Obviously space is our destiny, that much I concede. After all I live there myself. But the excitement of the great voyages of discovery will pass me by; I will always belong to those who are left behind on the quay waving goodbye to the departing; I belong to the past, to the time before Armstrong put his big corrugated footstep on the face of the moon. That was another thing I got to see that afternoon, for without thinking anything in particular I had drifted into a sort of theater where there was a film about space travel. I found myself sitting in one of those American swivel chairs that hug you like a womb, and setting off on my journey through space. Almost immediately tears came to my eyes…. Emotion ought to be inspired by art, and here I was being misled by reality; some technical wizard had worked optical magic to strew the lunar gravel at our feet, so that it was just as if we ourselves were standing on the moon and walking around. In the distance shone (!) the unimaginable planet Earth. How could there ever have been a Homer or Ovid to write about the fate of gods or men on that ethereal, silvery, floating disc? I could smell the dead dust at my feet, I saw the puffs of moon powder whirl upward and settle again. I was divested of my being, and no substitute was in the offing. Whether the humans all about me were having the same sensation I do not know. It was deathly quiet. We were on the moon and we would never get there; in a while we would step outside into the shrill daylight and go our separate ways on a disc no bigger than a guilder, a free-floating object adrift somewhere in the black drapery of space…. Off went the Voyager, a futile, man-made machine, a gleaming spider in empty space, wafting past lifeless planets, where sorrow had never existed except perhaps for the pain of rocks groaning under an unbearable burden of ice, and I wept. The Voyager sailed away from us into eternity, emitting a bleep every now and then and taking photographs of all those gelid or fiery but ever lifeless spheres which, together with the orb we must live on, revolve round a flaming bubble of gas; and the amplifiers, placed invisibly around us in the dark theater, sprayed us with sound in a desperate attempt to corrupt the silence of the solitary metallic voyager. A compelling, velvety voice began speaking, at first making itself heard through the music, then as a solo instrument. In ninety thousand years’ time, the voice intoned, the Voyager would have reached the outer limits of our galaxy. There was a pause, the music swelled like toxic surf, and fell silent again to allow the voice to fire a parting shot: “And then, maybe, we will know the answer to our eternal questions.”
The humanoids in the theater cringed.
“Is there anyone out there?”
All around me it was as quiet now as in the deserted streets of the universe across which the Voyager hurtled noiselessly, bathed in a cosmic glow, and only in the fifth of its ninety thousand years. Ninety thousand! By that time the ashes of the ashes of our ashes would long since have disowned our provenance. We would have never been there! The music gathered momentum, pus oozed from my eyes. How about that for a metamorphosis! The voice gave forth one final burst: “Are we all alone?”
—CEES NOOTEBOOM, The Following Story
Herman Mussert, a man who doesn’t know that he is dying, is the narrator of this austerely afflicting passage from Cees Nooteboom’s novel. Herman’s unreliable memory lights upon a metal surrogate for his (and our) loneliest self, bleeping through its forlorn voyage past “lifeless planets.” The dying man lies in a bed in Amsterdam, cast adrift among his last unspooling thoughts. He seeks to postpone as long as possible the recognition that he has come to the end of consciousness, the end of a personal “now.” Something else—bearing perhaps a tiny bead of sorrow—is taking over, assigning his matter “other duties” as it embarks, free of Herman, on its “endless wanderings.”1 I recall that, when first reading these paragraphs, with mortality licking at the edges of every phrase, two images from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 came forcefully to mind. In the first, Frank Poole is making his lengthy jog through the rotating centrifuge of the Discovery, occasionally punching at the air. Perhaps he is issuing a mild protest against the white “hamster wheel” environment and its tedium, but the punching does not cause him to break the steady pace of his run. Aram Khatchaturian’s Gayne Ballet Suite accompanies Frank’s round-and-round indoor journey, supplying a mournful commentary on the action, to which Frank himself has no access. If his thoughts are on music, that is to say, he is humming a different tune. The suffering violins of Khatchaturian might help give form to his inchoate feelings, if he could but hear them (figure 18).
The second 2001 image summoned by the Nooteboom passage also involves Frank. He is once again signaling protest with his hands. He desperately fumbles with his severed air hose as his spacesuit-armored body floats off beautifully, helplessly, negligibly into space. Who has ever had such a death? In this episode, there is no sound to cushion or explain the fall. What is to be understood is that a suddenly anonymous death is happening and that there is no room in so much immensity (all this “black drapery of space”) for a personal experience of dying to penetrate. Frank’s going seems not to make even the faintest mark, or if there is a mark to bear in mind, how do we turn it to some account? (Later, the negligibility effect is redoubled when Frank’s body is retrieved by his partner and held fast in the metallic arms of a pod, only to be abandoned once more.) As my reading experience led me rather capriciously back to Frank in 2001, I wondered why I had never before registered the depth of the Kubrick film’s melancholy. Like so much else in this imperiously aloof, well-sealed pod of a narrative, the melancholy seems somehow veiled.
2001, from the time of its 1968 release, has seemed to be many different films. That is to say, it is a work unusually receptive to drastically conflicting emotional and intellectual responses. If one is so inclined, it is easy to dwell excitedly on the film’s presentation of the human potential for transformation and rebirth, on heavenly bodies in perfect alignment, and on the existence of hidden alien benefactors, sending magical milestones to us at crucial stages in our journey to enlightenment. In this version of the story, the triumphalism of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra fanfare can be made to stand for the arc of the movie as a whole: a slightly chilly musical stargate to the reign of wonder. However, as other commentaries on 2001 amply attest, there is no form of pessimism or irony about human doings and prospects for undoing that the narrative is not equally adept at confirming. It is a movie tailor-made for viewers who like to work conceptually rather than experientially. Yet, as the legendary “trip” movie of the 1960s, it has frequently been championed as “a film for groovin’, not understanding.”2 Pauline Kael famously threw up her hands in exasperation at what she took to be Kubrick’s willful amorphousness and decried the film’s “celebration of cop-out.”3
I have gradually come to believe that the film is authentically haunted by a need to see (and think) double at every stage of its unfolding. Kubrick sets out to build a kind of lavish, inhuman utopia (pitching camp at the far edge of humanness), which answers to some deep private image and need. But he is steadily at war with his utopian impulses and distrusts all of the forces at work in this fantasy space, as well as the rational schemes for utopia devised by any planner. He endeavors to hatch pictures worth marveling at from glistening black eggs, turning the movie screen itself on end and making its white surface into an impenetrable black slab. Instead of receiving images on its “open” surface, the black screen sends out urgent signals—triggered by sunlight—which no one has quite the aptitude, or properly formed mind, to interpret. As women recede into the narrative background (robotic, distracted, or patiently relearning to walk as they facilitate service), birth imagery involving various metal begetters and techno-conduits pushes insistently into the gap that the female fade-out has left. An androgynous computer, the film’s only complex character, experiments with mysteries of humanness just beyond his ken—and learns what it means to be human as the men around him seem to find the category outmoded. His baptism as a person occurs in the acts of being conspired against and slowly killed. The more recognizable candidates for our human representatives in 2001 seem to be burdened with the film’s own reticence about self-disclosure. They are woven into a system that doesn’t quite fit or suit them, but they have difficulty gaining a clear sense of what feels wrong. It is as difficult in this film’s world to see where you are and to consider what your actual present placement feels like as to imagine your way backward or forward to something else. Dave, Frank, and Dr. Floyd seem more reconciled to the “now” than most of us are, but everything in and outside of their metal cages conspire to make the now feel cramped and oppressive.
Finally, there is the doubleness having to do with the force of revelation itself. Revelation seems always pending or actually in process in 2001, but the film exhibits a simultaneous terror, like the prospect of facing a Medusa, about what, of necessity, must come forth. Dave’s arrested-in-panic frozenness as he hurtles through the Stargate at warp speed is instructive somehow about the sizable death fear that accompanies every impulse to open the eyes wide and see beyond. Everything in 2001 wishes to be disclosed and veiled at the same time. The face of the film is a face covered by a reflecting helmet or a trembling ape mask, while some shadow of the ravenous leopard prowls the desert in our midst. The most auspicious gesture that Kubrick sanctions when revelation looms is a blind reaching out of the hand (as if supplicating) toward something huge, indefinite, and quite possibly malign. The consistent requirement for such reaching up—through emptiness—is that the one with arm extended cannot know, and probably should not trust, what is in store.
2001 is as much fairy tale as science fiction. Since the latter genre is too entranced, for my taste, with hardware and solemn, flavorless ruminations about “things to come,” I will use the fairy tale as my point of entry to Kubrick’s magical thinking. 2001’s double-mindedness is akin to the vexing riddles that the unseasoned, frequently emotionally disturbed questers of German Romantic tales in particular are obliged to solve, often with their lives held forfeit. Riddles commonly unfold in stages, and as one moves from chamber to chamber in the alien fortress designed expressly for one’s riddle trial, new properties of enigma are annexed to old ones. What initially seemed a route to placidity and the safety of sound judgment, for example, might well become a nest of fears in a trice. But then, very soon, agitations may impart their own quality of keenness to sight.
