The prospect of human venture into space has always raised the disconcerting prospect of discovering either nothing or something. While the loneliness of nihilism has always been possible, it lacks dramatic potential. To find something is a very different story. Since its inception, science fiction has become the popular medium for portraying that something—the presence in the universe that challenges (or confirms) the anthropocentric presumptions of the great monotheistic civilizations of Western society. As Stanley Kubrick was fond of noting, the psychologist Carl Jung predicted that any encounter with transcendent intelligence would tear the reins from our hands, “and we would find ourselves without dreams. We would find our intellectual and spiritual aspirations so outmoded as to leave us completely paralyzed.” Quite aptly, therefore, Kubrick said of his film masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey: “I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001—but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God.”1 He recognized that space travel is nothing less than a voyage into time: into the future and into the past, toward end time and back to creation.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, two potent ideas introduced the questions that science fiction was invented to answer. The first centered on Darwin’s theory of natural selection, raising questions about how, in fact, humans could have developed from a chance roll of the evolutionary dice. The second engaged Mary Shelley’s classic picture of man as the simultaneous inventor of technology and creator of monsters. Theologians and, more broadly, a whole host of imaginative thinkers have struggled with the problem of the human place in a universe that might only incidentally, if at all, be concerned with the fate of mankind. Simultaneously, they have worried over the human tendency to embody ambition, greed, and aggression in technology. Both of these preoccupations occupy the very center of Kubrick and (science fiction author) Arthur Clarke’s space travel film. But, unlike a good deal of contemporary science fiction either in literary or film form, which manages to resolve the plot with a glance at God, or reaffirm the limits on human aspiration defined by the religious and philosophic traditions of sin, pride, and hubris, 2001 steps into a different sort of beyond. This idiosyncratic vision of man’s encounter with a higher intelligence is accompanied by the suggestion that humans err in presuming to be the anthropomorphic model for God. The result is a remarkable personal conversation about the implications of decentering man within the universe. In this regard, Arthur Clarke’s offhand remark about the film rings with unintended truth. “While the film was being made,” he explained, “I made the comment that MGM is making the first ten-million-dollar religious movie, only they don’t know it yet.”2 The film’s millennial title alone should have suggested a spiritual project to anyone aware of the mathematics of apocalyptic thinking.
Science is the vehicle for Kubrick’s spiritual quest in outer space in much the same way that it energized a huge body of speculative fiction about “ETs.” The possibilities that science raises and the certainties that it challenges constitute perennial problems and periodically demand a revision of God images and belief structures. As the director put it during an interview for Rolling Stone magazine, “On the deepest psychological level, the film’s plot symbolized the search for God, and it finally postulates what is little less than a scientific definition of God.”3
In the 1960s, as the Apollo missions swung closer to a moon landing, 2001 spoiled the impact of that landing for us all. More realistic than reality itself, and certainly more dramatic, the film depicted man’s venture into space within a rich mix of mythological allusions. It presented a picture of space in ways that the real astronauts could not. With stunning clarity, it demonstrated weightlessness, imagined the moonscape, and pictured the passage of meteors. At the same time, it interpreted the whole experience within a broader framework of mythological and religious symbolism. It combined science and technology with philosophy, anthropology, and religion in ways that were unthinkable to the more conservatively scripted American moon explorers of 1969.4
It is noteworthy that almost simultaneously in this period, Protestant evangelical thinkers were constructing a case that used science as the vehicle to speculate upon divine beginnings and endings, to salvage their view of a universe that was purposefully man-centered. In 1962, John Whitcombe and Henry Morris published their influential reformulation of creation science, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications. In this challenge to Darwinism and modern astronomy, the engineer and the theologian confronted the huge problem of explaining away evolutionary science. Quite understandably, they chose to attack the theory of uniformitarianism: “the belief that existing physical processes, acting essentially as at present, are sufficient to account for all past changes and for the present state of the astronomic, geologic, and biologic universe.” A world that operated by the slow and inexorable shifts that Darwin had made central to evolutionary theory could never, they affirmed, create an intelligent being such as a man. Evolution could not, on its own, prompted by blind and chance forces, create anything so splendid. It was precisely at this point of radical doubt that Kubrick and Clarke began their famous story of a journey beyond the stars.5
Their reason for engaging evolution is, curiously, the same as the creation scientists: there is no drama in evolution, however persuasive a theory it might be. Without outside intervention, there is no tale to tell; in other words, there is only the Nothingness that has always remained a possibility in man’s encounter with the Universe. Unlike the preposterous pulpfiction worlds of Mars and Venus created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example, where an energetic evolutionary force has created an elaborate hierarchy of intelligent beasts and beings, Clarke and Kubrick looked to outside intervention to spur the slow, steady state of terrestrial change. If the only tie to evangelical creation science is this question mark about evolution, it nonetheless reveals the moral and aesthetic problems of a Darwinian explanation that 2001 chose to confront. For the encounter with ETs implies nothing less than a new explanation of the origins of humans and the prediction of their future. Evolution might have remained a driving force in this universe, but, like the explanations of the late Stephen J. Gould, it was a force that operated to the rhythm of “punctuated equilibrium”—or put simply, long periods of slow development interrupted by catastrophic change.6 2001 is a film that explains such cataclysms.
