Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey has provided us with one of the most frequently noted transitions in film history, the match cut that takes viewers from “The Dawn of Man,” as the film’s first sequence is titled, to the year 2001 (figures 3 and 4). That cut matches a bone cast into the air by a shrieking hominid, one of those on which the opening sequence focuses, to a space station, similarly thrust into space by the modern humans who dominate the succeeding sequences. It is a wonderfully ironic piece of editing, suggesting how, for all of our technological advances—advances attested to by the complexity of the space station, the other satellites we glimpse, and the civilized strains of a Strauss waltz that accompany this shift—we have fundamentally progressed very little. We continue to fling our bits of technology into the air, higher and faster, of course, but with a similar sort of exultation, of self-conscious pride, as we strive to overcome one of the fundamental laws that weighs us down, governs human life, and constrains our ambitions: gravity. It is on gravity that this chapter focuses, in part because the film itself, perhaps simply with a desire to be faithful to the scientific laws governing space travel—which are often selectively ignored by earlier science fiction films—frequently reminds us of its operation and emphasizes how in various ways it impinges on us. But gravity also becomes something more than just a scientific context for this narrative; it opens onto a larger gravitas, or seriousness of purpose of 2001, a seriousness that has at times gone unappreciated because of our focus on the film’s painstaking efforts at scientific accuracy.
One hallmark of the initial response to 2001 was precisely an appreciation for its unusually rigorous attention to scientific detail, a rigor that had pointedly been missing both from the “space operas” of the serials and early science fiction television and from the mutation and alien invasion films that had largely dominated the genre during the previous decade. Yet it was an appreciation that curiously suggested very different attitudes toward the film. On the one hand, critics repeatedly underscored its technical accuracy as the surest sign of the film’s achievement, almost as if that were its point. As one reviewer offered, “[T]he detail … is immense and unimpeachable, I’m sure. This must be the best-informed dream ever.”1 And Kubrick’s frequent praise for his “staff of scientific advisors,” including Marvin Minsky of MIT, one of the leading authorities on artificial intelligence, certainly encouraged this approach.2 Yet on the other hand, a number of critics complained about that very emphasis. One claimed that the film demonstrates “a kind of fanaticism about … authenticity” that results in a story “somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.”3 Prior to 2001’s appearance, the science fiction narrative had largely become a platform for speculation not so much on how our science and resultant technology might allow us to accomplish things, but on the dramatic and usually fearful consequences of those developments. The landmark science fiction films of early cinema, Metropolis (1926) and Things to Come (1936), were both heavily melodramatic and highly stylized dystopic visions, while the flood of such films that appeared in the 1950s and early 1960s had become, as Susan Sontag famously noted, a kind of cultural “imagination of disaster,” one in which our technological developments simply “stand for different values,” as the narrative itself becomes an almost moralistic “allegory.”4
In marked contrast, 2001, with its careful attention to detail, its scrupulous accounting for the various laws of nature and the physics of space flight, and its expert-driven extrapolation from current science and technology,5 seemed to stake out a different trajectory. As Edward James offers in his history of the genre, Kubrick’s film, because of its realistic texture and aura of scientific authority, “did as much as Apollo to make space flight both real and even banal” for audiences of the era.6 He suggests that its main effect was to prepare us for the real thing. And indeed, in some ways, it recalls the near-documentary nature of such rare earlier efforts as Destination Moon (1950) and The Conquest of Space (1955; figures 1 and 2), both of which employed the leading rocket experts of the day as technical consultants in attempts to realistically forecast how mankind would take its first halting steps into space. However, both of those movies, because of their B-film budgets and B-film imaginations, failed to marshal the sort of special effects or dramatic visions that would make their versions of space travel either convincing or compelling. In 2001, though, the real, even in its sometimes banal or mundane forms, is central to the film’s—and the filmmaker’s—imagination.
