The general impression that viewers tend to bring away from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is an overall feeling of “coldness,” not just the physical cold of outer space, but of the film’s sense of humanity. As has often been observed, the computer HAL seems a more complex character with greater emotional depth than any of the people in the film. And while the computer’s death is a scene of wrenching pathos, the three hibernating scientists expire in what is perhaps the most antiseptic depiction of death in all of cinema, a bland-looking monitor indicating “Life Functions Terminated.” 2001’s relative dearth of dialogue, wooden characters, slow pace, and sleek production design, which depicts the environments of space travel as thoroughly antiseptic and ordinary, all contribute to the film’s cold tone.
These aspects of 2001 have been much commented upon by other critics, sometimes positively, sometimes not, but what has gone largely unnoticed is how many of the film’s stylistic elements work in relation to one of its primary themes, the gendered implications of space exploration. The coldness of the film’s characters, most of whom are men, is part of the film’s overall view of the relationships among science, technology, violence, and patriarchal masculinity, a view consistent with other Kubrick films. This perspective is surprisingly similar to that of feminist philosophers of science, who have critiqued traditional science as informed by a masculinist bias at least since Francis Bacon employed metaphors of rape and seduction to describe men’s mastery over a feminized Nature.1 Baconian science, based on rational empiricism, induction, and a masculine culture of objectivity and nonsensuality, is “a science leading to the sovereignty, dominion, and mastery of man over nature,”2 as Evelyn Fox Keller puts it. I want to suggest that this sensibility of masculine mastery, as conveyed in popular culture’s representations of space travel, is purposefully undermined by 2001. That is to say, Kubrick’s space epic explores a discursive space as much as physical space in that it seeks for a stylistic alternative to the science fiction film’s conventional depiction of space exploration as an act of phallic masculinity, of penetration and possession—or, to borrow the title of one of the first Hollywood movies on the subject, The Conquest of Space (1955; figure 1).
2001 makes clear immediately in the opening section, entitled “The Dawn of Man,” that it will explore these issues. Kubrick depicts the landscape here as harsh and hostile, a man’s world where only the fittest survive. Warring bands of apes contest with each other and with animals for control of the crucial natural resource, a waterhole; the blanched skeletons of dead apes mingle with the rocks and dust, a reminder of the stakes of survival. The balance of power tips decidedly when one ape (Moon-Watcher in the script) takes the human race’s first technological step by turning a bone into both a tool for killing prey and a weapon for bludgeoning enemies. Only now do the apes seem to walk more upright for, the film suggests, it is the very point when men begin to harness technology for the purposes of extending their inherent aggression that they truly become men. This opening section of 2001 plays out in brief this theme, which preoccupied Kubrick over the course of his career even as it is central to the science fiction genre.
According to science fiction writer and critic Damon Knight, the genre’s appeal resides in what he calls “a sense of wonder.” As Knight explains:
[S]ome widening of the mind’s horizons, no matter in what direction—the landscape of another planet, or a corpuscle’s eye-view of an artery, or what it feels like to be in rapport with a cat … any new sensory experience, impossible to the reader in his [sic] own person, is grist for the mill, and what the activity of science fiction writing is all about.3
Science fiction offers us worlds clearly discontinuous from our own, fantastic worlds that inevitably return us to the known world for comparison.4 If this dynamic of “cognitive estrangement”5 is central to science fiction, then theoretically it is an ideal genre for exploring the ideology of gender, for questioning our culture’s rigid, constrained thinking regarding gender. Yet science fiction, both in literature and film, has been overwhelmingly masculine and patriarchal, and truly alternate visions of gender have been few.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1816 and generally considered to be the first true science fiction novel, offered a critique of masculine scientific presumption in its story of a masturbatory male scientist who chooses to create life on his own rather than with his new bride.6 Yet by the time of Jules Verne fifty years later, the genre was taken over and shaped by men, and women writers retreated from the expansive vistas of science fiction to the more domestic spaces of Gothic melodrama and the novel of manners. Nathaniel Hawthorne, himself a writer of science fiction tales in the 1840s, famously dismissed women writers as “d——d female scribblers.”7 Verne’s popular voyages extraordinaires, such as Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1870), are colonialist tales about male explorers going where no man had gone before, adventure stories wherein, in the words of Robert Scholes, “boyish men played with new toys created by science.”8 At the turn of the twentieth century, H. G. Wells became the founder of modern science fiction with his series of “scientific romances” beginning with The Time Machine in 1895. Wells himself was a champion of women’s rights, among other social causes, but his novels are “romances” only in the literary sense—that is, as a fictional mode. In fact, Wells’s major science fiction novels contain no significant female characters, with the one possible exception of Weena, the childlike, helpless woman in the distant future of The Time Machine. But she is less a rounded character than a tabula rasa on which Wells’s heroic but patriarchal Time Traveller, retreating from the rapid social changes at the dawn of the twentieth century, including the growing independence of women, can reinscribe his Victorian values.
