10 months ago
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July 2016
I've been pondering 2001: A Space Odyssey since I could tie my shoelaces. The divisive 1968 film version directed by Stanley Kubrick was the first movie to ever play in a household where my family had cable television--it was October 1979 and I was six years old. Up until then, the movies I watched on TV were interrupted by commercials and edited for content, and I was baffled by the content of 2001. Thanks to this fantastic, mind altering novel by Arthur C. Clarke, also published in '68 and based on the screenplay the author developed with Kubrick, I'm confident that I could now discuss the movie intelligently with my kids. This may the first time I've regretted not having any.
Following his black comedy Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick wanted to make a science fiction film. At the time, sci-fi was still the juvenile domain of flying saucers and spacemen, schlock basically, but what Kubrick had in mind was a film about man and our relationship with the cosmos. It was recommended that he contact Arthur C. Clarke, who was living in Sri Lanka. Meeting in New York in 1964, Clarke offered Kubrick six of his short stories. The filmmaker selected "The Sentinel," which concerned the discovery of an alien artifact left on the moon by extraterrestrials. In need of more material, Kubrick and Clarke spent two years building around the story, developing a novel, and then a screenplay.
Kubrick, who favored using images and sound to tell a story and held contempt for plot, believed all a movie needed were six to eight "non-submersible units," according to science fiction author Brian Aldiss who worked with Kubrick on A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. These non-submersible units were chunks of story that were so emotionally compelling that they could not sink. If they didn't quite fit together with the other units in the film, that was okay; the tonality encouraged viewers to complete the movie in their own imaginations. There is no better example of non-submersible units than 2001, whose seven parts are given greater clarity by Clarke's novel.
1. Three million years ago on the African veldt, a tribe of man-apes are facing extinction, felled by hunger and by predators like the leopard, which they have no natural defenses against. The man-apes have no concept of a past and little hope of a future, until the tribe awakens to find a rectangular slab three times their height standing by the river. Ignored due to its non-value as food, the monolith emits a vibrating pulse which seems to initiate strange new behaviors in the tribe.
2. Moon-Watcher, the healthiest of the man-apes, is struck by inspiration. First, the thought comes to him to grab a docile boar and use the animal as a food source. Later, he attempts to drag a dead gazelle to the cave and several other man-apes actually help him. When the leopard follows the blood trail up to their shelter, the man-apes use bones as tools to kill their enemy. Those same tools are used to repel a rival tribe for territory. Pulling themselves to the top of the food chain, no connection is made between their ascent and the appearance of the monolith, which disappears.
3. In the year 2001, Dr. Heywood Floyd, Chairman of the National Council of Astronautics, is the sole passenger on the first ever chartered flight to the Moon. Lifting off from Florida, Dr. Floyd is piloted the 45 minutes to Space Station One, fielding questions from the stewardess and a Russian colleague about a quarantine and a rumored epidemic. Making the twenty-five hour flight to Clavius Base on the moon, Dr. Floyd is driven to an excavation site where a geometrically perfect black monolith, ten feet by five feet, has been dug up. Exposed to the sun, it directs a vibrating pulse to Saturn.
4. Two years later, the spacecraft Discovery is launched in the first manned expedition to Jupiter and Saturn. First captain David Bowman and second captain Frank Poole maintain the vessel with the assistance of HAL 9000, the highly advanced computer which serves as the brain and nervous system of the ship. Also on board in suspended animation are three members of the survey team: Whitehead, Kaminski and Hunter. Neither Bowman or Poole seem aware of the monolith.
5. HAL, who is capable of voice communication like any other member of the crew, begins to exhibit strange behavior, warning Bowman and Poole of the imminent failure of their communications antenna, which they discover to be operating normally. Piloting a pod and exiting the vehicle to repair the antenna, Poole is dragged to his death by the pod. When Bowman instructs HAL to revive Whitehead to replace Poole and the computer resists mission parameters, Bowman suspects a mutiny.
6. Bowman narrowly escapes death when HAL opens the pod bay doors and depressurizes the vessel. Though the survey team die in the emergency, Bowman successfully disables HAL. From Mission Control, Dr. Floyd reveals to Bowman his true mission, which is to investigate the signal the monolith on the moon, known as TMA-1 (Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 1), has transmitted to Saturn. Bowman is promoted to mankind's ambassador in the first meeting with an extraterrestrial intelligence.