Certainly, one of Kubrick’s strengths, as demonstrated in his previous films, was his scrupulous—if not quite fanatical—attention to detail and especially to scientific and historical accuracy. An earlier film, The Killing (1956), with its characters who minutely plot out the elements of a race track heist and their planned escape, points toward the director’s meticulousness, as well as his fascination with human efforts at fashioning and living by a thoroughly rational world view. As Kubrick noted, his approach to each project he undertook was to “totally immerse” himself in it, reading and researching exhaustively in an effort to achieve a level of total verisimilitude.7 Beyond achieving a simple realism, though, that attention to detail consistently served a larger film aesthetic for Kubrick, his belief that filmmaking is “dealing in a primarily visual experience, and telling a story through the eyes.”8 If his painstaking efforts helped to create the vision of a scientifically true and believable experience of space and space travel in 2001, then they also point toward something more, his sense that film conveys its most important messages—“complex concepts and abstractions”—most directly by exploiting the intricate texture of the world we see around us, forcing us to use our eyes to see it clearly and better understand it, and thereby, as he says, “short-circuiting the rigid surface cultural blocks that shackle our consciousness to narrowly limited areas of experience.”9 In short, the real—including a rigid scientific accuracy—was the essential path to increased understanding.
One of those complex concepts is bound up in that famous match cut—which Annette Michelson has justly termed “the most spectacular ellipsis in cinematic history”10—and particularly in what it realistically visualizes and anticipates. Tossed bones, of course, inevitably fall back down to Earth, thanks to the law of gravity. Good science simply anticipates that something thrown into the sky will eventually arc downward. Yet that hominid’s exuberant effort to defy gravity, an effort celebrated by the images of satellites and other space probes that we then glimpse as the narrative bursts through the boundaries of the past and moves to the year 2001, is a signpost for a most momentous development for humankind, which justifies the narrative’s radical jump in time and space. As Paul Virilio explains, the relatively “recent acquisition of the speed of liberation from gravity” constitutes a feat of “historic importance,” comparable to the development of “the absolute speed of our modern real-time transmission tools,” enabling us “to escape the real space of our planet and so to ‘fall upwards.’” Yet that new trajectory—or different sort of “fall”—ultimately means little, he offers, unless it also spurs us to move beyond a certain way of thinking, the influence of “the stability of gravitational space that has always oriented man’s habitual activities” and left him clinging to a stable yet staid, even stultifying mode of thought.11 It is this subtler, yet ultimately stronger force of stability and complacency which 2001 and its meditations on gravity eventually bring into focus.
To further tease out that image on which we have initially focused, we might again note that thrown objects never continue along their original vectors for long. Bent by the force of gravitational space, they tend to curve back, in much the same way that human thought, grounded in custom, seeks out a point of stability. Thomas Kuhn has offered one of the most noteworthy explanations of this pattern, or what he terms the scientific “problem of progress.”12 As he offers, the scientific breakthrough that powers technological advances also tends to become the confining paradigm that stands in the way of further advances; the insight which once effectively “transformed the scientific imagination,” arcing out beyond the status quo, eventually becomes a way of thinking which patterns all that follows, or what Kuhn labels the “tradition of normal science.”13 In terms of 2001’s pattern of visual design, we might simply say that the vector warps into a curved shape or, given a bit more force, produces a circular pattern, that described by the typical orbital body, such as a satellite or, more pointedly, the shape and motion of the space station that introduces the second major sequence of 2001.
In fact, it is this space station, itself circular and inducing a spinning motion to the shuttles that want to dock there, that provides us with another sort of paradigm for the narrative that follows. The shuttle carrying Heywood Floyd to the station, we might note, repeatedly foregrounds the power of gravity, in part by frequently underscoring its absence—through Floyd’s floating pen (figure 5), retrieved by a passing stewardess; his arms that undulate as he sleeps, as if he were floating in water; and the lingering close-up of the stewardess’s special gravity shoes, which allow her to perform normally if rather awkwardly in the zero-gravity conditions of space14 These details, precisely the sort upon which most reviewers quickly seized, not only illustrate the weightless state attained on this flight, but also point up the human effort at countering this state, at constructing gravity where it is not natural. Thus, as the shuttle approaches the circular space station, which is rotating in order to generate its own gravity, it too begins to spin, as if engaged in a dance with the station to the tune of the Strauss waltz on the soundtrack. The music and movement together suggest a kind of harmony here, although they also hark back to an earlier state—to the romantic era and to the gravity of Earth. No longer falling upward, as Virilio puts it, the space travelers on board the station have reconstructed their customary stability, translating the exploratory vector of space flight into a stationary circularity and hinting of a larger tendency here, even as humanity moves into the unknown, to compromise exploration, to control or even cover up discoveries, to cling to the ruling paradigms. We might think of it as a kind of fear of falling—upward.