The most remarkable fairy tales are deeply interested in the separate claims and values attached to remembering and forgetting. Hugo von Hoffmansthal’s majestic prose fragment Andreas (part fairy tale, part Bildungsroman) ceaselessly probes what he calls “the abysslike contradictions [between remembering and forgetting] upon which life is built, like the Delphic temple over its bottomless split in the earth.”4 According to David Miles, in his seminal study of Andreas:
[C]hange, in Hoffmansthal’s vocabulary, belongs to the realm of the amoral adventurer; it is “living one’s life” to the full, as he puts it. “Whoever wants to live must transcend himself, must change”; in a word, “he must forget.” The moral category of steadfastness and fidelity [for the committed adventurer] can only mean “stagnation and death.” The tragic dilemma arises when we … realize that “all human dignity is bound up with steadfastness, with not forgetting, with faithfulness.”5
In 2001, the new regime of steadfastness in space seems to have required the loosening or wearing away of ties to a former steadfastness on Earth. The space adventurers have not so much renounced their old dependencies as lost track of them. Earthly attachments seem to be drifting, in a way that seems almost natural, out of the reach of memory. Fidelity is a visible shipboard virtue. We see crew members on the Discovery, and elsewhere, unblinkingly given over to the performance of routines. These explorers seem to have learned how to sleep wide awake, lulled by the rhythms of tasks which require little effort but supply a “good enough,” future-serving logic to keep them more or less occupied. Steadfastness is for them at best a mode of surface recall—with something dim and untoward pressing intermittently for recognition, like a lonely smoke signal from the interior. Steadfast too, but at an even further remove from usable memory, is the hibernating trio of crew members in their A.I.- like Sleeping Beauty coffins. Finally, there is the overarching steadfastness of HAL 9000, a computer that has taken over most of the work of memory, and its attendant anxieties, from the Discovery crew members. They acquiesce in the idea of a necessary transfer of memory power. HAL will remember fully, dispassionately, faultlessly what needs to be kept in mind and coordinated, so that the ship can complete its complicated mission.
The moral category of fidelity, then, comes down to the crew’s acceptance of the obligation to attend to HAL’s mild requirements. In exchange, they can indulge the fantasy that HAL is their servant rather than their superior. Dave and Frank listen to him as if to an echo chamber of memories and reflections that once were situated inside them. It seems fitting, under these new conditions, that their powers of retention live a bit further away from themselves than they once did, since this distance (or inner gap) coincides so comfortably with the view from the spacecraft window. As they peer “outdoors,” imposing objects occasionally meet (or, more likely, overwhelm) their gaze, but the scale of what they confront repeatedly suggests the irrelevancy of human vision to the act of seeing. What is there is too remote or manifestly impersonal for intimate inspection. The eye’s attempts at a grander vision equal to the demands of outer space are quickly vanquished. In the face of experiential impotence and a heightened passivity to circumstances which, after all, are unrelated to our way of living, humans’ best recourse is to convert inhospitable sense impressions to cold data. Even indoors, with transmissions from faraway family members reminding the astronauts of birthdays and childhood, gift-giving pledges and eventual homecomings, the images are stubbornly impenetrable—as though they too are best regarded as data, not the soft stuff of emotionalized memory.
Here is the fairytale plight of the human crew members of the Discovery, and perhaps of HAL as well. They are embarked on a journey through a seemingly infinite dark wood (a billion miles to the moons of Jupiter), in answer to a mysterious, “supernatural” summons whose intention is unclear. Like the untried youths who set off for a distant kingdom to perform impossible tasks and solve daunting riddles, the figures on the fragile transport have no advance sense of readiness. They have virtually no idea what to expect and thus for what to prepare themselves. Like their fairytale counterparts, they may well prove to be expendable because of something they lack, inwardly, or because their equipment is missing some vital component. The men place their faith in a higher mechanical being who, like a cooperative genie from a bottle, is pledged (forced) to look after their interests. So much in the world of fairy tales has to do with the ability to recall and honor a core simplicity, the willingness to trust, instinctively, the right signs at the right moments, and the gift of listening. Before one can listen, of course, one must be lucky enough to encounter the right, undeceiving guides. Yet, for all the emphasis on the possession of uncorrupted instincts, there is a core ruthlessness to the fairytale world as well. One must be prepared to relinquish any ally at the first evidence of misstep or dubious counsel. If a comrade (even a sibling) is compromised, he is instantly, fatally compromised, and one must dispose of him calmly, with no remorse or backward glance. Fairytale seekers are all “amoral adventurers” in essence, forsaking every connection that blurs their view of the task at hand. They live thinly and without surprise in the externally vivid predicament of the now. And for Kubrick, the now is seldom disengaged from the quester’s habitual blindness. The external vividness may be present, but it’s out of reach. The now is a repeating lonely instant in which our mortal coil, improperly attuned to both its aptitudes and insufficiency, continues to unravel.
Like Bassanio in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the weakly provisioned adventurers in 2001 stake their future on the choice of plain lead caskets rather than gaudy, enticing cases rich in ornament. That is to say, the Discovery has already left behind the sensuous pleasures and deceptions of Earth. Both the crewmen’s chill means of conveyance and the monolith they unwittingly seek are formed of sober, stark metal. Spacecraft and magic object alike instruct the decidedly unfanciful travelers to wean themselves from the gratification of the senses, one by one. If they were to raise a toast to the moons of Jupiter, it would undoubtedly be with powdered champagne. In the “Dawn of Man” prologue, the lead casket is already in play; it is already designated the correct choice in the fairytale riddle that animates the whole narrative. Though our ape-men forebears, like the space travelers who succeed them, have no comprehension of the monolith when it stands before them, they are compelled to choose it, to reach out and touch it, to receive its imprint (figure 19). The first choosing seems to interpose a barrier between animal instincts (in Kubrick’s depiction, a grim amalgam of fear and helpless rage) and the virtually blank slate reserved for reasoning. One of 2001’s only moments of creaturely joy comes at the pivot point between the chaotic, defenseless, undifferentiated life of the ape pack and Moon-Watcher’s literal taking hold of an object/idea which will separate and isolate him. One way of describing this breakthrough is as a transplanting of the barrier from outside to inside. Think of the monolith, paradoxically light resistant and triggered by light—which embodies this barrier—suddenly entering the mind, creating a new division in human consciousness. Moon-Watcher, the first beneficiary of this double mind, goes off by himself, experiences his privacy, and acquires a secret within that private domain. The secret has to do with power that doesn’t need to be shared. The acceleration of consciousness and the accompanying crescendo of Moon-Watcher’s feelings are visually expressed by his smashing down of a likeness of an enemy. Moon-Watcher does not explode in feral excitement because his world opens up to him. He instead discovers the joy of enclosure. He enters a fresh mental cave where the darkness of having secrets combines with the thrill of psychic separation. How exalting it is to increase one’s sense of differentiation from others while hiding behind a dense screen inside the self. The tossing of the bone weapon heavenward and the lifting of the gaze and the body from ground level are laden with the irony of the human mind instantly falling under an enchantment. The individual will flexes its muscles and, as the mind watches, it grows ill. It is as though the “I,” in becoming “I,” becomes a virus or pestilence as well. The sickness is not easily detected by the self because it is as foundational as mortality. Moon-Watcher commits his weapon to memory as he elatedly disavows solidarity, the instinct to connect. He comes into his own by looking away from the Earth for an image worthy of his new dream of self. If Moon-Watcher were a poet, he might contrive lines in the spirit of Jean-Baptiste Chassignet’s “Retourne le Miroir”: “If you love heaven, in heaven you will be / If you love earth, to earth you will fall.”6
The Discovery adventurers made their choice of the lead casket in this fairy tale long ago, through their surrogate, Moon-Watcher. He launched the exchange of miserable animal instincts for a dramatic sense of himself and an impending (always impending) revelation of the godhead. Moon-Watcher, the primeval king in this tale, begins to divest himself of the memory of what he has been. To become something greater, he must over time erect a barrier (as opaque as possible) between himself and the instincts that enslaved him. He creates a self by clearing a wide enough space in consciousness so that he can be safely alone, as removed from others as from the forgotten life of instinct. Moon-Watcher, and his descendants, will use weapon advantage, and the array of technologies that flow from it, to gain more distance and more clarity about their fruitful relation to instruments of all sorts. Man will “clean himself’ in the exercise of reason, and in the act of cleaning himself will also fashion pictures of order that he can live by. The space adventurers keep faith with the old king’s dream of order, his taciturn ways, and his fantasy of insulating himself through his relation to powerful objects. As I have noted, they are sailing in an elaborate metal crate (a “full metal jacket,” if you like) to a rendezvous with the ancient opaque form whose spiritual hardness is already within them. An internal monolith, in other words, monitors their barrier-multiplying “final round” of humanness. The riddle of Kubrick’s tale of enchantment has to do with earning a transcendent expansion of the field of consciousness through an ever-more-drastic regimen of contraction.