7. Bowman reaches his destination, the moon of Japetus orbiting Saturn. He discovers a black monolith the size of a building, dubbed TMA-2. The damage to Discovery ruling out a rescue mission as an option, Bowman boards a pod and goes out to investigate the monolith. His last transmission to Earth--"The thing's hollow--it goes on forever--and--oh my God!--it's full of stars"--baffles mankind for years. Meanwhile, Bowman enters a Star Gate.
My three thoughts on 2001, which teeter totters between four and a half stars and five:
-- I BELIEVE IN SCIENCE! Visiting the Houston Museum of Natural Science as a kid, I never imagined adults running for national office would need to confirm this, that it was a given, but perhaps due to the political climate we now find ourselves in, I responded to the succinct brevity Clarke summoned to write about evolution, as well as space travel, how both are possible and neither are the result of a supreme being. While the mysterious presence of the monolith at the dawn of man could easily be assigned religious implications, the novel is much less ambiguous as to their origin.
-- 2001 hit pop culture at the peak of the space race and is both a direct result of it, as well as a potent reminder of the innovation that was a given at that time. Clarke immortalizes a bygone sophistication, recalling the jaunty spirit of Pan Am or Ian Fleming when it comes to travel and exploration that I loved. We never got colonies on the moon or commercial space travel, but many of Clarke's concepts--from vision-phones to electronic newspapers to reusable spacecraft--did. It was a pleasure to be swept away into one possible 2001 where the technological leaps of the space race didn't stop with the moon landing.
-- The monolith is the greatest extraterrestrial ever put on film and so far, the most compelling I've come across in fiction. Nothing summons the fear, fascination and unknowable quite like a geometrically perfect black slab. It does not walk. It does not talk. It does not explain where it came from or what its intentions are. It comes and goes as it pleases, baffling mankind but also inspiring us, redirecting our evolution in ways we can't possibly perceive at the time. Clarke reveals much more about the origin of the monolith than Kubrick did in the film, but with restraint, leaving much for the reader to fill in.
Perhaps as a result of the film, I did not expect dynamic characters or a particularly diverse cast, though come to think of it, Clarke never goes into ethnic specifications on Floyd, Bowman or Poole. I'm content that the last five science fiction movies I've seen dealing with space exploration (Gravity, Europa Report, Interstellar, The Martian, Star Wars: The Force Awakens) all featured female astronauts and I didn't expect that sort of inclusion from Clarke based on when he wrote his story. I opened my mind and had it reasonably blown.
Following his black comedy Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick wanted to make a science fiction film. At the time, sci-fi was still the juvenile domain of flying saucers and spacemen, schlock basically, but what Kubrick had in mind was a film about man and our relationship with the cosmos. It was recommended that he contact Arthur C. Clarke, who was living in Sri Lanka. Meeting in New York in 1964, Clarke offered Kubrick six of his short stories. The filmmaker selected "The Sentinel," which concerned the discovery of an alien artifact left on the moon by extraterrestrials. In need of more material, Kubrick and Clarke spent two years building around the story, developing a novel, and then a screenplay.
Kubrick, who favored using images and sound to tell a story and held contempt for plot, believed all a movie needed were six to eight "non-submersible units," according to science fiction author Brian Aldiss who worked with Kubrick on A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. These non-submersible units were chunks of story that were so emotionally compelling that they could not sink. If they didn't quite fit together with the other units in the film, that was okay; the tonality encouraged viewers to complete the movie in their own imaginations. There is no better example of non-submersible units than 2001, whose seven parts are given greater clarity by Clarke's novel.
1. Three million years ago on the African veldt, a tribe of man-apes are facing extinction, felled by hunger and by predators like the leopard, which they have no natural defenses against. The man-apes have no concept of a past and little hope of a future, until the tribe awakens to find a rectangular slab three times their height standing by the river. Ignored due to its non-value as food, the monolith emits a vibrating pulse which seems to initiate strange new behaviors in the tribe.
2. Moon-Watcher, the healthiest of the man-apes, is struck by inspiration. First, the thought comes to him to grab a docile boar and use the animal as a food source. Later, he attempts to drag a dead gazelle to the cave and several other man-apes actually help him. When the leopard follows the blood trail up to their shelter, the man-apes use bones as tools to kill their enemy. Those same tools are used to repel a rival tribe for territory. Pulling themselves to the top of the food chain, no connection is made between their ascent and the appearance of the monolith, which disappears.
