On the 10th anniversary of Kubrick’ passing: “2001: A Space Odyssey”

The previous installment of the Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) retrospective discusses “Dr. Strangelove.”

The screen is at first an impenetrable dark. “Real country dark” as Alex DaLarge might say. Slowly, quietly, alien sounds emit from deep within the blackness. We expect images but we get none to guide us. Instead we must retreat inwards, away from the inscrutable void and into our own consciousness, reaching into our soul for answers.

We don’t know it yet but we are already watching the Monolith. Kubrick has buried it in the cinema just as it was buried on the moon. It has forced us to make the leap from narrative cinema to the avant garde. Some will be astonished, some will loathe it, but like Dave Bowman, the audience will be transformed by the experience forever.

Now as the soundscape reaches its sinister crescendo it becomes almost unbearable, scratching and clawing at our ears, writhing under our skin, making us long for the light. We are Odysseus tied to the mast, driven half mad by the otherworldly songs of the Sirens.

Thus Spake Zarathustra. Like a primordial Earth, we are set free by our first glimpse of life, a celestial alignment that takes our breath away. The music rises and falls with the force of a tsunami, crashing finally over the title, “A Stanley Kubrick Production” leaving us in no doubt that it is the director who is creator of the Monolith of 2001, that his own god like genius will eventually guide us from ape to star child.

A silent montage of barren landscapes now confronts us. This is the dawn of man first seen as a shrewdness of apes coexisting peacefully with the animals they will later kill for meat. Stealthily, a second group attacks and drives them from their water hole. Are we witnessing the first ever act of war?

Under the cover of night the defeated apes shelter in a rocky outcrop. Here we are given our first close-up, the initial spark of human intelligence behind terrified eyes. Whilst we observe them cowering, we realise we are no longer watching apes but men.

Abruptly the Monolith appears amongst them. A prehistoric television radiating the same terrifying sounds we heard earlier. Gingerly, the ape-men approach it, flicking out a finger to touch its difference, gradually becoming braver in their advances. Eventually they surround it, worship it, and learn from it. Learn to kill from it.

In triumphant slow motion one of the ape-men adapts a bone into a weapon, his circular motion anticipating the rotation of Space Station 5, wielding it with ever-greater confidence until he eventually kills a tapir. On tasting meat for the first time their primitive thoughts turn to the murderous recapture of their watering hole.

A monumental match-cut, from the bone to an orbiting nuclear weapon, propels us forward millions of years, warfare the driving force behind human evolution. The swelling beauty of “The Blue Danube” soothes us emotions as it accompanies the docking ballet of a space-plane, a shard of white bone gliding gracefully towards the spinning Space Station 5, framed by the majestic Earth, azure and alive.

Oblivious to the spectacle is Dr Heywood Floyd, fast asleep on his Pan American space flight. For a man of his academic ability, Floyd seems constantly more interested in the mundane. Once on board the Space Station, he never once looks at the Earth. He is more content using the videophone or pondering the instructions of a zero gravity toilet.

Floyd’s shuttle to the moon is shaped like a devilish skull, eyes glowing red as it descends into the mournful maw of the Clavius base, pincers drawing back to admit the craft. Perhaps mankind has shaped his advanced technology to resemble its very first tool – the bone.

When addressing other scientists in a boardroom, Floyd is almost dismissive of the subject, the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence. He may as well be hosting an insurance conference. Kubrick argued that scientists would be restrained in such circumstances, measured in their reaction to the unthinkable.

However, even on the moonbus Floyd is more taken with the sandwiches than the prospect of seeing the Monolith for the first time. We want to take him by the scruff of the neck and shake him.

The Monolith, like the Pyramids on Earth, is littered with the ugly technology of modern man. Floyd and his team are busy slapping each other’s backs like doctors on a golf course. They treat mankind’s greatest discovery as a photo opportunityt. Suddenly, they are clutching their heads as an ear-shattering cry of radio waves smashes their smug complacency.

Eighteen months later the Discovery spacecraft, a drifting man-made spinal cord, passes ominously across the screen to the mournful tones of the Gayane Ballet Suite. The bone tossed millions of years ago is now travelling towards Jupiter, where the Monolith is aiming its signal. Kubrick lets us fill in the blanks, Floyd and his team, like the ape-men, have made the next technological leap necessary to carry out the mission from their contact with the Monolith.

We cut inside the Discovery to a giddy tracking shot of Dr Poole shadow boxing. All sense of physics are shot to pieces as Poole runs an impossible loop around the hamster wheel of his living quarters. As he completes each circuit we glimpse strange mummified figures, as if Poole were a slave buried alive in this high-tech tomb with his masters.

