[Following are three opinions from the ALT.MOVIES.KUBRICK group.]
* * * * *
This may be the question of all questions. I suspect that there isn't a
"logical" explanation . . .
Some seems indisputable: the same aliens who deposited the slab on
earth at the Dawn of Man to teach the apes left the buried slab on the
moon; the job of the slab on the moon was to notify the aliens when it
got discovered. In other words, to say "Remember those apes? They just
made it to the moon." The moonslab beamed its message towards Jupiter;
hence the Discovery mission was sent towards Jupiter to see who the
moonslab was talking to. Now we get to the part where the fun starts,
and where anybody's interpretation is as good as anyone else's, I
guess. Mine:
Bowman encounters a slab floating in space, and seems to get sucked
into it; he travels for a long time and sees lots of cool stuff. Some
of what he sees seems vaguely biological; sperm and eggs. Other stuff
seems like formations of land and oceans. Still other stuff seems like
an exposition of geometrical form. It seems to me that Bowman is having
the "mysteries of the Universe" shown to him, perhaps courtesy of the
aliens. Why Bowman? Well, maybe because he was there. Or maybe it
happens to all of us when we die; who knows? Bowman ends up in what
seems like a hotel suite, where he seems to age very quickly. My own
view is that Bowman ages normally; but that now that he sees things in
a much larger, universal context, he sees his own life for what it is:
trivial, short, and unimportant in the scheme of things. It passes in
what seems like seconds, cosmically speaking. At the same time, his
life IS important; DOES have meaning; an entire environment has been
created for him, apparently solely so that he can live out the rest of
his days in comfort. (For the first time in the film, somebody is seen
eating what seems like an appetizing meal.) Bowman breaks his
wineglass; I, personally, don't think this is a nod at Jewish symbology
or anything along those lines. I think it's just the core of Kubrick's
message: even after learning all there is to know about the universe,
man is still man; still makes the same stupid mistakes and -- in the
next shot, as he lies on his deathbed, still reaches out for the slab
exactly as the apes did millions of years ago, and as Heywood Floyd did
on the moon. In dying, Bowman graduates to a higher plane of being, the
starchild. It is only through such a complete transformation that man
can change at all. We are doomed to be mere apes until we die -- apes
driving fancy cars and spaceships, maybe, but still apes. The only
possibilities for real change in human nature are not of this earth,
and not of this lifetime.
Logical? I dunno. But that's what it says to me.
(A.K.)
One reason I like the movie over both the short story and the after-the-
fact novel is that Kubrick leaves things open for many possible
interpretations from different perspectives. For me the passing through
the Stargate is "clearly" the characterization of Dave's passing through
the portal of death. The room where he emerges is an image of the "house
with many mansions", and the crystal clarity represents the clear vision
one has of the retrospective of one's own past. Dave is experiencing in
all calm and objectivity the "judgment" of his past life, and this is
transformed as he journeys farther through the spheres. He emerges in
some distant future time pictured as a human embryo, hovering over the
earth, where he is about to descend to a new incarnation.
Clarke of course would tell us that that is not "what it means" and give
his detailed explanation of what we are supposed to see in it. Kubrick
leaves us alone, and he leaves enough things unsaid and unshown that
many different insights are possible. I suppose if I proposed my reading
of it to Kubrick he would mumble something about how that wasn't what he
had in mind, but I bet he would still leave the door open.
(G.P.)
At the point of crisis the hero, Bowman, takes on a more active role and
HAL, by trying to destroy him, becomes the agent of his call to
adventure. In the act of murdering of the machine Bowman symbolically
murders his mechanical nature too. We hear no more about Mission Control
or of collective decision making. We are also not told how long he
travels in the deserted ship, all that matters now is that he is alone,
a solitary pilgrim on his way to a meeting with the Godhead.
JUPITER AND BEYOND THE INFINITE . . . opens with a montage of a
universe that is no longer empty, but filled with the celestial
splendors of Jupiter and her satellites. There are lots of visual
analogies to birth and religious (notably Catholic) imagery in the
styling of the effects shots. The Jovian system is filtered in a
diffuse, milky light, as if the planets and Discovery are floating in
amniotic fluid, the sperm like pod leaves the hold of the phallic
Discovery for the last time and the Jovian moons align themselves to the
vertical while the floating monolith folds in and out of the blackness
of space to form the horizontal genuflection of a cross.
Bowman enters the Stargate, a phenomena like a procession of stain
glass windows streaming by him at incredible speeds. We watch his face
grimace under the pressure of tremendous acceleration, then blur out of
recognition.
There is a merging of Bowman's point of view with ours and we pass
thought galaxies and super novae together now as one traveler. We watch
as star systems form and decay before our eyes, as if millions of years
are passing in every second of perceived time. One of the forms we see
is bright red and looks like a fetus; another is a retrograde comet, or
perhaps an external view of the pod itself, but glowing white with a
membranous tail it resembles a sperm, implying perhaps that in the
furthest extremities of space, Bowman has returned to an enactment of
his own gestation in the womb.