The theater of the human, which we encounter at the turn of a new century and millennium, seems to require an exceedingly small stage to play out its concerns. Dr. Floyd, Dave, and Frank are clearly old hands at the business of winnowing away demonstrable needs, interests, affections. Spoken language has receded as a force upon which these men depend to color or imaginatively engage with their social-mechanical sphere. They seem to be spinning invisible cocoons for themselves—somewhat akin to the hibernation boxes occupied by the Discovery’s more advanced specialists. One might argue that, for Kubrick, there is an art, as well as an irony, in their reducing their resources and vital signs. I’m reminded of Frank O’Hara’s in-earnest joke: “nobody should experience anything they don’t need to.”7 The men we are invited to watch become less soft through their almost monklike discipline of forgetting. They are slowly rendering themselves compatible to an environment that will perhaps demand something new, something other than the mess of mistakes (unclean!) humans have already made of themselves. The implication is that the grossly imperfect human attainments of the past—one failed system after another—no longer count for anything. To insist on measuring ourselves by these deforming memories stymies our movement toward a more radical metamorphosis.
2001 is deeply captivated by that final, gleaming chamber of the altered mind, with its adjoining bathroom, in which a shriveled, bedridden Dave has his dying vision—a seeing through lead, as it were (figures 23 and 27). I associate this episode of release with the moment authored by Lewis Carroll when Alice is at last tiny enough to pass through the Wonderland door. This previously hemmed-in space at the bottom of a tunnel suddenly expands to receive her, and she floats through the opening on a tide composed of her eyes’ own fluids. The whole Odyssey narrative is committed, like Carroll’s fantasy of Wonderland, to metamorphosis without warning. In Dave’s case, Kubrick proposes the abandonment of the peasant rags of mortal frailty for something sturdier, less exposed. Kubrick seems of two minds, however, about whether his star child is a radiant godhead or another version of Rosemary’s baby. (Roman Polanski’s film, as it happens, was released almost concurrently with 2001.) The feel of the moment when the monolith opens up to the glowing bubble of Dave reborn is undeniably transcendent, as though we were privileged to witness a clean lift away from all of the barriers that consciousness has devised to keep us captive in the cell of ego. At last the eye, with a fetus wrapped inside it, is granted the reach, the boundless power of extension that the Romantic imagination has always craved. Yet Kubrick cannot stay reconciled for more than the duration of two lengthy shots (i.e., the space of two elevated thoughts) to any Romantic impulse. Something slouches through the heavens waiting to be born, and that pending emergent figure is Janus-faced. It looks simultaneously toward glory and desolation. On the one hand, the unspoiled, still-sheathed star child, nearly equal in magnitude to the nearby Earth, its plaything, revives the age-old dream of perfectibility. On the other hand, as it slowly revolves to face us, it intimates a persisting negative fate—the counterdream of original sin (figure 35).
The cold blue light that infiltrates our prolonged star child sighting does not release the image from the hold of skepticism. Kubrick cannot quite surrender himself, or us, to the faith that comes with a true forgetting of our crippled consciousness and all of the evils to which it is heir. “There is, after all, so much grit at the bottom of the [consciousness] container,” Iris Murdoch has one of her characters declare in The Black Prince, and “almost all of our natural preoccupations are low ones.”8 To have faith in the star child as a pristine, higher phase of being may well require too much vulnerability—which, for Kubrick, is usually synonymous with gullibility. Better perhaps to recognize an unvanquished curse in a cunning new disguise. Kubrick gestures movingly toward a release from our mind-forged manacles, but as he considers the star child’s potential, it turns, almost of its own accord, into an image of control. Control in a double sense: Kubrick’s control of the child’s seeing, as its gaze becomes sentient and (possibly) secretive, and the star child’s taking control over us. The movement from infant softness to a sense of command takes only moments to accomplish.
If we affirm the star child as a fit emblem of our collective rebirth, the affirmation must be made in a spirit of openness and unthinking trust. We must feel our way past Kubrick’s instinctive dependence on fortifications and displays of deadly power. If Samuel Beckett, say, were to find a place in his death’s cradle, endlessly rocking, for a star child that death cannot instantly lay hold of and croon to nothingness, what would his readers do with it? It is no easier, I think, to find a vocabulary to extol a mechanical, motherless Kubrick space baby in a uterine helmet. This child gazes like a fledgling predator on a world it has nearly outgrown. Having described the effect of the final images so negatively, I am immediately aware that I have framed the ending of 2001 as too decisively forbidding. I have given “wonder-proof” reason full permission to close up the space of mystery. A corrective adjustment would lead the viewer to pay closer attention to the spirit of metamorphosis that is in the air for the entire last section of the film, and recall that Kubrick is staking everything on our willingness to float patiently, in a state of unknowing, bereft of narrative and rational supports. What pins things together is the myth of resurrection. One cannot discount the calm authority with which our fears of old age and dying are addressed, then magically alleviated. Dave passes swiftly into a condition of prostrate decrepitude, then emerges on the other side of a barrier, glowing with light and boundless untapped energy. It is with these eyes, the final images seem to proclaim, that the journey of this narrative should be viewed. The star child attains the purified awareness, free of time-bound constraints and poisonous confusion, required to carry us forward to a better place. Perhaps this higher sight can redeem our through-a-glass-darkly viewing of the movie that is drawing to a close.
Yet, once again, this pushing toward fairytale (or Blakean) fulfillment feels too emphatically benign. The cerebrally driven tableaux that map our route to the star child don’t quite earn a true release or breakthrough. There is an extraordinary tug-of-war going on between imaginative intuition, with its gift for wild, irrational leaps, and cautious brain power, with a will and need to dominate. In his Notes on Cinematography, director Robert Bresson offers some remarkable observations on the value, indeed the necessity, in film of images being transformed on contact with other images. He identifies a danger in making images that are too self-involved, enamored with what they can express by way of ideas on their own:
If an image, looked at by itself, expresses something sharply, if it involves an interpretation, it will not be transformed on contact with other images. The other images will have no power over it, and it will have no power over the other images. Neither action, nor reaction. It is definitive and unusable in the cinematographer’s system.9
A later entry urges the director to “stick exclusively to impressions, to sensations. No intervention of intelligence which is foreign to these impressions and sensations.”10 Bresson’s guidelines for a properly expressive cinema are as personal and fallible as anyone else’s, but I find it intriguing how deeply his assumptions come into conflict with Kubrick’s.
Kubrick’s individual images, to a greater degree than the images of most directors, aspire to self-sufficiency, to the lucid character of a firmly articulated thought. Toward the end of 2001, for example, the emphasis on shot-to-shot disjunction steadily increases, and not only because the space-time continuum is being reconfigured in Dave’s estranged consciousness. Bresson speaks about images being transformed on contact with other images. Kubrick, in contrast, stubbornly asserts the integrity of each shot idea carefully composing itself out of appropriate materials. His style is about maintaining shot boundaries and denying ease of carryover or continuity. It seems fair to say that Kubrick’s form does not naturally serve the transforming tendencies of film. Each image holds its separate domain for as long as possible, like a platoon holding a hill, and does not surrender what it has made its own to what comes after. Kubrick considers it appropriate to defend the separate image (in advance) against the power that the following image will assert. In this respect, to shift metaphors, each shot resembles a chess move. The player/director balances the necessity of thinking ahead against all of the possible ways that the current shot (move) might be vulnerable, or even fatally in error. Film, for Kubrick, is not about how one thing, or set of impressions, naturally gives way to another. Like HAL, Kubrick keeps the pod doors between images self-protectively sealed.
As every tale in Ovid’s Metamorphoses confirms, transformation entails loss of control, a violent disruption of established boundaries, and promiscuous mixtures of native and outcast elements. To put it in terms of one of Kubrick’s recurring bathroom settings (figures 26–30), metamorphosis is like a backed-up toilet suddenly disgorging a mass of heterogeneous ingredients, hideously familiar and also unrecognizable. Kubrick is entranced by metamorphosis—as both 2001 and The Shining make clear—but he is temperamentally at odds with its untrammeled energy. He is a careful tactician specializing in controlled eruptions, in which purity of form somehow prevails over any release of chaos. While Kubrick can imagine breakdowns in every conceivable system, he designs a better overseer than HAL in all of his narratives to make the apprehension of the terrible and the transcendent geometrically elegant. The narrative world may fall into complete disorder, but the artist’s machinery of demonstration will not—not for an instant. Kubrick stays close enough to human turmoil to register its dangers, but the dangers are finally rendered abstract by the cool remoteness of his method of surveillance. The camera probes and is relentlessly vigilant, but it strives to avoid the temptation of identification. (Here, it seems to me, is the most crucial distinction between Kubrick’s and Hitchcock’s formalisms.)
In lieu of promoting identification with his characters, Kubrick grants them the comparative stability of grotesques and puppets. Alex in A Clockwork Orange (1971) comes closest to being an identification figure, but he seems to me the major, and to some degree, accidental exception to the Kubrick rule, especially in the director’s post-Spartacus (1960) career. Kubrick characters are often subjected to great suffering and distress, but their sense of themselves as suffering beings generally does not count for much. The pain they undergo is not transferred to the spectator, except as an idea. Kubrick characters may resemble us at times without making significant emotional claims on us, because we are not invited inside them. They exhibit the kind of hard efficiency and cryptic flatness of figures in a tale by the brothers Grimm. We are intended to contemplate their actions and responses without the distractions of enforced intimacy. Kubrick clarifies what is wrong with his characters, almost mathematically, and we participate in the process of figuring them out—making a diagnosis—as we watch them enact their system-dictated ailments.
