We also watched a TNT showing of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (in a letterboxed edition, which was a gain — but with all too many commercial interruptions, which was not a gain; this is one film that cannot survive being chopped, sliced and diced for the financial requirements of commercial television). — 7/27/93
•••••
I ran Charles the tape I’d made from Turner Classic Movies
two months ago of a shortened (149 minutes instead of the 171 minutes of the
theatrical version and the 185 minutes of Kubrick’s first cut) but, blessedly, letterboxed
version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It remains a haunting film despite the virtual
failure of any of its predictions
to come true — we’re just 2 1/2 years away from 2001 and the world is
singularly bereft of giant space stations, regular passenger service to the
moon and intelligent computers that talk and ultimately go psycho. It’s also a
great film — I remember thinking in the 1970’s it was the only movie made since
Citizen Kane I would put at the
level of the all-time best (even in that American Film Institute poll of the
100 greatest movies of all time — already, predictably, controversial because
of its blatant omissions[1]
— 2001 placed 22nd, which helps
make up in retrospect for its appalling omission from the Academy Award
nominees for Best Picture of 1968; the Academy is often criticized because Citizen
Kane, the top vote-getter in the AFI poll,
didn’t win Best Picture for 1941, but at least it was nominated!) — and it holds up surprisingly well, though I
noticed Charles was impressed less by the metaphysical aspects of the movie
than by the subplot involving the psychotic Hal (Charles was actually talking
to the screen during much of the human-computer confrontation, warning the
astronauts not to trust the computer — and even I couldn’t resist joking, when
Hal boasted that no H.A.L. 9000 computer had ever made a mistake, “At least not
since we stopped buying chips from Intel”) — and even though there’s a certain structural shakiness
about the movie, in which the final psychedelic sequence and the rebirth of
astronaut Dave Bowman as the Star-Child seem grafted-on flights of purest
fantasy that don’t have all that much to do with everything we’ve seen up until
then, which has been meticulously plotted science fiction.
Charles said he can’t help, whenever he watches 2001, but read back the details of Arthur C. Clarke’s book
version of the story into the film and fill in its ambiguities that way — which
is a perfectly justifiable way to handle a film that is made from a book, but is somewhat more problematic in a movie
like this in which the book was written after the film, albeit by one of the people who conceived
the script (and Clarke’s main motive in writing the book seems to have been
less to create a definitive literary version of the story than to write a
version encompassing all the differences he’d had with Kubrick over how the
story should go). I think it’s best to conceive of the book and the film as two
separate versions of the same legend; certainly Clarke’s novel provides one perfectly viable reading of the film, but not the only (or necessarily the most authoritative) one. Many of
Kubrick’s directorial decisions — especially the elimination of the narration
that was originally going to run through the entire film and explain everything
— seemed designed to heighten the
ambiguity, to increase the number of viable readings that could be made of the
film — and in that sense, as I
told Charles at the end, 2001 seems
to vindicate director Allan Dwan’s statement that “we write with the camera,
not with a pencil or pen, and we’ve got to remember that and not get trapped by
the fellow who writes with words.” (Charles replied with the argument that at
least words say something
specific, whereas images don’t! He was also amused when I mentioned Ray
Bradbury’s statement that he hadn’t
liked 2001 because he thought
Stanley Kubrick was a terrible writer who got in the way of Arthur C. Clarke, a
great writer.) Certainly 2001 has
been enormously influential, not only in making science-fiction a respectable
film genre at last (though there had been important science-fiction films before — not
only oldies like the original Metropolis but also estimable works in the 1950’s like the first Invasion
of the Body Snatchers, Forbidden Planet and
even — despite the ill-advised inclusion of a bug-eyed monster — This
Island Earth — and I’ve always been amused
by our friend Chris Schneider’s comment that he particularly hates Star
Wars because he felt the success of 2001
opened up the market for intellectual science fiction in films and the even greater
success of Star Wars closed it
again) but also in anticipating the current age of music videos in exalting
vivid imagery over intellectual sense (though 2001 is a marvel of clarity compared to a number of recent
films which supposedly tell a
coherent story but are really excuses to get from one explosive action scene to
another), and also technically in terms of actually making spacecraft and other
planets that looked convincingly
real on screen for the first time. — 6/18/98
•••••
The movie Charles and I selected last night from our DVD
backlog was one of my all-time favorites — indeed, when Citizen Kane was finally displaced from its traditional top slot
in the 2012 Sight and Sound “10
Best of All Time” poll by, of all things, Hitchcock’s Vertigo (which I really like but I don’t think is the
greatest film ever made — indeed, I don’t even think it’s the greatest film
Hitchcock ever made: I’d rate Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious and Strangers on a Train ahead of it), I thought that if any film deserved to knock off Kane from the “best film of all time” title it was this
one: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. 2001
was first released in 1968 after Kubrick had spent over three years shooting
it, originally calling it Voyage Beyond the Stars until, according to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, he
saw the 1966 science-fiction film Fantastic Voyage and hated it so much he was determined not to use
the word “Voyage” for his film. When it first came out it didn’t draw big
audiences initially — especially not big enough to fill the large theatres
needed to run it in its original 70 mm format (it was billed as being in
Cinerama but really wasn’t) on a road-show basis, complete with intermission —
but a strange thing happened. Maybe not that many people liked it, but the
folks who did like it went to see
it again. And again. And again.
