A Long-Delayed Reaction to 2001: A Space Odyssey

Stirling,

Because you're such a big movie buff, I always assume that if I see a classic movie, you've seen it before as well. I'm particularly hoping that that's the case with respect to 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Katy and I watched this afternoon for the first time. I'm hoping you can give me some guidance as to what I should be thinking about this film. I came to the movie shockingly unspoilt—other than knowing that there would be monkeys, monoliths, and a computer saying, "I'm sorry, Dave—I'm afraid I can't do that," I had no preconceptions. Here's what I got out of it.

The movie is divided into four essentially self-contained episodes. First, we see prehistoric apes discovering a monolith, which does something—it's not clear what—after which they discover tools, weapons, and warfare. Second, we see a sequence in which we learn that modern, space-faring humans have discovered a similar monolith on the moon, which does something—it's not clear what. Third is the most pop-culturally familiar sequence, in which an astronaut named Dave, in the midst of a mission to Jupiter, faces off against a homicidal artificial intelligence, HAL9000, his ship's onboard computer. Fourth and finally comes a sequence, by turns psychedelic and then just avant-garde, in which Dave reaches Jupiter, discovers another monolith in its orbit, hallucinates (?) for a while, and then finds himself in what appears to be Versailles, except with fluorescent lights for floors, for—I'm guessing here—basically eternity, after which, another monolith does something—it's not clear what—involving Dave being reincarnated as a galactic fetus.

The plot is sort of hazy to me, as you can probably tell. Luckily, I get the feeling that the plot isn't really at the center of the film. The points of connection, in terms of plot, between any of the four episodes are pretty limited. There's no plot point in common between the ape-episode and any of the later ones, unless you count the bare fact that monoliths figure heavily in all of them. The moon- and Jupiter-episodes are connected, we learn fairly late, by the fact that Dave's mission to Jupiter was motivated by the discovery of the moon-monolith. And the only plot connection between the psychedelic episode and the rest of the film is that Dave is present. To put it simply, these aren't chapters in a book—they're short stories in an anthology. Rather than being plot-driven, the important connections between episodes are thematic—themes of humanity, intelligence, and technology are present throughout, as are those pesky monoliths.

But even as I get this, I have to admit that I don't have a clue what's being said about humanity and intelligence and technology and monoliths. Worse yet, I'm not even sure I've identified the relevant questions that I'm intended to take away. In the end, the plot is so loose, and the symbology so underspecified, that I feel I'm just flailing around in the dark. Still, I have to pose the following questions:

1. Are the monoliths alien artifacts, as most of the characters seem to suppose? Or are they naturally occurring objects, somehow (spiritually? metaphysically?) connected to the origin of the universe (and its rebirth)?
2. What are the monoliths doing? What exactly happens to the apes who come into contact with the monolith, that wouldn't have happened to them otherwise? (I mean, is it completely clear that tool-use and warfare are direct effects of the monolith? Are the tool-using apes even the same apes who encountered the monolith, or are they their distant descendants?) What happens to the folks on the moon as they gather around the monolith for a photograph? We're never told. What is happening to Dave when he encounters the monolith in Jupiter's orbit? (This question could be answered either literally or figuratively—it just needs to be answered). What is happening to Dave when he encounters the monolith on his deathdbed? (Ditto).
3. Is HAL malfunctioning? I find it somewhat more terrifying to imagine that he's in perfect working order.
4. If HAL is malfunctioning, what is the cause of his malfunction? "Human error," HAL's own diagnosis, seems too trite an answer for this film. All of the other episodes, besides the one in which HAL appears, deal with matters of cosmic significance. To me, there's something absurd about allowing the HAL-episode—the film's indisputable (right?) centerpice—to be contingent upon a programming error by some unknown codemonkey back on earth. Could the malfunction be monolith-related? I ask this in part because the HAL-episode is the only episode in which no monolith appears. That is, the monoliths are conspicuous by their absence from the HAL-episode. But, from a plot standpoint, how would it be possible for a monolith to cause the malfunction?
5. Is HAL a conscious being? Does he have real emotions? Even though the movie explicitly poses these questions, they're never answered, nor, upon reflection, do they seem particularly important thematically. Is the whole issue a total red herring?
6. How literally is the final episode supposed to be taken? Completely literal? Are some parts of it just Dave's hallucinations, and if so, which parts? Or, by the final scene, are we being presented with something that is not the literal experience of any conscious being? For me, I suspected that by the end, we'd traveled even farther beyond the confines of plot than we were before, such that I was no longer even being told a story. Instead, it seemed to me that the movie was just saying things with images. But I don't know what it was saying.

That final sequence, in luminescent, green Versailles, was at the very least a striking bit of film-making. There's something terrifying about it. I remember, beside me on the couch, Katy saying at one point, "Oh, God, he's turning around. He's gonna see Dave. Wait. Where's Dave? Oh no, that's Dave, isn't it?" The mindfuckery of it is off the charts.

And the long minutes without dialogue. For ten, twenty, thirty minutes at a time, you'll hear nothing but apes caterwauling, or classical music as space vessels spin, or an astronaut's deep breathing as he's out for a spacewalk, or unintelligible human voices rising to a crescendo, in what seems for a long time to be hell, and still, at the end of the film, might be. There's emotional intensity to go around.

And then there's just the technological aspects. The fact that Stanley Kubrick, in the late 1960's, built a bunch of giant hamster-wheels so that he could give the audience a realistic look at how weightlessness and artificial gravity would look. Impressive stuff.

But here's what really got me in the end. To me, it seems that if this movie had been made ten years ago, we wouldn't be talking about it today—it would have been forgotten by now. It wouldn't be a sci-fi classic, remembered fondly by the former adolescents of the 60's and 70's—instead it would have been ghetto-ised as an art house film, so that most people would never have seen it or even heard of it. You'd never be able to assume it as a part of the pop cultural vernacular. What strikes me as most hopeful is that there was ever a time when a large number of Americans would have wanted to be as intellectually and aesthetically challenged by a film as they must have wanted to be in 1968, to have made 2001 such a cultural touchstone.