Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the most influential films ever made. Measured by the wealth of mythic, historic, and cultural references, Kubrick’s landmark film of 1968 can be compared to Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece painting of 1937, Guernica.
The film begins in the prehistoric period here on earth. It begins with a piece of classical music, Sunrise, the first section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, composed by German musician Richard Strauss, based on Nietzsche’s philosophic novel — named after Persian prophet Zarathustra. In Nietzsche’s novel Zarathustra goes through many transformations and finally embraces eternity. It just so happens that Strauss composed Zarathustra in 1896, a few months after the invention of cinema by the Lumière brothers in France. 1896 was also the year when German flight pioneer Otto Lilienthal had his fateful crash. A few years later the first airplane made its successful flight.
In the first chapter of 2001, The Dawn of Man, groups of apes fight over a water fountain. They then discover an enigmatic black monolith, harbinger from extra-terrestrial forms of life, which inspires the apes to learn that a bone club is both a weapon and a tool. In one scene the ape lets go of the bone club, his first tool. And the bone club is thrown upwards. There comes one of the most famous cuts in the history of cinema, and a tribute to Russian director Sergei Eisenstein’s notion of intellectual montage. The film fast forwards by millions of years. And the shot of the bone club floating above the ape’s head cuts into that of a spaceship flying to the moon. So begins the film’s second chapter, the dawn of the 21st century.
Scientist Dr Floyd is sent on a mission to investigate a similar monolith found below the surface of the moon. Both the Americans and the Soviets have active space missions on the moon. But Floyd refuses to share information about the Americans’ mission with his Soviet counterparts. Floyd and his team surround the monolith just as the horde of apes had surrounded it in pre-historic times.
There is another dimension to the film, that of ancient Greek mythology, namely the Odyssey. Here is a summary of a tale from the Odyssey, as related by British writer Robert Graves.[1] In Homer’s epic, Odysseus (aka Ulysses) and his companions came to an island. It was the land of the barbarous Cyclopes, so called because of the large, round eye that glared from the center of their forehead. The Cyclopes led solitary lives in caves. Odysseus and his companions entered one of the caves, that belonged to a Cyclops named Polyphemus. The Greeks made themselves at home in the caverns. In the evening Polyphemus appeared. He closed the entrance of the cave with a large slab of stone. Once he realized there were unwanted guests in his cave, he proceeded to devour them one by one. Finally Odysseus exacted his revenge, made Odysseus blind and fled with his surviving companions.
In the third and longest chapter of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the spaceship Discovery is sent on a mission to Jupiter. The crew of Discovery consists of astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole, and three colleagues traveling in a state of hibernation — they hibernate like some animals do in caves. The ship is mainly operated by HAL 9000, the super-intelligent computer on board. HAL 9000 is the most advanced realization of Artificial Intelligence. According to Kubrick, HAL was ‘an acronym based on the words heuristic and algorithmic, the two forms of learning which HAL mastered.’[2] HAL is a full-fledged crew member who has more power than the humans on board. HAL is omnipotent and omnipresent. Unbeknownst to the astronauts, Dave and Frank, HAL 9000 prioritizes its own survival instinct over their plans and tries to exclusively take over the spaceship.
Like the Cyclopes in the Odyssey, HAL 9000 has only one eye. Like Polyphemus, HAL closes the entrance to the spaceship. Polyphemus devoured his unwanted guests. HAL terminates the lives of hibernating crew and that of Frank, after playing a game of chess with him. Odysseus had to defeat the one-eyed Polyphemus. The astronaut Bowman has to defeat, one-eyed HAL. As Deleuze pointed out, HAL ‘goes haywire from the inside, before being lobotomized by the astronaut who enters it from the outside.’[3] Bowman shuts down HAL and continues the journey alone. In deep space Bowman witnesses yet another monolith gliding through the space. The lone astronaut is soon thrust into a star-gate and he journeys across the universe at faster than light speeds.
The black monolith is reminiscent of Russian Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich’s work of 1915, The Black Square, and French painter Henri Matisse’s work of 1914, Window at Collioure (Porte-fenêtre à Collioure). Kazimir Malevich wrote this about his painting: “My new painting does not belong to the Earth exclusively […] And in fact, in man, his consciousness, there is a striving toward space. An urge to take off from the Earth.”[4] Matisse considered black a radiant color with a luminescent quality. “Black is a force: I depend on it to simplify constructions.”[5] And the black cube (Ka’ba) located in the Sacred Mosque of Mecca in Arabia is the most sacred site in Islam, since its very beginning in 610 CE.
Built by an extraterrestrial civilization, the enigmatic monolith is a hyper-intelligent computer on a journey through the cosmos. It has been said that the first generation of computers using quantum computing will be as different from classical computing as today’s advanced high-performance computer is from an abacus. By the same token, one may argue the unspoken premise of 2001 is that the monolith represents a computer technology far more advanced than HAL.
The plot of 2001: A Space Odyssey was inspired by The Sentinel, a short story written by British writer Arthur C. Clarke. Another important inspiration was Ikarus XB-1, a Czechoslovak film directed by Jindrich Polak in 1963. Ikarus XB-1(released in the US as Voyage To The End Of The Universe) was based on The Magellanic Cloud, a novel written by Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem.
Many thematic, special effects, and set design ideas in 2001 were directly inspired by Ikarus XB-1 — that includes scenes of astronauts engaged in sporting activities, speaking with the earth by tele-conferencing, and a central computer on the spaceship. It is noteworthy that in Star Trek, the American TV series of 1966, the spaceship Enterprise also has a computer. But the computer in Star Trek does not control the spaceship. It is used as an advisor to help with Captain Kirk’s decision making; in Ikarus XB-1 and 2001, one central computer operates the entire spaceship. Indeed, 2001: A Space Odyssey is the tale of a journey, that of apes’ transformation to humans, that of humanity’s journey through the cosmos, that of bone clubs evolving into advanced instruments, eventually into spaceships with computers endowed with artificial intelligence.
[1] C.f. The Greek Myths, Robert Graves, Moyer Bell Limited, 1988.
[2] c.f. Stanley Kubrick, A Biography, Vincent LoBrutto, Faber and Faber, 1997.
[3] c.f. Cinema 2, Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze, Editions de Minuit, 1985.
[4] c.f. Kazimir Malevich, C. Douglas, New York: H.N. Abrams, 1994.
[5] c.f. Black is a Color, Henri Matisse, 1946.