On board the space station too we see underscored the problems of that gravitational and intellectual stability, at least in its cultural manifestations. Here Heywood Floyd encounters his Soviet counterparts, and their polite banter eventually gives way to pointed questions and even warnings about strained relations between the Russian and American moon colonies. With this encounter, Kubrick suggests that there is to be no falling away from Cold War realities, no end in sight to—or hope for progress beyond—the confrontation between East and West that he had so bleakly satirized in his previous film Dr. Strangelove (1964). This potentially destructive stability would apparently continue far into humanity’s future. At the same time, it inscribes another sort of narrative circularity, by reframing the opening sequence and the hominid conflict that eventuated in violence, killing, and a bloody bone tossed into the air. Here, of course, a civilized humanity puts a polite cover on its violent potential, its bloody bones, but the veiled threats of the Russians and Floyd’s transparent misrepresentations remind us how, even as we seem ready to break free of the past or fall upward, humanity appears almost gravitationally bound to replicating its earlier, violent history, to continuing along the dominant cultural paradigm.15
During Floyd’s journey from the space station to the Clavius moon colony, we encounter at almost every turn the human difficulties involved in functioning in this new, gravity-free environment—difficulties that help to underscore Michelson’s precise assessment of 2001 as a “film of dis-orientation.”16 Eating in zero gravity means sucking liquefied food through a straw, and when Heywood Floyd momentarily lets go of his food tray, it quickly begins to float away. The stewardess must awkwardly cope with a constantly shifting interior horizon, as we see when she tries to serve the ship’s pilots and seems to walk around the circular wall of the ship and exit upside down (figure 6). And in one of the film’s infrequent light moments, we see Floyd in close-up as he stands bemused, staring at the elaborate instructions attached to the “zero gravity toilet,” complete with an ominous caution that “Passengers are advised to read instructions before use” (figure 26). Each example reminds us—and in the case of the stewardess’s gravity-defying movements, almost literally—of the fundamental ways in which we rely on that customary pull of gravity and easily become disoriented in its absence. And the visualization of these effects only serves to prepare for that far more unsettling effect that has instigated Floyd’s trip, his effort to investigate and maintain a cover for the discovery at Clavius of the mysterious black monolith, an artifact that, he assures his colleagues, must be kept secret because of its enormous potential “for cultural shock and social disorientation.”
Tellingly, the subsequent sequence, titled “Jupiter Mission—Eighteen Months Later,” quickly returns to this emphasis on disorientation, keyed to the problem of weightlessness. For while it begins with a slow and deliberate tracking shot of the spaceship Discovery—a shot that makes maximum use of the Super Panavision aspect ratio to underscore the ship’s linear trajectory in space17—it leads to a pointedly unsettling image, that of Frank Poole jogging on a seemingly vertical track within the ship. As the camera tracks along with his movement, we recognize that our sense of disorientation, the visual challenge to our normal sense of “up” and “down,” results from the movement of a portion of the ship; the living quarters of Discovery are housed in a centrifuge that rotates in order to produce its own artificial gravity, thereby allowing Poole to seemingly run upside down (figure 18). To further emphasize this effect, the subsequent scene in which Poole and his fellow crewman Dave Bowman eat and watch a BBC interview is constructed of shots that show the two astronauts seated but place them on a horizontal axis, as if their backs were to the floor (figure 7). While Alexander Walker has called attention to the repetition of these “bizarre ‘irrational’ angles possible in this ‘squirrel’s cage’ environment,” he passes them off as simply a matter of style, of Kubrick trying “to pull off some spectacular effects.”18 But more than simply an effect, these images link both simple and complex elements of the narrative: the human effort to create an artificial gravity and the larger consequences of that constructed orientation. Those strange angles do, of course, make the astronauts’ positioning in screen space repeatedly seem awkward and unnatural, in the process hinting of how unready they are for the task of “discovery,” which will ultimately render a conventional, Earth-centered, and gravity-determined orientation irrelevant.