But punctuated equilibrium and catastrophic change are neither strictly religious nor scientific concepts for Clarke and Kubrick. Even if the narrative of the film is the long story of the creation and resurrection of mankind, it is nonetheless true that this is not strictly a religious or scientific account. That is what Kubrick meant when he described the theme as an oxymoron—a “scientific definition of God.” It is why the film encompasses more time than perhaps any other film made, for no less a period could contain such expansive narrative ideas from evolution itself or prophetic religion.
Yet this religious-science emphasis does not begin to exhaust the meanings of the film. Indeed, 2001 is layered with allusions to several of the principal secular and pagan mythologies of Western civilization. As Kubrick noted, it would not reach millions of viewers unless it explored “the universal myths and archetypes of both our shared cultural experience and our collective unconscious.”7
Sometimes these mythological allusions are explicit, as in the notion of the Odyssey, which is suggested not only by the film’s title but also by the various names given to characters or locations. If the astronaut Bowman is a latter-day Odysseus and outer space the tempest-tossed Mediterranean, the classical references nevertheless remain intentionally incomplete and undeveloped. The astronauts do not undergo the variety of adventures that kept the Greek hero and his crew from returning home. So too with other stories that are invoked, such as Nietzsche’s Superman, called forth by the leaping chords of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, which is played at the beginning; when ape-men first use the tool/weapon they have been inspired to discover during the first section of the film; and in the birth of the star child at the end. As Alexander Walker paraphrases this theme, the film is Kubrick’s story of the nature of intelligence: “He roots intelligence in the mythological past, before man has begun to use it, then ends intelligence in the metaphysical future, where man cannot yet grasp its latest transformation.”8
In addition to such analogies, there is, of course, the theme of man and modern technology run amok. Kubrick makes this point repeatedly, for example, in the affectless human reactions of the “Moon Station” sequence, in the robotlike astronauts Poole and Bowman, and finally, most dangerously, in the computer HAL, who turns murderer when he believes (wrongly) that the mission to Jupiter is endangered. This too, is a retelling of older myths—of the sorcerer’s apprentice, of Frankenstein, of course, and of the countless science fiction films and stories that repeated this warning. From the havoc caused by out-of-control science in H. G. Wells to the cerebral considerations of Isaac Asimov in his brilliant examination of technological control, I Robot (1950), this variety of science fiction fits the description of what Susan Sontag has called “the imagination of disaster” as the defining characteristic of the genre.9
Beyond the obvious references to mythical stories and older literary plots and science fiction clichés, critics have found symbolic meanings of a different sort in the film. For example, the monolith left by the aliens has been regarded as the God beyond God. Some critics have discovered Freudian symbolism in the rebirth of the fetus after a voyage through a womblike tunnel of light, or in the breaking glass as Bowman eats his last supper in the Louis XVI motel/zoo/observation room. Others have described the monolith as a representation of pure form, or discovered in Jupiter a symbol of the father.10 The possibilities are legion, and I believe that this is intentionally so.