Several decades later, during the so-called golden age of science fiction literature of the 1930s through the 1950s, the popular pulp magazines assumed a male readership with their typical stories of BEMs (bug-eyed monsters) to be destroyed and BBBs (big-breasted babes) to be enjoyed. The promise of both pleasures often was featured prominently in their sensational cover illustrations. These images carried over into science fiction film in the 1950s, when the abrupt arrival of the atomic era suddenly made the genre one of the most popular. Gog (1954), for example, is atypical only to the degree to which its imagery is embarrassingly explicit in linking masculinity with power, potency, and technology, all coming to a head, so to speak, in the deliriously libidinous climax wherein the scientist hero (the staunchly reassuring Richard Egan) asserts his phallic dominance by destroying rampaging robots that have been sabotaged from a Soviet ship in space. The robots are themselves excessively phallicized, their defeat by the hero indicating that American science is more potent than that of godless communists. Amply demonstrating his masculine potency, the hero wins the hand (and presumably the body) of the sexualized woman scientist, a damsel in distress dressed in a provocatively tight lab suit and high heels.
The rationale behind Gog’s typical conflation of space exploration as masculine potency and Cold War propaganda (the “space race”) is emphatically clear in the scientist’s explanation in Invaders from Mars (1953), another science fiction movie of the period, for why conquering space is so important: “If anybody dared attack us, we could push a few buttons and destroy them in a matter of minutes.” Destination Moon (1950), the film that launched the decade’s spate of science fiction movies, takes the position, as one of the characters explains, that “whoever controls the moon will control the Earth.” When the astronauts land on the lunar surface, they claim the moon “by the grace of God” and (adeptly anticipating Neil Armstrong) “for the benefit of mankind” in the name of the United States.
The intertwined issues of technology and patriarchal masculinity are central to stories of space travel, which constitute such a significant part of science fiction that they have their own subgeneric designation—the space opera (a type, we might note, to which 2001, with its soundtrack of classical music by Johann and Richard Strauss rather than the more typical Theramin-inspired electronic score, has a special relation). Space stories usually involve an emphasis on technology and gadgetry since both elements are required by the premise of interstellar travel. Outer space, like the frontier in the western genre, is a dangerous place that requires the fortitude of men to traverse it.9 (It is worth noting that, according to the generic discourse of science fiction and mirroring the operative distinction in the real sciences, stories of space are deemed, appropriately, “hard” SF, as opposed to stories more concerned with social extrapolation, which are called “soft” SF.) Space stories have conventionally depicted interstellar travel as the penetration by men of the dark, womblike vastness of space in phallic-shaped rockets. In the standard iconography of the genre, while aliens frequently float in rounded spacecraft (UFOs, flying saucers), earthlings tend to take their giant steps for mankind in protruding, pointed ships.
Once rocket technology became imaginable in the early twentieth century, science fiction literature quickly dispensed with such patently impractical means of interstellar travel as Cyrano de Bergerac’s bottles of dew, Poe’s balloon, Verne’s giant gun, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s astral projection, and seized upon spaceships, which were quickly streamlined and masculinized. The hyperbolic covers of the pulps typically emphasized the piercing and penetrating power of human spacecraft through such graphic techniques as the exaggerated foreshortening of rocket nose cones. With the aim of settling other worlds, astronauts often are depicted as piercing and impregnating the universe, spreading the seed of human civilization. In movies, the phallic power of human spaceships was emphasized with the first science fiction movie ever made, Une Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902), in which French filmmaker Georges Méliès envisioned a giant cannon that discharges a space capsule moonward with an eruptive force powerful enough to achieve escape velocity. As if to demonstrate the masculine triumph of this technology, the cannon ejaculates to the incongruous accompaniment of a group of dancing women—in effect, the first chorus line of “Rockettes”—in the mise-en-scène literally below the powerful phallus (figure 16). Méliès borrowed the idea of a giant space gun from Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, in which the cannon is erected by the members of the all-male Baltimore Gun Club, and it appears again as late as 1936 in Things to Come, where it sticks out, so to speak, as a strikingly unscientific anomaly in H. G. Wells’s tale of the future, which otherwise strives for scientific accuracy.
Polish SF writer Stanislaw Lem parodies the phallic discourse of space fiction in his 1961 novel Solaris (an element entirely missing from both film adaptations). The novel opens with Lem’s narrator, a male scientist named Kelvin, describing his journey through space in a small rocket shell:
My body rigid, sealed in its pneumatic envelope, I was knifing through space with the impression of standing still in the void, my only distraction the steadily mounting heat…. The capsule was shaken by a sudden jolt, then another. The whole vehicle began to vibrate. Filtered through the insulating layers of the outer skins, penetrating my pneumatic cocoon, the vibration reached me, and ran through my entire body. The image of the dial shivered and multiplied, and its phosphorescence spread out in all directions. I felt no fear. I had not undertaken this long voyage only to overshoot my target!
… A sharp jolt, and the capsule righted itself. Through the porthole, I could see the ocean once more, the waves like crests of glittering quicksilver. The hoops of the parachute, their cords snapped, flapped furiously over the waves, carried on the wind. The capsule gently descended….
With the clang of steel rebounding against steel, the capsule came to a stop. A hatch opened, and with a long, harsh sigh, the metal shell which imprisoned me reached the end of its voyage.10
Kelvin has traveled through space to investigate a distant planet that is one large sentient ocean. Earth scientists have been studying this ocean planet for generations, producing exhaustive volumes of data and theoretical tomes about it, but thus far have been unsuccessful in the attempt to make contact with it. In his opening description of Kelvin’s space flight, Lem establishes his character’s phallic stance toward the universe while, in contrast, the ocean planet represents a kind of feminine mystery, pliant yet impenetrable in its difference, seemingly beyond the scientific comprehension of men.