And though wags liked to joke that they were seeing it multiple times to figure
out what was supposed to be happening in it, 2001 attracted a series of cult followings including
hippies turned on by the long psychedelic sequence at the end, in which
astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), the last survivor of the crew of the
interplanetary ship Discovery,
crashes through the so-called “Star Gate” to reach the interstellar aliens who
have been controlling all human evolution; computer nerds who heard and saw the
talking H.A.L. 9000 computer (nicknamed “Hal”) and got into artificial
intelligence work because they were inspired to create such a computer in real
life; as well as all sorts of other people who just liked the idea that someone had finally created a science-fiction movie with the
depth and complexity of the best science-fiction writing. The film began life
as a 1952 short story by Arthur C. Clarke called “The Sentinel,” in which early
human explorers on the moon dig up an artifact left there by some other
civilization — a tall object that looks something like an elongated pyramid —
and note that it beams a radio signal back to wherever it came from. The
explorers realize it was a sentinel left there by another planet’s ship so when
it was uncovered it would send back a signal that humans had evolved enough to
be capable of space travel — and the story ends with the narrator expressing
the expectation that there will be some kind of response and writing the last
words, “I do not think we will have to wait for long.” Director Stanley Kubrick
read “The Sentinel” and after completing Dr. Strangelove in 1964 decided to expand it into the basis for his
next film. He hired Clarke to write the screenplay in collaboration with him,
and the two worked out an arrangement by which Clarke would publish a novel
with the film’s title, over whose content he would have sole control, while
Kubrick would have sole control over the content of the film. So with 2001 we have a rare level of documentation of how, at
least for this one film, the always contentious relationship between
screenwriter and director worked out: the differences between 2001 the novel and 2001 the movie represent the points of contention between
the two creators.
The story opens with a prehistoric sequence (quite convincing
even though it, like the entire movie, was shot inside the soundstages at MGM’s
studio at Borehamwood,[2]
England — later, for his Viet Nam War movie Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick re-created Viet Nam on British soundstages
quite convincingly even though one imdb.com contributor noted that the palm
trees were not only fake but all looked exactly the same: they had been made
from the same mold) called “The Dawn of Man,” in which prehistoric apes are
threatened by hunger, drought and predators (including a leopard, who drives
them off the carcass of a zebra — actually a dead horse painted to look like a
zebra, even though biologically zebras are closer to goats than horses) until
inspiration from outer space, represented by a giant monolith (in Clarke’s
novel its proportions are 1:4:9, representing the sequence of square and cubed
numbers, but in the movie the monolith is more elongated than that), teaches
them how to use the bones of dead animals as tools so they can kill the
ubiquitous tapirs for food and also attack each other. (It seems curiously
against the pro-peace Zeitgeist
that Kubrick would release a film in 1968 that argues that violence is a
necessary and inextricable part of human evolution, but it was a theme Kubrick
would return to in his next film, A Clockwork Orange.) The lead ape, Moon-Watcher (Daniel Richter),
throws his bone into the air in triumph — and Kubrick jump-cuts to a scene in
space in which Earth has been honeycombed by nuclear weapons in orbit, each
bearing the logo of one of the world’s three major powers (the U.S., the Soviet
Union and China), placed there so any one of them can launch a nuclear attack
without having to do so from earth-based missiles, bombers or submarines. (2001 was originally supposed to end with the Star-Child —
the reincarnated form of Dave Bowman whom the aliens have sent back to earth —
blowing up the nuclear weapons in space and thus rendering them harmless, but
Kubrick thought this would look too much like the “We’ll Meet Again”
end-of-the-world ending of Dr. Strangelove, so the plot point of atomic weapons in space is almost totally lost
in the final film.)