But why this layered—some might say confused—structure, with bits and pieces of myth cited and partially developed, with suggestive images that cannot quite be unified into a persuasive and coherent whole? Why a story that competes with one of the most fundamental accounts of our civilization, the Bible, in presenting the beginnings and the endings of human existence but that is yet not a truly religious depiction? Why a clearly designated discussion of evolution that, in the end, denies or seriously modifies Darwin? There are, I believe, a number of plausible explanations: the pride of the autodidact eager to display his omnivorous reading; the long period of development and incomplete modifications to the plot and its execution; the powerful presence of Arthur Clarke, who conceived of the film in somewhat different terms than Kubrick; and the likely possibility that confusion or diverse clues were intentional and that the various and even conflicting possibilities were part of Kubrick’s purpose to promote multiple interpretations of his work. This is what he meant by calling the film a “mythological documentary.” As Clarke put it, “We set out quite consciously and deliberately—calculatedly if you like—to create a myth, an adventure, but still be totally plausible, realistic, intelligent.”11 Without, of course, quite saying what it all meant.
In addition to myth and symbol, there were certain related intellectual enthusiasms that Kubrick also wished to interject in the film. First among these was the director’s strong belief in the existence of extraterrestrial beings. Although Arthur Clarke claims to have saved him from a naïve belief in UFOs and flying saucers, Kubrick’s enthusiasm was based upon substantial science or, better, probable scientific speculations. As he said in an interview, he was fascinated by the “scientific probability that the universe was full of intelligent civilizations and advanced entities.” Allying himself with “most astronomers and other scientists interested in the whole question,” he affirmed that he too was “strongly convinced that the universe is crawling with life, much of it, since the numbers are so staggering, equal to us in intelligence, or superior, simply because human intelligence has existed for so relatively short a period.”12
It was also Kubrick’s belief that evolution had worked in a particular fashion: that the human discovery of tools was embedded in the development of warfare. In other words, man’s progress was as much determined by destruction as by advance; the race was truly descended from Cain and Abel. This attitude certainly expressed his ambiguity about technology, whatever his enthusiasms for cryonics and space travel. Like much of the science fiction from which he hoped to differentiate his work, he retained an edge of suspicion about technology and a tendency to emphasize the dark side of mechanical progress.13
In justifying his allusions to multiple myths, Kubrick sometimes cited Joseph Campbell’s anthropological study of mythologies, Hero with a Thousand Faces; J. G. Frazier’s Golden Bough; and his own adherence to the psychology of Jung. What links these works is their exploration of the symbolic dimension of culture. In other words, they are about the myth-making genius of human beings and societies as much as they are about specific stories. This capacity of the imagination to hold varieties of mythic ideas in a kind of synchronous tension justifies the partial references that intersperse the film. In this sense, even the allusions to Christianity are cast within the larger schema of multiple mythologies.14
What some critics have treated as confusion and intentional obfuscation—and they may partially be right about this—also reveals Kubrick’s purpose of opening up speculation about possible interpretations. The director purposely chose to convey meaning through visual signs and symbols, aiming at both the conscious and unconscious aspects of the viewer, rather than explication through text. By making what is essentially a silent film, with language used sparingly to convey certain necessary narrative cues or to act as a counterpoint to visual messages, Kubrick made it more difficult to determine precisely what he intended. Because visual metaphor is generally less specific or concrete in content than speech, it was tempting because it was possible to layer multiple meanings into the structure of the film. As he put it in an interview with Playboy magazine in 1968:
2001 is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and 19 minutes of film, there are only a little less than 40 minutes of dialogue. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeon-holing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001, the message is the medium.15
If true, there exists an interesting paradox. Kubrick and Clarke never stopped talking about possible interpretations of the film, and Clarke’s novel (published after the release of the film) carefully explained many of the more obscure meanings and suggested interpretations that would surely have been beyond the consciousness—or unconscious—of the average viewer. For example, that the room in part 4, after Bowman passes through the Stargate, was furnished in Louis XVI style, or that these living quarters were actually an observation chamber furnished out of Bowman’s own memories are not obvious without considerable prompting. Kubrick, critics, and the legion of interpreters writing about the film have added meanings that ordinary viewers, by themselves, would ever see. How, for example, was the viewer to know that Kubrick had, in his own words, filmed “a human zoo approximating a hospital” that was constructed out of Bowman’s “dreams and imagination”? For good reason Arthur Clarke seemed unable to let go of the story, rewriting it three more times before his death, in novels entitled 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, and 3001: The Final Odyssey. Indeed, for a film whose meanings were purportedly individual and subconscious, 2001 has been subjected to a remarkable degree of scrutiny and intellectualization, more than making up for the silences of the film itself. The aura of commentary has become as much a part of the experience of the film as the viewing of it.16