While the planet Solaris may never explain itself, in the 1970s feminist voices in science fiction began to speak, to venture into public space, beginning with the publication of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969, just one year after 2001. Earlier, a few women writers had ventured into the masculine territory of space fiction: including Thea von Harbou, who wrote the screenplay for her husband, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Frau im mond (Woman in the Moon, 1929), which introduced the concept of the countdown adapted by NASA; and Kate Wilhelm, whose 1961 story “The Ship Who Sang” is about a physically deformed girl who is hardwired into a spaceship as its computer. But LeGuin’s novel opened the stargates for women to write about space travel. Described by science fiction critic Carl Freedman as “the book with which sf most decisively lost its innocence on matters of sex and gender,”11 The Left Hand of Darkness imagines an alien race, the Gethenians, who are normally genderless except during the fertility season, known as kemmer, when they may become either male or female depending partly upon the gender of others near them. The plot isolates a Gethenian politician and a human male ambassador from the planetary federation on an epic adventure, like Hawkeye and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg, or Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. But while the classic American fiction of Cooper, Melville, and Twain, as Leslie Fiedler and D. H. Lawrence have pointed out, represses the dread of femininity and homoerotic desire within stories of male adventure,12 LeGuin foregrounds these tensions with a character who is at once both genders and neither. As the two protagonists, initially alien to each other, begin to overcome their distrust and become intimate friends on their arduous journey together, the earthman, like the terrestrial reader, is prompted to rethink his rigidly conceived, heterosexist categories of gender and sexuality.
The influence of LeGuin’s novel was enormous, and on its heels came a wave of feminist science fiction from such writers as Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, Pamela Sargent, Connie Willis, Kit Reed, and Octavia Butler. Sargent’s three anthologies of feminist science fiction, the Women of Wonder series, published between 1974 and 1978, provided solid evidence of a feminist “movement” within the genre. Earlier, women science fiction writers such as C. L. Moore (Catherine Moore), Idis Seabright (Margaret St. Clair), and James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), used masculine or gender-indeterminate noms de plume in order to get published, to “pass” with editors and readers. But by the 1970s, women science fiction writers could boldly go where few had before, announcing their gender difference and writing science fiction that in various ways challenged the genre’s traditionally masculinist bias. Novels such as Russ’s The Female Man (1974) and Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) targeted the very language of science fiction as a masculine discourse, not only by featuring female protagonists, but also by experimenting with unconventional narrative structures and multiple points of view in order to provide alternatives to the masculine way of looking at things. These works provided science fiction’s sense of wonder, but one consciously rooted in gender difference.
To take a particularly relevant example, Tiptree’s story “The Women Men Don’t See” (published in 1973, four years before the author revealed herself as a woman) deconstructs the masculinist assumptions and ideology of male adventure fiction by undermining the misogynist clichés of the genre’s characteristic hard-boiled style. The story involves a stereotypical macho adventurer, Don Fenton, who becomes stranded with two women when the small charter plane on which the three are passengers crashes in an isolated, rugged part of Mexico. Fenton promptly takes charge, assuming the responsibility of providing for the women’s survival and seeking a way of making contact with the outside world while, at the same time, the women stumble upon and make contact with aliens who have landed in the seclusion of the jungle for a quick pit stop. In the end, the women decide to leave Earth with the aliens rather than stay with the intolerably sexist Fenton, who would kill the aliens in order to “protect” the women, which he assumes without question is his masculine duty. The narrative is told from Fenton’s decidedly male point of view, and although he uses all of the stereotypical clichés of male adventure fiction in his narrow attempt to understand the women, Tiptree makes clear that they are more complex people who could never be fixed by Fenton’s formulaic phrases. Ultimately, the two women are as alien to Fenton as the undulating extraterrestrials he automatically fears, while the women are so alien-ated by Fenton’s patriarchal limitations that they would just as soon pull up terrestrial stakes and, like so many male adventurers before them, light out for the territory. Trying to explain their decision to Fenton, one of the women tells him that Earth is a patriarchal world and that women are like opossums: “What women do,” she says, “is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.”13 The story’s prose style, which appropriates but subverts the masculine hard-boiled style typical of its genre, is itself an example of a guerrilla aesthetic striking a blow at the patriarchal world machine.
In film, however, the genre has advanced little since the 1950s, when male anxieties about women’s postwar independence were given expression in the form, on the one hand, of monstrous wasp women, she-creatures, and fifty-foot-tall dominatrixes, and on the other hand, of passive lab assistants and scientists’ virginal daughters, who must be rescued by men, as in Gog. A few later science fiction films, such as the Terminator and Lara Croft movies, switch the gender of the traditional male hero, but this is an illusory form of “empowerment” that simply reinscribes rather than questions the patriarchal values of such narratives. Apart from only two films, Rachel Talaley’s Tank Girl (1995) and Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995)—both of which critique masculinity and the pleasures of masculinist representations, and both of which, not coincidentally, were box-office failures—science fiction films have held onto the conventions of cinematic style and representation that have characterized popular cinema generally.