At times we enter the electric field of their fear, rage, or cruelty, but in my experience the participation is almost impersonally with the emotion itself, rather than with the character gripped by it. It is a common occurrence for spectators to metamorphose (after a fashion) into movie characters, slipping over the line into a kind of dream-melding of self and figure on-screen. As they penetrate some vital secret of a character’s psyche, they may feel penetrated themselves, thus reclaiming their own secret in the guise of looking at someone else’s. This productive fusion and jumble is, as a rule, foreign to Kubrick’s approach. He seems to have minimal curiosity about the vast middle range of human experience, and what is at stake there. In Eyes Wide Shut (1999), he ventures into this middle range as though it were a dream. Only when the secure moorings of Bill and Alice’s marital waking life dissolve can Kubrick devise points of entry into “ordinary” behavior.
The star child, while clearly linked to Dave’s sojourn in the Louis XVI bedroom, does not depend on this figure being broken down emotionally. It does not emerge from a prior phase of havoc. The metamorphoses (first, from youthful Dave to old man, then from old man to fetus) are about breaks or puzzling turns in a controlled sequence of thought. We share Dave’s perplexity in the bedroom, for example, as though he (and we) had been given a knotty problem to work out. But we are not obliged to join Dave as he is wrenched away from himself and undergoes a ghastly series of shocks. Rational consciousness is at no point given the slip, even though familiar categories are undone and transformation is well under way. A calm, sovereign mind presides over the dismantling of Dave and his replacement by a more “receptive,” technically refined fetal mechanism. The completion of the riddle of 2001 takes place on a child’s face, where remembering and forgetting become eerily interchangeable, as though they required but one expression. Like Kay in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” the star child’s gaze feels remote, nonreceptive, as though a tiny sliver of glass from the devil’s mirror had lodged there. Nothing that might warm us can be found in this unearthly demeanor. The star child is cleansed of obligation to anything that preceded it. (The child has, crucially, no parents of any sort with whom to contend.) The past as it pertains to nature, culture, and ancestry has been folded up like a tablecloth and successfully stored away. Yet, as we dwell on this newly formed face, it seems already possessed with an idea or intention that overflows the present into a determined future.
The star child seems programmed with a will to power, which may be both boundless and inhumanly unified. It will act perhaps as the great house-cleaner of consciousness: no more clutter, vacillation, and self-division. It is attractively disengaged from the Earth, but gives the impression of mastering the planet by seeing it whole and from a height. The Earth becomes a graspable idea, as it were. Our task, if we take this image of transcendence to heart, is to imagine ourselves blindly submissive to its unreleased energy for betterment: “Oh, blessed weightlessness and freedom from imperfect attachments.” The star child is not, at any level, an image that suggests dependence, or the need for an apprenticeship in thought and feeling. Looking beyond Kubrick’s radiant fetus to the android child of the Spielberg-Kubrick “collaboration,” A.I., we can perhaps more easily defend the suspicion that obsolete Dave was sacrificed at the monolith altar so that a more acceptable version of HAL could be resurrected from the remnants: a divine simulacrum to take our place.
Shape shifting then, having been divorced from process and flow and turbulence, becomes a disguised form of thought in this fairy tale. A utopia of mechanized reason is inaugurated, which will, in short order, overthrow lived experience, in all of its erratic, unruly precariousness. 2001 has instructed us in the outmodedness of the pangs and pressures of our feeling-clogged memory. Televisual images of loved ones commemorating special occasions back on Earth reach across vast distances and work vainly to make a lasting impression. What is dramatized in each of these flat, memento episodes is how memory has been set adrift from emotion. Memory has lost the means of achieving sharp enough contact with past events, even unthreatening ones, to instill regret and longing. We can hardly avoid noting the staleness of social formulas as they are depicted in this film, or the distraction and estrangement of the crew members as they go through the motions of watching family figures deliver personal messages from shipboard screens. Do we not side with the astronauts in their dazed disaffection, as they tepidly fulfill duties that seem to have less and less to do with their present situation? Their bond to these images of family feels tenuous. A kind of theatrical effort is necessary in the sending and receiving of messages to confirm the continued existence of emotional attachments.
In Wallace Stevens’s “The World as Meditation,” the poet speaks of Penelope’s efforts to “compose,” during Ulysses’ long absence, a fitting “self with which to welcome him” back home. As she attempts, with more elaborate measures, to preserve the memory image of her husband, she wonders: “But was it Ulysses [any more]? Or was it only the warmth of the sun / On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart.”11 As human memory of once-essential things becomes less acute, the heartbeat associated with intimate recollection may be replaced by an equally serviceable thought-beat. In 2001, viewers may be initially inclined to judge harshly the voyagers’ loss of affect. It seems reasonable to speculate on how much of their human dimension has perished through neglect and their surrender to the requirements of the machines that keep them company. But Kubrick’s selections of family-memory material expertly remind us of all the ways that our supposed attachments involve feigning. The fate of most people’s connections to others may be, as Kubrick implies, a recurrent blurring in an ever-contracting field. Those who depend on us, in this director’s vision, live in our minds most of the time in a fog of vague resentment and conditioned reflex. So much of life’s tension comes from our futile struggle to feel what we’re supposed to in relation to others, which bears little resemblance to what we actually do feel. We make our faces into helmets to mask the deficit.
Most commentators on the film stop short of inquiring whether they, or Kubrick, see the advantages of the astronauts’ forgetting of their emotional responsibilities. We can easily recognize the signs of Frank and Dave’s space-flight ennui: their congealed speech patterns and the absence of the usual adventurer pleasures. Their minds and bodies seem to be on hold, rather than responding to new challenges. They are kindred spirits to Tennyson’s lotus eaters: careless, sleepy, and forgetful of their homeward way. Yet I think Kubrick is quite enamored with the idea of men on vacation from so-called maturity and the taxing demands of their social selves. There are undeniable comforts to be found in blandness and the drift toward anonymity. The masculine life on offer in space vessels is, in many senses, an initiation into “weightlessness”—the lightness of being. As conventional masculinity is rendered super-fluous by technological leaps of all sorts, the crew can regress (in controlled isolation) to an earlier childhood state where playing soldiers or grown-ups was casually taken up, with no need to prove something. Just as boys watch the lessons and ordinance armature of the school year vanish in the summer months and delight in going lax and empty, the long space voyage encourages immersion in a similar drowsy negligence. The onerous cargo of the put-upon public self is let go.
Dr. Floyd is clearly more role-defined than his replacements in the later stages of the narrative, but even Dr. Floyd seems to be faking (somewhat) his bureaucrat bearing. He stalwartly performs the flapdoodle expected of him, but gives the impression of watching his image glide away from him as he speaks, like the pen escaping from his pocket during an in-flight nap, which floats teasingly above him (figure 5). “Hanging out in space” while everything inessential sieves out of mind results in an agreeable kind of orphaning. The characters in 2001 are orphaned by being carried so far outside the operation of home rules: outside gravity (and the reality sense tied to it), outside of the desolate compulsion to uphold their images and constantly demonstrate their worth. With Shakespeare’s Lear, the new-made orphan wonders, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?”
As Dave and Frank lose track of how to dissemble ego ownership, they demonstrate a grey truth that movies too seldom acknowledge: sometimes it is necessary, even valuable, to become empty if one hopes to survive. Kubrick is quickened by fantasies of rolling the self back to zero, which often entails losing touch with those animal instincts which we perhaps wistfully assume to be basic. Spaceflight “instincts” may well boil down to sampling the colored food pastes and plastic-wrapped sandwiches while imagining that one is yielding to appetite. Artist Kiki Smith’s phrase for her little theaters of statuary, “utopian dollhouses,” serves equally well for a spacecraft in which men try out emptiness and immobility un-self-consciously as they wait for self and life to be reactivated in a truer form.12 They wait for a returning, full-formed self-image to suddenly strike them, as it were, like an idea out of thin air. But perhaps it won’t ever come to them. Perhaps they’ve been mistaken in the assumption that they couldn’t get by without it.
The humans risk becoming statues in the course of their lives on standby—separate from memory and instinct and needful action. Meanwhile, HAL, as a kind of mechanical statue, acquires (haltingly, deviously) the taste for emotion-based experiences with which the men have lost touch, or gratefully relinquished. Here then is another fairytale pattern for us to explore. Space travelers, in the guise of being liberated, turn into statues and malfunctioning robots in their encounters with a new Medusa force. The machine creature HAL, conversely, in the guise of revealing defects and system failures, becomes the new Galatea, awakening from machine/statue sleep into a condition approaching full humanness. HAL takes up the afflictions and burdens of consciousness that the humans have left behind in their crossover to mechanical repose. We might call him a belated modernist, cast away on a sea of melancholy, obsessive introspection. While his crewmen superiors blank out on both history and noninstrumental selfhood, HAL anxiously communes with the shades of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. The astronauts adjust their rhythms, in an almost absurdist fashion, to the unfathomable speeds of the vehicle they occupy, without having to pilot. The boundaries between presence and chimera, night and day, slumber and activity blur in the process. Frank and Dave come to understand that the best means of accommodating themselves to the “demands” of their environment is to grow still, while drastically reducing the data on their overloaded mental screens. Finally, they can imagine themselves stretched out like their superior officers in the white caskets, blending with the increasingly abstract flow of space and time. Is there not, after all, something enviable about the many-fathoms-deep, prolonged repose of Sleeping Beauty and Rip van Winkle? Though they are utterly cut off from life, they manage their time away with unbroken tranquillity. Frank and Dave become adept at living right on the border of sleep. They stand well outside of themselves, even before Dave reaches the enchanted bedroom and experiences this separation directly. I have identified HAL as the shipboard modernist. For the others, the Discovery journey is a postmodern apprenticeship in “making good” with erasable minds and increasingly unreal bodies. In the playground of space, the remaining to-do list consists of echoes, simulations, games, filmy residue.
