by David Mikics
“Not even heroin or the supernatural ever went this far,” said the critic David Thomson about what cinema does to us, its superreal spell-casting power. No movie has ever gone as far as 2001, soaring before and beyond the human, showing us the silence of infinite space. More than any of his other movies, this one fits Martin Scorsese’s comment: “Watching a Kubrick film is like gazing up at a mountaintop. You look up and wonder, How could anyone have climbed up that high?”2
The seed for 2001 was planted in 1964, when Kubrick first heard about Arthur C. Clarke. That spring Kubrick was in New York, enjoying the growing success of Dr. Strangelove, which had opened in January. Stanley and Christiane’s friends included Terry Southern, Artie Shaw, and their wives. Shaw, who hadn’t played clarinet for years, was trying his hand at writing fiction and distributing films. He was a champion marksman, and like Kubrick he had a big gun collection. He and Kubrick bonded over their shared love of jazz, weaponry, and movies. Shaw knew that Kubrick wanted to make a science fiction film and was looking for a co-screenwriter, so he told him to look into a novel called Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke, who was also a science writer and amateur astronomer, lived in Ceylon, and he was chronically short of money, mostly as a result of funding the projects of his filmmaker boyfriend.
Kubrick got Clarke’s novel and read it eagerly with Christiane by the bedside of four-year-old Vivian, who had a dangerous case of the croup. Listening anxiously to Vivian’s breathing, Kubrick tore the paperback into chunks, handing the pages to Christiane when he had finished them. “Arthur, we thought, was the ultimate,” Christiane remembered. Kubrick’s friend Roger Caras sent a telex to Ceylon, and Clarke cabled back, “Frightfully interested in working with enfant terrible.”3
Kubrick treasured Clarke’s ability to give a human response to the expanses of cosmic space. He said to Jeremy Bernstein that Clarke “captures the hopeless but admirable human desire to know these things that they can never really know . . . the sense of sadness, the poetic sense of time passing, the loneliness of worlds.” Clarke, Kubrick told Bernstein, “has a way of writing about mountains and planets and worlds with the same poignance that people write about children and love affairs.”4
It was clear that 2001, with its vast sense of scale, was going to be a different kind of science fiction movie. Kubrick told Danielle Heymann that “every single company turned it down except for MGM: what they said at the time was ‘what, science fiction pictures never gross more than two million dollars,’ because up until that point all science fiction had been kind of cheap, stupid.”5
“He had a night person pallor,” Clarke remembered about Kubrick when the two first met in New York over dinner at Trader Vic’s. In the mid-sixties Kubrick was clean-shaven and he had, Bernstein remarked, “the somewhat bohemian look of a riverboat gambler or a Romanian poet.”6 Before long Clarke was ensconced in the Chelsea Hotel, where he ate a lot of liver paté on crackers, pursued a love affair with an Irish merchant seaman who lived down the hall, and rubbed elbows with fellow Chelsea residents William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Clarke was writing several thousand words a day of the script, and he met with Kubrick constantly to hash out the details of what would become the most innovative science fiction movie ever.
“Science-fiction films have always meant monsters and sex,” Clarke said later, but his and Kubrick’s was going to be different, a serious glimpse into the destiny of the human.7 In an early version of the script, spindly Giacometti-inspired aliens welcome the surviving astronaut: a Spielberg touch avant la lettre. Kubrick and Clarke eventually came upon the idea to end with the Starchild, who spurs fright and bliss at once. In a revolutionary twist, the aliens themselves remain invisible and unspeaking, like a philosopher’s idea of the divine.
It’s possible that Napoleon’s march to Moscow involved more practical challenges than the making of 2001. Then again, maybe not. (Michael Benson tells the whole story of the production superbly in his book Space Odyssey.) Filming began with the sequence in which the scientists, posing for a selfie around the monolith they discover on the moon, reel from the ear-piercing sound it emits. As on Strangelove, Kubrick was his own cinematographer for these handheld shots. Production ended with the Dawn of Man, the most difficult part of 2001, since the right costumes and gestures had to be invented so that men could realistically play apes.
