There is as much thought in the body as there is shock and violence in the brain. There is an equal amount of feeling in both of them. The brain gives orders to the body which is just an outgrowth of it, but the body also gives orders to the brain which is just a part of it.
GILLES DELEUZE, Cinema 2: The Time-Image
2001: A Space Odyssey is an allegory of the evolution of human intelligence, deliberately appropriating the cinematic apparatus to embark on its philosophic journey, which is realized in its conception of the “cinematographic” brain. The film has a subversive agenda and a design on the spectator. Critical to its own journey, the Odyssey probes conceptions of the human brain: is it the rational center for and seat of knowledge about a constant and determined world, the embodiment of intelligence whose evolution began with the tool-wielding ape and culminated in the computer that never errs? Or is there more to understand about the history and trajectory of evolution? And how does the technology of space in conjunction with the cinematic apparatus enter into the film’s allegory of perception, affect, and intelligence?
Stanley Kubrick pursues the enigma of intelligence by turning the Cartesian brain-body dualism on its head by invoking images of faces, eyes, interiority, and exteriority that place spectators outside the traditional anthropocentric context. He inverts and distorts the potential of the brain to “give orders to the body” and the body’s ability “to give orders to the brain.” As in Kubrick’s other films, the intellectual journey is reliant on the meticulous figuration and questioning of bodies, images, sounds, and verbal language. The identity between the world and the brain involves a rethinking of the relations between mind and body, affect and thought, sight and sound. Describing the films of Stanley Kubrick as an “intellectual cinema,” Gilles Deleuze wrote:
If we look at Kubrick’s work, we see the degree to which it is the brain, which is the mis[e] en scène. Attitudes of body achieve a maximum level of violence, but they depend on the brain. For in Kubrick, the world itself is a brain, there is identity of brain and world, as in the great circular and luminous table in Dr. Strangelove, the giant computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. The black stone of 2001 presides over cosmic states and cerebral states: it is the soul of the three bodies, earth, sun, and moon. But also the seed of the three brains, animal, human, machine. Kubrick is renewing the theme of the initiatory journey because every journey in the world is an exploration of the brain.1
The challenge posed by Deleuze’s comments on Kubrick’s work is to think through the “identity of brain and world” in 2001. The allegory that limns and unfolds this identity is not seamless, linear, and progressive in a conventional sense; it is discontinuous and fortuitous, dependent on flashes of selective memory: it creates unsettling associations between past and present. The film’s allegory is an exploration of an “acentered system.”2 It explores the destructive consequences of a reductive and obsessive commitment to the primacy of either subjectivity or objectivity, body or mind. The film turns its investigation of consciousness into a simultaneous investigation of the history and character of cinema, a medium that has the potential to explore unexamined connections between forms of intelligence and representations of the world. Moreover, while some of the images in the film may seem dated to some critics,3 the questions that the film raises about simulation, space, and time are timely given the astronomical growth of television, video, and computer technology and their relation to the technology of the cinema.
The worlds of 2001 are neither a celebration of the tools of technology nor their denigration. To interpret the allegory as moral parable, a commentary on the evils or blessings of technology, is to skew the work of the film as film and reduce it to a statement. The characters (apes, scientists, robotic HAL, and astronauts) are portrayed as automatons, sleepers and sleepwalkers, subject to forces that appear to emerge from outside themselves yet determine their interior states. The spectator becomes a seer or visionary who, instead of being placed in the familiar and repetitive position of having to “recall or reconsider the past,” is invited to invent the future.4 The film’s reflexivity about its status as film enhances its investigation of the cinematographic brain, a brain that has the potential to generate incorporeal images of thought not present to the senses and productive of different and hitherto unperceived relations of time and hence existence.
Following Deleuze’s provocative comments about an identity between world and brain, this chapter treats the film as an allegory that proffers a critical and historical treatment of intelligence that raises disturbing questions about the future and about human survival as well. At the core of the film is the unanswered question about the “purpose and meaning of human existence.”5 This allegory of the cinematographic brain implicates the spectator in the film through the film’s investigation of “what is thinking?” This chapter tracks different configurations of the brain—animal, human, computer, and cinematographic—and probes the film’s tactics for creating an experimental and philosophical narrative based primarily on visual and aural images with a minimum of verbal language.
The initial episode of the film, “The Dawn of Man,” is proleptic, that is, anticipatory of events to come in the subsequent three episodes. Day and night herald the different temporal phases of the transformation of the man-apes from omnivores to carnivores and from cringing and threatened beasts to aggressive hunters. The visual and aural themes involve the accenting of sound in the animals’ grunts and screaming and in the György Ligeti and Richard Strauss music associated with the appearance of a mysterious black object referred to in the novel as a monolith. This enigmatic object, which appears four times in the film, produces alterations in those who respond to its presence. However, the monolith remains a puzzle. Is it benevolent, malevolent, or neutral? How does its presence serve to alter the behavior of the ape-men and the subsequent direction of human life?