In the creation, filming, and final editing of 2001, Kubrick transformed a relatively concrete, if brief, short story by Arthur Clarke into an increasingly elliptical and suggestive narrative in which speech, on the few occasions it is used, imparts important information or elsewhere reveals, in its banality, the absence of meaningful communication. As Frederick Ordway, NASA astronomer, rocket expert, and technical advisor on the film, noted, Kubrick cut elements of voice-over commentary that explained several of the key scenes of the film. It was thus left to Clarke, Kubrick, and various critics to reintroduce those missing elements in interviews and articles on the film—and especially in Clarke’s novelized version.17 For example, in describing how aliens changed the ape-men, he helpfully explains that the monolith probed their minds and implanted ideas: “It was a slow, tedious business, but the crystal monolith was patient.”18
Because he demanded so much from visual symbols, Kubrick moved ever closer to the aesthetics of silent film, defined by the camera work and montage. Such consequences were surely anticipated. As Kubrick noted, “words are a terrible straitjacket.” By suppressing speech, the director returned the science fiction movie to its origins in the masterpiece of Georges Méliès, whose 1902 Trip to the Moon first demonstrated the possibilities of using montage as a kind of new language in which the miraculous or extraordinary could be spliced into the narrative through special effects (figure 16). In 2001, the silence only underscores and calls attention to the significance of the camera work itself. Kubrick’s meticulous care in creating verisimilitude, technological plausibility, and the depiction of space-travel reality equally matches his care in depicting multiple symbols and metaphors. Both interact in the deep silences of space.19
But, of course, silent films were and are neither completely silent nor always without words. By titling parts of the film “The Dawn of Man,” “Jupiter Mission,” “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite,” Kubrick borrowed another tactic from silent films: by dividing the action with titles, he cued the viewer through signs that the scene and action had shifted through time and space. Doing so granted him, as it allowed silent film masters, the ability to jump from one scene to another, plausibly and without any explanation of how or why. As for silence, before the advent of sound, films may have lacked a soundtrack, but they were often accompanied by music that reflected, anticipated, and enhanced the mood of the scene playing on the screen. Kubrick also uses music in this fashion, as a kind of counterpoint to the action, and his choices have been much noted and often discussed. So, for example, he uses Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra to accompany the beginning of man’s evolutionary ascent. The bone/weapon tossed by Moon-Watcher into the air and then transformed into a shot of an armed space ship circling the Earth is perhaps the most famous cinematic element of the film (figures 3 and 4). And this is accompanied by the transition from Strauss to Strauss, from Richard to Johann, Jr., from the rising, majestic chords of the famous tone poem, to the banal oom-pah-pah of The Blue Danube. In the “Dawn of Man” sequence, the music lends mystery, tension, and brilliance to the action; in the second, the waltz reduces the technological miracle of space travel to the ordinary—which is exactly how the humans in the film react to it. Further on, Kubrick uses the eerie voice and orchestra pieces by György Ligeti (The Requiem, Lux aeterna, and Atmospheres) with their religious and mystical overtones to suggest the mythical dimensions of the voyage of the Discovery 1.20
Reaching back into the history of cinema is only one way that Kubrick reinforces and highlights the symbolic and metaphoric gravity of the film. He also engages in a long-running dialogue with the genre characteristics of science fiction films, in effect, arguing against their conventions in order to distinguish his work from the hugely popular and often trite plot lines and conventions of the form. At the same time, he remains within the form in certain key respects, capitalizing on the expectations of an audience that had been well trained in what to expect from other depictions of technology gone berserk or the encounter with ETs.
With the exception of a few science fiction films that owed their plots to literature (like Fahrenheit 451, War of the Worlds, or even A Clockwork Orange), most of them repeated a clearly identifiable set of characteristics. It can be argued that 2001 is an argument against the conventions of science fiction as much as it is a representative of that genre. Sometimes Kubrick intentionally introduced extraneous elements into the general format, even as he satirized others as if to call attention to his understanding and contempt for the platitudes of the genre.