Those same bizarre angles also help to prepare us for the narrative’s eventual trajectory: a movement away from this sort of conventional orientation and from the psychic gravity that has so bound humanity to Earth, to certain modes of Earth-oriented behavior, and to particular paradigms of thought. For an announcement by the HAL 9000 computer, which keys the principal action in this sequence—that part of the ship’s communication equipment will fail within seventy-two hours—quickly focuses the narrative on issues of stability and orientation. Throughout the following scenes, HAL’s red, staring eye becomes an unmoving—and unblinking—presence, representing the electronic intelligence that controls all functions, including life support, on board Discovery and carefully monitoring the behavior of the two astronauts in case they too become in some way unstable and pose a threat to the mission (figure 13). In marked contrast, we see Dave and Frank being forced out of their comfort zone, that is, the artificial gravity of the centrifuge. First, Dave and Frank, in a section of the ship lacking that gravity, are depicted at an unsettling 90-degree angle from each other as they run a check on HAL’s calculations, and then Frank floats in space while replacing the AE35 part that has been predicted to fail. The visual contrast between the constantly oriented eye and the physically disoriented astronauts—disoriented both in space and in terms of their newfound uncertainty about HAL’s own reliability—foreshadows the coming conflict, as HAL returns to the violent ways of the hominids, killing Frank and sending him floating off into space,19 and then locking Dave out of the Discovery, and thus out of the artificial environment on which he has come to rely.
Suggesting both desperation and a kind of imaginative growth, Dave’s response points to the sort of momentous human development that Virilio has described, to our new ability to “fall upwards.” Shut out of the Discovery and lacking a helmet that might allow him to move around safely in space, Dave essentially gives birth to a new attitude, positioning the pod, as if it were a kind of womb, opposite the emergency entry (a long corridor suggesting the birth canal) and squatting in a fetal position behind the pod’s door, which he then blows open, exposing himself briefly to a most unstable environment—cold, airless, and certainly weightless. Blown out with the door, he does seem to fall upward, and even as he is sucked back toward the pod, to space, and possibly to death, in a sort of inevitable complement to that explosive trajectory, he manages to shut the emergency hatch so that he can begin his new life (figure 8). It is one in which we no longer see him in the grip of gravity; rather, he moves at odd angles and even floats through portions of the ship as he deactivates HAL: disengaging portions of the computer’s memory which, appropriately, float out from the mainframe, and in the process disengaging himself from the sort of conventional stability and rational limits that HAL and the control section of the Discovery have come to represent (figures 14 and 22).
It seems fitting that only with this move, with the shutting off of the computer (and of conventional logic) and in a completely weightless state, does Dave finally confront the problem of “disorientation” and learn of his purpose—to investigate the source of that black monolith whose “origin and purpose [are] still a total mystery” on Earth. For the subsequent wordless sequence, as Dave emerges from the Discovery to pursue a monolith apparently floating among the moons of Jupiter, involves him in a new sort of exploration, one beyond gravity, beyond conventional orientation, in a visionary experience that critics at the time quite rightly described as a kind of “light show.” In the course of this scene, there is no stability, no easy orientation, only the sense of constant movement through space and eventually across a landscape that looks remarkably like that of Earth in the opening sequence, yet outlandishly colored to suggest its different nature, to emphasize that Dave has not simply fallen or followed a circular trajectory back to Earth. Here, it is his eye—in contrast to HAL’s—that becomes the narrative ground, as the film cross-cuts between the landscape over which we rapidly move and close-ups of his eye, blinking and straining to take in these scenes while deprived of the sort of stability and orientation to which earthmen are accustomed (figures 33 and 34).
To underscore the importance of these images, we might recall Kubrick’s next effort, A Clockwork Orange (1971), in which the protagonist Alex wears a set of cufflinks styled like bloody eyeballs (figure 9). Given the decaying, crime-ridden, and futureless world that Alex and his “droogs,” or companions, inhabit, those cufflinks immediately suggest the violent nature of his environment, but they also point beyond it, hinting at a way out of a decadent dead end for humanity. What they point to is a new mode of seeing, a vantage that has been literally, even violently ripped from its normal orientation, freed from its common limits, although here mainly to function as decor, as a symbol of the sort of different perspective for which Alex and his companions subliminally long and which their world so sorely needs if it is to pass beyond this manifestly dead cultural end. However, for various reasons—political, cultural, perhaps even genetic—no one here seems able to achieve that new sort of vision, to cut the ties to the violent human past, to progress much beyond the lingering influence of those hominid ancestors who, in 2001, toss the bloody bone/club skyward in a gesture of transcendence. Style notwithstanding, their vision is simply gravitationally bound to an earlier way of life. But in 2001, seeing in a new way is a key part of what is accomplished: seeing liberated from HAL’s restrictive vantage, from the Discovery’s artificial environment, from an earthly perspective.
