[From THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, by John Allen]
Whenever the thunder of critical controversy rips through the air, one
thing is certain: Lightning has struck. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE
ODYSSEY is just such a bolt of brilliant, high-voltage cinema.
Like any sudden flash accompanied by a loud noise, the film is both
startling and illuminating -- if it has temporarily left viewers more
dazed and curious than enlightened, this is perhaps intentional. The
evocation of wonder and awe is perhaps the primary aim of the film.
Whether one wonders what the black metallic monoliths are or what the
surrealistic end of the film is supposed to mean or what the opening
prehistoric sequence signifies -- or simply what the film world is
coming to -- is temporarily beside the point. What matters is that the
imagination and intellect are jolted out of complacency by the
experience of seeing the film. Wonder, like laughter or tears, is a
legitimate emotional response.
Such a response, however, cannot be evoked by a work of art that is too
pat, too readily comprehended, too easily flattened by the onrush of
tradition or sheer intellect. Since science and technology themselves
have stunned our sense of wonder into numbness by the very habit of
providing new mysteries daily, it is not only fair but essential that
the arts (including film) take up arms against our indifference.
It must be remembered, however, that the mystery which surrounds 2001
is not the result of arbitrary obscurantism designed to confuse. It is
the mystery of self-containment that makes certain works of art (and
not a few human beings) fascinating and irritating in turn.
It is part of the genius of 2001 that it must be approached on several
levels at once. There are, in a sense, at least four films on the
screen at all times -- three of them available to all viewers and a
fourth one perhaps unique to each viewer. Ways of looking at the first
three and hints about the latter follow.
The first three are comparable to the wrapping paper, box, and gift
that mark some special occasion. What that occasion means depends on
the one receiving the gift, however. That is at once the most important
aspect of the experience and the least easily verbalized. If anything
can be said about it at all, it is necessary to start with the simpler
aspects.
Strangely enough, confusion sets in at the level of the wrapping paper
-- the outermost and least important of the four films that are
simultaneously given to the viewer.
On its most superficial level 2001 is a science-fiction film full of
gadgets and special effects -- a film about space travel in the near
future and man's encounter with a strange slab that seems to prove the
existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
It is on this same superficial level that one gets disturbed about the
lack of plot, dialogue, and character. It is as though wrapping a gift
in newspaper, like a fish, would have been better than using a paper of
bold new design and color.
It is on this level, too, that questions arise about the meaning of the
slab, the point of the film's beginning and ending, and the general
direction of cinema as it hurtles out of the 1960s into the 1970s.
We are in the habit of approaching film as though it were a book that
needed only to be opened and read. Most films succeed at this level.
Most of them must or there would not be such confusion over a film that
treats such a level of comprehension as a mere covering that must be
torn away.
If this film succeeds at this level, it is a tribute to Stanley
Kubrick's courage as producer and director that he so flagrantly sets
his film in opposition to tradition. But he assumes (quite rightly, one
suspects) he is dealing with a generation that has been brought up on
television as much as on the written word, a generation oriented to
visual images and the grammar of the visual more than to the slow
plodding of language.
For such viewers he has made a film that operates on a second level of
comprehension. It corresponds to the box inside the wrapping paper. It
is so beautifully wrought and so intricately carved and inlaid as to
defy description. If it has a name, it is called the art of
filmmaking. It has little or nothing to do with the design of model
spaceships, the gimmickry of showing weightlessness on the screen, or
cataloguing the potential inventions or conditions of the year 2001. It
is the use of these things to achieve a kinesthetic and psychological
effect on the viewer. It is also film as poetry, film as painting and
music, film as dance.
It is the result of using film for what it is: the motion picture.
Attention must be paid, quite consciously, to both the motion and the
picture-movement and the visual images. The resemblances between images
as to form, outline, and color must be seen and felt just as their
patterns of appearance and variation must be noted.
The movement of objects on the screen and especially the sense of
movement experienced by the viewer as the result of the camera's
mobility bring to the audience a sense of being in space. In some ways
2001 is not simply about space and time travel and the encounter with
the unknown: watching it is like such travel and to some extent like
such an encounter.
All these elements are so beyond the approach of words as to render
criticism of the film at this level almost impossible. For one thing,
2001 is so full of such touches of cinematic artistry and sleight of
hand as to require that a book, rather than an essay, be written to
catalogue and describe them. But the catalogue already exists: The film
is its own catalogue.
Hints can be given, however, through one example that strikes this
viewer as both brilliant and significant: the music that was selected
-- rather than written -- for the soundtrack. Specifically intriguing
is the use of Richard Strauss's opening measures from the tone poem
THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA, which open the film.
On the first level of comprehension, it works well -- almost too well.