“The Dawn of Man” episode highlights the primacy of gesture. The mysterious (chance? predetermined?) arrival of the black object transforms the apes (and the viewer’s) sense of movement and action. The random movements of the animals become focused as the apes’ attention becomes directed toward the monolith. This unusual object with its impact on the ape-men projects the animal brain as connected to the body and to terrestrial space. The animal brain is sensory and physical; communication and decision making are expressed through the body, which conveys affects relating to fear, pain, threat, pleasure, and aggression. The animal brain constitutes one form of intelligence that is often regarded as inferior in comparison with the human brain. Yet 2001 does not fall prey to this judgment.
Initially, the perspective in this episode is that of the objective gaze of the camera, offering a perspective (alternating middle- and long-distance shots) on the static and barren landscape and on the monotonous and threatening world of the apes whose existence is devoted to foraging, survival, and defending their territory. Close-ups, especially of Moon-Watcher (the name in the script for the alpha male played by Daniel Richter), precede the apes’ approach to the monolith. After the arrival of the monolith, the camera work and editing change, finally becoming expansive in relation to outer space. The apes’ movement toward the monolith is accompanied by Ligeti’s otherworldly music. The music increases in volume and in complexity as the apes approach and retreat from but finally return to the alien object. The suggestion of the ape-men’s increasing mobility in this episode is enhanced by the passage of time, from night to day, from darkness to light, and from retreat and hiding to aggressive attack (figure 19).
The editing now consists of lengthier shots, now involving more agitated movement on the part of the apes that culminates in the touching of the monolith. Moon-Watcher’s at first tentative, then more assured, wielding of the bone is accompanied by the renewed and jubilant sounds of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Further, the appearance of the image of the sun flaring at the top of the monolith enlarges the spectator’s sense of space, as if signaling that the constraints of the apes’ earlier existence in the African veldt has been overcome and anticipating the journey to outer space. From a tight framing of the landscape, which suggests the impossibility of visually contemplating the out-of-field, the episode has expanded its cinematic horizon. The odyssey to consciousness has begun. The movement climaxes in the spectacle of Moon-Watcher’s exultant and victorious throwing of the bone into the air and the bone’s transformation into a space ship that resembles the shape of the bone (figures 3 and 4). The Strauss music dramatically and effectively marks a transformation in the apes, producing a shocking caesura. Visually and aurally, this moment is characteristic of the film’s allegorical treatment predicated on its dramatic yoking of an image from the past with one from the present.
This episode also is indicative of the film’s mode of allegorizing by way of introducing a connection between vision and thought. The episode is remarkable for its emphasis on gesture. It becomes an investigation of gesture as a form of consciousness that recalls how the early, silent cinema was an instrument of perception and not merely a storytelling medium. Kubrick’s insistence on the importance of affect is clearly conveyed in the focused and sensory-motor behavior of the apes, evident in their awakening as expressed in their killing of game and establishing their territorial dominance by means of the bone. If the early cinema was supreme in focusing on situation and action and relating them to modes of perception, these early moments of 2001 are for the spectator an invocation of the “dark dreams of the past” not as linear, immutable, and absolutely true but as exposing different presents and relations to the past, a past threatening ever to return.
The behavior of the ape-men is exemplary of what Giorgio Agamben has described as the politics of the gestural, the potential of the body for communicability as something other than a means to cultural, economic, and political control. This potential for communicability is what he describes as a means without end. Relying on music, dance, and display, the body communicates the power of the gesture, returning, in Agamben’s language, “images back to the homeland of gesture,” where life can once again become decipherable, breaking “with the false alternative between means and ends that paralyzes morality and presents.”6 In producing the gesture, “the duty of the director,” Agamben further writes, is “to introduce into this dream the element of awakening”7 and, if anything, to explore the potential of cinema to jar the spectator into wakefulness. In allegorical and proleptic fashion, the episode invites speculation on the question of technology as a problematic prosthesis, a means of survival at great intellectual and affective expense, but also a tool to think differently from prevailing conceptions of rationality and consciousness.
In heralding the transformation of the apes to “the status of a sapient subject,”8 the film has not only posed the problem of knowledge and its effects but has confronted the viewer with the cinematic medium as a visual and auditory instrument for this cerebral examination. The dramatic visual transformation in the landscape and in the portrait of the ape-men connects the prehistory of humankind to the present of the spectator, but the episode has also offered a meditation on the history of cinema as more than a mere recording but as a medium capable of reflecting on its own uses of the technology of images in the sparse dialogue, valorization of music, and “abandonment of narration, emphasizing the sense of sight at the expense of language.”9 The technique in addition suggests an early form of filmmaking, where perception was communicated through sensory experience, gesture, and affect.