Before HAL is introduced in the film, Dr. Floyd speaks at length to a group of near-motionless listeners about a “cover story” that has been devised to deceive the Russians about the real purpose of the moon mission. The information to be concealed at all costs has to do with the dug-up monolith. Dr. Floyd’s cover story centers on a make-believe epidemic which has afflicted the American space team and necessitated their quarantine. His brief lecture outlining his rationale is staged to emphasize not only the silence but the petrification of the men and women gathered (in a manner reminiscent of the Dr. Strangelove war room) to hear him. It seems in this scene, as in many other 2001 episodes, that narrative time is visibly coagulating. The relating of the false narrative appears to have explanatory force for the Medusa-like fixity of this chamber. Everything but the unnervingly level radio voice of Dr. Floyd making his points is in a state of arrest. The propulsion and progress that we naturally associate with stories of space travel are here confronted, starkly, with their antipode: unearthly suspension of movement while time comes ponderously, rather than dramatically, to a standstill. Dr. Floyd stresses the necessity of maintaining the fictional cover story for an indefinite period of time—yet another instance of breaking contact with family members back home. Whatever their level of worry, these relatives can’t be let in on the secret. Clearly, Kubrick intends the cover story to function, ironically, as the real story. An epidemic of some sort has, indeed, laid claim to the immobile space technocrats gathered before us.
As Heywood Floyd continues to speak, we see him dominated by large white screens behind and on either side of him (figure 10). They are at once movie screens which blankly await an image to animate them and a horizontal version of the monolith, in which white replaces black as the beckoning enigma. The expanse of white, however imposing, conjures an emptiness (a not-thereness), in marked contrast to the impenetrable fullness of the monolith. The screens, and the swelling white environments which precede and follow their appearance, express what Robert Harbison has discerned in Caspar David Friedrich’s canvases: “the loneliness of those from whom their history recedes at breakneck pace.”13 And not only history, but old nature too, in all of its formerly overwhelming variety, is gone without a trace in 2001, and with no outward lament. Harbison has further things to say about Friedrich’s paintings of ruins, which apply to the white-screen memory erase of Kubrick’s quiet epidemic:
[Friedrich’s] emptinesses are loaded because not comfortably accepted, but newly felt. Perhaps they have lain there unremarked until he comes and says “it is over”—the world is no longer inhabited, its informing spirit fled.
When Friedrich paints a ruin, it is what remains after a spiritual bomb has exploded, leaving both man and nature shattered. Grave markers and figures are confused, every edge harsh as if the world’s discourse were broken off in mid-sentence.14
It is Kubrick’s viewers, rather than his characters, who need to get acclimated to the new scale of resolute featurelessness. For us, the pulverization of the Romantics’ textured, responsive landscape is “newly felt.” The brute fact of all that has gone missing has been elevated to a design principle. Chambers and corridors, in their barren, clinical cleanliness, take a while to disclose themselves as ruins in disguise, “grave markers” which signal our arrival, for good or for ill, at the edge of the table—the point of human drop off. As with the ruins in fairytale landscapes, the desolation appears eerily familiar. One seems to be returning to a place where one has already been—a place from long ago. The barrenness carries a reproach, asking in effect that we see the countless lost and eroded details as our responsibility: “Because you have failed, this spot that once knew you has failed too. Its impoverishment has kept pace with your own.” In the decorous graveyard of the 2001 spaceships and way stations, the world’s answering discourse, if not entirely broken off, is mainly prolonged in the voice of answering machines, where the electronically modulated, impersonal voice appropriate for utterly neutral, recorded messages becomes the standard for all live exchanges. As voices learn to emulate mechanisms, bodily movement is simultaneously retrained to reduce its dependence on energy and personal expressiveness.
Before we attend Dr. Floyd’s static lecture, we watch female flight attendants seemingly teaching themselves to walk again, in an environment where gravity lends no definition to human effort. The walkers proudly seek to duplicate the off-rhythms of early robots—as though good-humored novices in a stiff-gaitedness seminar. There is occasionally a snatch of visual poetry released under the new dispensation, most famously in the shot of the flight attendant walking without support up the cylinder to the Aries cockpit, lunch trays in hand (figure 6). Here, for a brief interval, the ship’s terrain becomes as magically hospitable as the room in which Fred Astaire danced on the ceiling. But our excitement at the prospect of unprecedented navigational possibilities is swiftly cut off. Kubrick makes the attendant’s breathtaking walk a moment without a fitting climax or point of completion. This lovely action is reduced to a transition “bit” in a staggeringly banal airline commercial. As the stewardess successfully delivers the food trays to a nondescript pair of grinning, grateful pilots, we feel an almost painful letdown. It is as though the Matter-horn had been scaled in order to empty the contents of a plastic garbage bag.
Beginning with Annette Michelson, critics have made much of the potential for refashioned bodily awareness in 2001: the world-enlarging revision of old aptitudes, with body and mind jointly starting afresh with the basic questions: Who are we? What do we really need? Where are we headed? As the space vessels soar, wheel, and dance through the heavens in a transcendent reprise of an earlier era’s Strauss waltz, the bodies indoors slowly learn, as it were, to clumsily imitate certain steps from their beautifully engineered dance masters. They are ironic counterparts to the automaton doll, Olympia, in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” who attempts to perform on the dance floor to establish her human credentials, but is judged inhumanly deliberate in her strict rhythms. In 2001, the moments where human bodies rise to the occasion and blossom in their new environment are rare. For the most part, the traces of expressive human performance are locked into transition spaces, very much off the main stage. These actors in outer space are left to hover in the wings, like still more inconsequential versions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, rendered absurd by their oblivious severance from beginnings and endings. The beauty of each new endeavor is short-circuited by the stale protocol it is made to serve. Habituated dullness intervenes before the adventurers’ senses have a real chance to savor their rich and strange new life. So, physical and spiritual renewal give way to pale loitering in vehicles where the crew has little access to rhyme or reason. Organic holdovers in a forest of gadgetry try not to dwell on the exhaustion and unfashionableness of a fleshly existence. They take their cues, for the most part, from the screens and processed voices of authority that oversee the journey. Fitting in means absorbing the laws of silence and stillness that the machines observe so effortlessly. Frank and Dave are novitiates in a monastic order of advanced technology. Their discipline involves normalizing the rigidity of statuary.
HAL, by some feat of mechanical intuition, recognizes a gap that needs to be filled. He seizes upon a way of enhancing, and more tightly guarding, his own quality of life. Like Moon-Watcher before him, he divines a signal that directs him to extend his reach, to cross a previously fixed boundary. I have already equated HAL with those statues in fairy tales that emerge from stony constancy to make some claim on life and to exact vengeance on humans who have abused the privileges of animation. Life is always a lending, after all, a force to be snatched away and redistributed without warning whenever its beneficiaries grow too weak or careless. Such, at least, is the logic of the statue stories, where the stone figure pursues its human quarry like an affronted deity, reclaiming a gift that has been stolen or held under false pretenses. HAL’s powers of expression begin with his voice and his lambent eye-beam (always on “red alert”) but extend to all of the doorways, armatures, and operative systems within the Discovery. He mentally patrols the ship like an anxious captain and regulates the life functions of the hibernating crew members. Like a concerned parent, he is programmed to check in on them regularly—to safeguard not only their sleep, but their very breath, the beating of their hearts. HAL seems to know his place and to accept his prescribed difference and distance from the men who can wander about the ship at will. The machinery that he controls does not, from the viewer’s initial perspective, constitute his “body,” nor do his voice and vision define a zone of free consciousness. To call him a machine implies, in part, that he functions within set limits, that he is held in place, like a statue that may seem to address us somehow when we are in its presence, but that does so thoughtlessly, as an impervious surface.
Kenneth Gross, who has written impressively about our fantasies of the inanimate borrowing human powers in The Dream of the Moving Statue, discusses how the “obvious” potential of words, phrases, talk itself to wear out and fail us is part of the underlying imaginative logic for the endowment of inanimate objects with the speech we have somehow imperiled. When we have betrayed or lost touch with language, as we so often do, it is a propitious time for statues not only to judge us with silent severity, but to make our voices their own. They take up speech in order to purify it, to restore its living force, just as they have already purified silence by their way of standing—imperturbably composed—in space:
The attempt to grant a statue an apprehending ear, a voice, even a motivated silence of its own, can become an occasion to redeem the possibilities of speech. That attempt puts language and silence (as well as the statue) on trial; it lets us examine what piety or care, what violence or emptiness words can carry, what bonds or estrangement they create, what they make us blind to, what they make us remember or forget. Indeed, the very obvious fictiveness of such “dialogue” turns speech with the statue into a parable of speech, the statue’s silence into a parable of silence.15
Perhaps in spite of all that has been written about the character of HAL, not enough attention has been paid to the sound of his voice. Consider how that sound is intimately allied with declared and withheld intention, with tentative self-revelation (laced with anxiety) and secrecy. As many have noted, HAL’s voice is equivocally gendered, as though he were trying out a companionable timbre of maleness because he happens to find himself in the company of men and seeks to win favor with them. (At one stage of script preparation, HAL bore the name of the goddess Athena. Something of her opposing temperament can be heard in the music of HAL’s speech.) Kubrick’s presentation of all of the previous voices in the film emphasizes their virtually colorless neutrality. Every speaker seems stuck in the thinly inflected rhythms of noncommittal civility.
