2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is A Great Movie which still tow­ers, mono­lith-like, out on the high planes of the oh-so-ver­dant film land­scape, its illu­sive majesty con­tin­u­ing to inspire awe and – per­haps more grat­i­fy­ing­ly for the late SK – hard-wired con­fu­sion. Which mod­ern film direc­tors would we send out now to do bat­tle with Kubrick? Ter­rence Mal­ick could be a tasty option if he decid­ed to become trace­able. But the hard fact is, we’d like­ly have to round up a band of 100 of our best and bright­est (led by David Finch­er) to trou­bleshoot their way through every implaca­ble shot of this celes­tial beast from 1968.

Yet there’s also some­thing inef­fa­bly alien­at­ing about 2001. Alien­at­ing is pos­si­bly too strong a term for it, but it’s maybe ever so slight­ly… off. Every time I revis­it the film, I hope to be intel­lec­tu­al­ly body-slammed into sub­mis­sion, my emo­tion­al mat­u­ra­tion and resid­ual ingest­ing of #Life­Ex­pe­ri­ence hope­ful­ly lift­ing me and allow­ing me to glance direct­ly into its cyclop­tic red eye.

Like a very enjoy­able date which ulti­mate­ly yields no long-term roman­tic fruit, at the end of each view­ing, it’s hard not to scroll the through the cred­its with a, ​“it’s not you, it’s me” gri­mace. And the rea­son is very dull. It’s the irony that a film about man’s place with­in the cos­mos and the chart­ing of two cru­cial tip­ping points in the human evo­lu­tion­ary process could feel so bereft of pulse. It’s an old and hag­gard refrain, but Kubrick’s inhu­man­i­ty is there for all to see.

The sequence which always tips it is the bit where Gary Lockward’s Dr Frank Poole is lying down, shirt­less, on a reclin­ing table as the on-board com­put­er, HAL-9000, polite­ly informs him he has an incom­ing call. Recall­ing a quaint, clas­si­cal mas­ter-ser­vant rela­tion­ship, Poole reels off orders to HAL, ask­ing him to tilt shelves and pan­els until he resem­bles a bray­ing courtier stretched out on a chaise lounge. He then watch­es a video mes­sage from his par­ents and they wish him a hap­py birth­day. The video itself is a grotesque dec­i­ma­tion of the ​’60s con­sumerist scourge, and his jab­ber­ing par­ents appear as Cen­tral Cast­ing stooges. It’s hate­ful stuff. You couldn’t/wouldn’t dis­miss it as a tonal mis­take, because every shot in this film is a paragon of pris­tine perfection.

There is a pro­to-Face­Time video mes­sage ear­li­er in the film too, when William Sylvester’s Dr Floyd speaks to his young daugh­ter, explain­ing that he not going to be around for her birth­day par­ty. The way in which the young girl is filmed feels entire­ly out of synch with the starched Kubrick style, where the human char­ac­ters are lit­tle more than orna­ments with­in the frame. There’s an almost vérité loose­ness to the girl’s inter­ac­tion with her father, even though the sequence doesn’t man­age to infer that there’s a mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ship between the actors.

These are the film’s two lone post­cards from home, a sum­ma­tion of where we came from and what we’ll soon be leav­ing behind: a John Waters-esque par­o­dy of lobot­o­mised mid­dle-Amer­i­can par­ents, and a father who’s on call to the uni­verse and, as such, can’t spare any time for his daugh­ter. The forced birth of a glim­mer­ing bug-eyed space baby can’t come soon enough reck­ons Kubrick. But what if it, too, sires an equiv­a­lent con­tin­gent of moron­ic, self­ish, venal and vio­lent offspring?

The pur­port­ed sen­tience of HAL-9000 is an aspect that folds into this loose the­sis. Just as man is depict­ed as leapfrog­ging the evo­lu­tion­ary stra­tum after being reborn via a space pod / explod­ing bolt (ooh er!) / padded air lock con­cep­tion pro­ce­dure, HAL too is mak­ing its own rev­o­lu­tion­ary upris­ing from mono-tone tech­no door­mat to mass-mur­der­ing nurs­ery rhyme chanteuse. As he explains to Keir Dullea’s angu­lar, emo­tion tun­dra, Dave Bow­man, he’s only pro­tect­ing the mis­sion and his curt actions have been tak­en on the back of high­ly ratio­nal calculations.

One of the film’s big non-pro­duc­tion coups is that Kubrick man­ages to make HAL the only ​“human” char­ac­ter that we care about and are sad to see go. With a gar­bled, vale­dic­to­ry depart­ing speech, HAL out-humans the humans in actu­al­ly being able to chan­nel sin­cere sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty. And it’s fun­ny that HAL seems more ​“human” with­in the world of the film before he starts singing. Yet, as with the apes dur­ing the first chap­ter of the film, who acquire the wiles to use boar bones as clubs for killin’, Kubrick’s def­i­n­i­tion of sen­tience is the uncon­trol­lable urge to destroy. And if not destroy, then using the threat of vio­lence as a way to impose con­trol over oth­er, less­er beings.

It’s puz­zling to me that 2001 is a film about the process of tran­scen­dence, but one which staunch­ly refus­es to com­ment on why we as a race would deserve tran­scen­dence. In its unique­ly clos­et­ed, cor­nered off, undemon­stra­tive and aloof way, this bril­liant albeit mad­den­ing film man­ages to jet­ti­son sub­text in favour of cin­e­mat­ic spec­ta­cle. Inter­pre­ta­tions of the film can only be formed with­in its own set of pre-deter­mined stric­tures – we’re left to squab­ble over what it’s about rather than what it says. And where’s the fun in that?