As the ship, a craft that resembles the bone thrown in the air by the ape, floats through space in the next (untitled) episode to the music of The Blue Danube Waltz, the spectator is given a different perspective on the brain. The transition from the terrestrial world to that of space
[i]nvolves a passage from a shot that has a certain subjective force, since the bone has been thrown by the ape and there is a relationship of contiguity between them, to a shot that is utterly external in its presentation. The view of the spaceship does not belong to any character and cannot be attributed to any contiguous person; and the following dance to “The Blue Danube Waltz” is meant to be enjoyed as a spectacle, not as the presentation of anybody’s perception or subjectivity.10
If “The Dawn of Man” episode highlighted the solidity of the terrestrial terrain, the apes’ physical proximity to each other, and the bodily movements of the protomen in relation to the emergence of decision making, what is evident in this untitled segment is a loss of contact with the landscape and with the body expressed in the unsteady movement of humans and the restraints on communicability (particularly in the banality and duplicity of the verbal language that has replaced the vocalization of the apes).
Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester), on his way to investigate the presence of a disturbing object on the moon, is Moon-Watcher’s replacement. Yet he appears only after an elaborate series of shots in space, highlighting the Hilton Space Station, the vehicle seeking entry to it, and views of the ship’s controls and computer monitors as the ship is brought to a precise landing. The image of the pilots is impersonal; they are shot from the rear minus dialogue, and the first encounter with the scientist Floyd reveals him to be immobile as he sleeps and not in complete control of the milieu. A moving object, resembling a miniature spaceship (his pen), floats until seized by the flight attendant, who plants it in his pocket, her movements unsteady in her “grip shoes” (figures 5 and 6).
After landing at the space station, Floyd is greeted by the mission controller (Frank Miller). The interior is predominantly white with the exception of the pink-clothed attendants and the startlingly red modernistic chairs seemingly designed for appearance rather than comfort. Finally, the film provides dialogue in the banal and clichéd greetings of the mission controller and Floyd; in Floyd’s telephone conversation to Earth with his daughter, Squirt, played by Vivian Kubrick, the director’s daughter (figure 17); and in his interchange with the Russian scientists. Floyd is the antithesis of the ostensibly malevolent scientist of conventional science fiction who is passionately consumed with the quest for knowledge to effect the transformation of humanity into godlike or demonic creatures. Floyd as scientist is without affect, a sleepwalker, a transmitter of clichés, un-self-consciously imbued with a sense of superiority.
His gaze is belligerently opaque in his brief but low-key “fight” with Smyslov (Leonard Rossiter). Floyd is “consistently casual, affable, and bored, wearing the same pleasant managerial mask whether it confronts an actual stranger’s face, the video image of his daughter’s face, or that synthetic sandwich.”11 He is formed in the image of the mechanistic world he inhabits. Though identified with space travel, he is indifferent, if not inured, to the mysteries of outer apace. His affinity with the apes seems obscure. He is not a predator for food, and his territoriality is expressed through his reductive use of language to conceal his military objectives. He appears to be a creature of verbal language rather than of vocalization, but his use of words suggests, in Thomas Allen Nelson’s terms, “an archaic and earthbound verbal baggage. Language has not kept pace with a technological entry into a universe far beyond the boundaries of Earth.”12 Floyd’s speech and behavior are dissonant with the continuity, openness, and vastness of space.
Despite the elaborateness of the technology and the sophistication of the instrumentation, this episode shares with the postmonolith apes a preoccupation with territoriality (defending a claim to an occupied area), an assumption of the superiority of nation, science, and technology. If the apes do not communicate via words, ironically neither does Floyd. The episode with him portrays the brain of the scientist as consecrated to state power and hence to paranoia, secrecy, and deception. Language is his tool to mystify and conceal; briefings are cryptic and authoritarian; the conversation with the Russians is similarly aggressive and withholding: “language conspires with politics and a primitive social hierarchy to conceal the discovery of the monolith.”13
Conspicuously, his limited and controlled body movements, verbal impoverishment, and confined sensory-motor capacity locate him in a world where intelligence is focused on suspicion, where the brain appears detached from the body, and where knowledge implies secrecy. In this episode, the body disappears; it does not make decisions. The brain gives orders; it is in command but, as portrayed through Floyd, the human brain has become specialized, capable of purposeful thinking in terms of means and ends, but woefully deficient in imagination, feeling, empathy, and creative activity.
The confrontation of Floyd and the other men with the monolith, which parallels that of the apes, obscures the men’s bodies, giving them the impression of aliens, looking like the insectlike or robotic figures familiar in popular science fiction films. The doctor and his colleagues are helmeted and completely sheathed in their suits of synthetic material as they move toward the monolith and slowly surround it while the Ligeti music rises in intensity. Like Moon-Watcher, Floyd touches the black object, and the camera lingers on his hand in close-up as he runs it along the edge (figure 20). Attention is focused on the man with the camera, who organizes the others into a group in front of the monolith (incongruously like a tourist shot), but then something different occurs than had happened with the apes. Instead of the triumphant Richard Strauss music, the audience hears the Ligeti music culminating in an aversive screeching crescendo and ending in a squeal as the men, apparently in pain, raise their hands to their ears, which are covered by their space helmets, and the scene fades to black.