These mummies are actually other members of the crew, hibernating to conserve the Discovery’s life support systems. The mission leader Dr Bowman and the HAL 9000 computer accompany Poole. HAL is sentient, and at times far more emotional than his human colleagues. He is also harbouring a secret.

HAL observes and studies Bowman and Poole. Does he envy their freedom of movement from his static position or fear their limited capabilities? Does Bowman’s comic book portraits of the hibernating crewmembers and his inability to beat HAL at chess seal their fate? Can Bowman lead them to successfully complete a complex mission millions of miles away from Earthr?

The computer takes charge and seeks to divide and conquer his human opponents. By lip reading the astronauts conversation HAL realises they don’t trust his judgment regarding a faulty communication unit. If HAL is wrong they will disconnect him. And then the black of an intermission, another Monolith to help the audience prepare for the dazzling climatic second half.

When we resume, HAL murders Poole when he is performing an EVA to replace the unit. He uses the pod (again a skull) to cut Poole’s ‘umbilical cord,’ almost an act of infanticide. Poole spins off like a rag doll into forever, a discarded plaything. Perhaps Poole is paying the price for his lack of interest in his family. What HAL would give to have a family like that?

Bowman then makes his most human decision yet. He takes another pod to recover Poole even though he must know he is already dead. In his haste he forgets his space helmet, vindicating HAL’s calculation of human error. Bowman cradles Poole in the pods robotic arms, this physical detachment as sentimental as Bowman is ever likely to get. This is the complete antithesis of Joker holding the dead Cowboy close in “Full Metal Jacket.”

Separated from the Discovery, Bowman is helpless as HAL switches off the hibernating crew’s life support systems in a chilling sequence. The economy of shots, cutting coldly between HAL, the computer read outs, and the still faces of the crew are punctuated only by the shrill alarm of each individual flat line. HAL’s act here is a clinical one of abortion, we are told they were in a “dreamless sleep” but we can’t be sure they didn’t suffer.

Now the chess game between HAL and Bowman begins for real. Bowman is held in check by his own careless mistake. “Open the pod bay doors HAL,” he asks through gritted teeth. He tries to keep calm, as if talking to a naughty child, but the shades of red that illuminate his face give away his hatred.

The whirring and clicks of the pods systems zero us in to the inner workings of Bowman’s mind. He calms down, suppresses his anger and takes a calculated risk. He violently blasts into an emergency hatch without his helmet and just has time to close it shut.

Safely aboard the Discovery and helmet in place Bowman will now triumph. Kubrick switches to a hand held camera, giving immediacy and urgency to Bowman’s course of action. HAL must be deactivated.

Swathed in crimsons Bowman dissects HAL from the inside out, removing his memory one unit at a time. All we can hear is Bowman’s breathing, amplified through his helmet, strangely inhuman when compared to HAL pleading for his life, “I’m afraid Dave, my mind is going I can feel it.”

We think Bowman will not be dissuaded from his grim task at hand, but he nearly cracks when HAL offers to sing him “Daisy Bell.” Bowman needs this distraction to block out his emotions as if he were smothering his own baby. As HAL dies, the truth about the mission is finally revealed in a pre-recorded message from Heywood Floyd.

Just as we were getting comfortable in a vaguely familiar narrative on board the Discovery it is snatched away from us once more. Bowman approaches another Monolith in orbit around Jupiter but this one is colossal. He prepares to go beyond the infinite. This time the Monolith will bombard us with both sound and image.

Extreme close ups of Bowman’s eye imitate the visions that dumfound our own sight. We can’t quite believe our eyes as we race through the “Star Gate” over hallucinatory, kaleidoscopic worlds with him, faster and faster until we stop ourselves from trying to reason the shapes and colours before us and just experience them.

We are with Bowman in a brightly lit 18th century bedroom. Bowman encounters older versions of himself increasingly less interested in his sumptuous surroundings until he points from his deathbed at another Monolith. All the while we can hear whispers of alien voices that sound as if they are underwater or behind glass. Is Bowman being observed?

And what of the ending? Is Bowman transformed or transfigured into the Starchild? Are we dealing with gods, aliens, or a new evolutionary step for mankind? One thing is certain, many in the film business now saw Kubrick as Hollywood’s messiah, the holy warrior proving that the growing threat of television could never replace the majesty, ambition and scale of the cinema. The Starchild is Kubrick himself and the Monolith his own vision of cinema. He would now be free to do as he pleased.