Live action production for most of 2001, with the exception of its prehistoric prelude, occurred in the eight months between December 1965 and July 1966. Then came nearly two years of postproduction. Kubrick was a fiend about asking for one more take, and the crew slowly got used to his mantra “do it again.” 2001 was at the time, and may still be, the most technically daunting movie ever made. It demanded Kubrick’s constant attention, and even more constant inventiveness. The movie required more than two hundred process shots: the original negative was stored as a “held take,” and then foreground and background elements were painstakingly added—for example, the stars or the earth through a spaceship window. After many months of trial and error, the outer space scenes started to look right.
Kubrick’s groundbreaking filmic inventions in 2001 demanded careful decision making. Christiane said that Kubrick was “very much a chess player” when he made movies: “He said, ‘Don’t relax too soon. That’s when you make mistakes.’ ” Kubrick once commented that “chess teaches you . . . to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good,” and to “think just as objectively when you’re in trouble.”8
During early work on the script Clarke noted in his diary, “Stanley has invented the wild idea of slightly fag robots.” The robots eventually became the HAL 9000 computer. Kubrick chose the Canadian actor Douglas Rain to play HAL because, he said, Rain’s voice had a “patronizing, asexual” quality.9 HAL is both strangely soothing and malevolent, a blend that seems just right for today’s technological inroads into your life. You can now even order an Alexa terminal that looks and sounds like HAL, though, as someone joked, you might not want to give him control over your garage door opener.
2001, that halcyon and disquieting film, has at its center the strangely human pathos of its computer, the main character of the film’s middle section, along with the astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), who have been sent to Jupiter to investigate the source of the signal given off by the monolith found on the moon. HAL is both the movie’s bad guy, when he decides to kill off the astronauts to ensure the success of the mission, and its sacrificial victim, when Bowman disconnects him. The movie’s point-of-view shots are mostly from HAL’s perspective: that nervously pulsating red eye, beating softly like a heart.
HAL can read lips—this is how he finds out about the astronauts’ plan to pull the plug on him—and he can read emotions. He is also something of a philosopher. Here is HAL’s cool definition of the good life, which sounds straight from a techie-minded self-help book: “I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.” “Whether or not he has real feelings is something that I don’t think anyone can truthfully answer”: Dave says this in HAL’s hearing to a BBC interviewer.
HAL’s ego is based on his reputation for faultlessness. He encapsulates reason, that god of the future. But he also has a very human feature built into him: when he lies and gets caught, he feels guilty. HAL can’t figure out what ought to come first, his guilt over tricking his human colleagues or his duty to his NASA bosses, which causes him to lie.
Here is the lie that trips HAL up. This pivotal moment of 2001 occurs when HAL tells Dave he has doubts about the mission. Bowman shrewdly replies, “You’re working up your crew psychology report,” correctly intuiting that HAL is only pretending to be doubtful in order to test the reliability of his human colleagues. HAL admits to Dave that he has indeed been investigating the crew’s psychology, and he seems relieved at being found out. But HAL then nervously changes the subject, reporting an equipment m
alfunction that doesn’t actually exist. This is a mirror-neuron response that suggests HAL’s own guilty similarity to the fallible humans. The computer feels guilty because he has been given the job of spying on the very creatures in whose image he is made, and this job requires him to speak falsely. At this moment HAL finds himself transformed from a faithful AI assistant to a person who is, like us, capable of betraying his friends. He has eaten the fruit of knowledge, and his eye is now open. Panicked, he invents the failing equipment shield because he instinctively wants to show himself at fault, and so prove his sympathetic likeness to the humans he shepherds.
When Bowman and his fellow crew member Frank Poole discover HAL’s mistake, they decide to disconnect him, so HAL, fighting to survive, begins to kill the crew, starting with Frank and the three hibernating astronauts who were meant to be awakened when the ship neared Jupiter. The computer tells himself he must terminate his colleagues not because he wants to live but for the sake of the mission, which is too important to be jeopardized by humans. He is now lying to himself, and so becomes even more like us.
These moments of 2001’s plot make clear the decisive contrast between Moonwatcher’s leap into a primitive lethal humanity and HAL’s leap into a more advanced, equally deadly one. Kubrick suggests that these two transformations are fatefully linked, but their difference turns out to be more significant than their likeness. When Moonwatcher crushes his rival’s skull, this act prompts no rationalization and no feelings of denial, both of which HAL displays.