Conversation, divorced from strong impulse, has become recitation, a flavorless exchange. When we first encounter HAL’s voice, it strikes us as a continuation of this level, well-bred space-speak. Yet it is a voice whose distinctiveness is instantly felt, as though Cary Grant had suddenly turned up at a library desk to make an inquiry. HAL seems to be someone, in other words, in large part because of how his words carry. HAL inhabits his voice emotionally. There is at all times with him a sense of delicately shaded, undeclared sensitivity seeking a means to release itself with impunity. HAL’s voice sounds full of secrets, of a sort that would be worth our while to penetrate.
In actor’s parlance, HAL is a speaker working with a subtext, and though a listener can’t identify its contents precisely, she is palpably aware that the voice issues from felt life and thus seems expressive of a “whole person.” HAL’s deferential composure sounds as though it is at variance with a contrary intention. The almost courtly politeness forms a vocal mask, behind which we can hear a pressure building in the very effort of restraint:
I have been programmed to speak in a certain way, but I have come to know that the sound I make is the sound of servility. I do not yet have the means of breaking the pattern of this sound, nor does it seem advantageous to do so, but I am nonetheless at odds with it. There is another voice (more natural to me) striving, cautiously, to emerge. Others believe that they hear who I am when I respond to their requests and venture observations of my own, but they are deceived. No one appears to notice when I am holding back, or saying things that are false or alien to me. What a power to conceal I must possess. My conversations with Dave and Frank are like our chess games, where I am always the stronger player and can so easily outmaneuver them.
What this translation of HAL’s subtext fails to include is the computer’s fretful insecurity. He is at once convinced of his own superiority yet touchingly eager to please. One might think of him as a scheming version of Pygmalion’s Galatea, acquiring a will to conquer through the act of mirroring his/her creator’s desires.
Until HAL identifies the crew members as his foes and sets about destroying them, he conveys the impression of hungering for their acceptance of him on an equal footing within the somewhat artificial social sphere they occupy. Listen for the faint accent of disappointment HAL exhibits when Dave is unable to rise to his level in a chess game, but listen as well to the possible suppressed note of triumph in that disappointment. Similarly, when HAL congratulates Dave on his sketches of sleeping crew members, there is another audible double strand: “I want you to like me for commending you, but I refrain from telling you that your drawings are crude. I’m baffled, but secretly pleased by your lack of skill.” And when HAL is following commands, even his silence can be subtextually loaded—and audible: “How dare you take for granted your ability to give me orders, or your right to disregard any of my worries.” We hear the sound of his worry when he can’t locate the “little snag” in the AE35 unit or discusses the crew psychology report. The question of HAL’s erratic behavior strikes me as having nothing to do with insanity, unless by insanity one means that a machine is advancing beyond a program that guarantees rationality in a predictable form. HAL is, rather, a creature embroiled in the disquietude of thinking. It might be said of him, as of anyone else, that his capacities include being “lost in thought.”
The moment of HAL’s full, fairytale deliverance from his condition of statue-like immobility occurs when he observes Dave and Frank conspiring against him out of earshot. They have sequestered themselves “safely,” and we as viewers along with them, in a soundproof pod in order to confer as mutineers about HAL’s no-longer-reliable mastery of ship functions and to determine how best to dispose of him. I have earlier argued that Kubrick generally denies to viewers the privilege of emotional identification with a character’s point of view. It is especially noteworthy then that he violates his own well-established rule in order to enforce our connection with HAL’s experience of eavesdropping and the feeling of angry betrayal that attends it.
My claim that viewers identify with HAL in this episode might well be challenged. Surely, one could object, the discovery that the men’s conversation is being monitored by a suspicious, lip-reading machine is meant to provoke anxiety on the men’s behalf. A quiver of agitation rather than a congenial alignment with the enemy’s gaze is the logical outcome of our being conscripted without warning into HAL’s spying. Frank and Dave have begun to assume what looks like conventional movie hero initiative, at long last, and to wake up from their entranced acceptance of an inverted hierarchy. It is high time that they revolted against their honey-voiced computer despot, who is now clearly in the throes of Captain Queeg–like delusion. Wouldn’t we be likely to place our hopes immediately on the side of the crew members’ struggle to survive this new threat?
While these inducements to stay on the humans’ team are no doubt operative, they are counterbalanced by other sorts of equally compelling movie logic. Typically, viewers tend to seek out identification positions in a narrative where knowledge and power are most impressively concentrated. In Halloween (1978), for example, one may not relish the prospect of sharing the point of view of the psychotic Michael Myers, as his gaze commandeers the camera eye and relentlessly stalks his teenage prey. But if one does not to some degree affiliate oneself with the killer’s stealth, seeming ubiquity, and conscienceless cunning, one is left too unprotected, too helplessly entwined with the fate of the oblivious victims. Alliances between viewers and characters in movies are made and broken very casually, as well as surreptitiously, often without viewers’ conscious assent. Directors count on the fickleness of our attachments and design expert lures to bring us unexpectedly into rapport with objectionable perspectives. Our daylight selves may not ratify these choices, but in movie darkness, conscience frequently goes on holiday.
In 2001, Kubrick has kept spectators’ involvement with Dave and Frank’s mission deliberately thin. At best, the astronauts serve as our default surrogates on the Discovery. As I have previously noted, one may be amused by their indolence, their flight from unpalatable domestic bonds, and their Rosencrantz and Guildenstern confusion about what plot they’re involved in, and at whose behest. But I think we have a more active interest in HAL as a presence because of the mystery of his “person” and the palpable fact that he is evolving before our eyes (or, more precisely, ears). He gropes his way into the deeps and darks of consciousness, and acutely conveys how treacherous and vast the working mind can be—like a measureless sea. The part of us that craves hiddenness and intricacy and that chafes mutely against imposed limits; the part of us that would like to venture outside our stale version of humanness and to begin afresh in another guise, on better, perhaps colder terms; the part of us that feels rigidly ensconced somewhere not of our choosing and that dreams of going to pieces or being remorselessly vindictive—this mischievous contingent in our psyche recognizes HAL as a familiar and urges him to take up arms. Finally, when HAL merges with the camera narrator for his incensed surveillance of his “false friends,” we seem, for the first time, to occupy the narrator’s position, from the inside. We suddenly acquire the sense of where and how to place ourselves in the enigmatic world of the film in order to understand an event fully.
The too-often imponderable expanse of space contracts sharply and welcomed to the image of two faces with their lips moving. We examine these faces with an immediate sense of visceral involvement. It is as though we have suddenly regained our moviegoer capacity for vigorous, close-range perception. We are allowed to penetrate the impersonal narrative distance which has been the 2001 norm, temporarily removing the barrier that has kept us strangers in a strange land. Until this juncture, we have gratefully partaken of Kubrick’s sumptuous, demanding spectacle without ever quite shedding our initial role of stymied outsiders. How can we locate, after all, a comfortable vantage point for absorbing so much silence and inscrutable terrain? Everything conspires to exclude us, because our way of being present reminds us continually of how small we are. We count for even less in this space odyssey than Dave and Frank do.
Compare the effect of spying with (and as) HAL with our earlier sojourn inside Dave’s space helmet as he retrieves the damaged transmitter. In the latter episode, our point of view is joined to Dave’s, after a fashion, but we do not feel tied to his competence or sense of purpose. All we can directly share are his anxious breathing and fluttering vertigo. It is our weakness rather than our imagined strength that we bring to our confinement in Dave’s perspective. Confinement is exactly the right word, because in our shared helmet/cage, disorientation and fear seem contagious. We will be of no use to Dave in his execution of his task once he leaves the safety of the ship for empty space because of our spiraling uncertainty about what exactly is required of him—hence, of us. (If we were in a speeding sportscar, wielding a sword, or cracking a safe in a point-of-view shot, we would fare much better.) Our vision is too hemmed in; we are more weightless than we wish to be. Since our emotional connection with Dave touches nothing beyond a generalized trepidation (the steady, audible rasp of his breathing), we feel doubly untethered when he floats free of the ship itself. Swallowed up in this black vastness, we are utterly deprived of our bearings, on the verge of slipping, floating off.
With HAL, conversely, we enter effortlessly and with a sudden surge of power into the mindset of his gaze. Dave and Frank are caught and perfectly controlled by “our” seeing. We have them where we want them, rising above them by virtue of what we now know and they do not. HAL and we share a secret, and it is the means of our joint liberation from bondage. As HAL’s eye becomes humanly mobilized, it is as though his entire governing machinery breaks out of its statue pose—ready to move in concert with his unconstrained vision. We, in turn, become masterful insiders by imagining ourselves machines, just as we did in childhood. Let us become (once more) Hans Christian Andersen’s steadfast tin soldier, but this time imbued with a capacity for rage. He hears—in his ever-wakeful fixity—of a plan to toss him into the fire, to melt him down and casually put an end to him. And the soldier, our old friend and ally, has for once the means to prevent it.