For Virilio, as we have noted, that new human capacity to fall upward, to escape from the limiting forces and mindset of our world, is simply one sign of a much larger shift in human orientation, as we enter an environment in which speed and movement, as defined by “the cosmological constant of the speed of light,”20 becomes a key dimension of human development. It is in this context that we might read the film’s final sequence, which finds Dave Bowman, along with the pod that has transported him, in a mysterious, classically decorated suite, wherein he undergoes a series of transformations—transformations that defy the normal paradigms of human thought and that effectively warp our normal sense of space and time. Within this strange environment, described by some as a kind of human zoo, Bowman experiences a series of rapid changes. Starting from his position as an astronaut within his pod, Bowman looks out, and his vantage ultimately produces an image of himself, outside the pod. Each look thereafter produces not the simple and expected glance-object relationship typical of classical film editing, but rather an image of himself in another position, even at a later age, as if the look itself were now enough to rapidly propel the self through space and time, to give birth to a later version of the self (figure 15). Perhaps paradoxically, gravity still operates in this unnatural circumstance, as the falling of a glass from a table underscores. But it is as if it were simply part of the furnishings here, recreated from the storehouse of Bowman’s personal and cultural memory, and something that momentarily catches his attention, as if he were suddenly reminded of how it functions. But it is also readily suspended, as we then see when an aged Bowman, lying in bed, extends his hand and points to a monolith (figure 23), now floating in front of him, and when, in another reverse angle shot, we see the embryonic star child suspended above the bed in Bowman’s previous position. One of the points implicit in this concluding sequence is that gravity—and even space and time, which, we know, are warped by gravity—finally matters very little. It is something to which we are accustomed, a convention of our lives, one of the old laws that bind us to a status quo, that keep us from achieving the sort of escape velocity that, as a species, humanity needs to attain in order to evolve further, to be something other than highly rational and inevitably violent ape-men.
The film’s final scene precisely illustrates this situation, as it offers us two symmetrical images floating as if side by side in space. One is recognizably the Earth, the starting point for the trajectory of the spaceship Discovery as well as the film’s trajectory of discovery. The other is the star child that Dave Bowman has become, as he too completes his trajectory and comes back to Earth. Recalling the bone earlier tossed into the sky, momentarily defying gravity and through a sharp break in narrative time avoiding falling back to Earth and instead magically turning into a kind of satellite, Bowman21 as the star child seems suspended in space, free from the physical laws that bind the planet to which he has arced back, but also a companion to and model for that planet, his birth/rebirth the start of a new round of human evolution (figure 35). As Virilio offers, “beyond earth’s pull, there is no space worthy of the name, but only time,”22 and here time seems ready to produce a transformation every bit as significant as that from hominid to human, from bone to satellite.
In this ultimate ability to defy gravity, we can locate at least a portion of the real gravitas or seriousness of purpose that marks 2001. For this final image emphasizes that humanity will not be bound by the conventional laws of science, by the paradigms that seem to insist on a limited human trajectory, and that once the journey of discovery begins, we need not be drawn back to or fall into a primitive condition. When questioned about that kind of human destiny, about our place in the cosmos, Kubrick has been emphatic on this point. Even with his manifest fascination for scientific detail and the careful attention he gives to it in 2001 and elsewhere, he has also professed his skepticism toward the state of scientific knowledge and what the scientific community often regards, despite Kuhn’s caution, as absolutes. As Kubrick has offered, “I find it difficult to believe that we have penetrated to the ultimate depths of knowledge about the physical laws of the universe…. I’m suspicious of dogmatic scientific rules; they tend to have a rather short life span.”23 The result with 2001 is a film that astonishes with its scientific accuracy and yet also pulls viewers up short with its profound skepticism about the rational world view from which our science operates.