The distinction between the earlier, prehistorical episode and this cerebral journey resides in the human loss of bodily, sensory-motor connections to the world. What is operative here is the transformation from the actual to the virtual, from the real to its simulacrum. The cinematographic brain is reduced to images on a monitor: the sumo wrestling observed on the TV by the attendant, the information shown on the screen that enables the pilots to land the spacecraft, and even window shots of the Earth and moon that are like cinematic stills from the interior of the ship. The disturbing shriek emanating from the monolith can be construed as a massive reproach to the indifferent men who surround it, taking its picture and robbing it of its power and magic. Perhaps this is the film’s conception of popular cinematic technology where the visual images appear to have no links to the outside world, where the alienated brain has no connection to an exterior world: it is disjoined from the body, which is an encumbrance rather than a source of knowledge.
This episode is an investigation of vision. The viewer is everywhere confronted with instruments of visual technology: the information on the video monitors, the telephone-video image, and the surveillance technology that separates friend from foe. This visual cornucopia invokes, as in Dr. Strange-love, a world where vision does not equate with seeing and critical comprehension. Visual and verbal information are exchanged among the men, but it is very clear (as in the encounters among the scientists) that knowledge is withheld. The understated style of these encounters, the implied stylistic differences between this film and popular cinema suggest that the film is also an exploration of spectatorship and a critique of conventional forms of cinema technology (e.g., the genres of science fiction).
Perhaps the last moment of this episode with its discordant sound is further a major strategy for jarring the spectator into wakefulness. The sound disrupts and possibly diverts the spectator from the forgetfulness engendered by conventional cinematic forms. The satiric allegory can be compared to the exploration of language and silence and their relation to scientific conditioning dramatized in A Clockwork Orange (1971). In its critique of the scientific brain, 2001 has trod the path of other science fiction narratives. However, in its allegorical treatment, its daring tampering with narrativity, its eschewing of dialogue, character, and psychology, its introduction of critical questions derived from social science and film theory, the film has challenged the clichés about the brain and consciousness dominating the literature, science, and popular writings on the brain.
The action now shifts to the spaceship Discovery where three characters—two astronauts, Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), and the computer, HAL (given a human voice by Douglas Rain)—become melodramatically involved in a life-and-death struggle. The satiric dimensions of the previous episodes become elegiac (reinforced by the music of Aram Khatchaturian): “The mood now becomes deeply melancholy—a pair identical and yet dissociated, like a man and his reflection—eat and sleep and exercise in absolute apartness, both from one another and from all humankind.”14 The astronauts’ passive reliance on and complacency about the computer’s brain turn into suspicion and alarm after HAL’s expression of concern about “extremely odd things about the mission” that are linked to the strange story of “something being dug up on the moon” and the “melodramatic touches” of bringing on board three men in hibernation. Indeed, the struggle between man and computer begins to unfold when HAL characterizes his own unease as “silly” moments before reporting a prospective failure in his AE35 unit.
The Discovery episode contrasts with other science fiction films in its uses of melodrama, its injection of the politics of sexuality in a cybernetic milieu, its reflexive focus on vision, and its transforming of the usually grotesque alien figurations of the extraterrestrial regime into men and their technology. The helmets of Bowman and Poole with their shimmering surfaces are shot at a distance or from above, concealing the astronauts’ faces and making them appear alien. Further, the spaceship appears to have anthropomorphic features, specifically heads with prominent eyes (figure 21).
The body seems to be most often reduced to an image of the head. Elements of the human face are prominent in images of the shuttles with their glowing eyes. Similarly, the cockpits of the ships appear as faces as does “the shape of the Discovery with its elongated round head.”15 The emphasis on images of the head underscores the film’s investigation of the specialization of the brain—now, the computer brain—emphasizing disengagements between body and brain, feeling and rationality, childhood and adulthood. The episode’s evoking of the imagery of birth and of phallic sexuality and its decidedly anthropomorphic presentation of technology reinforce the allegorical character of the filmic text as an exploration of “displaced eroticism and a mystification of modern technology”16 that obscures distinctions between the human and the technological, the actual and the virtual. Kubrick’s computer brain reproduces the customary tendency to think of technology in terms of received categories of human perception that rely on reason and affect in contrast to the latter-day technology of electronic images, which “are the object of a perpetual reorganization” and “no longer seem to refer to the human posture.”17 HAL’s portrait seems to rely on a conception of technological power based on a mythology of decision making in the interests of establishing control from a central source. Power over others is legitimated by a long-standing myth about human progress: the possibility of producing a robotic intelligence, a machine free from miscalculation, blunders, and lapses.
HAL, the “personification” of the computer brain, is the latest model of the “9000 series,” has never made a computational error and is described by his creators as being virtually incapable of error. As befitting the film’s resistance to conventional science fiction imagery, HAL is not a formed robot. Rather, HAL’s ubiquitous presence is conveyed through his voice, the recurrent image of his Cyclopean eye, and the memory modules stored in the brain room. Though ostensibly the “brain and nervous system of the ship,” HAL has charisma and his candor exceeds that of the astronauts. Thus, the film raises the enigma of what goes wrong when HAL diagnoses an error in the AE35 radar unit with tragic effect. What accounts for HAL’s rampage against the humans, for the struggle between the computer and the astronauts, and, finally, for Bowman’s elimination of HAL’s cerebral functions?