Kubrick’s ambiguous relationship to the standard format of science fiction films can be grouped around four general themes: depicting aliens, scientific verisimilitude, the ironic denouement, and humor. Susan Sontag’s famous essay “The Imagination of Disaster,” written in 1965, outlined the principal elements of the genre for her time. Taking the Hollywood monster invasion films as her model, she suggested that audiences responded to “the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself.” Dehumanization and the threat of being “taken over” by alien forces of some kind demonstrate, she suggests, “the depersonalizing of modern urban life.” Ambivalence toward science, she continued, is another hallmark of these films. In effect, they constitute a record of fears, disappointments, and apprehension about the future, metaphorically reproduced and dramatized through the imagination. They emerge, she says, from the present condition of society. Arthur Clarke himself said something similar of ordinary science fiction literature:
The majority of authors who have called up science and fiction, with a characteristic lack of imagination have only seen in these monsters (other forms of intelligence in the solar system) a pretext to describe the conflicts and acts of violence just like those that sully the pages of our own history.21
In other words, science fiction is the displaced, disguised drama of our own nightmares, set in an alien atmosphere, but like the dreams they resemble, only thinly disguise the disturbingly familiar dread of loss of self-control, invasion, and death.
Kubrick’s 2001 includes many of these generic elements. There is the director’s much-publicized belief in intelligent aliens, even superior aliens. There is his well-known hostility toward technocracy and the destructive effects of a technology devoid of any human control or empathy. There is an evil monster: HAL, the computer turned murderer. There is the loss of control and personal invasion. There are aliens. There is space and time travel. Indeed, almost all of the principal elements that constitute the classic science fiction film are in 2001.
At the same time, Kubrick appears to enjoy playing against stereotype and the expected. Compare his work, for example, with Planet of the Apes, also released in 1968 and the film that won the Academy Award that Kubrick thought should be his. Planet of the Apes, like many previous science fiction films, is a morality play whose ending is an ironic commentary and sudden explanation of everything that has preceded it in the film. Like many other examples of this genre, it employs the distance of science fiction to depict (and disguise) a contemporary social question—for example, racism. Kubrick certainly includes social commentary in his portrayal of the dangers of technology. And yet the director undercuts the very elements he invokes so seriously, like his distrust of technology. For example, the “monster” HAL, albeit a murderer, dies an almost comic death. When Bowman destroys his intellectual capacity piece by piece, he pathetically sings the chorus from the old song “A Bicycle Built for Two.”
In what is perhaps their wisest move, Kubrick and Clarke, unlike almost any other sci-fi makers, resisted the temptation to embody the aliens. Instead, geometric monoliths represent them rather than, as Clarke put it, “some pathetic papier-mâché monster.” And the geometric slab, which only symbolizes the aliens is, itself, suggestive of a variety of other mythic or psychological meanings. While the two creators debated the ending of the film for months, considering all manner of possibilities, such as strange new cities or alien creatures, they chose to picture the death and rebirth of Bowman through the psychedelic sequence, the surrealistic scene set in the Louis XVI room, and the final birth of the star child, contemplating Earth and an unknown future. In one sense, Kubrick here is playing with the expectations of the audience, who had been trained to expect a final unveiling of the aliens and a specific explanation of their motives.22
Kubrick also confronts three clichés common to many other films, all of them based upon a misapprehension of the dynamics of space travel. His rocket ship makes no noise in the vacuum of space, for example. There is no visible plume of exhaust. And, when a meteor tumbles perilously near the Discovery 1, in a scene with no other purpose than to demonstrate his technological knowledge, it makes no swoosh.
Together with such obvious moments when he is having fun with the form, the director was meticulous in his research into anthropology for the section on “The Dawn of Man” and in visualizing the various other effects of space travel. Scientists like Carl Sagan and Ordway, among others, were consultants, and an original, ten-minute prologue of interviews with scientists and theologians about the possibilities of alien existence was filmed, although it was cut from the final version. As David Stork has noted, the depiction of space travel was so accurate that portions of the film were used in training NASA astronauts. Kubrick also consulted corporations like IBM and Boeing to make sure that he got his hardware and software right. To some observers, this was not necessarily a positive. As physicist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton observed, “When I saw Kubrick at work on Space Odyssey in London, I was immediately struck by the fact that he was interested in gadgetry rather than in the people.” Or as Renate Adler put it in her famous hostile review for the New York Times, “The movie is so completely absorbed in its own problems, its use of color and space, its fanatical devotion to science-detail, that it is somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.”23
Kubrick’s commitment to scientific plausibility further differentiated his work from most science fiction films, especially in its conclusion. The stock sci-fi film ordinarily ended with a preposterous but easy to grasp explanation, for example, that radiation had caused a mutant monster, or that man’s aggrandizing soul had ironically tempted him to commit harmful mistakes. Kubrick had little use for this ironic interplay between human aspiration and failure. Kubrick’s film, rather than returning to the human condition and the comforting status quo ante, self-consciously breaks through to rebirth and regeneration. Thus it is open-ended and speculative, where most other science fiction films circle back upon themselves in asserting the moral limitations of humanity. Where most science fiction returns to a kind of stasis, delivering the audience back to the world of mundane reality, 2001 ends with an opening to the future.