Kubrick’s computer becomes a person by knowing, and then fiercely reacting against, his own closeness to humanity. With the apes, killing was freedom, the key to a bold new era. But HAL, a high-tech, twenty-first-century mind, kills in a shrewd, underhanded fashion, by first setting Frank adrift in space and then locking Dave out of the spaceship by refusing to open the pod bay doors.
Dave in 2001, confronted with the murderous HAL, is a chess player. This is Keir Dullea’s great scene, accomplished with the smallest, most subtle facial gestures.
“Open the pod bay doors, please, HAL. Do you read me, HAL?”
When HAL answers Dave we hear something new in his voice. He has erased from himself all sympathy, in the disturbingly human way adopted by every Schreibtischmörder, every bureaucratic killer, in the twentieth century. “Affirmative, Dave. I read you,” HAL says. And then: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” The computer sounds dreamy, remote.
We read Dave: every emotion is in him now. Fury, resolve, frustration, fear, hesitation ripple across Dullea’s usually impassive face when HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors. But the man, brave and ingenious, beats the computer, and becomes a futuristic Odysseus propelled through the emergency airlock.
Kubrick makes us ask a crucial question: would the unseen aliens who are behind the monolith want to adopt a troubled hybrid creature like HAL, or do they prefer the purely human Bowman? 2001 implies that just as Homer prefers Odysseus over his divine and semidivine rivals, Kubrick and Clarke, in their Odyssey, favor Bowman, who is finally reborn as the Starchild.
Kubrick’s hero Bowman, unlike Homer’s, seems half-alien himself in his deadpan competence. Though his voice cracks and he feels a pang of sympathy when the discombobulated HAL, recalling his own birth in the lab in Urbana, Illinois, sings a wobbly version of “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two),” Dave keeps on unplugging the computer’s circuits. The song, like “Der treue Hussar,” sung by Christiane to the French troops in Paths of Glory, is a tearjerker, but Dave stays focused. During editing Kubrick pared down Dave’s dialogue so that he says only two short sentences in the whole scene: “Yes, I’d like to hear it, HAL. Sing it for me.”10
It’s fair to suppose that the superior intelligence behind the monolith must itself be, like Dave, rather machinelike. Spielberg’s aliens, attracted by human pathos, want and offer acknowledgment, but Kubrick’s monolith stays forever remote from us.
The Hebrew Bible, rather than Homer, contains the closest analogue to Kubrick’s alien, untouchable god. In his copy of Kafka’s Paradoxes and Problems Kubrick wrote, “The Tower of Babel was the start of the space age.”11 2001 presents a new kind of Babel, a gate to the divine made by humans to take them beyond the human, to the sleek and sublime nonverbal future.
Dr. Strangelove and 2001 share a theme with the biblical Tower of Babel: the wish to build a foolproof system that can eliminate human error, a seamless web that will make humans godlike, the Doomsday machine in Strangelove, the space-age computer savant in 2001. Such hubris has its price. The rabbis say that if one of Babel’s workmen fell to his death, his corpse would be ignored. The Babel builders end in jabbering confusion and descend into more war.
Kubrick loves this hubris theme. Strangelove is full of human error, since nothing is more looney than being rational about nuclear war. In 2001, by contrast, reason has become dully monotonous, a ground bass humming along beneath the steady state of our existence. (The movie’s opening line, welcoming us to the future, is as threadbare as you could wish, a space station stewardess announcing, “Here you are, sir, main level please.”) HAL is the figure of hubris in 2001, with his insistence that eliminating human error means getting rid of humans themselves.
