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Fresh Musings on Kubrick’s Monument for the Ages: 2001

Posted by halfnote (A) on May 10, 2008 at 21:52:06

It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I see this film … whether I see it from the beginning or pick it up halfway through … there is always some aspect of this peerless cinematic work that I seem to have failed to distill or meditate upon.

The UHD network has been showing 2001 for a few weeks now in glorious 1080i. I watched it once from beginning to end, and have seen segments, adventitiously, here and there, a few times since.

Tonite, one or two other things struck me.

Everyone remembers the simple eloquence of the scene in which HAL murders the three crewmen in their suspension capsules. Their faces, barely visible though the little windows of their capsules, slightly blue, with the electronic charts on the wall above them showing their vital signs … and then, the charts go flat; and alarm goes off, and a small visual display flashes “COMPUTER MALFUNCTION … COMPUTER MALFUNCTION”.

It certainly IS a “mal”, or malevolent, function, isn’t is? And it raises the whole question as to where malevolence, or an entire ethical system for that matter, comes from, doesn’t it? It is merely a matter of self-preservation? Is it purely a matter of calculated advantage? Or is it something beyond that, something even metaphysical? Here we have an inamimate calculating machine commiting murder. Is he responsible? It brings to mind Dave’s earlier chess game with HAL, doesn’t it? Soon after, they play for KEEPS. It also echos, millions of years later, the battle of the man-apes over the water hole that begins the odyssey.

Ironically, it is HAL “who” is supposed to be in command of all the ships functions. Yet, in the simple flashing indicator which reads “COMPUTER MALFUNCTION”, Kubrick slyly suggests that there is a higher authority. HAL’s actions are being “judged.”

There is another powerful element of this murder scene which is very easy to overlook. All the subjects who are murdered are asleep. – or more precisely, they are in suspended animation. They are, in a sense, already dead to the world. At first, their deaths seem to us less significant than the murder of Frank Bowman. On the other hand, in their state, they are utterly innocent. And so their murders, seen from this perspective, are all the more terrible. They become emblems of the tens of millions of nameless, unknown innocent people murdered throughout history in the name of personal ambition. They also occupy an interesting point on a scale which has life on one end, and death on the other (or consciousness and inanimacy, if you like), which Kubrick (and Clarke, to be fair) continuously probes throughout this film – most obviously in the character of the psychopathic and, at the same time, inanimate HAL 9000 computer.

And, before I put you to sleep, I’d like to close with one more observation. The film opens with beautiful and colorful stills of vast landscapes, shots that would make Ansel Adams take notice. The film closes with similar shots at the conclusion of Dave’s journey, this time chromatically shifted to the point of psychedalia, and ostensibly rooting the picture in it’s late 60’s era. Yet, the intentional contrast between these two landscapes raises important questions: Why is one strange, and the other familiar? Why is the one “far away” and the other “home”? And finally, how far has humanity REALLY travelled from the painted landscapes that open the film. And so, as the film “roots” itself in time, it transcends it.

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