Persistence and Hope in Science Fiction Films Pt.3 (2001: a Space Odyssey)

Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking masterpiece is a notorious chore to watch. It is beautiful and resonant, and slow and ponderous. It was a revolution in its construction and conceptualization, but an aberration in its pacing.



Yet its pace is part of its power. The almost surreal way in which humans move and communicate at a slight fraction of normal speed interrupts the audience’s accustomed experience. If it doesn’t lull you to sleep it will instead wake you up and make you look harder, the way an object just out of sight causes you to strain, as though squinting would bring it closer. Its sense of the space between objects in Space is made to seem truly enormous by the way time is forced to unfold within it. All of these devices heighten audience awareness so that the world presented seems nearly documentary in its reality even if its characters remain fairly two-dimensional.

 

The world within 2001 is what we are meant to perceive. The technologies and environments are absolutely paramount. From its opening in man’s prehistoric primate past the focus is upon human achievement. Of course the plot suggests that human achievement has been guided by boosts from alien technology along the way, but its resonant optimism about human destiny permeates every frame. For 2001 human progress is an inevitable force, like gravity, which will invariably work its self out.

It would be easy to sneer at 2001’s reading of a near future characterized by the triumph of great achievement over great turmoil, since it has now been so long since the year of its title and yet we are still mired in turmoil. But its chosen date is less important than its central position on human nature.

For 2001 our deepest nature is that of brutes. Our leap from nearly extinct simian to dominant tool-making world-beaters was a leap of barbarity. What 2001 suggests is that our brutish nature drives us into further invention but the call outward holds our salvation. And even barring any alien monoliths to speed us forward it remains entirely credible that exploration and cooperation hold the keys against barbarism and fear.