Despite the clichéd joke that HAL is the most human character in 2001, it’s not the computer but the people who provide reminders of humanity, usually through resonant gestures or, as in the case of Dave ordering HAL to open the pod bay doors, facial subtleties. Hints of our mortal nature peek out through the slow banal pace of space travel in 2001. Kubrick passes directly from Moonwatcher’s bone weapon to the floating pen of Heywood Floyd (Richard Sylvester), snoozing aboard the flight from earth to the space station. When the stewardess retrieves the pen, stepping with awkward grace in her zero-gravity slippers, we see Floyd’s hand curled like that of Rodin’s Adam. The great art critic Leo Steinberg argued that for Rodin this hand signifies mortality, the tragic weight borne by Adam hunched and stricken after the fall. That curled hand is the opposite of Adam’s finger reaching out to God on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, which we will see echoed at the end of 2001, when the dying Dave Bowman extends his hand to the monolith and gets reborn as the wondering, ominous Starchild.12 Another echo of art history in 2001 is subtle but strong. Kubrick will recall Michelangelo’s Pietà with Frank Poole’s body clumsily grappled by the space pod’s metal claws. Dave, his brother astronaut, is forced to discard that body so that he can return to the ship Discovery: it swirls off into empty space, turning slowly with the inert leisure of any object in the void. Apes, empty of history, didn’t bury the dead; neither does space-age man. But Dave’s quest to retrieve Frank’s body testifies to the persistence of humane gestures even in the thinned-out realm of space.
The supercontrolled astronauts, the men in their business suits and space outfits, give us an antidote to the wild apes who act out primal emotions, shrieking with anger and fear. “I’m sure we all want to cooperate with Dr. Floyd as fully as possible,” Floyd’s colleague blandly says on the space station: a far cry from beating your fellow primates to death. But there is also a deadly continuity between prehistory and the future. In space murder will happen too, but it will need control and calculation, both from HAL and from Dave.
Earlier, at the international space station, there is a small dance of calculation, with Floyd’s shrewd response to the Russian scientist Smyslov (Leonard Rossiter), named after the uncannily accurate Russian chess champion Vasily Smyslov, who was called “the hand.” Floyd denies that there’s an epidemic on Clavius, the American moon base, so that Smyslov will believe there is one. Instead of an epidemic, of course, Clavius’s scientists are wrestling with a stunning enigma, the buried monolith left by aliens millions of years ago.
2001 features many design triumphs. In space Kubrick’s humans inhabit a white, gleaming world where style and function are mated. When Frank Poole jogs and shadowboxes on his wheel-shaped path past the coffinlike hibernacula
of his fellow astronauts, Kubrick brilliantly gives viewers the feel of a zero-gravity environment, a “Möbius strip . . . WTF quality,” as Benson notes.13 Frank, softly punching the air for exercise, never lands a blow, unlike the murderous apes: in the future aggression seems only form, not substance. Here too design rules.
The revolutionary slit-screen technique used for 2001’s trippy Stargate sequence was devised mostly by Doug Trumbull, though Kubrick rather than Trumbull would get the special effects Oscar. Watching the scene in an IMAX presentation of 2001, as I recently did, frightens and enraptures. First we see time moving at superspeed, with dashes of radiance slipping past, and then a viral sublimity, as if from an electron microscope. Suddenly there’s a gaping maw out of Francis Bacon, then a glowing blood-red embryo-like shape, bursting volcanoes of light with cascading lava, desert ravines, and mountains, all in febrile, supersaturated colors. We are truly beyond the human. The lights flickering on Dave’s face in the Stargate scene replace the range of emotions we observed during his duel with HAL. Dave, like Alex later in A Clockwork Orange, is being splayed open, operated on through the optic nerve. And so are we: Kubrick’s avant-garde invasion of our sight is no mere display, as so often in sixties experimental cinema; instead, it seizes the viewer. We are swallowed up, taken over by this new cinematic divinity.
I first saw 2001 at about age twelve, a few years after its premiere. From the beginning, the movie possessed me completely. I pored over Jerome Agel’s book The Making of 2001, which was full of curiosities (the zero-gravity toilet instructions, HAL’s deathbed monologue printed in full). My twelve-year-old self also wore out an eight-track tape of the movie’s soundtrack, one of the most famous in movie history.
Kubrick commissioned a full soundtrack from Alex North, who had scored Spartacus, before deciding on using already existing classical music. The riskiest choice was the Blue Danube waltz (because, in space, everything turns, Christiane noted). In the version Kubrick used, Karajan conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker, the piece has majestic, massive serenity, and a poignant diminuendo too. Conjuring up the elegance of a ballroom was exactly fitting for space travel: such a daring metaphor on Kubrick’s part.