The grandiose swell of sound is almost a self-parody of grandiose-
sounding music.
Yet on this second level -- in which the fitness of the parts to the
whole on an aesthetic level is paramount -- it is magnificently
appropriate. It is, first of all, a bit of music known as the World-
riddle theme, introduced by an ascending line of three notes, C-G-C.
When it is first heard, at the opening of the curtain, the camera, too,
is rising, and three spheres appear in alignment: the Moon, the Earth,
and the sun. As the theme reaches its climax, the image of the sun has
risen above the curvature of the earth.
Virtually every element of the film -- from its sometimes ironical
indebtedness to Nietzsche, to the emphasis on the appearance of things
in threes (or three times), to the tension between straight lines and
curves -- can be traced outward from these three notes of music. In
some ways the best program guide one could read in preparing for the
images and ideas that flow across the screen during the film is the
prologue to Nietzsche's THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA.
The best clue to their artistic organization and development is
contained in the number three -- mother-father-child, the eternal
triangle, two's company three's a crowd, the three primary colors, and
the three dimensionality of the universe we normally think of as
"real," perhaps even the Trinity and three as a magic number for
infinity.
2001, of course, is not pictures meant to accompany one's reading of
Nietzsche or one's hearing of Strauss. It is whole and complete in
itself with its own ends and its own means of organizing time and space
-- through light, movement, and imagery -- as a means of accomplishing
those ends. Synthesis, rather than eclectic derivation, is the basis of
its indebtedness to other cultural phenomena.
Once we begin to look at the film as a film in this way, the otherwise
obscure relationship between the continuity, flow, and duration of
images on the screen -- their reappearances and significance -- begins
to come clear. We begin to comprehend what kind of cinematic
thunderbolt has been hurled into our midst.
Out of this approach emerge some inklings about the third dimension of
the film -- its gift of a myth and a warning for contemporary man, a
myth about man in the 1960s.
Mr. Kubrick's tracing of mankind's development from prehistoric past to
post-fantastic future is the old theme of "apeman-angel" (or ape-man-
superman, to put it into Nietzsche's terms) translated somewhat
literally yet strikingly into cinema. The unifying prop that becomes a
terrifying protagonist is the machine -- the weapon, or tool, that is
the clever extension of man's arm, eye, or brain.
As Hitler was a false human version of the superman, so the HAL 9000
computer becomes an equally destructive mechanical version of the
superman. The reason for this destructiveness is that the machine
appears, in fact, altogether too human. It is presented as capable of
pride, envy, rivalry, fear, murder, and the false notion that a
scientific mission is more important than life. In short, it is insane,
and its insanity threatens to destroy life.
Its insanity, of course, is no greater than that of any fallible mortal
who assumes fallible mortals can create, out of their own cleverness,
an infallible machine.
As the myth ends, the human hero undergoes a kind of death and
transfiguration -- after a Last Supper accompanied by bread and wine.
His transformation is the result of his having been swept out of time
and space altogether into some contact with intelligent beings of pure
energy.
It is at this point that the film itself enters a kind of fourth
dimension (the three primary colors are finally abandoned for a palette
of greens), and further interpretation of the film becomes highly
subjective.
On a fourth level of comprehension, however, it is precisely this level
of subjective response -- the film having virtually left the screen and
entered into the experience of the viewer -- that matters most.
Even if one assumes that intelligent beings of nonterrestrial origin
are meant to be taken literally rather than allegorically in this film
(or anywhere in science fiction, for that matter) there is still a
basic problem:
If intelligent beings from elsewhere in time and space are needed to
effect the regeneration of man, who effected the change for them? Where
does the search for the ultimate cause of intelligence lead, inside or
outside this film, inside or outside time and space?
Inside the film, the search involves a plot twist that sweeps a man
outside time and space altogether into a fourth dimension. Between the
film and the filmgoer, it involves a brushing aside, through effective
cinematography, of traditional notions of filmic time and space -- the
establishment of a kinesthetic and emotional breakthrough into realms
of imagery and experience not normally found in film.
Ultimately for the filmgoer, however, the search involves turning
inward. If seeing the film once isn't enough, it may be because passive
viewing of the film won't do. It is thinking about the film,
approaching it intelligently, reaching toward it and beyond it that
counts.
If the black rectangular slab -- that calling card of the unknown and
that doorway to the future -- is like any signpost in one's present
experience, it may very well resemble 2001 itself.
Neither the slab nor the film is the ultimate mystery, of course. Both
are tokens that someone who cares has passed this way. One of the
tokens, at least, is already a part of human history in the 1960s.
There is no telling what will turn up by the time 2001 here, is there?
Is there?
(excerpted in J.A., pp. 229-34)
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