Laura Mulvey and other feminist film scholars have argued that one of the defining qualities of mainstream narrative cinema is that the gaze of the camera tends to be gendered as masculine. According to Mulvey, classical film construction positions male characters as subjects, as the bearers of the camera’s gaze, authorizing its look, while women are consequently rendered as objects, possessed and fetishized by the camera.14 In science fiction, the patriarchal gaze and objectification of the female body is clearest in campy space operas like Fire Maidens of Outer Space (1955) or Barbarella (made the same year as 2001), but other movies are only slightly more subtle. Alien, for example, is progressive in its representation of gender insofar as it shows female characters working alongside men in space and as it makes one of them, Ripley, its hero, in fact, the only crew member of the Nostromo to survive and defeat the eponymous extraterrestrial. Yet precisely when Ripley is at her most heroic, the film stylistically reinscribes a masculine perspective during the climactic battle between Ripley and the creature by displaying her as an erotic sight, the object of masculine desire. The camera’s position and angle emphasize Ripley’s gender in a provocative “crotch shot,” a shot motivated not by the requirements of the story but by the apparent necessity of reminding viewers of her gender difference.15 Thus, if science fiction films like Alien present a more active and heroic female protagonist, on the discursive level they tend to remain traditional in their gender politics by containing women within a sexualized and controlling masculine gaze.
Given this generic context, 2001: A Space Odyssey may be seen as especially progressive and innovative in ways far more profound than simply its convincing, then state-of-the-art special effects, although these elements of the film certainly contribute to its wider rewriting of the science fiction genre. In taking science fiction in new directions, in truly unexplored territory (to “Jupiter and beyond the infinite”), 2001 anticipated the wave of revisionist genre movies that characterized the New Hollywood of the 1970s. The way in which 2001 treats science fiction’s depiction of space exploration turns the genre on its ear, like Kubrick’s depiction of zero gravity in the film, and aims, as John Cawelti said, to “set the elements of a conventional popular genre in an altered context, thereby making us perceive these traditional forms and images in a new way.”16 Instead of rewriting the myths of the Western frontier as did films like Little Big Man (1970) and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), 2001 deconstructs the myths of the final frontier.
An avid reader, Stanley Kubrick professed a particular fondness for science fiction. Three of the director’s thirteen films—Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001, and A Clockwork Orange (1971)—are generally recognized as important contributions to the genre. The fact that Kubrick made three science fiction films in a row indicates the extent to which he was interested in the genre. (A fourth science fiction film, A.I., was begun by Kubrick but completed by Steven Spielberg in, appropriately enough, 2001.) Indeed, Kubrick claimed that by the time he began work on 2001, the middle film of the series, he had seen virtually every science fiction film ever made.17 Robert Kolker argues that 2001 differs from earlier science fiction movies by deliberately employing elements of the genre’s conventional streamlined production design, which equates progress with orderliness, neatness, and efficiency—but not to celebrate these values so much as to question them by showing how such progress “equals emotional and intellectual death” in a world where “perfect order and perfect function decrease the need for human interference.”18 This is true enough, but the film also differs from most earlier science fiction films in its focus on masculinity and technology as major themes rather than simply containing these values as unexamined or naturalized ideology.
Kubrick was drawn to science fiction for the same reason he was attracted by the war film: both genres are fundamentally concerned with these themes, which were prominent in the director’s work. Masculinity and violence are central to The Shining (1980), which chronicles the descent of a family patriarch into violent madness. In Dr. Strangelove, the nuclear apocalypse is initiated when General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), satirizing the Cold War paranoia of the previous decade’s science fiction films, overcompensates for his sexual impotence by talking loudly and carrying several big sticks: a cigar clamped in the side of his mouth, a machine gun at his hip, and a wing of nuclear bombers, which he unleashes on the Soviet Union to prevent the communists from sapping his “precious bodily fluids.” The marine recruits in Full Metal Jacket (1987) are trained to think of their weapons as synonymous with their penises. One of the platoon’s marching mantras, as they parade holding their rifles in one hand and their genitals in the other, is “this is my rifle, this is my gun / this is for fighting, this is for fun.” Grammatically, the antecedents of the couplet’s pronouns are ambiguous, so it’s unclear which tool is for which job. The film’s very title, slang for a rifle’s loaded magazine, also evokes the image of the male body armed and armored against the world.
The aggressive power of the phallus in Kubrick’s world is made literal when Major Kong (Slim Pickens) straddles the nuclear bomb he drops on a Russian target in Dr. Strangelove, and in A Clockwork Orange when droogie Alex (Malcolm McDowell) attacks the Cat Lady with a sculpture of a giant penis. Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel about urban life in the near future shows that sexual aggression is an essential part of masculine identity because when Alex is conditioned to be sickened by violence, he becomes a whimpering, helpless victim of the violence inflicted on him by other men. Women in Kubrick’s films tend to be dominated within a patriarchal world, as metaphorically visualized by the tables in the shape of nude women in the Korova Milkbar in A Clockwork Orange, or living in the cracks of the male world machine, like the female sniper in Full Metal Jacket. The masculine world machine in Dr. Strangelove is ultimately the Doomsday Machine, which at the film’s end destroys all life on Earth. In 2001, Kubrick’s view of the destructive, phallic nature of technology is expressed beautifully in the celebrated cut from the ape’s bone, at once man’s first tool and first weapon, to a space station: in this one magnificent edit, Kubrick summarizes 4 million years of human history as a continuation of phallic territoriality and conquest (figures 3 and 4). This is perhaps the film’s most memorable moment, but other aspects of 2001 also may be understood in relation to this critique of traditional masculinity.