Cybernetic technology is implicated in knowledge and power, and HAL’s brain is a “visually beautiful evocation of institutional order, in keeping with the sounds of HAL’s voice, but at odds with his erratic behavior and the content of his speech.”18 The conflict between the human and the computer brains in this episode entails human emotion—anxiety, suspicion, rage, shock, and abjection. The agonistic encounter between HAL and the astronauts is not the conventional struggle between man and machine. It is the struggle of man against his own capacity for deceit.
The allegory does not lead in the direction of nostalgia for a prior state of primal innocence and a valorizing of physical life in the body. Rather, the allegory highlights the film’s insistent critical concern with the human capacity for secrecy and deception in defense of territory, power, and position that ultimately leads to murderous aggression and death. The final termination involves Bowman’s forceful reentry into HAL’s body and the dramatic and speedy lobotomizing of HAL’s computer brain (figure 22).
The character of HAL has understandably been the focus of much critical attention. HAL’s programming to express emotions in order to facilitate communication is so successful that some writers find HAL’s character more human than the depersonalized astronauts and the crew members in their hibernating chambers. Other critics find HAL sinister, identified with conspiracy and with the “machine mind” as being “more human than human, and thus doubly doomed to kill and be killed.”19 HAL’s is a “queer voice” in the film, the carrier of the “odd, the uncanny, the undecidable.”20 The narrative further suggests a connection between paranoia and cinema linked to Kubrick’s “queer musings on the future of sexuality.”21 Repressed desire can be read into the portrait of HAL, emblematized in ghostly voices and functioning “as a destabilizing force in the narrative”22 capable of murdering four characters in his charge—the three hibernating men (appropriately identified as undergoing “life termination”) and Frank (whose death is rationalized by HAL as an unfortunate “bad decision”)—and attempting to murder a fifth.
HAL’s role as a malevolent instigator of violence certainly speaks to the “human” character of his make-up. Ultimately, HAL’s actions mime human limitations in relation to thinking and decision making. His vulnerability to emotion in his expression of anxiety about the “strangeness of the mission” or his expression of fear in the face of his “death” qualifies him to be regarded as human as does his ability to kill mechanically, to rationalize his actions, and, when apprehended, to express remorse and promise to make “better decisions” in the future. Thus, HAL is not a flawless expression of a new and higher form of thinking but a reminder of humans’ evolutionary limitations in relation to thinking and action. Once again and with greater detail and complexity, the film probes the unresolved tensions between the actual and the virtual.
This melodrama is enhanced by vivid contrasts between sound and silence—the silence of space and the eroticized sounds of the astronauts breathing in their spacesuits—through understatement, the dearth of verbal language, HAL’s disembodied voice, and the reiterated images of the computer’s eye. Indeed, Poole’s death becomes melodramatic not through gory images of an imploded corpse or inflated affective language, but through nuanced images of the receding spacesuit, and the hibernating astronauts’ deaths are recorded on monitors in machine-generated words while otherwise passing in silence.
The critical moment in this melodrama is Dave’s systematic dismantling of HAL’s memory modules, rendering the affective part of the computer brain defunct. HAL’s “demise” is conveyed through the film’s tampering with conventional cinematic language, not in vivid and excessive images of mutilation, but in the lowering of HAL’s voice’s pitch and speed as Dave systematically dismantles HAL’s functional memory and ability to perform independent behavior. Dave’s “surgery” or HAL’s “lobotomy” is, in the context of the allegory of the brain, a shocking action, but the event eschews a binary between good and evil. Dave’s “neutralizing” of HAL would seem motivated by Dave’s reasonable assumption that HAL poses a continuing threat, but the precipitousness of Dave’s action suggests that his motives are tinged with vengefulness. The computer brain may be superior to the human brain in its speed of computation, accuracy, and logical thinking, but HAL’s coexistence with human beings also made him vulnerable to human error. What is presented is not a simplistic binary vision of the war of man against the machine but a profound interrogation of man’s wisdom in dominating the computer brain.
HAL’s earlier assessment of the failure of the AE35 radar unit introduces a philosophic and political issue, namely, the human (and melodramatic) tendency to attribute aggression and violence reductively to an “error,” to “bad decisions” stemming from faulty calculations, to find a psychological explanation for one’s “mistakes,” and hence to confess and expect absolution. However, finally, the central critical dilemma is not error but the character of the human creators of a machine that is made in their image and is at war with their bodies: “the men become (at least in fantasy) like HAL in that they no longer seem to require a body, sex, life support, or contact with earth.”23
The disembodiment of the humans is further developed in the film’s treatment of femininity. While portrayals of women are minimal throughout the film (they appear as hostesses and conventional maternal figures), conceptions of femininity are not absent but invoked in the somewhat effeminate voice of HAL and in his “maternal” care-taking of the astronauts (his attentiveness to their needs, playing chess, validating Dave’s creativity, and sharing his feelings). Like children, Poole and Bowman are similarly dependent for their life functions on HAL. The two astronauts are infantilized; the hibernating men sleep like babies, their life systems sustained completely by HAL. The absence of women underscores poignantly the fantasy of a male universe, controlled technologically by thinking machines that can also feel, as personified by HAL, and by humans who are stunted in their affect. Yet both the men and the computer are compelled to respond with secrecy, deceit, and aggression to their paranoia about threats to their privilege, dominance, and domain. Ultimately the alienation of the men from their bodies reinforces the contiguity not the difference between the humans and the machines they have created. In contrast to celebratory versions of computer technology, the film’s perspective appears to be a morose and critical treatment of humans, who can only create a computer brain that mirrors their aggressiveness and territorial ambition. However, are there other ways to understand Kubrick’s treatment of cinema and technology and their relation to the history of thought in film?
