2001: A Space Odyssey
1968
Stanley Kubrick
One thing I've been pretty inconsistent about throughout Never Seen It is deciding how much I'm going to read about a movie after watching it but before I write about it. There have definitely been films that have so blown me away that I've felt the need to rush to the nearest computer and try to type through that emotion before I lose it. Other times, I'm so flabbergasted by what I just saw that I feel it's my responsibility to read the wise words of movie critics that have come before me, in an attempt to find solid ground and just even start the process of understanding.
I don't know which 2001: A Space Odyssey is. Perhaps both, or neither. I can tell you first that I have been extremely diligent regarding spoilers for this particular film for the past five years, because I knew it was going to hit me at the tail end of this journey, and I wanted to approach it without absolute purity. Sure, Barbie parodied the beginning sequence, and Community, I seem to recall, briefly parodied the ending, but I wouldn't say that I saw those parodies and was like "whelp, I guess I know all about 2001 now." I knew it was a movie held in extremely high regard (#15 on the AFI list, #6 on the BFI list, in Roger Ebert's personal Top Ten), but that's about it. And I just finished it, like fifteen minutes ago.
Since this is my final solo post for NSI (hoping to have some help next week when we wrap it up with 8½), I thought I could try to have it both ways. I'm here, I haven't read a single word about this movie in my entire fucking life, and so I'm going to try to capture my very first thoughts and feelings. Then, I'm going to pause my reflection, read a few internet articles that I can about the film, and return to the blog, where I will reflect on what I got wrong, what I would never have thought of myself, what my fresh reactions are to the historical reactions, and what my ultimate takeaways are from finally viewing this classic film.
Let's see... this is my seventh (and final, obviously) Kubrick film on the list. Five years later and I remain perplexed with most of his art, and would not be able to speak intelligently on it for even a second. But if tasked with saying what is "similar" about all the films of his that I've now seen, I can name two things.
The first is pacing. This is not something I would have noticed until this viewing of 2001, but thinking back, I believe it to be true with all this films: he's not afraid to linger. Certain shots go on way longer than you'd expect. Some of those scenes that linger have music or sound effects that are so loud that you can't even fucking imagine how long you can endure the lack of movement, and still, it goes on. Some scenes are so quiet and still that you have to check to make sure the screen didn't freeze. Sometimes I feel the same feeling that I do when I'm talking with someone and they refuse to break eye contact with me. It's discomforting, on purpose.
The second is that there are rarely easy answers to your standard "what does the film mean?" question. I saw a phrase recently regarding Kubrick, and it's ringing in my head now: "intellectually rigorous." That's just a fancy way of saying "they make ya THINK." Which is also a discomforting feeling, I think, mostly because it means you get to the end of the movie and you can't possibly say whether you liked it or not, since it's the type of movie you have to parse out over at least a few extra minutes (if not a lifetime), and that goes against the impulse of snap judgments. "How does 2001 make you feel?" I mean, I sincerely don't know yet, because I don't even fucking know what the fuck it is about, ya know?
Okay, so... what does it mean? Shit, man, I'm really gonna have to do this, aren't I? I'm gonna have to write the first bullshit that pops into my head and then be made to look the fool in front of everyone when the internet say "ha ha nah dude it's obviously symbolism for such and such" and I'm like, "well duh!" It's the last time, though. No worries. Give me your worst, internet.
The monolith (is that how we refer to it?) is there are the beginning and the end. We see it first at "the dawn of man," which is really just a bunch of monkeys. They are all hanging out, picking food out of the dirt, mostly keeping to themselves. Then, the monolith appears. All of a sudden, the head monkey is getting violent with his bone weapon, first pounding the other bones, and then beating another monkey to death. So if this is when the idea of "Man" begins, then we can assume that the monolith symbolizes man's dark nature. Monkeys become men when they learn to kill.
We see it next when they uncover the monolith on the moon. It's never confirmed whether it's the same monolith or a different one. But this monolith on the moon apparently does nothing except send one strong signal in the direction of Jupiter. This sets things in motion to send five humans to Jupiter to check it out (though at least two of them are not told why they are going to Jupiter). The spaceship has a computer—HAL 9000—and that computer eventually turns on the humans, probably killing four of them, locking the last outside of the ship. But that guy—Dr. Bowman—breaks back in, and destroys HAL. Then he sees the secret tape that was supposed to be played while on Jupiter. Then...
...I'm not sure. Lots of fantastic imagery, colors, special effects. Still shots of Bowman looking contorted (those shots freaked me out, if I'm being honest). Then we either cut to an alternate dimension, or the afterlife, or just simply the future, and Bowman is there, and he's old, he's dying, and in his final moments, right before he is reborn, he sees the monolith, and he raises his finger and silently points to it. In my view, he's assigning blame for his life and everything that's happened. Which is logistically true, since he wouldn't have been sent on a failed mission to Jupiter if the monolith hadn't been discovered. It's also symbolically true, if we're taking seriously the opening sequence of the monolith symbolizing the heart of darkness within mankind. Humans designed HAL in their own image, that human-esque computer flipped to evil as a self-defense mechanism, and people died. Regardless of whether the ending actually happened or was all a fantasy of one of the characters or even Kubrick himself, it is the monolith that symbolizes the fact that there can be no happy ending due to mankind being inherently evil.
I'll cop to not really "getting" a lot of the long shots of colors and shapes and galaxies and what is probably the American desert drenched in neon. This is the intellectual rigor in action. It's not just Kubrick showing off; it has to mean something. But what it means is not given up easily. My initial thought is that this sequence obviously inspired the opening sequences to The Tree of Life, but it just worked in the opposite direction. The Tree of Life was showing you that everything that happened had to happen in this exact sequence for this present moment to exist as it does. 2001 is showing you that everything that is happening now will always happen, the violence and the hate and the senselessness are all immortal and will never end (hence the title of this section being "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite"). It's a terrible truth to consider, which probably explains why Bowman looks so horrified in the brief moments we see his face.