Most obvious perhaps is the film’s casting and detached treatment of its characters, to which I alluded at the outset. Accounts of classical film narrative argue that the reliance on heroic and virtuous characters with whom spectators can easily identify is the central device for involving viewers in the cinematic story.19 But 2001 denies viewers any such easy figure of identification. William Sylvester gives a low-key performance as Dr. Heywood Floyd, who serves as the audience’s escort to the moon and then disappears from the narrative except for the recorded message that plays when the Discovery 1 ship reaches Jupiter. Both Gary Lockwood and Keir Dullea, who play astronauts Frank Poole and Dave Bowman, are inexpressive actors cast in similarly inexpressive roles. Lockwood had only a few undistinguished roles before 2001—perhaps his most notable being, ironically, his appearance on the Star Trek episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before” in 1966, in which some crew members of the Enterprise develop powers of ESP when they journey to the edge of the galaxy. Dullea’s previous credits included David and Lisa (1962), his debut, and Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), two films in which he played psychologically disturbed characters repressing their real feelings.
Vivian Sobchack has noted that in science fiction movies the combination of rationality and strength needed to “conquer” space means that emotion and sexuality are displaced onto the iconography of space technology. Almost always at the helm, in control, are men, astronauts who are typically cool, rational, even sexless. In Sobchack’s words, “whether named Buzz or Armstrong, Buck, Flash or Bowman,” they are typically “as libidinally interesting as a Ken doll; like Barbie’s companion, they are all jaw and no genitals.”20 Kubrick’s astronauts in 2001 are perhaps the most sexless and undemonstrative of the lot, their libidinous impulses completely sublimated by the technology that envelops them. The images of the semi-nude yet laconic Lockwood supine on his tanning bed have nothing of the corporeal, eroticized charge of Sigourney Weaver in her improbably flimsy space underwear in Alien. After the star-studded casts of Paths of Glory (1957), Lolita (1962), and Dr. Strange-love, the avoidance of big-name actors in a blockbuster production like 2001 seems a deliberate attempt to avoid the larger-than-life quality of movie stars in deference to the grandness of the celestial stars. If 2001 has a “hero,” it is, as in Olaf Stapledon’s novel Last and First Men (1930) or Wells’s Things to Come, other science fiction narratives with similarly epic scope, the human race itself, not a particular individual.
David Bordwell describes the classical narrative style as “an excessively obvious cinema” because it always aims at orientation, which he refers to as “a larger principle of ‘perspective’”: “not the adherence to a particular spatial composition but a general ‘placing’ of the spectator in an ideal position of intelligibility.”21 Yet 2001 consistently works to thwart or make problematic such a privileged spectatorial position. For example, the film’s motif of spiraling imagery denotes the weightlessness and absence of directional orientation in space, but also refuses to orient spectators with fixed reference points, unlike classic narrative construction. Such images appear, for example, in the cockpit console of the shuttle to the Clavius moonbase, with its spinning telemetry; when the flight attendant on the shuttle turns “upside down” to enter the cockpit with refreshments (figure 6); and in the spinning cylindrical drum that Poole and Bowman enter before leaving the Discovery 1 to repair the AE35 unit. When Dr. Floyd is in the Bell photophone booth at the space station talking to his daughter, through the window we see the Earth seeming to spin around outside the porthole (“Daddy’s traveling,” Floyd says tellingly to his daughter), a sight repeated during his discussion with the Russian scientists (figure 17). Although this use of sustained rotating imagery has since been absorbed into the mainstream, appearing, for example, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and more recently in Brian de Palma’s Mission to Mars (2000), the technique was radical when Kubrick introduced it in 2001. Further, 2001 employs this imagery in more complex ways than these other films, playing off spectators’ perceived spatial orientation with seemingly contradictory movement within the frame. So, for example, when Bowman is tumbling and spinning toward the Discovery 1 from the repair pod—at the point, that is, when he is finally taking action, being most “heroic”—he looks upside down in the image. Back in the ship, as Bowman descends a ladder, he seems to be moving sideways within the frame, given the camera’s position in relation to him. And when he proceeds with determination to disconnect HAL, Bowman goes up a ladder although in the shot it looks as if he is going down head first. A similar trompe l’oeil effect occurs while Bowman floats in HAL’s memory logic center. The famous first shot inside the Discovery 1 shows Frank Poole jogging in the rotating centrifuge, which immediately challenges our spatial orientation in the ship. As this is the first shot inside the Discovery 1, it is an ironic “establishing” shot because it establishes only our disorientation, an effect entirely apposite in the context of a journey into the unknown (figure 18).
According to Bordwell, classical mise-en-scène relies on balanced compositions and the centering of protagonists in individual shots.22 But in 2001, emphasizing the vastness of space and humanity’s relatively humble place within it, Kubrick’s characters are often depicted as tiny creatures in big wide-screen images, often placed off to the side of the frame, as when Poole spins off into the void. The film’s long takes use time to convey the immensity of space, as do the periods of silence on the soundtrack (“In space no one can hear you scream,” as the advertising tag-line for Alien put it). While Dr. Floyd may be utterly certain of his central place in the universe (“moon/American/Floyd” is the way he identifies himself at the computerized security check), Kubrick’s mise-en-scène in the space sequences undermines conventional ways of regarding the universe and our place in it.