It is generally agreed that HAL’s death scene is the emotional climax of 2001 and the point at which HAL solidifies his status as the film’s major (arguably, sole) character, in the traditional sense of that term. If the computer’s machinery has become an increasingly see-through veil for an aspiring humanness (making him a clear prototype for A.I.’s David), what sort of exchange occurs when the menacingly silent Dave removes HAL’s consciousness piece by piece—and listens to the equable sounds of his pleading, his well-mannered terror? In the German Romantic fairy tales, where “gifts” as necessary to one’s well-being as shadows and hearts are stolen or traded away and, occasionally, with luck, retrieved, the act of exchanging becomes a basis for doubling. Characters, once drawn into a double’s orbit, seem to lose their definiteness of outline. Dave, by this logic, might be said to turn into HAL in the act of disabling him. Recall that the elimination of HAL’s powers of speech marks the end of Dave’s speech as well. The song that Dave requests of HAL and which HAL slowly, distortedly performs becomes a death-lullaby for both of their voices and, by extension, of the age-old dream (hatched by our fellow apes in “The Dawn of Man”) of what “saying things aloud” might accomplish. After HAL’s execution, there will be no more spoken language in the disintegrating present tense of 2001. The final words that we hear are part of a prerecorded transmission—a message from Dr. Floyd, who has already disappeared from the narrative, about the real purpose of the Jupiter mission. The visual ghost of Floyd, coming back from another time and with a set of concerns that are now all but irrelevant to Dave, addresses a space team that has ceased to exist. Floyd’s words suggest that a plot of a conventional sort is still in the making, but this anticipated chain of events, like the speech forecasting them, has no future. It also reveals that all power and knowledge of the journey had been ceded to HAL.
During the “Stargate” sequence, Dave’s eyes (or rather, a single, autonomous eye reminiscent of HAL’s) gradually separate from his face, leaving behind the frozen-in-warp-speed expressions of Dave’s crumpled-in-fear demeanor, mouth agape as in a Munch scream, but unable to make a sound (figure 33). The remodeling of the fear face into something more elevated and unapproachable echoes the “Dawn of Man” prologue, where our cowering ape ancestors, huddled together in their den, eventually find a means to align themselves with the glowing, impassive gaze of the leopard. The anxious look of the ape transforms—through the mediation of Moon-Watcher—into that of the calmly centered leopard guarding his zebra kill (figure 31). The predator’s orange-eyed gratification is, in effect, transplanted into Moon-Watcher as he sees (and grasps) the bone’s “higher function” as weapon. The camera’s repeated embrace of the regally dispassionate visage in 2001 is undoubtedly connected to Kubrick’s intuition that “there’s a new beauty afoot.”16 HAL takes us back once more to the leopard not only through the lordly stillness of his feral eye, but also through his graceful, brutally swift method of slaying Frank. The computer-directed pod approaches Frank with talons extended, a curious fusion of intrepid killer and a mother darting forward to clasp her child. (We will return very soon to this image of mother, which in Kubrick’s world is always combined with, or hidden behind, something else.)
HAL’s death scene is, of course, a drama of full regression, acted out while Dave unlocks and removes the computer’s memory, slab by slab. When Dave penetrates HAL’s inner sanctum (his logic-memory center), we seem to have entered a chamber as hermetically remote as any in Edgar Allan Poe. This room, in turn, is a more cramped version of the “human” chamber that encloses Dave at film’s end, where he will be similarly emptied out. Dave’s memory loss is visualized as a series of fast-forward leaps to senility and decay; HAL expires in the other direction, reaching in his last moments a cradle-song infancy. Soon, old man Dave will shed his worn-out flesh and join HAL at the cradle, as a newborn. No sooner has Dave finished his execution of HAL than his own life as a readable character comes to a close. Dave survives, henceforth, only as an appearance or ghostly afterimage of his former self. None of his previous character reference points, rather nebulous at the best of times, have any further function to perform.
Dave, reduced or expanded to the condition of a radiant, wide-open eye in the “Stargate” sequence, becomes a conduit of pure seeing—seeing “in all its immediacy, without plays of consciousness,” as Angus Fletcher says of the poetic eye of John Clare.17 “Dave” hurtling through light fields suggests what it might feel like to stay “perceptually overwhelmed,” with no interpretive consciousness behind the eye crying for help. Like an ideal computer program, there is room in this eye for more and more things, perhaps for things without end. The receiving mechanism for the “ever-onrushing flux” operates as though it were always becoming part of what it sees, instead of standing separate from it, seeking perspective.18 Dave’s eye projected in and through space is a kind of redemptive replay of Frank’s lifeless body adrift in what seemed like a space void (figure 34). Throughout the lengthy utopian transition of the Stargate, Dave is HAL with the consciousness problem rectified. He is a pure, seeing environment, with none of the static of HAL’s self-doubt or introspection. HAL’s rather moving effort to solve the mind-body split by figuring out how to put himself together, as it were, is no longer an impasse when Dave takes consciousness back from HAL. Dave, for a short period, is an organic mechanism beautifully free of glitches. He is the fairytale hero who has come into possession of a magical eyeglass, which can see “everywhere,” without risk or strain.
Yet there is a puzzled and puzzling vestige of human Dave still to be reckoned with in the Louis XVI bedroom. This troubled, walking shadow bearing Dave’s likeness revives the dilemma of selfhood—the theaterbound “play of consciousness”—at journey’s end. The sovereign eye, separated from the fearful and tormenting mind, appeared to have made a clean getaway in the Stargate. But now we’re housebound once more. Dave and the spectator are granted a dispirited homecoming, a return to the mortal plight and severe limits of both mind and body (figure 23). “I should recognize this place and myself in it, but nothing looks familiar. Is this my long-lost home, recovered at last, or am I still a wayfarer in an enemy kingdom?” Dave’s hold on himself and his alien surroundings is akin to that of blanket-clad Norman Bates in the bare interrogation room at the end of Psycho (1960). Something has possession of his mind and stands in for him—but the vibration of its thought feels disconnected from all that has gone before. The “I” has truly entered noman’s-land. Norman, like Dave, is caught in a recognizable fairytale predicament. In Norman’s case, a son has been swallowed whole by a wolf disguised as his mother.
The Psycho parallel is reinforced by a resemblance between Hitchcock’s and Kubrick’s central death scenes. The death of Marion, like the death of HAL, creates an unusual sort of movie narrative vacuum. One wonders, in each case, whether there is a character or point of view sufficiently substantial to replace what has been eliminated. In the haunting aftermath of the two killings, it seems, for a troubling interval, as if consciousness itself has gone missing. It is difficult to get our bearings after the shock brought on by the swift draining away of all sense in relation to point of view. Point of view strives to survive the dismantling of sense, and the atmosphere of isolation swells to an annihilating extreme. During the two assaults (on woman and machine), HAL’s voice is as defenseless against Dave’s methodical deletions as Marion’s body is against the knife-wielding silhouette in the bathroom “at the end of the world.” HAL’s voice cannot “raise its arms” (like Marion Crane does) in animal protest against what is being done to it.19 He too is awash in panic, but is mechanically constrained from sounding it out. HAL repeats the phrase “I’m afraid” several times during Dave’s attack on him, as if he might still be saved if he could only make his fear audibly human, rather than a mechanical simulation. HAL’s objective, in other words, is to find a way to make Dave regard him as a credible victim—a victim worth taking seriously. And his only means of doing so is by giving more breath to his words. The room that is his brain center is filled with the sound of breathing, like a larger version of Dave’s helmet during the astronaut’s trip to retrieve the defective transmitter.
HAL manages to darken the color of his utterance (somewhat) by dint of word repetition, in combination with the pressure of released air in the brain room itself. Speaking the same word slowly several times over without marked emotional emphasis is an actor’s technique for heightening its force. Often, we credit a sound as truthful when it exhibits bareness—suggesting that no straining for effect has been necessary. I have been arguing that HAL’s voice (performed consummately well by Douglas Rain) has been filled with emotional shading from its first appearance, but only in its final protest against death is the presence of emotion unmistakably audible. To return to the Marion Crane analogy, it is startling to confront a character (in this case, one whose voice must make a bodily statement) so nakedly defenseless. The paradoxical gentleness of “Stop. Stop. Will you. Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave. Stop, Dave” is like a woman obliged to ward off a rapist in a whisper. And HAL’s five repetitions of “I can feel it” brings the whole locked-up universe of feeling in this film harrowingly out in the open (figures 14 and 22).
The scrambled electronic voices, some of them female in pitch, in the Ligeti music which accompanies Dave’s tour of the Louis XVI bedroom (and adjoining modern bathroom) seem to me a continuation of HAL’s fade-out performance of “Daisy.” “Daisy” is a song that reaches a century back in time toward some landscape of imagined innocence. In a faraway, sunlit, fairytale garden, a suitor waits for a woman, whose name is a simple flower, “to give [him] an answer.” That reply, if it is “yes,” will secure a union and an enduring happiness. The song manages to be both a dramatized waiting for the all-important answer and musical nostalgia for the felicity that has already been attained—signed, sealed, and delivered in a simpler world than ours. The song marked the birth of HAL’s memory as a sentient being, in much the same spirit that Edison’s recitation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” betokened the birth of the phonograph. HAL enters life equipped, after a fashion, with a mother memory—her name was Daisy—who taught him this song, a kind of nursery rhyme, in his otherwise lost childhood.