We then meet Dr. Haywood Floyd (William Sylvester), Earth
scientist on his way to the moon in a craft flown there by Pan American Airways
(one of a number of firms shown in this film that met their demise well before
the real 2001), which docks on a space station so Floyd can transfer to a
landing craft to complete his journey to the moon. (Clarke’s novel has an
ironic comment that Floyd has just made a trip humans had been dreaming of for
millennia — going to the moon — and it was totally routine. The line became even
more ironic when humans actually did
go to the moon six times between 1969 and 1972 — and then stopped.) After a
whole lot of stiff-upper-lip conversations between Floyd and his Russian
colleagues on the space station, and then between him and the people at Clavius
base on the moon — which has been quarantined, ostensibly because of an unknown
epidemic among the personnel stationed there but really to protect the secrecy
around the discovery of another monolith, obviously put there (as per Clarke’s
original source story) by members of another civilization to let them know when
humans evolved enough to make it to the moon — we finally get to see the
monolith, it emits its high-pitched signal — there’s a grimly amusing moment in
which the moonbase staff put their hands over the “ears” of their space
helmets, acting by instinct and momentarily forgetting that the sound they hear
is through their own radio receivers because sound waves don’t carry in the
moon’s airless environment — and then Kubrick cuts to the spaceship Discovery on a mission to Jupiter 18 months later. Discovery contains five astronauts, though three of them are
in hibernation, in which their bodies’ metabolism has been slowed to the
absolute minimum to sustain life and they’re unconscious in giant combination
refrigerators (we see ice crystals formed around the windows that allow us to
see their eyes and noses but nothing else about them) and sarcophagi.
The two
astronauts who are “up and
running,” as it were, are Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary
Lockwood), both attractive young men who make their on-screen debuts in gym
shorts as they run up and down the curved interior of the space vehicle
(curved, like the space station, to create artificial gravity). The sixth
member of the crew is their H.A.L. 9000 computer, who’s represented as a
glowing red eye with a yellow pupil — indeed. H.A.L.’s eyes run throughout the
ship, giving the astronauts a sort of living-under-Big-Brother feel as the
computer can keep track of them wherever they are on board — and the computer,
whom (as a BBC reporter in a news segment on the voyage helpfully explains) one
addresses as “Hal.” One not only addresses it, it addresses back in the
chillingly monotonous tones of actor Douglas Rain, a Canadian who was engaged
by Kubrick because he had an even-toned voice that would sound credible as one
synthesized by a future machine. (Interestingly Kubrick originally thought of
the computer as having a woman’s voice, like most recent commercial artificial
intelligences, including Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, which are given
female voices and personae.)
Unfortunately Hal goes crazy for reasons that, like much about this movie, are
kept ambiguous in the film (though Clarke is clearer about them in the novel);
he makes a minor error — predicting a flaw in a radio control unit on board and
sending Bowman on a mission to replace it — and this snowballs into another
extra-vehicular mission in which Poole goes out to replace the first unit and
let it fail, and while he and Bowman are gone Hal goes totally bonkers, killing
the hibernating crew members (this is depicted in what one of the original
reviewers called “the most chilling modern death scene imaginable”: the lines
representing the hibernators’ vital functions gradually become less wavy and
finally flatten altogether, and the computer screens flash first “LIFE SYSTEMS
CRITICAL” and then “LIFE SYSTEMS TERMINATED”), severing Poole’s oxygen line so
he floats away helplessly in space, and refusing to open the ship so Bowman,
flying the space pod that was supposed to support Poole, can’t get back in.
In
a sequence Clarke borrowed from another short story of his, “Take a Deep
Breath,” Bowman is obliged to use the manual entrance and, since he’s dressed
in his spacesuit but forgot to put on its helmet, he has frantically to clutch
for the seconds he can survive in a vacuum until he can pull the lever that
seals the door and allows air to flow back into the chamber. Then he marches to
the central chamber that holds Hal’s higher brain functions and methodically
disconnects them — leaving on only the purely autonomic controls that maintain
the ship’s operations, including its life support systems — and Hal responds by
delivering a slowed-down version of “Bicycle Built for Two” as he’s essentially
lobotomized until he expires completely. In Clarke’s novel there’s a long
depiction of Bowman’s voyage to Jupiter after that — he discovers the ship’s
library of recorded music and works his way backwards through classical-music
history, starting with the Romantics and ending with Bach — but in the film it
quickly cuts to Bowman reaching Jupiter and taking a space pod out to explore a
third monolith, this one orbiting Jupiter. (In Clarke’s original conception the
destination planet was Saturn, but it turned out that the special effects
required to create a convincing surface of a gas-giant planet and the ones
required to create convincing rings around it were so different they were
incompatible, so while the astronauts in Clarke’s novel bypassed Jupiter and
used a slingshot effect to get to Saturn, the ones in the movie stayed on
course for Jupiter.) Then the monolith opens the “Star Gate” (though you
wouldn’t know it was called that unless you’d read Clarke’s novel) and Bowman
passes through a long series of stunning optical illusions, much like the
experimental movies that were popular with student audiences in the 1960’s but
of course produced on a much more expansive budget, including second-unit
footage of the Hebrides in Scotland and Monument Valley in Utah, famed as the
location of innumerable John Ford Westerns. (But the view of Monument Valley,
though including the famous elevated mesa often seen in the background of
Ford’s films, is heavily solarized and color-distorted, leading me to joke, “I
have a feeling we’re not in John Ford’s Monument Valley anymore.”)