The spatially disorienting images are echoed by the ambiguities Kubrick builds into the film even at the level of the soundtrack. Every time we see a monolith, it is accompanied on the soundtrack by the choral music of György Ligeti. But while Ligeti’s music may sound, in the words of Norman Kagan, “like a frantic collage of all the religious themes in the world,”23 its diegetic status, hence its meaning, is unclear. The apes do not seem to respond to the music, and the scientists looking at the monolith in the Tycho moon crater respond to its signal, not to the music. How, then, are we to understand the music? Are Ligeti’s voices emanating from the monolith, the music of the spheres that modern man is incapable of hearing? Or is the music the stylistic embellishment of a filmmaker who is known for the careful and striking choices of music in his films?
Unlike classical film narrative, 2001 is excessively opaque rather than excessively obvious. Just as Stanislaw Lem wisely never reveals the motives or meanings for the humanoid manifestations created by the entity Solaris, so 2001 contains numerous enigmas that remain unresolved at the film’s end. It is never clear, for example, whether the monoliths represent alien technology, a supernatural force, or the presence of God. Nor is it clear whether the monoliths actually determine human evolution and history, or merely inspire, or just observe us. And the film never explains what happens to Bowman once the Discovery 1 reaches its destination and the final “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” sequence begins. Alexander Walker notes that when Bowman listens to Dr. Floyd’s recorded message after disconnecting HAL—when, that is, the film is almost over—Floyd’s comments are at once “the first audible and unmistakable clue to the audience of what the film is narratively ‘about’” and, amazingly, “also the last utterance in the film.”24 And Floyd’s brief briefing, which does not really explain very much (he notes in his recorded message that only HAL knows the details of their mission), is itself somewhat ambiguous. Is its playback, as would appear to be the case, pretimed to begin when the Discovery reaches Jupiter? Does the recorded message engage automatically when Bowman disconnects HAL? Or does HAL initialize it as his dying gesture? In the end, the film’s story seems to remain a “total mystery,” like the monoliths as described by Dr. Floyd in his recorded message. Just as we should not master the universe, we are unable to master this film’s narrative.
What slim narrative 2001 possesses falls away completely when Bowman enters the Stargate where, along with the astronaut, we are showered with an awesome display of distorted landscapes and abstract, swirling colors, more like a nonrepresentational experimental film than a mainstream movie. The very length of the sequence seems motivated by a desire to immerse us in a visual experience rather than to convey narrative information and advance the story, the primary goal of classical narration. After the Stargate, Bowman appears in a room that looks at once old and new, a confusing combination of Louis XVI and modern styles, where the astronaut confusingly watches himself age and die (figure 15). It is never clear whether what we are seeing is a trip through outer space or the inner space of the astronaut’s mind. In a detailed formalist analysis of this sequence, Mario Falsetto has shown how Kubrick’s editing consistently subverts the viewer’s understanding of narrative space and time by violating such normally inviolable techniques as the conventional shot/reaction shot in order to convey a sense of Bowman’s transcendent experience.25 Each time Bowman sees another, moreaged version of himself, we first see the new yet older Bowman from the physical point of view of the older but younger Bowman; but then the next shot reveals that the earlier Bowman is no longer there. Thus these apparent point-of-view shots cease to be point-of-view shots, and their perspective—and ours as viewers—becomes “disembodied,” just as Bowman will lose his male body when he transforms into the star child.
As we travel through the Stargate, Kubrick inserts periodic close-ups of a human eye, presumably Bowman’s, which each time it blinks changes to the same hues that color the Stargate images (figure 34). Whatever these images might “mean,” we see them through Bowman’s eyes, which begin to merge with what he beholds. This sense of extreme sensitivity to the point of merging with nature rather than conquering its secrets is what Evelyn Fox Keller describes as “a feeling for the organism” demonstrated by, for example, the intimate and empathic relationship that geneticist Barbara McClintock established with the maize seedlings with which she was working.26
In Kubrick’s cinema, eyes figure prominently as images of vision and perception, or the lack of it. A Clockwork Orange features numerous close-ups of Alex’s eye, first in his droogie garb with eye make-up and the eyeball cufflinks (figure 9), and later when his eyes are propped open during the Ludovico treatment. Kubrick’s last film, completed just before his death, shows people blinded by the quotidian world, entrapped within the confines of their individual egos and living with their “eyes wide shut.” But 2001 suggests that we learn to be more open to nature, to perceive beyond the armored confines of traditional masculinity. Significantly, the star child at the end of 2001 is not only naked, ungirded, vulnerable to the universe, but its eyes are already wide open, not shut. Orbiting the Earth in the film’s last shot, the star child can see beyond our terrestrial limitations, perceiving with a new, widened consciousness even while still encapsulated within the enclosed but transparent cosmic womb (figure 35).
