Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Older post - reposted to contrast Spielberg's Space Odyssey

I had seen Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey a few times over the course of my life, but never felt I really understood what Kubrick was up to until I read Miller and Hanson’s takes on the film. My most recent viewing did seem to support Hanson’s argument that Kubrick was showing through the similarities (i.e. the repetition of behaviors, though granted transformed over time) between the apes and space age man, that “the human race has gone nowhere fast”. The future is shown as a technological marvel, but with the price of isolating man from his fellow creatures (they communicate without touching, families separated by vast space, whose only tool is a telephone to make some connections (the apes at least had each other to huddle against in the cold world that surrounded them. Also the repression of sex (w/ sex only alluded to via the Lolita reference to an abandoned cashmere sweater) also permeates the film, so much so that Hanson’s article regarding the repressed homosexual tendencies of not only the astronauts, but HAL, made the film take on a deeper meaning. Not only do the scenes showing the narcissistic crewmen (who watch themselves on monitors), the penetration back into the ship that mirrors an ejaculation, and the (un)screwing of HAL become obvious with this reading, but the malfunctioning “unit” that Hal thinks is about to fail and which turns out to be nothing wrong with (HAL's problems are only in his head), make HAL’s deadly actions make sense. If we grant that HAL has evolved into a being, with all the psychological baggage consciousness brings with it, then his castration by the astronauts he cares for no longer seeing him as perfect and his concern for the “malfunctioning unit” (I love how Kubrick has Poole cross his arms like an injured lover as he first discovers that HAL my be malfunctioning) make the following actions become clearer. As HAL discovers Dave and Poole are going to castrate him by terminating his memory, he, as can be expected of a conscious being, attempts to kill them first.

When Dave enters HAL and begins (un)screwing him, HAL sings him a love song as he says he is losing his mind. The video (HAL’s unconscious) that results in the termination of his memory shows that deep within HAL was the knowledge that not only was he not considered perfect by the astronauts any longer (due to his worrying over his malfunctioning unit) but they were on a mission to seek out an intelligence even greater than HAL’s. HAL knew consciously as well as unconsciously that his potency was waning. HAL could be seen as a lover that was being castrated and abandoned and given his was a relatively new conscious, his actions can be better understood. He was a consciousness that had yet to understand what consciousness and desire were (though I am not sure any of us really do). As for the final ending with the “starchild” hovering over earth - as the whole movie dealt with the separation of humanity by their technology, I don’t think the lone, isolated floating fetus was suppose to be a happy ending as some would claim it is. Given Kubrick’s genius and all that led up to that moment, I think the final scene is more a tongue-in-cheek finale that actually criticizes our belief that technology will somehow assist us in reaching a higher level of consciousness.