Finally
Bowman ends up in a ridiculously ornate hotel room and progressively ages in
various steps (looking surprisingly like the real Keir Dullea as he has
naturally aged — often actors who were artificially “aged” for a role when they
were young don’t look at all like that when they really get to be that old)
until, after one more visitation from the monolith, he’s reincarnated as a
planet-sized fetus (the “Star Child,” he’s called in Clarke’s books) and ends
up orbiting the earth and moon. In the original draft of the script — and in
Clarke’s novel — he sets off all the nuclear weapons the great powers have
orbiting in space, but Kubrick thought that would look too much like the ending
of his previous film Dr. Strangelove
— in which the Russian “Doomsday Device” sets off a series of nuclear
explosions that render the whole world’s surface uninhabitable — so at the end
the Star Child simply floats in space. “Now that he was master of the world, he
didn’t quite know what to do. But he would think of something,” wrote Clarke in
the novel (which I’m quoting from memory). Clarke would eventually write three
more novels in the 2001
“universe,” and his first sequel was filmed (but extensively changed) in 1984
as 2010 with Roy Scheider as
Heywood Floyd, the character William Sylvester played here. Though its
prediction that once we got to the moon humans would continue space exploration
indefinitely and build permanent space stations, run regular moon flights and
ultimately colonize the rest of the solar system proved wrong (and so did
Arthur C. Clarke’s rather optimistic prediction that the moon would contain
water-bearing rocks, which would have allowed human colonists to crush them and
extract water, which in turn could be used to release breathable oxygen, which
was disproven when humans actually landed on the moon and found no embedded
water in its rocks), some of 2001’s
calls proved surprisingly correct: the hand-held screens on which the Discovery astronauts watch radio transmissions from Earth look
like modern-day tablet computers and the electronic devices used to monitor the
health status of the hibernating astronauts are in standard medical use today.
The term “flatlining” is even used by modern-day doctors and nurses to describe
what’s happening when a person starts losing their life while being so
monitored and needs emergency intervention to keep from croaking completely.
2001:
A Space Odyssey remains a magnificent film
even though the date in which it was set has come and gone and humans have
retreated back to earth after their first forays to the moon; with the arguable
exception of Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still it was the first science-fiction film made by a “name”
director since Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon (1928), and Kubrick’s attention to detail made it
the most realistic-looking one to date. Instead of the smooth-surfaced toy
spaceships that had bounced around on wires in things like the 1930’s Flash
Gordon serials, the moon craft and the Discovery look like actual electromechanical devices, with
ridges, protuberances, bolts and the other accoutrements of actual human
construction instead of the idealized burnished surfaces of previous movie
spacecraft. (There’s a nice bit of “planting” in the script when we twice get
close-ups of the back of the space pods, with their “CAUTION! EXPLOSIVE BOLTS”
warnings, before the explosive bolts themselves feature prominently in the
sequence of Bowman breaking back into the Discovery after Hal refuses to let him back in.) Stanley
Kubrick took credit for the special effects as well as the overall direction of
the film — which incensed Douglas Trumbull, who was really the effects person
in charge but just got relegated to a long list of assistants (ironically 2001 won the Academy Award for Best Achievement in Visual
Effects and the award went to Kubrick, the only Oscar he ever won: the Academy
didn’t even nominate 2001 for
Best Picture — at least the famously shut-out Citizen Kane got nominated — and the film that did win Best Picture that year, Oliver!, was a rankly sentimental musical whose only saving
graces were the shards of genuine darkness and emotion left over from Charles
Dickens’ source novel after author Lionel Bart and the filmmakers got through
sweetening it), which in turn led Steven Spielberg to credit not only Trumbull
but his entire team on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, leading to the insane inflation of movie credit
rolls we’ve seen since.