3. In the year 2001, Dr. Heywood Floyd, Chairman of the National Council of Astronautics, is the sole passenger on the first ever chartered flight to the Moon. Lifting off from Florida, Dr. Floyd is piloted the 45 minutes to Space Station One, fielding questions from the stewardess and a Russian colleague about a quarantine and a rumored epidemic. Making the twenty-five hour flight to Clavius Base on the moon, Dr. Floyd is driven to an excavation site where a geometrically perfect black monolith, ten feet by five feet, has been dug up. Exposed to the sun, it directs a vibrating pulse to Saturn.
4. Two years later, the spacecraft Discovery is launched in the first manned expedition to Jupiter and Saturn. First captain David Bowman and second captain Frank Poole maintain the vessel with the assistance of HAL 9000, the highly advanced computer which serves as the brain and nervous system of the ship. Also on board in suspended animation are three members of the survey team: Whitehead, Kaminski and Hunter. Neither Bowman or Poole seem aware of the monolith.
5. HAL, who is capable of voice communication like any other member of the crew, begins to exhibit strange behavior, warning Bowman and Poole of the imminent failure of their communications antenna, which they discover to be operating normally. Piloting a pod and exiting the vehicle to repair the antenna, Poole is dragged to his death by the pod. When Bowman instructs HAL to revive Whitehead to replace Poole and the computer resists mission parameters, Bowman suspects a mutiny.
6. Bowman narrowly escapes death when HAL opens the pod bay doors and depressurizes the vessel. Though the survey team die in the emergency, Bowman successfully disables HAL. From Mission Control, Dr. Floyd reveals to Bowman his true mission, which is to investigate the signal the monolith on the moon, known as TMA-1 (Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 1), has transmitted to Saturn. Bowman is promoted to mankind's ambassador in the first meeting with an extraterrestrial intelligence.
7. Bowman reaches his destination, the moon of Japetus orbiting Saturn. He discovers a black monolith the size of a building, dubbed TMA-2. The damage to Discovery ruling out a rescue mission as an option, Bowman boards a pod and goes out to investigate the monolith. His last transmission to Earth--"The thing's hollow--it goes on forever--and--oh my God!--it's full of stars"--baffles mankind for years. Meanwhile, Bowman enters a Star Gate.
My three thoughts on 2001, which teeter totters between four and a half stars and five:
-- I BELIEVE IN SCIENCE! Visiting the Houston Museum of Natural Science as a kid, I never imagined adults running for national office would need to confirm this, that it was a given, but perhaps due to the political climate we now find ourselves in, I responded to the succinct brevity Clarke summoned to write about evolution, as well as space travel, how both are possible and neither are the result of a supreme being. While the mysterious presence of the monolith at the dawn of man could easily be assigned religious implications, the novel is much less ambiguous as to their origin.
-- 2001 hit pop culture at the peak of the space race and is both a direct result of it, as well as a potent reminder of the innovation that was a given at that time. Clarke immortalizes a bygone sophistication, recalling the jaunty spirit of Pan Am or Ian Fleming when it comes to travel and exploration that I loved. We never got colonies on the moon or commercial space travel, but many of Clarke's concepts--from vision-phones to electronic newspapers to reusable spacecraft--did. It was a pleasure to be swept away into one possible 2001 where the technological leaps of the space race didn't stop with the moon landing.
-- The monolith is the greatest extraterrestrial ever put on film and so far, the most compelling I've come across in fiction. Nothing summons the fear, fascination and unknowable quite like a geometrically perfect black slab. It does not walk. It does not talk. It does not explain where it came from or what its intentions are. It comes and goes as it pleases, baffling mankind but also inspiring us, redirecting our evolution in ways we can't possibly perceive at the time. Clarke reveals much more about the origin of the monolith than Kubrick did in the film, but with restraint, leaving much for the reader to fill in.
Perhaps as a result of the film, I did not expect dynamic characters or a particularly diverse cast, though come to think of it, Clarke never goes into ethnic specifications on Floyd, Bowman or Poole. I'm content that the last five science fiction movies I've seen dealing with space exploration (Gravity, Europa Report, Interstellar, The Martian, Star Wars: The Force Awakens) all featured female astronauts and I didn't expect that sort of inclusion from Clarke based on when he wrote his story. I opened my mind and had it reasonably blown.
