Fetus in the Sky

Last week I got suckered into playing that desert island game again. I wonder if this is just a Boomer thing. I can’t ever recall my parents talking about what things they would take to a desert island--you know, like 10 favorite Burma Shave billboards or Amos ‘n Andy episodes. It has to be pop culture items of course. The game is not for nerds. No one ever asks what 10 flora and fauna you’d bring or what 10 chemical elements. It’s always movies and songs (and books, at least until the last of the readers dies). 
My Facebook friend who posted the question last week tried to make it Desert Island X-TREME by limiting us to only two movies. It still should’ve been a snap for me since I’d already gone public with my 10, and all I’d have to do is pick 2 of my original 10. As it turns out, one of my two picks was just a back-up on my top 10 list of no more than two months ago—Groundhog Day. That’s the way it goes with these things. Sometimes it’s so damn hard just to up with yourself. The other choice not so ephemeral: 2001: A Space Odyssey has occupied a secure spot in my top 10 since I first viewed it under the unusual circumstances described in my earlier post. Still, I surprised myself by making it one of my two for this go-round, and realized it had been the second Nobby Works reference to the film in recent months. With newly enhanced and expanded time now on my hands, I decided to pop the DVD in and view it again—again being for approximately the 100thtime. And call me crazy, but it was better than ever.
Two nights later I watched Imax: Hubble about the launch and in-space rescue and repair of the Hubble telescope, a terrific film in its own right. But here’s the thing, Hubble played like a sequel to 2001. The slow, lyrical movement of the space vehicles; the brilliant, infinite palette of the cosmos; even the reserve of the astronaut personalities—all are of a piece with 2001. Whatever one wants to say in praise of the Star Wars movies or the Star Trek movies, you cannot watch them and then watch the Hubble drama unfold and feel at all as if you’re in the same cosmos. Kubrick totally anticipated that cosmos without benefit of the breakthroughs in space exploration which have happened since he made his masterpiece in 1968.      
And it’s a masterpiece not just for its verisimilitude, but for its stunning cinematic qualities as well. First, let’s dispense with questions of length and pace. There are people who like their pleasures long and slow, and there are people who prefer things short and quick…premature as it were. As a lifelong baseball fan (and Pointer Sisters fan), I count myself among the former. And I admire great art that unfolds in its own sweet time. (Bad art that unfolds in its own sweet time is another matter, and almost every movie made nowadays—good or bad-- is too long by a fourth because they make them to fit a time slot rather than an artistic vision.) What makes 2001 great is that it always knows where it’s going; it never rambles, though it may appear to do so to viewers with limited attention spans. Every sequence of scenes ends with a plot point that pushes the story forward, and once you accept the film’s pace, it has as much tempo as any Lucas or Spielberg film.  
Then there's the sine qua non of great filmmaking--telling the story with sound and pictures rather the dialog. 2001 is almost as short on dialog as the cosmos is on oxygen, and yet it manages to stir the visual and aural senses from beginning to end.
It stirs the senses while challenging the mind. Like the best creative works of the Sixties, it makes the audience part of the creation. At that critical point in all movie plots where all seems lost for the hero, a voice-over narration intones: 

"Except for a single, very powerful radio emission, aimed at Jupiter, the four-million-year-old black monolith has remained completely inert, its origin — and purpose — still a total mystery."

That’s aimed right at the audience, and every member of that audience—at least the first timers—know that it’s still a mystery to them as well. They’ve paid their money, they’ve sat there attentively, they’ve tried to pull together the few dull clues offered, and still they don’t know what the hell that monolith is supposed to be (or the meaning of life for no small matter). They are as mystified as the crew of the Discovery space ship that’s now embarked on a journey into deepest space to solve the mystery.
Inside an effete bedroom at the farthest end of the galaxy, the mystery falls away to reveal the enigma inside the riddle that is human existence. A man grows old before his very own eyes...and then dies...and then is reborn. Nothing more. Nothing less. The fetus--more commonly and comfortably referred to as the star child—that dominates the final scene was, at the time, a powerful symbol of humanity’s place in the cosmos...as well as our ability to renew and expand our place in it.
Nowadays, unfortunately, that symbol would be freighted with political weight and probably draw picketers outside the theaters from the ranks of those who insist on judging art according to their own parochial views. They would try to shrink Kubrick’s grand, profound vision to another debate topic for cable TV and talk radio. 
Except on my desert island, where all the inhabitants would prefer art to politics.