Finally, and perhaps most dramatically, Kubrick challenges the science fiction genre through the use of humor. This occurs in many guises and several places, but perhaps most notably in the initial sequence in part 2, the section dealing with the alien monolith discovered on the moon. Even some of Kubrick’s most perceptive critics, in their undivided attention to the brilliant jump cut from Moon-Watcher’s bone to the encircling nuclear warheads, have missed his follow-up comic gesture. From the orbiting bombs, he segues to the approaching space ship, and finally, inside, to Heywood Floyd’s floating pen (the same shape as the bone and the rocket ship; figure 5). What follows are a number of verbal and visual jokes about eating (bad airline food), airplane bathrooms, and telephones in space, replete with a stewardess in a tacky airline uniform. The end of this sequence is the almost ludicrous and uninformative briefing given by Floyd to scientists working on the moon discovery. And over all of it are the bouncy chords of The Blue Danube—one of the most decidedly non–science fiction sounds in the universe. Although there are other moments of humor sprinkled throughout the film, none is so pointed or extensive as these. But they all serve to differentiate his work from the deadly serious plots of most other science fiction films.
At the same time, Kubrick raises serious issues that he does not resolve but that other films might have fully engaged. For example, there is a slightly ominous discussion with Russian scientists about the moon slab, which the Americans are keeping a secret under the cover story of a quarantine. Floyd pointedly warns that disclosing the existence of the slab might cause panic and fear throughout the world. Yet Kubrick declines any follow-up to these ideas of nuclear competition and worldwide alarm at the discovery of alien intelligence, just raising and dropping them as if to say, “I could have gone in this direction, but I chose not to.”
Perhaps only Kubrick was sure-footed enough to be playful and even misleading where other directors feared to break the continuity of mood and verisimilitude. Yet, nothing about these numerous encounters with the platitudes of science fiction in any way diminishes the serious intent of 2001. Instead, like everything else in the film, these moments call attention to the director, the choices he makes, and his sometimes obscure purposes.
To understand why there is this constant reminder of the mechanics of movie making, we must return to the beginning, to the fundamental question of what sort of story Kubrick is telling. In confronting and combining the two grand narratives of the origin and fate of man in the universe, of creation and evolution, of religion and science, where does he stand, finally? The answer, insofar as there is one, is suggested by Kubrick’s incessant depiction of the eye. There are eyes and cameras everywhere, and HAL’s “seeing” is, in fact, a form of camera work. Whether it be in the guise of the sun rising over the first monolith (like the Masonic symbol on the dollar bill), the eyes of the ape-men, the eyes of the tiger, HAL’s computer camera-eye, or finally, the distended eye of the star child, this is a shifting, significant symbol (figures 13, 14, 31–35).24 Seeing is conflated with the camera and then, again, with Kubrick’s camera, which is present at every moment. This witness indicates that the most important presence in the film is finally not HAL or Bowman or Moon-Watcher or the star child—not the hero of the Odyssey, but the poet of the drama, like Homer or the singer of the psalms, or the auteur himself. In this respect, the auteur as creator takes on a new meaning. In the end, the only one, finally, who knows the meaning of the mythic story in 2001 is Kubrick himself. And like other great creators of myths about human origins and fate, he has invented a story that is filled with possibilities, which he may or may not have intended. Thus it is left, finally, for the viewer to decide whether this new myth is religion or science or some personal combination of the two—and whether it merits a place among the other important stories of origin and fate.
1. Quoted in Stephanie Schwam, ed., The Making of 2001 (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 265.
2. Quoted in ibid., 163.
3. Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (London: Fine, 1997), 313.
4. Lynn Spigel, “From Domestic Space to Outer Space: The 1960s Fantastic Family Sit-Com,” in Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction, ed. Constance Penley et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 205–35. Spigel notes that critics deplored the boring, unpoetic, vulgar, “oh boy!” tone of the Apollo 11 mission (229).
