[The following analysis is from Nelson's KUBRICK: INSIDE A FILM
ARTIST'S MAZE (pp. 121-3, 126-8), and is typical of the level of detail
found in that work.]
* * * * *
[I]n 2001 Kubrick shows a character shedding his doppelganger and
opening his eyes to new perceptions. Poole's physical and earthbound
activities balance Bowman's slightly more dreamy and spatial definition:
Poole jogs and shadowboxes, wears gym shorts, sunbathes under a heat
lamp (like Miss Scott of STRANGELOVE), and watches his birthday
celebration over a screen transmission from Earth while reclining
between two coffin-shaped hibernacula; Bowman prefers to draw pictures
of figures, like himself, who sleep time away in anticipation of an
awakening in deep space. Overall, however, Poole and Bowman represent
mirror twins more than true doubles, especially after it becomes
apparent that a computer, not Poole, will play Quilty to Bowman's
Humbert. Not only does Kubrick choose two actors with significant
physical resemblances, but he repeatedly places them in visual or
comparative contexts that create a mirroring effect: Bowman is left-
handed and Poole right-handed, and both eat the same food while
narcistically watching, on separate newspad screens, a BBC telecast
(ironically titled "The World Tonight") where their images, along with
HAL's eye, are duplicated. Poole loses a game of chess to HAL (a
foreshadowing of his death) while Bowman sleeps, and Bowman displays his
simple drawings of the hibernators before one of HAL's appreciative
fish-eyed lens while Poole sleeps. In most two-shots, Bowman occupies
screen right and Poole screen left, while in one-shots an empty space or
chair recalls the missing twin. Whenever the two astronauts are seen in
two-shot through one of HAL's eyes, for instance, Bowman is screen right
and Poole screen left. When Bowman shows HAL his drawings, Bowman is
framed to the right and an empty chair is prominent on the left; at the
end of this shot, Bowman brings the pictures closer to HAL's eye so that
they fill the screenleft position. Later, when they talk in the pod just
before the lipreading scene, Bowman (right) and Poole (left) are
profiled as twins, while between them Kubrick has framed HAL's eye
within the pod's oval eye; just above HAL we see the empty red helmet of
Bowman's space suit, which, surrealistically, seems to stare into the
pod as well. In this one shot, Kubrick both twins Bowman and Poole and
doubles HAL and Bowman. Poole and Bowman each take an extravehicular
trip outside the spaceship, while the other watches on a screen from
inside; and finally, after Poole is murdered by HAL's "bone" (the pod),
Bowman uses another pod in an attempt to rescue his twin from the
darkness of space. Both serve HAL in a janitorial capacity and depend on
him for companionship, knowledge of their world's status, and the very
air they breathe. In addition, HAL has a 9000 twin on Earth (the Jekyll
to his Hyde), and his "character" is defined by shots of his eye, which
recalls both the hominid's watchful look and the leopard's yellow stare,
and by the sound of his voice (Douglas Rain), which imitates Floyd's
language of calm reason. Through visual and dramatic associations,
Kubrick both doubles Bowman and HAL and recalls the pairing of Moon-
Watcher and Floyd. Bowman is first seen as a revolving and distorted
reflection in HAL's eye (as he "descends" and rotates from the ship's
hublink) and each experiences a journey into memory at the moment of
"death." One ends with a song called "Daisy" and the other on a green
and gold bed in an eighteenth-century room. Symbolically, HAL reenacts
Moon Watcher's primitivism and Floyd's blindness when he becomes the
first Cain in space and denies knowledge of the monolith. Bowman, by
contrast, both reaffirms the humanity of that first struggle for life in
a hostile environment and transcends the earthbound limitations of
Floyd's vision. . . .
Inside the spaceship, as Bowman is confronted with the loss of his Earth
twin, his placid mask begins to break up as Keir Dullea indicates the
first signs of his awakening and transformation. In his anxiety to
rescue his twin, Bowman figuratively loses his head (he leaves his red
helmet behind), the one that protects him from an airless space but
insulates him from perception. From inside the pod, his face changes
color and his eyes are framed in light as he searches the darkness and
becomes the first character in the film to look through a window/eye in
an act of spatial exploration. Symbolically, Bowman searches for
himself, that earthbound twin whom he must shed before his eyes can open
and experience the colors and shapes of the Star-Gate. He finds Poole --
now an object more like Discovery than like Bowman, floating in space
like the shell of an extinct species -- and cradles Poole's body in the
motherly arms of the pod, only to be denied entrance into a
technological womb that aborts its children (hibernators), turns pods
into weapons, and creates the sterile perfection of a reflexive
universe. Bowman releases Poole's body into the darkness and uses the
pod's explosive bolts to force his way through the red, uterine corridor
of an emergency air lock. Not since MoonWatcher has a character in 2001
taken such a life-affirming action, although paradoxically Bowman's
involves an act of divestment rather than accumulation. Once he chooses
to survive and battle his way back into Discovery, Bowman begins a
process in which he will shed a sense of self-identity (Poole as twin),
the extensions of Reason and technology (HAL as alter ego), and the
temporal reservoir of memory (eighteenth-century room). His prenatal
breathing on the soundtrack and the use of handheld camera to film the
scene internalize Bowman's last struggle against HAL's verbal authority
("Look, Dave. I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think
you should sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over").
Significantly, as he disconnects HAL amid the red and vertical enclosure
of the Logic Memory Center, Bowman only speaks in reply to HAL's
childish desire to sing a song ("Yes, I'd like to hear it, HAL. Sing it
for me"). He then gazes in wonder before the innocence of creation
("Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true,/I'm half crazy all for the
love of you") and the experience of time (Floyd's prerecorded briefing).
It is a backward journey for the film as well, a return to Moon-
Watcher's legacy, one that not only reverses but nullifies time.
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