Adam reaching out to be touched by God.  But is the monolith God? Is it knowledge? Evolution? Are they all one and the same?  

Dave, in his final incarnation, becomes a fetal creature, floating in space in a bubble, looking at us with… hope?  challenge?  new beginning for humankind?  In a more recent viewing of the film, will humanity pass into something more innocent? More helpless?  Will the virus kill us off?  Will there be a human afterlife? It is an image to contemplate, in what is one of cinema’s true works of art.

“2001: A Space Odyssey” contains images and technologies that appeared impossibly cutting-edge in 1968, but many of which have come to pass.   There is a seat-back television on the space shuttle. The film is filled with computerized graphics, on control panels and elsewhere. HAL is an early and advanced form of artificial intelligence, more dangerous than the sci-fi robots created to that time. Computerized printouts can be ordered by voice command. There is an early video telephone (amusingly, only 1,90 from space).  And for Frank, one of the lonely astronauts, there is a virtual birthday celebration from his parents, on a screen for him to view.

The film demonstrates the necessity for virtual experiences in extreme circumstances.  But I find today’s over-enthusiastic push for virtual experiences annoying and alarming.  In the absence of meaningful human interaction, thrust upon us by the need for self-isolation, virtual talks and meetings can be emotional lifesavers. 

But for me, nothing virtual will ever suffice.  My world-view, the sharpening of my sensitivities, my humanity and the definition of a good life, have been shaped by opportunities for human interaction and contemplation in places like movie cinemas, coffee shops, art galleries, history museums, concert halls, sports arenas, libraries, fitness centers, restaurants, bookstores,  live theaters, zoos, gardens, lecture halls, guided travel, and so on.

I would not like to contemplate a time in which humankind, out of an abundance of caution, is reborn into a world where these experiences are only available through a computer screen.  We must seek better. I see the face of hope in the final image of “2001: A Space Odyssey”.