This doesn't necessarily have to do with "getting" the film, but I was surprised to see that this film was released in 1968. It was probably one of the first times that I've ever seen a movie and thought to myself "this looks ahead of its time" and actually meant it. 57 years later, and none of the sci-fi elements look hokey at all, and none have aged poorly. The camerawork is so crisp and clear, conversations flowed naturally even while aboard fantastical spaceships, and the special effects, whatever they end up meaning, were fucking gorgeous. I have no problem imagining audiences in the late-'60s being in total awe while watching this film in theaters, mostly because I felt the same way, and I was just watching the damn thing in the corner of my work computer screen.
In my estimation, 2001 probably stands so tall in the canon because it so deftly balances being beautiful and being inscrutable. It's both, in the best way. The mystery of the thing does not detract from the pure physical reactions it causes within its audience. Like, you could totally walk away from 2001 not understanding any of it and still love it, in my opinion. I think it's worth attempting to figure out "what it means" (both according to Kubrick and according to your own opinion), and obviously it's a film that practically forces you to figure it out, but at the same time, it's stunning enough even if you just sit back and stare blankly at the screen. It's a movie for the mind and the eyes. I've never really thought about it, but maybe there aren't too many movies that can do both.
Well, since I admitted to the possibility that I really don't know what 2001: A Space Odyssey is actually about, I suppose it's time to hit the books. I'll be back in an hour or so (my time) and in the span of one single paragraph break (your time).
I'm back. I have traveled through the cosmos and here is what I found. There is no accepted true meaning! Which is kinda nice. No really. Let me talk it out.
Basically everything I read indicates that this movie is special because we are "still debating it's meaning." Kubrick was asked throughout his lifetime and typically refused to give any straight answer, saying that the movie was intended to be like painting or a song, something that technically has a true meaning to its creator but exists solely to elicit a unique response from each person who engages with it. The answer is whatever you think it is.
Apparently, cowriter Arthur C. Clarke took a lot of the story from the initial planning stages of the film and wrote a book based on that. So if you are the type of person who NEEDS answers, then you could possibly find them there. You might find that the monolith was created by extraterrestrials to send to different planets to help them along in their evolutionary journey. For instance, the monolith is sent to help the monkeys learn how to use tools. There is a huge one near Jupiter that helps Bowman (and thus, the human race) enter the next phases (whatever you interpret the colors and shapes to mean). The ending scenes are Bowman kept in captivity to be observed by the aliens, and then turning into a starchild that is going to save the human race.
There is no way you can get any of that from the film. This is by design. Stanley Kubrick purposefully obfuscated the film's meaning so that the discussion of its meaning becomes the value of the film. This gives me hope, because it validates the thing I've been trying to do for 199 movies now. I've been trying to say this whole time that the only thing that ultimately matters—at least in the context of crafting this blog column—is how a film makes me feel, and how I interpret it. At times, this has felt lazy on my part, almost like I should be doing more to figure out what the filmmakers wanted me to feel. That's important too! But ultimately, we watch films to feel something, and the thing we feel is something that only we can interpret, and no one else.
Pessimistically, you can see the act of saying 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the "greatest films of all time" as a sort of circle jerk endeavor for movie critics. This film was #6 on that BFI Sight and Sound list, and Mullohand Drive, another film that demands discussion about what the fuck it even means, sits at #8. We endless debate these films and their meaning, and the act of placing them high on such a list goes a long way of self-validating the act of having those discussions. If we ignored the films that made us talk about those films, then there wouldn't be any film critics left to vote in the first place.
Optimistically, the space that a film such as 2001 gives us to reflect on what a film means, and through that, what life means, is what makes 2001, and movies in general, so magical. It's why watching almost 200 movies I've never seen before ultimately felt like a winning endeavor. I got to touch that magic so many fucking times, both while watching the movies and while reflecting on them here. Movies are fucking great, no matter how you interpret them.
But back to how I interpreted this movie in particular. Without doing any sort of extracurricular reading, I interpreted the monolith and the general themes of 2001 as violent. Humans are inherently evil, and the monolith stands as a testament to that. Bleak, sure, and I'm not saying I agree with it, I'm just saying that this is what I thought 2001 was trying to say. The interesting part is how so many people have a completely different interpretation of the film. Lots of people read it as optimistic. Some people see god. Mostly, they see the psychedelia and they see within it lots of hope for humanity, that there is something out there that is going to save us. Neither side is wrong, since it's been established there is no right answer, but it's worth acknowledging that there are two different sides here.
And the really interesting thing about it is that there seems to be a general divide in this way between audience and critics. Movie critics tend to view it as a pessimistic statement about humanity's future, whereas audiences chose to view it positively, in the way that humans are born and reborn. The fact that I originally fell on the pessimistic side means only one thing: I now have definitive reason to call myself a film critic. The proof is right there, folks! 199 movie blog posts, and I'm finally a movie critic! We did it! HAL, drop the grade for the second to last time!
GRADE: 4.5 pukes out of 5
NEXT TIME: Holy shit, this is the last time I'm ever writing "NEXT TIME" for this blog project. COVID really fucked me up, didn't it? Making me think that going through a list of 200 movie alphabetically was a good idea. Well, good idea or bad, I'm here at the end. Due to the completely arbitrary rule of watching these films alphabetically with the numbers at the end, we're wrapping things up with 8½. One more time, for the cheap seats: I have no idea what that film is about, because I've never seen it!!!!!!!!
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