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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
With music and mind-blowing visuals, Stanley Kubrick created a wildly popular avant-garde film that asked all of the biggest questions -- without venturing any easy answers.
Mar 5, 2002 |
"In the first year of the 21st century, there is strange and wondrous beauty, startling experiences that jolt and mystify, and the danger of complete obliteration." -- Original "2001" trailer
The painter Georges Braque once wrote that art is meant to disturb, while science reassures. When Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" arrived in April 1968, both fear and hope were in ample supply.
A few days before the film's premiere, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and President Lyndon Johnson, burdened by the ongoing quagmire of Vietnam, had just announced he would not seek reelection. Robert Kennedy's assassination was just two months away, with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to follow. Youth across the world were burning bras and buildings.
At the same time, President Kennedy's dream of American astronauts reaching the moon was within our grasp. As Kubrick and co-screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke understood, excitement over the pending 1969 moon landing, and over space exploration in general, gave us license to consider a greater purpose and more enlightened future for humankind, even as the world seemed to be crashing down -- perhaps especially then.
Excluding "2001: A Space Odyssey," the cinema of Stanley Kubrick is not what you'd call optimistic. His films routinely explore how the folly of obsession leads to our undoing. In one of his earliest films, "The Killing," a band of thieves pull a perfect racetrack heist but then fall prey to personal distractions and betray each other. Later, the obstinate pride of a World War I general in "Paths of Glory" leads to three loyal soldiers' execution for treason. In "Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov's Humbert Humbert ruins his life chasing a teenage nymphet. And, mocking our Cold War nightmares, a series of military blunders bring about nuclear catastrophe in "Dr. Strangelove."
In "2001: A Space Odyssey," however, mankind's manic self-destruction is juxtaposed against the species' ultimate survival and evolution. There are plenty of casualties in Kubrick's film, but they do not derail the path of progress. In fact, "2001" asserts that, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, death "... assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life." Kubrick's film dares to ask where destiny will take us next, even as he refuses to spell out the answer.
Viewed more than 30 years later, when we've recently emerged from an age of exceedingly self-conscious irony, it's clear that while "2001" is full of classically Kubrickian black comedy, it never apologizes for dreaming big. The movie balances a youthfully idealistic sense of inquiry with a wisely restrained manner.
The film begins with the famous "Dawn of Man" scene, in which a mysteriously sleek black monolith appears 4 million years before the present day, seemingly to nudge a group of apes into using tools for the first time. The primary use of this new invention, however, is weaponry, forming one of the movie's constant refrains: That which advances us also sets us back. Or vice versa.
After killing its rival with a bone, an ape triumphantly tosses the newfound tool into the air, beginning the greatest shot transition in movie history, as the bone turns into a spaceship in the movie's title year. The ship, on its way to a space station orbiting the earth, floats poetically to the tune of "The Blue Danube," one of many instances where Kubrick effectively tells the story with pictures and music instead of words. (This is a 140-minute film with approximately 40 minutes of dialogue.) Or, more accurately, Kubrick uses these devices to let the story unfold, for unlike most Hollywood movies, the music and camera in "2001" never, ever tell you how to feel.
Interestingly, the film's initial human protagonist, Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester), is first seen on the spaceship strapped into his chair asleep, with weightlessness carrying his arm aloft in the same position as the ape's was when it hurled the bone. And indeed, Floyd will soon be part of an identical discovery. Soon we learn that another monolith -- the first evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life modern man has discovered -- has been "deliberately buried" in Floyd's words, on the moon. The monolith is beaming a radio transmission toward Jupiter as if to say, "go that way," which indeed 18 months later sends astronauts there searching for answers in the "Jupiter Mission" sequence.
The voyage to Jupiter aboard the spaceship Discovery (shaped a lot like a bone) is piloted by two humans, Dr. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), who, like the rest of the film's characters, show an almost laughable lack of personality. The indication seems to be that we're really not that much more advanced than the apes -- we just have better tools.