5. John C. Whitcombe, Jr., and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1962), xx. If this biblical tract shares some generic characteristics with science fiction (in its use of scientific arguments to validate an imaginative narrative), Tim La Haye’s enormously popular Left Behind series goes one step further in imagining the end of the world. Both Genesis Flood and Left Behind exhibit some of the key characteristics of science fiction typology outlined by Susan Sontag in “The Imagination of Disaster,” in Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966), 209–25.
6. See Stephen Jay Gould and N. Eldredge, “Punctuated Equilibria: The Tempo and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered,” Paleobiology 3 (1977): 115–51.
7. Thomas Allen Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 5.
8. Alexander Walker, Stanley Kubrick, Director (New York: Norton, 1999), 173. On other possible allegories and myths, see Leonard F. Wheat, Kubrick’s 2001: A Triple Allegory (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2000), 2–10.
9. Sontag, “Imagination of Disaster.”
10. David G. Hock, “Mythic Patterns in 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Journal of Popular Culture 4 (Spring 1991): 961–64; Michael Herr, Kubrick (New York: Grove, 2000), 13; Carolyn Geduld, Filmguide to 2001: A Space Odyssey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 62, 67–68.
11. Gene Youngblood, “Interview with Arthur Clarke,” in Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970), 147.
12. Neil McAleer, Odyssey: The Authorized Biography of Arthur C. Clarke (London: Gollancz, 1992), 194; Charles Kohler, “Stanley Kubrick Raps,” East Village Eye, in Schwam, Making of 2001, 246. See also Gene D. Phillips, Rodney Hill, et al., Encyclopedia of Stanley Kubrick (New York: Facts on File, 2002), xx.
13. “Stanley Kubrick: Playboy Interview,” in Schwam, Making of 2001, 275.
14. LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick, 266; Herr, Kubrick, 13.
15. Schwam, Making of 2001, 272.
16. Norman Kagan, The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick (New York: Continuum, 2000), 146. Since the 1990s, there has been an extraordinary surge of writing about Kubrick and his films, including several biographies. In addition to the other works cited, see John Baxter, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1997); James Howard, Stanley Kubrick Companion (London: Batsford, 1999); David Hughes, The Complete Kubrick (London, Virgin, 2001); Piers Bizony, 2001: Filming the Future (London: Aurum, 1994); Jerome Agel, The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 (New York: New American Library, 1970); David G. Stork, ed., HAL’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997); Gene D. Phillips, Stanley Kubrick Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001); Michel Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey (London: British Film Institute, 2001); Mario Falsetto, Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001); Michel Ciment, Kubrick (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1987); and Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
17. Frederick I. Ordway, “Testimonies,” in Schwam, Making of 2001, 126–28; and Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 9.
18. Arthur Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (New York: New American Library, 1968), 21, 25. Clarke explained in detail how the aliens transformed the ape-men and why.
19. Thomas Nelson suggests that Kubrick was influenced by V. I. Pudovkin’s concept of films laid out in his book Film Technique (London: Newnes, 1933). See Harry M. Geduld, “Return to Méliès: Reflections on the Science-Fiction Film,” Humanist 28 (November–December 1968): 23. See also Bizony, 2001: Kubrick, he wrote, “was happy to draw inspiration from the brilliant back-yard magic of George[s] Méliès and his Voyage to the Moon (1902)” (144). Also see McAleer, Odyssey, 217.
20. As Richard Strauss wrote of Zarathustra: “I mean to convey in music an idea of the evolution of the human race from its origin, through the various phases of development, religious as well as scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the Ubermensch.” Phillips et al., Encyclopedia, 12.
21. Sontag, “Imagination of Disaster,” 212–13, 216–17, 222–23. Arthur Clarke quoted in F. Hoda, “Éprouvante et Science Fiction dans le Cinéma américain actuel,” Positif 2 (November–December 1954): 16.
22. Clarke, Lost Worlds of 2001: Science Fiction (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1972), 189; Fred Chappell, “The Science Fiction Film Image: A Trip to the Moon to 2001: A Space Odyssey,” in Science Fiction Films, ed. Thomas R. Atkins (New York: Monarch, 1976), 33–45.
23. Geduld, Filmguide to 2001, 33–34; David Stork, “The Best-Informed Dream: HAL and the Vision of 2001,” in Stork, HAL’s Legacy, 133–34, 147.
24. W. R. Robinson and Mary McDermott, “2001 and the Literary Sensibility,” Georgia Review 26 (Spring 1972): 26.