Stanley Kubrick (1968)
2001: A Space Odyssey was pivotal in Stanley Kubrick’s career – his first years-in-the-making, self-conscious masterwork – and is widely regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time. In the most recent Sight & Sound decennial polls in 2012, it placed sixth among critics and joint second among directors canvassed. 2001 is even more widely regarded as the outstanding science fiction film. A few Christmases ago, we went to our next door neighbours’ drinks party and got into conversation with another couple about films and what genres we liked most and least. When I said I didn’t often like sci-fi, the next question was, ‘Not even 2001?’, which the man in the couple praised as ‘real philosophy’. I can’t remember what I answered but the honest answer would also have been ‘I can’t remember’.
I’d seen the film only once, as a student in Leeds, around 1978. I did recall it as very long, though, and was pleasantly surprised, when this month’s BFI brochure arrived, to discover it’s not such a marathon – a few minutes under two-and-a-half hours. I decided to give 2001 a second go. It’s been the subject of graduate dissertations and doctoral theses, as well as countless critical analyses and think-pieces. As I still can’t summon up a lot of interest in the film, this note won’t be more than a few, sometimes non-conformist observations. As countless people have seen 2001 many times, I won’t bother including any kind of plot synopsis.
Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke developed 2001: A Space Odyssey as a novel in parallel to their co-authored screenplay. (The source material for both is Clarke’s short story The Sentinel.) At this distance in time, the film is more impressive in anticipating the lunar iconography that the later Apollo space flights etc would soon make familiar than as a prediction of space exploration at the turn of the millennium. But 2001’s cachet, like that of George Orwell’s 1984, exempts it, in spite of the date-specific title, from adverse criticism on the grounds of inaccurate prophecy.
It’s worth comparing the very opening with that of Kubrick’s next work, A Clockwork Orange (1971). Both are launched by a piece of classical music that compels attention. Whereas Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary is almost immediately ambiguous and ominous, thanks to electronic distortion and what appears on the screen, Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, accompanying an image of the sun gradually rising above the earth and the moon, is unequivocal. It announces a Very Important Picture. Whatever one thinks of 2001, there’s no denying that the VIP tone established in these first moments is sustained throughout the film – and that the means of sustaining it is Kubrick’s exceptional technical skill.
His ingenious image-making and fanatical attention to both the concept and the detail of a production are a main reason why so many have been convinced that 2001 is a work of intellectual depth and imagination. Besides, the narrative involves major questions. The first of its four ‘acts’ is entitled ‘The Dawn of Man’, the last ‘Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite’. Kubrick is interested – upfront – in human evolution and aggression, artificial intelligence, our place in the universe, the possibility of extraterrestrial life. The movie is visually and sonically formidable (the cinematography is by Geoffrey Unsworth and John Alcott, the sound editing by Winston Ryder). The vehicles and sets whose design and building Kubrick supervised are a major feat of engineering. The film wears its important themes on its sleeve. It must be a thoroughly big deal.
BFI used as its handout not a contemporary review or an interview with Kubrick but thoughts on the film, after seeing it on its original release, from Margaret Stackhouse, a fifteen-year-old New Jersey student. Her teacher sent Margaret’s notes to Kubrick and he replied:
‘Margaret Stackhouse’s speculations on the film are perhaps the most intelligent that I’ve read anywhere, and I am, of course, including all the reviews and the articles that have appeared on the film and many hundreds of letters that I have received. What a first-rate intelligence!’
Thanks to their author’s youth, Margaret Stackhouse’s speculations (available online) do make absorbing reading but the register of Kubrick’s reaction to them is instructive too. His closing exclamation is the voice of the schoolmaster concluding a glowing report on one of his brightest students. It’s tempting to think that this kind of searching, diligent appreciation is what Kubrick expected of his audience more generally. He must surely have been delighted that 2001 has spawned so many solemn interpretations.