HAL’s computer brain would seem to be cross-linked at several points to Kubrick’s “cinematic brain.” HAL’s red eye with its yellow pupil is reminiscent of a camera lens, and his ubiquitous presence, monitoring, recording, and controlling the movements of men, elevates HAL to directorial status (figure 13). His studio/body is the Discovery itself, and the battle between HAL and the men for dominance turns on HAL’s ability to see them even when they think they have escaped his surveillance. The agonistic encounter between men and machine, leading to the deaths of four men, the rape-like destruction of the sexually and affectively indeterminate computer brain, and Dave’s survival present a critical “history of consciousness.”24 In the words of Gilles Deleuze: “Our lived relationship with the brain becomes increasingly fragile, less and less ‘Euclidean’ and goes through little cerebral deaths. The brain becomes our problem or our illness, our passion, rather than our mastery, our solution or decision.”25 Thus, Kubrick’s treatment of the brain constitutes a formal strategy for the representation of the film’s thematic and diegetic material.
The cinematographic brain is the film, underscored in the Space Odyssey’s last episode, “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite.” Here, the Odyssey’s confrontation with radically different conceptions of the brain reaches its apotheosis. Instead of the animal brain advancing inexorably toward domination, the human brain moving relentlessly toward deception, and HAL, the computer made in the likeness of man, dramatizing the failure of both animal and human strategies—unable to command human life without destroying it—the cinematic brain is the creation of media that have the potential to create a different and critical sense of reality.
“Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” begins with psychedelic images of the astronaut’s rush through space, intercut with a dizzying montage of lines and colors and close-up images of changing colors in Dave’s eyes, and culminates in the Louis XVI bedroom, Dave’s own aging and death, and the appearance of the monolith and then of the futuristic fetus. This episode recapitulates images and motifs from the previous episodes.26 The emphasis is on the vastness of the universe, the role of the human traveler now swept up in space and time by forces over which he has no control, and the doubling of images, mirror images, and splitting between objects and their reflections. Doubling as a distancing device was conspicuous earlier in the film: the doubling of Moon-Watcher and Dr. Floyd; the twinlike appearance of the astronauts Dave and Frank; the parallel computers on Earth and aboard Discovery; and, of course, the four identical black monoliths. The astronauts’ images are also doubled in the video transmission from Earth and in the close-ups of their faces as they observe themselves (and as HAL observes them) on the monitors. More doubling is evident in Dave’s two journeys in the pod, first to replace the AE35, then to retrieve Frank.
In the final episode, Dave sees himself in a mirror and over his own shoulder. Aging, freed from his astronaut’s artificial skin, he observes himself as an older man sitting at a table. Dave observes himself on a bed as an even more aged human being (figure 15). With his final transformation into a fetus, the human form of the astronaut disappears. Camera consciousness presents a direct image of time that presumes a different order of thought, a different conception of the brain, one that is freed from the tyranny of clichés, from identity thinking, and from repetition without difference: “At the end of Space Odyssey, it is in consequence of a fourth dimension, that the sphere of the foetus and the sphere of the earth have a chance of entering into a new, incommensurable, unknown relation, which would convert death into life.”27
Similar to the first episode in the film, there are no monitors in this epilogue, and the pod disappears to give way to the monolith, and the monolith gives way to the star child. While Moon-Watcher and Floyd had touched the black object, the dying Bowman can only point to its presence for the spectator to see (figure 23). The mirror and the early presence of Dave in his spacesuit are reminders of vision but, in contrast to the earlier episodes that prominently featured media, the emphasis on vision and sound is directed largely toward the point of view of the aging Dave and ultimately toward the film spectator, thus suspending the possibility of clarifying the point of view and passing on the burden of thinking to the viewer. If the ending alters the highly technological images of the previous episodes and downplays the multiple registers of vision, it also reiterates, albeit with a difference, the limitations of verbalization, “the tyranny of words,”28 by returning to the techniques of the overture, the images of the ape-men, and the appearance of the monolith.