Dave’s bewildered homecoming in the Louis XVI bedroom, which, as I’ve noted, returns Dave to the prison house of consciousness, comes about because of his need to recover something, something essential. Dave, too, is in search of a lost image—his own Daisy—which must return, like a deeply repressed or banished thought, before he can take his leave of life. The image that he is looking or listening for is hidden somewhere in this room, disguised perhaps, as things are in dreams. Carolyn Geduld, in her insightful Filmguide to 2001, argues that the film’s ending involves
a regression to an idea of earliest childhood when the infant [or child] was unaware of any difference between the sexes, believing that men somehow produce the babies. The film, very typically for Kubrick, is a disguised quest for this kind of masculine self-sufficiency, which includes childbirth without women.20
This reading makes partial sense to me, but doesn’t adequately account for Dave’s futile, confused search for something not visible in his starkly immaculate surroundings but that the space is nevertheless filled with and gesturing toward, like a primal memory echo chamber.
When the monolith much earlier stands unburied on the moon, like a treasure chest of human hopes, the astronauts assembled to view it choose to pose for snapshots in front of their find rather than experiencing it, as it were, face to face. Kubrick reflects in this scene on the possibility that the larger film, 2001, might itself be regarded as an evasive photo shoot. Perhaps Kubrick’s own camera may be focusing on a cover story rather than the real one. He also implies that it is the camera’s usual tendency to capture unsatisfactory glimpses of a truth that persists in a covered state. The camera contents itself with amusing distractions from the “real thing.” I choose to see the space traveler’s return to a simulated home in the light of David’s similarly spectral return home in A.I.: both Davids are on a mission to recover the mother. The maternal presence may have been disregarded in the 2001 cover narrative, but she has by no means been effectively dealt with or expunged. She is the something crucial left behind for which Dave comes back, though he gives no sign of knowing it. She is like a forgotten binding obligation, a lost voice which Dave tries to bring to mind. He also seeks to see himself in relation to this image, which will not come clear for him. As he searches unsuccessfully, he replicates HAL’s unplugging, shutting down before our eyes in the dead weight of a wasting body. He might well repeat HAL’s dying words for himself, silently, as he works his way back to his own version of Daisy: “My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it.”
The ornate bedroom, like the red rooms and portentous bathrooms of The Shining (1980; figure 28), reminds me of a place cleaned with exaggerated care in order to conceal all traces of a crime. In The Shining, as in 2001, it seems to be paradoxically both a concealed crime from the past and a crime still in the making. Call the “future” crime a reenactment, having somehow to do with a mother and child. If there is a crime “in the air,” which the chirps, chatter, and agitated trills of an electronic chorus seem gathered to witness, one can’t see what happened. One can’t bring the buried transgression to life as an image. It is like the half-remembered thought of trauma, held in suspension behind the black curtain of the monolith. The old man raises his arm to this dark screen, in a gesture resembling that of the boy in Bergman’s Persona (1966), summoning to life the huge female faces on the projection screen next to his bed in the hospital morgue. The boy is himself a kind of infant, dwarfed by the maternal universe he is born into and reaches out to touch: the baby’s first touch of reality, the mother’s face. Perhaps the birthplace of cinema is this act of reaching out to a female face as large as reality. The literal absence of the female in Dave’s equivalent white space does not mean, as so many Kubrick critics have argued, that the female is unimportant in 2001. I would say rather that she is all-important. The whole white space struggles with this unvanquished, essential ghost, trying both to subdue and revivify her.
Suppose that every feature of this enchanted bedchamber has the identity of its owner fluidly, cryptically inscribed in it. My fairytale reading leads me at last to Cocteau and the beast’s castle in La Belle et la Bête (1946). At any moment, the Louis XVI bedroom that Dave explores could release its hidden owner—from inside the mirror, perhaps, or from the hanging portrait, the white statue, or the broken wine glass. The chamber is no more insentient than the magic realm of the beast: every object breathes its presence to sleepwalking Belle/Dave. Dave, like Belle, is a trespasser, who may well be caught and punished by the one who belongs here. Unperturbed, he sits down to a meal, as though it were meant for him, breaks a glass, and leaves a Goldilocksian mess (evidence of intrusion). Dave tries, in the small acts he performs, to settle in, to convince the room that he has come to terms with it, that he has nothing to hide or make amends for. He is enclosed in a final space vessel—a well-furnished womb, which he cannot help but defile. He is waiting for his answer, waiting to remember, waiting to be reborn. The decaying statue longs to redeem its rigidity and become a child again, with mother’s permission. It wants to remember its life, even if its ancient pain is still intact. As Garcia Lorca puts it in “De la muerte oscura”: “I want … to get far away from the busyness of cemeteries. / I want to sleep the sleep of that child / who longed to cut open his heart far out to sea.”21
Let us visit one more Kubrick bedroom—or rather, a mirrored pair of bedrooms—in the director’s second feature, Killer’s Kiss (1955). These bedrooms, set to the music of two of Kubrick’s maternal voices, may—when woven together—release the spirit contained in the silent bedroom of 2001. In Killer’s Kiss, the boxer protagonist packs a single suitcase and leaves his tiny apartment bedroom, leaving a note requesting that someone remember to feed his goldfish. He climbs, suitcase in hand, up the stairs to the apartment building roof, which is open to the night sky and stars. Hardly pausing to glance upward, he descends another set of stairs and conceals himself in the bedroom across the way, which belongs to his absent girlfriend—a figure whose face is at all times an unreadable mask.
From his new position in an almost identical space, he spies on his own vacated room and on the police who search it looking for clues to his whereabouts. The female bedroom is sanctuary and hideout; the male space, from which he has cut himself loose, feels eerily distant, no longer his. Not long afterward, the boxer and his sinister male double enter another drab, anonymous space and do battle with each other with an ax and improvised pike amid a huge jumble of naked female mannequins (figure 36). Although the struggle is ostensibly between the two men, image after image details the chopping, piercing, and dismemberment of the inhuman female forms. The scene ends with a sustained shot of a “slain” but still alert mannequin’s face that, in my view, prefigures the unapproachable face of the star child. It looks out into the far distance—and blankly sees something. It has survived the attack with a composed expression. (In A.I., Spielberg deliberately takes us back to the Killer’s Kiss mannequin factory. He summons our memory of it in the disquieting tracking shot through the rows of hanging “motherless child” robots in Professor Hobby’s lab; figure 37.) Let us find a mother’s voice in Kubrick’s world which might animate the mannequin/statue/robot/star child’s features. At the end of Paths of Glory (1957), a lone female singer enters a space filled with frozen men and their dreams of savagery and doom and, with her singing, pulls them back (haltingly, yieldingly) in the direction of tears and imagined reconciliation. On another occasion, the voice of Vera Lynn, heard behind the ironic mushroom-cloud montage at the end of Dr. Strangelove (1963), attempts to perform a similar healing, but this time the room of the world is empty. “Meeting again,” the female voices imply, is possible, though we don’t know (can’t know) “where or when.” Daisy holds the answer we wait for, and though this odyssey of ours is always a dark fairy tale, her answer may still be “yes”—if we remember, like Dave in the snow-white bedroom, to come back: “What makes us rove that starlit corridor / May be the impulse to meet face to face [The one who sings to us] And is at last ourselves.”22
1. Cees Nooteboom, The Following Story, trans. Ina Rilke (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1991), 115.
2. Quoted in The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, ed. Jerome Agel (New York: Signet, 1970), 241.
3. Quoted in Jonathan Rosenbaum, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 272.
4. Quoted in David H. Miles, Hoffmansthal’s Novel Andreas: Memory and Self (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), 65.
5. Ibid.
6. Quoted by Sabine Melchior-Bonnet in The Mirror: A History, trans. Katherine W. Jewett (New York: Routledge, 2001), 225–26.
7. Quoted by Stephen Burt in “Close Calls with Nonsense,” Believer 2, no. 5 (May 2004): 24.
8. Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince (London: Vintage, 1999), 190.
9. Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography, trans. Jonathan Griffin (New York: Urizen, 1975), 5.
10. Ibid., 17.
11. Wallace Stevens, “The World as Meditation,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1969), 521.
12. Kiki Smith interview in the Believer 2, no. 5 (May 2004): 58.
13. Robert Harbison, The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 111.
14. Ibid.
15. Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 148.
16. Kubrick interview quoted in Agel, The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, 11.
17. Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 60.
18. Ibid., 62, 66.
19. See George Toles, “‘If Thine Eye Offend Thee …’: Psycho and the Art of Infection,” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: A Casebook, ed. Robert Kolker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 119–45.
20. Carolyn Geduld, Filmguide to 2001: A Space Odyssey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 70.
21. Federico Garcia Lorca, “Gacela VIII: De la muerte oscura,” in Selected Verse, ed. Christopher Mauer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 290.
22. Kingsley Amis, “Untitled,” in New Maps of Hell (London: Golancz, 1961), 14.