2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

 

It opens with ancient Earth and early humans.  We see apes using tools. Then it jumps forward a few hundred thousand years.  We see humans in spacecraft.  Apes using tools.  It may be the most recognizable match cut ever: from a bone, a primitive tool, hurtling through the air to a cylindrical satellite orbiting the Earth, a modern tool.  Following this, a dance between the planet Earth and the objects surrounding it.  Everything spins slowly.  The majesty of the Earth and of space have become ours to marvel at, thanks to an elegance and stability that didn't exist in prehistory.  The ancient apes and the modern apes are both contained within the film’s first act, titled “The Dawn of Man.”

 

But it quickly falls in doubt whether this elegance can last, and if it is the best we can do.  Appropriate of a film from 1968, we see some cordial but tense exchanges between American and Russian scientists.  The next segment, "Jupiter Mission," plays out in horror of the HAL9000 computer when it turns out to be violent.  The tension couldn't remain buried forever, and it shows itself in the intelligence that declares itself "foolproof and incapable of error."  

 

Ursula K. Le Guin's essay "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" made an implicit but obvious reference to this film:

 

"Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilize it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don’t know. I don’t even care. I’m not telling that story. We’ve heard it, we’ve all heard about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news."

 

Many people speak of 2001: A Space Odyssey as if it educes universal truths about Humanity, Technology, and Discovery.  But understanding its subject matter, as Le Guin does, as only one story to arise out of a much more complicated world, makes it look a bit different.  It's a film that generates ambiguous feelings of awe and anxiety which come from a specific historical moment, albeit one we haven't yet left behind.  It's the moment when we realized that we have the power to destroy everything, but found ourselves managing not to do it for the time being. 

 

The Monolith's perfect shape is something unseen in nature.  Its pitch dark surface looks like a hole in space, a doorway to some place you can't see.  When it appears, its edges form lines guiding our eyes toward the top of the screen, directly into the sky.  It points to the unfamiliar, evoking a hope that there is some other future for us than destruction or an eternity of tamping down any frustration or stagnation we might feel, binding ourselves to emote as little as the actors in this movie do.  

 

Stanley Kubrick's films are often subject to the "Youtube explainer" kind of analysis, which pores over a film not feeling anything, but looking for an exact explanation for every event depicted, sometimes trying to discover a "secret" story that for some reason wasn't made explicit.  Kubrick's films, especially 2001: A Space Odyssey, are also precursors to the "puzzle films" made to court such analysis.  There's a difference between a puzzle and a mystery.

I've read more than one review that said this is a film about "where we came from and where we're going," and found it glib.  But the fact is, this is a film about where we came from, in that it's frank about our origins as animals.  And it's a film about whether or not we're going anywhere, becoming anything new, or if we're stuck where we already are.   

2001 never fully shakes the anxiety that stands opposite to the Monolith's hope.  When Bowman disassembles HAL, we see nothing more than moving some pieces of metal around.  But it's a violent scene, and a particularly disturbing one, between HAL's reaction and the blazing red of the room where it takes place.  It's evident from other parts of Kubrick's filmography that he was influenced by the Cold War, and much of this film reflects the coexistence of techno-optimism and apocalypticism that took root in that period.

The film's final act, "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite," is all visual with no dialogue.  It at first introduces us to images produced using a technology never before adapted for cinema, but gradually coalesces into more recognizable sights.  This final act could have rendered the film trite, could have too easily hand-waved away the anxiety with an abstract symbol of hope.  But it's more bizarre and disturbing than that, and the recognizable images are actually more unsettling than the unfamiliar ones.  It culminates in a scene made up of various shots that seem to be from Bowman's point-of-view, but cannot possibly be, by convention.  

 

The film does kind of collapse under its own weight.  Like Citizen Kane, it's renowned as one of the greatest of all films, and as such has big shoes to fill.  Unlike Citizen Kane, however, it's a film that provokes discourse about lofty philosophical principles rather than specific eras in history or filmic techniques.  This kind of thing risks being a little too abstract.  But from that final sequence, we can at least take away a simple moment of difficult perception.  It's where intuition, rather than philosophy, forces us to reconsider our preconceptions about the camera's relationship with character and with us, and with our own eyes' relationship with the world after the film is done.