We cut to Bowman's strangely coloured eye, we are now traveling over the
surface of a planet. Is this the aliens' planet? If it is, there are no
sign of the presence of any Civilisation. The terrain looks almost like
earth's, despite the strange colours splashed over the surfaces. We
recognise that we are traveling over deserts, oceans and ice floes;
perhaps this is the earth of prehistory, in the throes of its own birth,
or perhaps this is a race memory from the dawn of humanity -- the empty
deserts and canyons of the landscape are very reminiscent of those in
THE DAWN OF MAN.
Cut again to the close up on Bowman's eye moving through a series of
colours, before the camera comes to rest on an extreme close-up of a
normal eyeball. We are outside of Bowman's head again, we see his face,
shaking uncontrollably -- a side effect of the pressures of his
incredible journey.
We glimpse the exterior of the pod -- it has come to rest in some sort
of a hotel suite. A white hotel no less! We are in a room styled to be
reminiscent of the classical opulence of Louis XVI, but with an underlit
floor and bleached out colours that are incongruously ascetic. As well
as the obvious Freudian interpretations, this room can also be seen as a
metaphor for human Civilisation in the Twenty First Century.
There now follows a series of strange transformation scenes where Bowman
watches his corporeal body decay before his eyes while his consciousness
is shifted into progressively older versions of himself. Time is
meaningless: we could be watching moments or years. The quality of the
scene is nightmarish, strange noises punctuate the soundtrack, there are
groans and screams as the camera roams around the room -- the symmetry
of Grecian statues and Gainsborough like paintings. When the camera pans
around a bathroom there is vaguely hysterical, operatic singing when it
passes a bath tub. Echoing the space walk scenes earlier in the film
there is the constant sound of Bowman's breathing in his space suit
lending the scene an intimacy as if we are inside his head with him.
Now the helmet is off, and we see Bowman again from outside as an old
man, dressed in elegant clothes and seated at an ornate trolley, eating
a meal. The mood changes, and the nightmarish voices vanish along with
the sound of Bowman's breath. Now there is only the scraping of cutlery
on bone china echoing in the silence. The ambiance of the room seems
more real now: as if Bowman is really there, as a prisoner perhaps, or a
specimen -- he no longer seems to be experiencing it as some mental
aberration, yet the dreamlike logic of the transformation continues.
Finally, we see Bowman as an old man on his death bed; the monolith is
there too at the foot of the bed. Bowman stretches out his arm in a
parody of the Birth of Adam by Michaelangelo. At last the epiphany
comes, he is reborn, a baby inside of a glowing suggestion of an
amniotic sac floating above the bed.
To the reprised soundtrack of ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA, the camera tracks
into the blackness of the monolith and in the second startling jump-cut
of the film we are transported millions of miles instead of years. The
Moon fills the frame, the first celestial object known to man, the
camera pans down to the blue sphere of the Earth, and then finally to
the radiant sphere, inside which is the Star Child himself. Protected by
this halo of light he stared benignly and enigmatically into the camera,
his infant hands held together in a posture of prayer. The screen goes
black.
The meaning of the transformation of Bowman into the Star Child is not
made clear. We sense that he, though some divine and asexual
reproduction, has been reborn with new powers. He is now a child of the
universe and like a fish evolving out of the oceans he has evolved into
space, with no need for the artificial placenta of a space suit.
However, the image of Bowman's transformation which confronts us is
unambiguously religious, the holy infant, a wise child bathed in a halo-
like aura. So, the effect for an audience is subliminally very powerful.
The impression is that Bowman is the first of a new species, a half
human half god, a Christ like hybrid of the divine and profane.
There is no ambiguity or irony in this depiction and on an intellectual
level, given the film's thesis, this is very puzzling -- the undeniably
powerful image of the Star Child is seemingly at odds with the tone of
rest of the film. But religious experiences are by definition
unexplainable, and Kubrick forces us to tread the path of the prophet.
The scenes in the Hotel are deliberately disorientating, so that our
minds are striving to assimilate them when he presents us with the Star
Child. In our confusion, its very clear significance is lost in a mental
gridlock of the higher mind, allowing Kubrick access other more
restricted areas, where the image resonates with an unspoken power.
The question is why such a cerebral film maker should resort to such a
technique? Well, perhaps the explanation lies in the spirit of the late
sixties. Mankind stood on the threshold of a great adventure but the
hope of nations was very much tethered to the earth by internecine
strife, squabbling and fear. Kubrick's SPACE ODYSSEY ends with a kind of
home coming -- the Star Child is an optimistic image of hope and re-
birth, whilst its vision of humanity throughout has been pessimistic and
even dystopian.
2001 presents us with three ages of mankind: the brutal early man, the
prosaic yet civilised future man, and a numinous transmutated man.
Kubrick's motivation then, in giving us an ending rooted in the familiar
grammar of religious experience, is perhaps to subtly satirise the
palliative hopes and inherent contradictions of the Space Program, which
ironically relied on technology developed for weapons of mass
destruction, to enable mankind to make its giant leap.
As the end credits fade, the juxtaposing of these contradictory moods
leaves us at the end both haunted yet strangely unfulfilled: this is
perhaps as Kubrick intended. Science Fiction has always been a medium
primarily of ideas. It can offer us either hope for the future or serve
as a warning against it. 2001 as the "proverbial good science fiction
movie" attempts to succeed at both.
(R.M.)
Back to Table of Contents.