Twice we see close-ups of Bowman’s face as he experiences the Stargate, bright colors reflecting off the glass visor of his helmet almost as if they were radiating from within. These shots recall the famous moment in experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage’s Reflections on Black (1955), in which Brakhage scratched the emulsion off the image of a man’s eyes to suggest his metaphorical blindness. But where Brakhage’s blindness is represented as a gaping absence within the image, Kubrick’s astronaut experiences a transcendent vision which seems to flood his eyes with a riot of color. Brakhage was a filmmaker whose great subject was vision and the possibilities of expanding perception. He once challenged spectators to free their vision from the blinkered constraints of culture:
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure in perception.27
In 2001 Kubrick similarly asks us to look at the world out there in just this way, as an adventure in perception, as experience rather than expropriation. Kubrick himself refused to explain the ending of 2001, saying that “its meaning has to be found on a sort of visceral, psychological level rather than in a specific literal explanation.”28
Arthur C. Clarke’s initial script for 2001 was based largely on his 1948 short story “The Sentinel,” which concerns the future discovery of an alien artifact on the moon. The artifact, a crystal pyramid, acts as a beacon, presumably signaling its makers that the human race had, in Clarke’s words, “proved our fitness to survive—by crossing space and escaping from the Earth, our cradle.”29 Although the conclusion of the story seems carefully constructed to avoid using any masculine terms, such as “mankind,” after working with Kubrick on 2001 Clarke said that from the outset the director “had a very clear idea of his ultimate goal…. He wanted to make a movie about Man’s relation to the universe.”30 His words are well chosen, for Kubrick was talking about exploring a perceptual space that has been left largely uncharted by men.
In Kubrick’s 1960 epic, Spartacus, there is a telling scene in which Kirk Douglas as the rebellious slave, inspired by his sudden freedom, tells his love, Virinia (Jean Simmons), of the new horizons he envisions. Spartacus crouches on the ground, just as Kubrick’s man-apes would do several years later in 2001, and says he wants to know everything (including, significantly, where the sun goes at night and why the moon changes shape). When he concludes that as yet he knows nothing, Virinia responds by reminding him, and the audience, that in fact he knows important things, things that cannot be taught, deeper truths than mere scientific facts. Spartacus is a true hero for Kubrick because he seeks a higher wisdom, to understand without possessing, the very opposite of the decadent Romans in the film, who know only material wealth and power. Ina Rae Hark argues that in searching for a subjectivity other than the two choices offered to Spartacus, animal or Roman, Spartacus asks the question: “Is there a non-phallic human subjectivity?”31 Within the context of science fiction rather than the biblical epic, 2001 asks the same question. In the film’s final shots, the star child’s gender is indeterminate: the first glimpse of it is a quick long shot which shows no visible genitalia, while subsequent shots do not show it below the chest. The star child is a new human who, in its openness to creation, has transcended patriarchy’s characteristic binary thinking about gender. If Bowman begins his journey to Jupiter and beyond the infinite in a spermlike ship, one more astronaut out to conquer and impregnate the universe, he comes to possess nothing from his previous being but the spherical, womblike repair pod before he is reborn, the aspiring sire becoming the sired.
Kolker suggests that instead of regarding the monoliths as literal artifacts of a higher alien intelligence, they be read as metaphorical “markers of humanity’s evolution,” perhaps a symbolic “obstacle, a perceptual block that must be transcended.”32 This obstacle, I would suggest, is phallic masculinity. The monoliths have a firm and solid presence and are seemingly everywhere, like the Law of the Father. In “The Dawn of Man” section, when the first monolith appears, the apes gather around it, touching it provocatively, at once wary and worshipful. At the end of the film, the aged, dying Bowman also reaches for it, but his gesture, like so much else in the film, is ambiguous: is he reaching out, like Moon-Watcher in the opening sequence, to touch the monolith, or is he raising his arm in a gesture of farewell as he completes the process of dying to an old consciousness and being reborn into a new (figure 23)? The ending would seem to suggest the latter, for, as I have argued, 2001 seeks to restore to us a sense of wonder that modern man has forgotten in embracing a masculine quest for scientific mastery.
Of course, it might be argued that 2001’s reliance on special effects is itself a fetishization of cinematic technology and a betrayal of its theme. Given the resources available for the film’s production, one is reminded of the young Orson Welles’s remark upon finding RKO’s studio resources available to him for making Citizen Kane (1941), that he felt like a boy with the world’s largest train set. Filmed in Super Panavision and presented during its first run in Cinerama, with state-of-the-art special effects costing more than half of the film’s total budget of $10.5 million and all supervised or created personally by Kubrick, 2001 is a convincing display of technological mastery by a master director entirely in charge of his production. That majestic cut from the bone to the space station not only cuts to the bone of cinema’s unique ability to conquer time and space through editing,33 but also points to the pervasive and potent presence of the author.
There is no escaping the fact that the cinema is an inherently technological medium, and 2001 marshals cinema’s technological possibilities to invite us to experience the world rather than to master it—not unlike Bowman, who needs technology to reach Jupiter, but who then abandons it to journey beyond the infinite. If the film’s astronauts initially privilege the values of reason and control, in the end Bowman must turn off his ship’s computer in order to let the Force be with him. But this is not to suggest that George Lucas’s space opera is anything like 2001, for the Star Wars saga is a juvenile Oedipal drama that embraces the very patriarchal myths of space adventure fiction (“I am your father,” in the immortal words of Darth Vader) that Kubrick seeks to go beyond. Where Luke must grow up and take his place within the patriarchal order, Bowman grows into a new being with a new perspective.