The reiteration of the images of birth and death is linked to the previous episodes, to the ape-man’s birth of consciousness and his acquisition of power over life and death, to the world of the disembodied scientist whose intelligence is single-mindedly focused on an exercise of state power, to the fetal character of life aboard the spaceship Discovery (exemplified in the sleeping state of the three men and in the passive, childlike images of the astronauts’ existence until they rebelled against their mechanical brain, HAL), and finally to the death of Bowman and the appearance of the star child (figure 35). In an economic display of images, the epilogue captures how life has passed through different phases in the history of human intelligence, the last being indeterminate in relation to the meaning of life and death. Bowman the astronaut is the last human, and his metamorphosis introduces ambiguous questions of the future, not the past. Is the star child a harbinger of the post-human brain, a trope for moribund humanity, or an expression of the coming of different life forms and forms of intelligence?
The cerebral journey has culminated in an indeterminate ending, suggesting in satiric and elegiac fashion that existing conceptions of the brain and forms of knowledge are as inadequate as cinematic technology has become in the post–World War Two world. The shattered crystal wine glass (the glass ball in Citizen Kane?) is a reminder of irreversible time, of the movement-image contrasted to a different conception of space and time through the crystalline time-image. In Nelson’s words, “2001 brings the human race to the limits of its growth, where, like the bone, it is converted into an artifact that turns to crystal and shatters from the weight of evolutionary gravity…. The mirror world has been broken, and beyond its reflexivity awaits the unknown and unexplored.”29 Accordingly, the allegory confronts the medium in which it is expressed, which involves the history of cinema and, further, the history of consciousness, inviting the spectator to contemplate the cinema and the world as a brain. The viewer is presented with different relations between the brain and the world where “a reconciliation is carried out in another dimension [a fourth dimension], a regeneration of the membrane which would pacify the outside [the cosmos] and the inside [the brain], and recreate a world-brain as a whole in the harmony of the spheres.”30
“Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” confounds conceptions of the real that rely on a split between inside and outside, mind and body, cinema and “life.” The film’s self-reflexive treatment of technology and the medium of cinema is an instrument for sharing with the spectator a critique of spectacle. The fracture between subjectivity and objectivity, the privileging of vision and knowledge is misguided in “attempts to know the world by seeing the world.”31 As the final episode develops, the conflict between HAL and the humans recedes before technological pyrotechnics, and confusion between the human and the cybernetic brain reigns. The relationships between humans and their creations metamorphose into self-division and ambivalence.
The episode resolves in a cinematic alternative to anthropomorphic spectacles. The visual and aural images, expressed by the cinematographic brain, belong to the regime of what Deleuze has termed the “time-image” in contrast to the “movement-image,” which is characterized by an identity of image and movement and a sensory-motor relationship among human beings, their milieu, and action. According to Deleuze, “[T]he optical and sound situations of neo-realism contrast with the strong sensory-motor situations of traditional realism,”32 which rely on distinctions between subjective and objective perception and action within a milieu.
The movement-image is, in its varying forms, linked to the animal, human, and even computer brains, while the time-image is the cinematographic brain. In the time-image, the identity between movement and image has been sundered and a different relation to space and time has emerged, particularly associated with experimental and avant-garde, post–World War Two cinema and art cinema. Neorealism carried the crisis of the movement-image further with “its slackening of sensori-motor connections.” The regime of the time-image presupposes different conceptions of narration, character, and reception. In neorealism, as an instantiation of the time-image, “the character has become a kind of viewer. He shifts, runs and becomes animated in vain, the situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on all sides…. He records rather then reacts.”33 The characters in the cinematic regime that Deleuze terms the time-image are, if not children, somnambulists, visionaries, and counterfeiters. The narratives blur lines between the everyday and the exceptional, the real and the imaginary, the physical and the mental, and the films are replete with empty spaces and idle periods of time. The “limit situations” in which the characters find themselves extend to the “dehumanized landscapes” where the spectator comes face to face with time. From the cinematic to the digital image, the technology question and its relation to thought has become increasingly complex, raising the issue of the possibility of intelligence and thinking in the face of man’s substitution by the machine.34
Ultimately, indeterminacy is the guiding principle to the cinematic brain in Kubrick’s film. The spectator, like the characters, is treated as a complex field of forces where the “distinction between subjective and objective … tends to lose its importance, to the extent that the optical situation or visual description replaces the motor action.”35 This indeterminacy is especially characteristic of electronic media and cybernetics. A generator of new forms of information and knowledge about causality, identity, perception, and materiality, cybernetics is a medium of power and control (technical, biological, and social) in ways still to be understood. The cinema has increasingly been allied to the production of electronic images that
no longer have any outside (out-of-field) any more than they are internalized as a whole; rather, they have a right side and a reverse, reversible and non-superimposable, like a power to turn back on themselves. They are the object of a perpetual reorganization, in which the new image can arise from any point whatever of the preceding image. The organization of space here loses its privileged directions.36
Rather than reveling in or despairing about technology, Kubrick’s film undertakes a cinematic odyssey that unhinges conceptions of space and time in the interests of exploring the fate of knowledge in the age of advanced mechanical reproduction, calling into question existing conceptions of the brain in terms that are temporal rather than spatial, open rather than closed. Particularly, by means of its allegory, the film questions conceptions of technology based on a reductive conception of and a belief in the “perfection” of the animal, human, cybernetic, and cinematographic. The film has offered the spectator a version of cinematography as an instrument for reflecting on consciousness.
1. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 205–6.
2. Ibid., 211.
3. Mark Crispin Miller, “A Cold Ascent,” Sight and Sound 4, no. 1 (June 1994): 18–26.
4. D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 202.
5. Arthur C. Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001 (New York: New American Library, 1972), 271.
6. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 56.
7. Ibid., 55.
8. Robert Burgoyne, “Narrative Overture and Closure in 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Enclitic 5, no. 2 (Fall–Spring 1981–1982): 173.
9. Mario Falsetto, ed., “Introduction,” Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick (New York: Hall, 1996), 11.
10. Luis M. García Mainar, Narrative and Stylistic Patterns in the Films of Stanley Kubrick (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 1999), 30.
11. Miller, “A Cold Ascent,” 20.
12. Thomas Allen Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2000), 113.
13. Ibid., 114.
14. Miller, “A Cold Ascent,” 24.
15. Randy Rasmussen, Stanley Kubrick: Seven Films Analyzed (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001), 75.
16. Ellis Hanson, “Technology, Paranoia, and the Queer Voice,” Screen 34, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 144.
17. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 265.
18. Rasmussen, Stanley Kubrick: Seven Films Analyzed, 97.
19. Piers Bizony, 2001: Filming the Future (London: Aurum, 1994), 18.
20. Hanson, “Technology, Paranoia, and the Queer Voice,” 137.
21. Ibid., 138.
22. Ibid., 140.
23. Ibid., 121.
24. Burgoyne, “Narrative Overture and Closure in 2001: A Space Odyssey,” 174.
25. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 212.
26. Carolyn Geduld, Filmguide to 2001: A Space Odyssey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 60.
27. Ibid., 206.
28. Nelson, Kubrick, 115.
29. Ibid., 135.
30. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 206.
31. Burgoyne, “Narrative Overture and Closure in 2001: A Space Odyssey,” 176.
32. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, 5.
33. Ibid., 3.
34. Michel Ciment, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, trans. Gilbert Adair (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), 126.
35. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 7.
36. Ibid., 265.
Agamben, Giorgio. Means without End, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Ansell Pearson, K. Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual. London: Routledge, 2002.
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne. London: Verso, 1996.
Bizony, Piers. 2001: Filming the Future. London: Aurum, 1994.
Burgoyne, Robert. “Narrative Overture and Closure in 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Enclitic 5, no. 2 (Fall–Spring 1981–1982): 172–180.
Charlot, John. “From Ape-Man to Space-Baby: An Interpretation,” East-West Film Journal 1, no. 1 (December 1986): 84–90.
Chion, Michel. “2001: l’Odyssée de l’espace: Stanley Kubrick, les yeux grands ouverts,” Positif 439 (August 1997): 82–87.
Ciment, Michel. Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, trans. Gilbert Adair. New York: Faber and Faber, 2001.
Ciment, Michel, ed. “Stanley Kubrick, les yeux grands ouverts,” Positif 439 (August 1997): 66–102.
Clarke, Arthur C. Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! Collected Essays 1934–1998. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.
Clarke, Arthur C. The Lost Worlds of 2001. New York: New American Library, 1972.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Dumont, J. P., and J. Monod. “Beyond the Infinite: A Structural Analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3, no. 3 (Summer 1978): 297–317.
Ede, François. “De la terre à la lune,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 503 (June 1996): 76.
Elmsholz, Jean-Marc. “2001: l’Odyssée de l’espace: Stanley Kubrick, les yeux grands ouverts,” Positif 439 (August 1997): 87–89.
Falsetto, Mario. Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001.
Falsetto, Mario, ed. “Introduction.” Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick. New York: Hall, 1996.
Feldmann, Hans. “Kubrick and His Discontents,” Film Quarterly 30, no. 1 (Fall 1976): 12–19.
Geduld, Carolyn. Filmguide to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973.
Gelmis, Joseph. “Stanley Kubrick: Une film doit être une illumination,” Positif 464 (October 1999): 11–22.
Hanson, Ellis. “Technology, Paranoia, and the Queer Voice,” Screen 34, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 137–62.
Howard, James. Stanley Kubrick Companion. London: Batsford, 1999.
Kagan, Norman. The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick. New York: Continuum, 2000.
Kolker, Robert Phillip. A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Krukowski, Damon. “Damon Krukowski Listens to 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Film Comment 38 (January–February 2002): 16.
Lucy, Niall. “Total Eclipse of the Heart: Thinking through Technology,” Senses of Cinema: An Online Journal Devoted to the Serious and Eclectic Discussion of Cinema 7 (June 2000): 1–7. Available. Online: www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/7/technology.html.
Mainar, Luis M. García. Narrative and Stylistic Patterns in the Films of Stanley Kubrick. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 1999.
Miller, Mark Crispin. “A Cold Ascent,” Sight and Sound 4, no. 1 (June 1994): 18–26.
Nelson, Thomas Allen. Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2000.
Rasmussen, Randy. Stanley Kubrick: Seven Films Analyzed. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001.
Rodowick, D. N. Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.