Of course, as we earlier noted, with its unprecedented focus on scientific detail—on the laws that govern us and the technologies we have crafted in line with those laws—2001 originally asserted its difference from the long tradition of popular science fiction films and suggested its quite serious intent. Kubrick produced one of the most compelling versions of space travel ever put on film, convincingly described the sort of ships and structures that would be needed to colonize space, and effectively suggested our increasing reliance on the computer for the command and control functions of space flight. Yet that very texture, as the ruminations on gravity here suggest, also serves to challenge one sort of paradigm. It can help us to consider the role of science and technology in shaping our future and particularly the ways in which a kind of thinking associated with science can both open onto and, if we are not careful, draw us back from, almost gravitationally, the full potential of that future, a future in which we might evolutionally become more than we are. In his study of paradigmatic thought in the sciences, Kuhn offers a similar caveat, noting that “scientists should behave” in a constantly skeptical way “if their enterprise is to succeed.”24 While thoroughly scientific, Kubrick’s film seems skeptical in very much this way. It offers us a glimpse of our potential, as it suggests that if the very human “enterprise is to succeed,” if we are ever to “fall” in the right direction, we shall need to overcome the pull of the physical and even cultural gravity that holds us, that stays the ultimate human odyssey.
1. Charles Champlin, review of 2001, in The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, ed. Jerome Agel (New York: New American Library, 1970), 213.
2. Jeremy Bernstein, “Profile: Stanley Kubrick,” in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, ed. Gene D. Phillips (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 36.
3. Renata Adler, “We’ll Get This Info to You Just as Soon as We Work It Out,” in Agel, Making of Kubrick’s 2001, 208.
4. Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” in her Against Interpretation (New York: Dell, 1966), 218, 226.
5. A noteworthy contribution to that expert-driven attention to detail came from Frederick I. Ordway, one of America’s foremost rocket and space experts. A former member of Wernher von Braun’s rocket team at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and author of numerous books and articles on rocketry and space flight, he served as scientific and technical consultant on the film for eighteen months and subsequently offered a number of postproduction suggestions on the shape of the narrative. For Ordway’s description of his involvement in the film, see his account in Agel’s Making of Kubrick’s 2001, 193–98.
6. Edward James, Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 191.
7. Joseph Gelmis, The Film Director as Superstar (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 298.
8. Ibid., 300.
9. Ibid., 302.
10. Annette Michelson, “Bodies in Space: Film as Carnal Knowledge,” in The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, ed. Stephanie Schwam (New York: Random House, 2000), 198.
11. Paul Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London: Verso, 1997), 2.
12. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 170.
13. Ibid., 6, 144.
14. In an interview with Jeremy Bernstein, Kubrick indicates that even the flight-wear for his space stewardesses was designed with gravity in mind: “the hats have padding in them to cushion any collisions with the ceiling that weightlessness might cause.” See his “Profile: Stanley Kubrick,” 35.
15. We might note how the film links cultural modes of thought with the trope of gravity here, as the polite encounter between Floyd and the Soviet scientists begins with a gravitationally oriented query, about the direction in which each group is heading: “up” or “down.” In space, of course, and even more so within a spinning and orbiting space station, their finger pointings in one direction or another are essentially meaningless, what we might term a gravitational anachronism.
16. Michelson, “Bodies in Space,” 208.
17. Super Panavision was a wide-screen format developed by MGM that used 65mm or 70mm film. It allowed for a much higher quality image than was achieved by the most popular widescreen process, CinemaScope, without relying on an anamorphic lens. It typically produced an aspect ratio of 2.2:1, although when reprocessed for anamorphic projection, it could be projected in a wider format, simulating the Cinerama process. For a discussion of Super Panavision and its applications, see John Belton’s Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 178, 182.
18. Alexander Walker, with Sybil Taylor and Ulrich Ruchti, Stanley Kubrick, Director (New York: Norton, 1999), 185.
19. Suggesting a link between HAL and the hominids of the narrative’s first sequence is the way that Frank is effectively hurled into space by the pod under HAL’s control. He becomes a sign of that aggressive violence just as did the bone cast into the air by the hominid at the end of the opening sequence.
20. Virilio, Open Sky, 13.
21. Bowman’s name, of course, precisely suggests the human ability to use our rather primitive technology to send things arcing into space, to defy the limiting law of gravity.
22. Virilio, Open Sky, 3.
23. Eric Nordern, “Playboy Interview: Stanley Kubrick,” in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 59.
24. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 207.