2001: A Space Odyssey ends with the star child back in the view of Earth, not only looking at the Earth in a different way, but also rotating to face the camera, returning our gaze as spectators as if challenging us to meet it, that is, to see better, to attain its higher plane of being. Here Kubrick, usually regarded, and rightly so, as a pessimist and determinist, offers us a remarkable gesture of hope and faith for an artist who elsewhere sees violence and death. The kind of sensual, open spectators whom Kubrick’s film encourages us to be recalls Stapledon’s description of the sexual nature of the next human order in his similarly visionary Last and First Men:
Around the ancient core of delight in physical and mental contact with the opposite sex there now appeared a kind of innately sublimated and no less poignant, appreciation of the unique physical and mental forms of all kinds of live things. It is difficult for less ample natures to imagine this expansion of the innate sexual interest; for to them it is not apparent that the lusty admiration which at first directs itself solely on the opposite sex is the appropriate attitude to all the beauties of flesh and spirit in beast and bird and plant.34
Simultaneously one of the most scientific of science fiction films and an anti–science fiction film, 2001 suggests that with such an open, nonmasculinist perspective, we can leave the cradle and truly take a giant step for humankind.
1. See, for example, Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985); Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991); Judith Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); and Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Jack Nelson, eds., Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1996).
2. Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, 34.
3. Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder: Essays on Modern Science Fiction, rev. ed. (Chicago: Advent, 1967), 13.
4. Robert Scholes explains the special dynamic of such fiction this way: “In the worlds of SF, we are made to see the stoniness of a stone by watching it move and change in an accelerated time-scale, or by encountering an anti-stone with properties so unstony that we are forced to reinvestigate the true quality of stoniness.” Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 46.
5. See Darko Suvin, Metamorphosis of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), chap. 1.
6. For an overview of feminist criticism of Frankenstein, see Catherine Gallagher and Elizabeth Young, “Feminism and Frankenstein: A Short History of American Feminist Criticism,” Journal of Contemporary Thought 1, no. 1 (1991): 97–109.
7. For a discussion of Hawthorne’s science fiction, see H. Bruce Franklin, Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 3–64.
8. Scholes, Structural Fabulation, 15.
9. Hence the number of westerns that have been adapted as science fiction. For more on this, see Barry Keith Grant, “Strange Days: Gender and Ideology in New Genre Films,” in Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls: Gender in Film at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Murray Pomerance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 186–88.
10. Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (New York: Berkley, 1971), 8–10.
11. Carl Freedman, “Science Fiction and the Triumph of Feminism: Barr’s Future Females, the Next Generation,” Science Fiction Studies, no. 81 (2000): 278.
12. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Delta, 1967); D. H. Lawrence, “Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels,” in Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Penguin, 1977), 40–51.
13. James Tiptree, Jr., “The Women Men Don’t See,” in The New Women of Wonder: Recent Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women, ed. Pamela Sargent (New York: Vintage, 1977), 205.
14. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.
15. James Cameron’s True Lies (1994) offers a more egregious example in the overlapping genre of the action film. While on the one hand the film allows the wife of the spy to become a partner in espionage, it includes a lengthy scene, again entirely gratuitous in relation to the plot, where the husband (Arnold Schwarzenegger) arranges for his wife (Jamie Lee Curtis) to perform a seductive striptease in a hotel room for a stranger. She remains unaware that the man watching in the shadows is in fact her husband, whose anonymous voyeurism in the dark becomes emblematic of the male spectator, for whom the camera obligingly emphasizes Curtis’s curvaceous body.
16. John Cawelti, “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films,” in Film Genre Reader III, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 251. The only film Cawelti discusses that pre-dates 2001 is Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967).
17. James Howard, Stanley Kubrick Companion (London: Batsford, 1999), 107.
18. Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 135.
19. David Bordwell, “Story Causality and Motivation,” in The Classic Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, ed. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), chap. 2.
20. Vivian Sobchack, “The Virginity of Astronauts: Sex and the Science Fiction Film,” in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1990), 107.
21. Bordwell, “Space in the Classical Film,” Classic Hollywood Cinema, 54.
22. Ibid., chap. 5.
23. Norman Kagan, The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick (New York: Grove, 1972), 150.
24. Alexander Walker, Stanley Kubrick Directs, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 259.
25. Mario Falsetto, Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1984), 115–28.
26. Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism (New York: Freeman, 1983). See also Nancy Tuana, “Revaluing Science: Starting from the Practices of Women,” in Nelson and Nelson, Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science, 22–31.
27. Stan Brakhage, “Metaphors on Vision,” Film Culture, no. 30 (Fall 1963): n.p.
28. Stanley Kubrick, quoted in Howard, Stanley Kubrick Companion, 112.
29. Arthur C. Clarke, “The Sentinel,” in Jerome Agel, ed., The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 (New York: New American Library, 1970), 22.
30. Clarke quoted in Howard, Stanley Kubrick Companion, 104.
31. Ina Rae Hark, “Animals or Romans: Looking at Masculinity in Spartacus,” in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 163.
32. Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, 136–37.
33. H. G. Wells noted this distinctive ability of the new medium of cinema in his first novel, The Time Machine, published in 1895, the same year as the first public film screening, where he describes the experience of time traveling as being like watching a speeded-up film.
34. Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 134. In his preface, Stapledon writes, “To romance of the far future, then, is to attempt to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to entertain new values” (11).