It’s harder to decide if he was similarly pleased for the film to be embraced as ‘the ultimate trip movie’. (Kubrick excised almost entirely from his version of A Clockwork Orange the drug-taking in Anthony Burgess’s novel.) It’s a nice irony that the psychedelic visuals produced such a powerful connection between control-freak Kubrick and the late 1960s counterculture – a marriage made not in heaven but in Star Gate. One of the film’s most notable creative consequences was David Bowie’s 1969 song ‘Space Oddity’. As Bowie told Classic Rock in 2012:
‘It was the sense of isolation [in 2001] I related to. I found the whole thing amazing. I was out of my gourd, very stoned when I went to see it – several times – and it was really a revelation to me. It got the song flowing.’
Unlike me, the two friends whose judgments I most feared as a teenager saw 2001 while we were still at grammar school. I remember one of them, Andrew, contemptuously describing the reactions of other kids in the audience he was part of – in particular, how some girls giggled when the ape realised, in momentous slow motion, how to use a bone as a weapon. I probably still wouldn’t dare tell Andrew but I also can see the funny side of this ‘classic’ moment. Kubrick (according to Wikipedia), made Daniel Richter, the mime artist who plays the leading apeman, ‘largely responsible for choreographing the “Dawn of Man” sequence, believing Richter could take the film away from Hollywood clichés of men in monkey suits’. But men in monkey suits are definitely what these creatures are. There was audible amusement in the NFT1 audience too but the cause of this was the sinister calm of the voice of HAL (supplied by Douglas Rain), the spacecraft computer. HAL certainly becomes a major character in 2001 but it needs to be said that, even before ‘his’ behaviour becomes erratic, there’s negligible human competition.
The actors are so blank and toneless that people who saw the film in 1968 could be forgiven for wondering if this was one more element that had to ‘mean’ something (those familiar with later Kubrick may recognise the bad acting as a sign of things to come). A scene in which the US government scientist Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) meets with Soviet boffins illustrates the point. Floyd is making a stopover en route to a US lunar outpost where a mysterious virus has supposedly broken out. The Soviets ask questions about the epidemic; Floyd woodenly deflects the questions; except when they have a line to deliver, the other actors (who include Leonard Rossiter and Margaret Tyzack) might be in suspended animation throughout the exchange. Keir Dullea, as the main astronaut Dave Bowman, is vocally much less expressive than HAL in the dialogues between them. Dullea’s better, though, when he doesn’t have to speak – notably in Bowman’s facial reactions, after leaving his craft on Jupiter to investigate the Monolith orbiting the planet, as his pod is drawn into the Star Gate vortex.
In the concluding scene, Bowman finds himself in a chamber with decor both baroque and clinical, where he ages from a middle-aged version of himself, still in his spacesuit, into an older man in a dressing gown and finally an ancient figure lying in bed. The Monolith that has made regular appearances since the ‘Dawn of Man’ is at the foot of the bed and Bowman, as he reaches towards it, is transformed into the Star Child foetus that forms 2001‘s final image. Margaret Stackhouse speculates that the ageing process may ‘represent the various stages in the life of one man or of all men’. Surely the latter: Kubrick shows no interest in humans individually, only in humankind.
The Star Gate sequence is doubly remarkable. The pace of the apemen introduction is brisk enough but most of what follows in 2001 is of a magisterial slowness, including the famously ‘humorous’ space-station docking, scored to Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz. The tempo, perforce, speeds up as Bowman ‘races across vast distances of space, viewing bizarre cosmological phenomena and strange landscapes of unusual colors’. Those words (of Wikipedia) hint at what else is remarkable here. High-class special effects illustrating out-of-this-world experience can make you wonder in more ways than one. You feel admiration and amazement. You also wonder whether, if such experiences were actually possible, the real thing could beat the cinematically imagined version. Stanley Kubrick has been described by many (and condemned by some) as a ‘God-like’ director and in the bravura son et lumière display of Star Gate, he seems to take the comparison almost literally. The wonderment this viewer felt, though, was for Kubrick’s technical command and nothing more. I don’t find 2001 either moving or thought-provoking. I’m glad I’ve seen it again but only in a mission accomplished sort of way.
29 May 2019
