Stanley Kubrick | 2001: A Space Odyssey / 1968

the lone star

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke (screenplay), Stanley Kubrick (director) 2001: A Space Odyssey / 1968

 

As I have made it clear in several of my writings, I am not particularly a fan of Stanley Kubrick, who, since he has a near-cult following and is beloved by many directors for better than he is, such as Martin Scorsese, probably doesn’t matter. Large crowds came out to see an exhibition a few years by at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, including my affable nephew-in-law, visiting from Iowa, who adores Kubrick, so he reported.

     I did not particularly enjoy 2001: A Space Odyssey (nor I might add other Kubrick favorites) when it was first released, and when I watched it again yesterday I found it, as historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. described it to be “morally pretentious, intellectually obscure and inordinately long.” And for once I fully agree with Pauline Kael, who characterized it as “a monumentally unimaginative move.” I might add that it is filled with absolute “kitsch.” Put me in a room with Kubrick classics along with films by Terence Malick and I would surely grow quickly mad.

    I am particularly offended by his use of Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra, parts of which Kubrick uses in several early scenes; moreover, I detest Johan Strauss II’s The Blue Danube, which this film repeats for what seems like an eternity during the spaceship docking. Nor am I drawn to bedrooms in the style of Louis Quatorze. Men jumping around in ape suits don’t much excite me, although I will say I found them rather convincing. Monoliths, have something vaguely to do with human evolution, do not register any awe to my way of thinking. And for in-camera manipulations and light and color, I’ll take Stan Brakhage any day over Kubrick and his crews. The few banalities uttered by most of the cast offer little entertainment value or evidence of acting.

    The models are fairly interesting, particularly the rotating space hotel with its modernist red Olivier Mourgue Djinn chairs. But these do not a good move make.

    The only reason that I bore watching the film again was the wonderfully intelligent Hal 9000, an early version of AI intelligence, who has a kind of nervous breakdown (or perhaps one should say a “circuitry breakdown”) right in front of us because of what he begins to see as his own fallibility and possible “destruction.” As Allan Turing—the only real reason why I reviewed this film—predicted: “by 2001, we will have full intelligent machines,” even if human error may have given them some flaws. He was off only a few years.

       Unlike the bland humans played by William Sylvester, and, later, by Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, Hal speaks loudly and reasonably—at least at first. And only he knows that their secret mission to Jupiter (it was originally to have been a voyage to Saturn, but the designers could not get the planet’s rings right) is all about. Neither the only survivor, the Dullea character, nor the surviving audience members ever quite find out what the mission was to have been: maybe just to check out he even larger monolith that exists on Jupiter.

    Hal, much like the replicants of Blade Runner (1982) goes awry because he cannot deal with his own mortality, making him even more human than the homo sapiens in this work—who after all, Kubrick suggests, in their collection of spacecraft and nuclear weapons, are not much different from the apes who learned to wield clubs. Hal is wily, lying about a malfunctioning part, refusing certain commands, while willfully performing others. He can even read lips!

     But Hal also has a crush, so to speak, on Dullea, finally allowing him reentry to the space capsule, while recognizing that he has done wrong, apologizing and promising to be good, then pleading for the astronaut not to kill him. It is indeed touching, and more than a little gay, when having lost nearly all of his marvelous memory, Hal sings the first song taught to him, “Daisy Bell,” for Dave Bowman, the Kier Dullea character, almost sung as a love song.*

      I remind my readers of the lyrics:

 

There is a flower within my heart

Daisy, Daisy

Planted one day by a glancing dart

Planted by Daisy Bell

[Chorus]

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do

I'm half crazy all for the love of you

It won't be a stylish marriage

I can't afford a carriage

But you'll look sweet upon the seat

Of a bicycle built for two

 

      After his death, who needs all of that technical artistry and mysterious goings on in a neoclassical bedroom? Or even a gigantic embryo floating back to earth? Hal, Turing’s invention, was the star of the show.

 

*MGM executives were evidently worried that HAL 9000s voice originally sounded far too gay. Even they recognized the potential that eventually became obvious.

 

Los Angeles, December 2, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2016).