Midway through the film — at the moment when it cut
from the moon to the Discovery
mission to Jupiter — Charles pointed out that 2001 is really more like a Soviet film, especially a
Soviet film made after the 1930’s, when Stalin ruled that the high-energy
fast-moving montage style of the Soviet silent classics was no longer
politically correct. Its closest successor is the Andrei Tarkovsky film of Solaris, made in 1972 and likewise a long, ponderously paced
movie about extraterrestrial intelligence and its power to manipulate human
beings — even though Tarkovsky said at the time he was trying to make an anti-2001 and in particular he wanted characters that had rich
emotional lives and went through recognizable and identifiable personal
conflicts. (The main character in Solaris is a space scientist who is still devastated by the suicide of his
girlfriend, only he meets up with her again when the sentient ocean that covers
the planet Solaris sends him a replica — only, since she’s based on the one
source Solaris had, his memories of her, he makes the same mistakes with his
replica girlfriend he made back on Earth with the original.) When 2001 was released one of the main things it was
criticized for was the dry, dispassionate depiction of the human characters,
who talk to each other in stiff, formal, almost militaristic language and show
no signs of any emotional connection. (The closest we come is the videophone
call between Dr. Floyd and his daughter back on earth, played by Kubrick’s then
five-year-old daughter Vivian, and even that seems more out of parental
obligation than any real love.)
Much of the criticism came from people incensed
that the H.A.L. 9000 computer seemed to have a deeper and richer emotional life
than any of the humans — within Douglas Rain’s monotone voice he’s able by
subtle inflections to indicate pride in the H.A.L. series’ flawless operating
record and a sort of thinly veiled patronization towards the human members of
the crew (indeed, not only did 2001
deserve a Best Picture Academy Award, but arguably Rain deserved one for his
incredible performance as the voice of Hal!), as well as genuine grief and fear
when he is finally disconnected — while in the disconnection scene Bowman, up
until then shown as little more than a cog in the mission, takes on real human
qualities and becomes an impressive revenge figure. Criticizing 2001 for making the computer more deeply and richly
emotional than the humans is seizing on one of the film’s great strengths and
calling it a flaw! Andrew Sarris, one of the main critics who panned the film
for the stiff, formal way the astronauts talked, later admitted he’d been wrong
when he watched the actual moon landing on TV and noticed the real astronauts
were just as stiff and emotionless as the ones in Kubrick’s film. 2001
is also an example of what Sergei
Eisenstein in the late 1920’s called “the sound film” as opposed to the talkie:
one which would have a bare minimum of dialogue (or, in Eisenstein’s vision, no
dialogue at all) but which would use the soundtrack to add music and sound
effects so it could tell a story more effectively than a silent film could. 2001 has also been praised for nice little touches, like
at least mentioning the
seven-minute delay in radio contact between the ship and Earth caused by the
sheer distance between them, and using total silence for scenes taking place in
space (since sound waves can’t move in a vacuum, space is silent, and some of
Kubrick’s most striking effects are the sound edits between space, which is
quiet, and the interior of the space pod, which contains air and therefore
sound — and reportedly Kubrick himself dubbed in Bowman’s heavy breathing in
some of these scenes). It is, to my mind, the greatest science-fiction film
ever made (my others would be the Tarkovsky Solaris, Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis and Woman
in the Moon, Wise’s The Day the
Earth Stood Still and the first version of Invasion
of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don
Siegel, which is essentially a science-fiction film noir) and the gold standard to which anyone making a science-fiction
film now should aspire. — 5/28/17
[1] — Among the omissions noted — and criticized — in yesterday’s Los
Angeles Times by
critic Kenneth Turan: none of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals — indeed,
nothing with Astaire at all, though Gene Kelly made the cut with “Singin’ in
the Rain” at #10 — as well as none of Garbo’s films (at least two, Queen Christina and Camille, should be on anybody’s list of the 100 best films ever
made in the U.S.!), nothing by directors Ernst Lubitsch or Preston Sturges, and
only four silent films, The Birth of a Nation (inevitable because of his
historical importance and artistic quality, despite its horribly reactionary
and racist politics) and three by Chaplin, The Gold Rush, City Lights and Modern Times — nothing by Buster Keaton, who made at least
two silent masterpieces worthy of inclusion (Sherlock, Jr. and The General). Turan also noticed that none of
Busby Berkeley’s films made the cut — though that’s not so surprising because,
as spectacular as his numbers were, very few of Berkeley’s films were all that
great as complete films — and neither did 1939’s Gunga Din, “without whose example everything from Star Wars to Raiders of the Lost Ark might not have happened.”
[2] — Earlier references to this studio I’ve seen spell
its name as two words: “Boreham Wood.”
