2001: A Space Odyssey

From The Jolly Contrarian
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Whichever way the causal chain flows, we have a prime mover: a newly ennobled ape, in primal exultation, hurls his bone-club towards the all-seeing sun.

Jump cut.

By the time the bone descends it is a satellite orbiting the Earth seen out the window of an orbital shuttle. Finally, we meet a human character, though it is a few minutes yet before he says anything.

In the meantime, Kubrick’s art installation continues apace. The eternal geometric forms are now space-aged and man-made. This is a satirical scene: Kubrick makes this space waltz literal by setting it to Johan Strauss’ accompaniment. We join Dr Heywood Floyd as he is transported, Pan American, via the rotating wheel of an international space station, towards the moon.

Kubrick focuses intently on the geometry and telemetry of the landing sequence. We are confronted by the contrast between the overwhelming strictures of gravity with the finicky sophistication of human technology.

The shuttle arrives at the lunar surface in a ludicrously over-engineered sequence that Rube Goldberg would baulk at. But for all Kubrick’s coolness and detachment, there is a sense of wonder and expectation, now lost, that a golden age of space travel is at hand. In 1968, air travel was glamorous: You have to wonder whether Kubrick would have drawn the same scene had he filmed in the age of Ryanair.

Dr. Floyd’s stop at the rotating space station, the merest of scene setters, is documented with extraordinary care. Kubrick introduces key themes. Communications are breaking down. Floyd calls his wife, but she isn’t there. We bump into a Russian delegation, led by a pre-Reggie Perrin Leonard Rossiter, who enquires about a communication lock down on the American base. Miscommunications, and partially told stories, form an on-going theme.

Cold war tensions have forced the Americans into dissembling: a cover has been fabricated about a lunar epidemic, but in a briefing room Floyd reveals: the Americans have discovered a monolith on the moon. We wonder what agenda the Americans are concealing from their scientific brethren. This is a risky strategy: independent moral agents have trouble following the script at the best of times. They have no hope if they’re reading from different ones.

Floyd and the delegation journey out to Tycho to inspect the monolith. It has been unearthed, but apparently untouched by solar rays. Like the Black Apes did, the white suited astronauts touch it, the sun peers over the lunar horizon. The gin trap snaps shut.

Jump Cut.

We see our thigh bone again, hurled toward the heavens, but this time it has trancended its previously inescapable gravity, in the shape of the space probe Discovery glides frictionlessly towards Jupiter. Frank Poole jogs like a hamster round the centrifugal unit at its core.

Kubrick’s visual scheme comes into its own: cuboids play out against orbs; reds are encased in white and led out into the black, where green awaits. At first, astronauts Bowman and Poole are presented as glorified tools: white suited automata with robotic personalities. Bowman has the emotion of a vulcan. Poole’s birthday call with his folks has the same wooden empathy and faux joviality as had Heywood Floyd’s videolink with his own infant daughter from the Space Station.

The only soul aboard who might pass a Turing Test is the only one who shouldn’t: HAL. These are men with their animal spirits hollowed out and their emotions deadened.

Then HAL starts doing something no Turing machine ought ever do: he gets neurotic. His human companions, to their cost, react like the dispassionate automatons they are. Poole, rhymes with tool, is sent tumbling like a hurled bone into the ether. Bowman, like a faithful retriever, fetches him back.

HAL the servant is now master of his domain. HAL refuses to let him back in.

After an intermission (faithfully reproduced on the DVD) we again are treated to pitch blackness (remember that wide screen aspect ratio), this time with Ligeti’s choral meltdown (Lux Aeterna (ha! Eternal light, when all we see is black?) as accompaniment.

Suddenly, the atmosphere has changed. Gone is all music, for one thing, supplanted by the melody and cadences of living things: breathing, for the meatware, and the digital equivalents: pings, sonars, from the machines. Kubrick lets his figurative scheme take full control and, as they do in Eyes Wide Shut, characters move around the screen stage propelled entirely by the metaphor. As a consequence they do, and neglect to do, things that real carbon (and silicon) life forms would, should or could not.

This last passage of play is dictated by the colours through which Kubrick conveys his metaphorical schema. 2001: A Space Odyssey starts off black, becomes infused with red, clothes itself in white, transcends the visible electromagnetic spectrum on its way to green and winds up black again, finally dematerialised and at one with the Cosmos.

The foundational black, of the screen, the ancient monolith and the unenlightened apes is a blank canvas. Animal intelligence and control is red in tooth and claw, from the Sentinel sun, the leopard’s retinal gleam to the cockpits, space ships and, of course HAL’s beady eye and brain. White denotes the tools of enlightenment: the bones, the spaceships, and HAL’s modules of higher conscience which Bowman eventually unplugs. HAL is both a tool and an intelligence, both a red master and a white servant, and it this moral conflict which drives the film.

Green is the state of enlightenment; the point at which a being is vulnerable neither to tools, intelligence or animal vapours. Bowman overcomes HAL only when he transcends his own animal self - surviving unhelmeted in vacuum space - and switches off his tools. He does this wearing a green helmet (which was situated in the airlock, beyond the reach of an untransformed being) on his red suit: an enlightened head on an animal body. Through the Star Gate the preoccupations of animal humanity (to the extent Bowman ever had any) are gone - time itself is off its spools - and Bowman starts appearing to himself in different ages and guises as if the space-time continuum itself has been repealed.

Eventually Bowman becomes black again - in his green apartment, but dressed in a long, boxy velvet coat resemblent of the monolith itself, which eventually appears and with which he amalgamates, to become part of the fabric of the cosmos itself.