Quite Annoying (Yet Valid?) Review of 2001: A Space Odyssey

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I came across this really interesting review of 2001: A Space Odyssey on YouTube:

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While I enjoyed the review and I think I agree with the YouTuber's analysis, I am annoyed with him reserving the right to delete any comments that he feels attempt to summarise his thesis in words. For that reason, I downvoted him and did not leave a comment. However, he has no such power of censorship here so I think we are free to express what we wish about his interpretation of Kubrick's work of cinema. If I were going to boil it down, I would say that his interpretation is that the film is a meta work of revelatory art intended to break the fourth wall. It's not primarily a film about man discovering he is not alone in the cosmos. We watch the screen and in the end it is we who are the characters in a movie being observed by the transcended form of Dave Bowman. It's as if Truman in The Truman Show completely turned the tables on his audience.

Do you agree with the analysis presented in the video, do you think my summary is an incorrect interpretation, and do you think the originator of the video has a nerve or an inalienable (sic) right to block commenters? Do you think meta analysis is a waste of time if you have to work hard to derive meaning from a movie? Does it matter if the subtle meaning completely escapes one (in my case apparently for decades but I always suspected the black rectangular motif meant something deeper)? But then I'm not a deeply thinking cinematographer with an encyclopaedic knowledge of many genres of art.

 

[Steve Roby]

I don't watch YouTube reviewers. Life's too short. But if you want to comment on a video that has comments turned off, you can always create your own video.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I think his review is well worth watching as it revealed something to me that was always there in plain sight but apparently missed by most people, myself included. It would be kind of pointless for me to make a video commenting on his when I actually agree with him. I just find his attitude smug, condescending, and annoying. The comments aren't turned off - they are apparently moderated according to his whim. Even if you agree with him, he will remove comments that he thinks disclose too much about his thesis - although I see a few that went under his radar. It's rather bizarre. He wants people to work it out for themselves and not be told what to think. However, not everyone has the time to behave like a pretentious wannabe academic wanker. I don't have the inclination to make a video just to comment on what a smartarse tool he's being.

 

[theenglish]

I watched about half of that, skipping forward and backward, to get what he is saying---not going to waste anymore time.

No, I don't subscribe to the breaking of the fourth wall idea in the sense that this guy is talking about.

 

[publiusr]

This whole “influencer” thing is a turn off.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Stanley Kubrick has been dead for two decades, A C Clarke nearly that, and unless Kubrick's family have been sitting on some secret account of his intentions for all that time, it's likely that we'll never know for sure. Perhaps the monolith was meant to be a black mirror into which humans (or protohumans) stare futilely - like a cinema screen after the film has ended - seeking a divine being that used to enlighten us but who is now dead. Gaze too long into the abyss and the abyss may gaze into you. Also sprach Zarathustra was the appropriate choice of theme. Perhaps that's Charlie Brooker's motivation for breaking the mirror, which is now usually a 16:9 aspect ratio TV screen rather than a 2.35:1 anamorphic cinematic projection.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

- Friedrich Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil
Nietzsche and the abyss – The unity of nothingness. – The Stand Up Philosophers

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I think it deliberately has more than one level of meaning. Stanley Kubrick liked to play that sort of trick. I'm not sure even A C Clarke was really aware of the hidden metalevel theme of 2001. The movie has the Odyssey in its title but the parallels with Homer's Odyssey are quite tenuous. I used to believe Bowman didn't actually travel anywhere beyond Jupiter but instead he was disassembled by the monolith, which is some form of Von Neumann universal constructor or Bracewell probe, and his consciousness uploaded into an internal VR simulation space. The Beyond the Infinite sequence would then be a representation of his sensory experience.

I think you can project what you like onto it and there is no correct interpretation. ACC's novel is more constraining than a visual medium, of course, but it is an accompanying work not the source work (that was ACC's 1951 short story The Sentinel). SK's choice of music is significant in several respects - especially, Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra with its connection to Nietzschean philosophy and transcendence through personal existential revelation through the death of God, eternal recurrence, the will to power, and the superman. I think the whole movie is intended more as a tetraptych work of cinematic art - both visual and auditory - than as a traditional narrative. The four panels of the tetraptych are the four acts of the movie.

We are mere ape men in the face of the effectively infinite vastness of the cosmos and the only way to cope with its challenges is to grow in maturity as a species. The weapons platforms shown near the beginning of the second act are toys that we must grow beyond or they will destroy us. However, anyone can interpret the movie however they like, including having the star child in the end observe us as we become part of the rectangular art work from its viewpoint. Like any art form, it is open to subjective interpretation. The monolith is a black mirror.

 

[Orac]

I might watch the video later but I'll quickly offer my simple minded interpretation of the films themes, (Iike all good movies there'll be more layers I haven't uncovered) .

My thoughts: I believe the monolith represents technology and the way it has accelerated our evolution. The monolith looks like what computers have evolved into; many people are carrying something very similar in their pockets today. Technology made us gods on this world and will make us gods amongst the stars despite the fact that most humans know very little about science and technology.

Anyways, that's my current thoughts on the film, I'll probbly think something else next time I watch it. I hope the video gives me some new insight into the film as the title seems to imply it will, I'm now looking forward to watching it later and may post more thoughts afterwards.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I might watch the video later but I'll quickly offer my simple minded interpretation of the films themes, (Iike all good movies there'll be more layers I haven't uncovered) .

My thoughts: I believe the monolith represents technology and the way it has accelerated our evolution. The monolith looks like what computers have evolved into; many people are carrying something very similar in their pockets today. Technology made us gods on this world and will make us gods amongst the stars despite the fact that most humans know very little about science and technology.

Anyways, that's my current thoughts on the film, I'll probbly think something else next time I watch it. I hope the video gives me some new insight into the film as the title seems to imply it will, I'm now looking forward to watching it later and may post more thoughts afterwards.

You might well be disappointed. The reviewer basically trashes any notion that Kubrick intended 2001 as primarily an SF movie about alien contact, technological development, or human evolution. It's more Kubrick's attempt to elevate cinematography into an artform on the level of painting that art historians can discuss and interpret endlessly.

 

[Orac]

The video is terrible, but the reviewer makes some good observations of the movie.
He's peeled back a few more layers for me.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

The video is terrible, but the reviewer makes some good observations of the movie.
He's peeled back a few more layers for me.

Yeah, he deliberately seeks to annoy with his use of the feedback sound effect from the movie to obscure the word screen. It's like nails on a chalk board - which is appropriate. Did you notice the changes to the background objects in his studio?

More on Kubrick's use of music during the movie:

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To quote Kurick: "I wanted the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer on a level of internal consciousness like music does; to explain a Beethoven symphony would be to castrate it by raising an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation."
Also: "I don’t want to chart a verbal path for 2001, so that every viewer feels obligated to follow or even improvise the theme of losing thread."

There is also the following study:
Music, Structure and Metaphor in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" on JSTOR

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

No wonder I had a visceral negative nine-year-old reaction to the 2001 LP music......specifically, the halfway mark when Bowman hears an extended screech, followed by what sounds like a huge boat flying overhead. Is that the effect the video uses?

The screech is at 3:22:

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No flying boat. The Discovery section immediately following is introduced by the adagio from the Gayane Ballet Suite by Aram Khachaturian:

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In the novel of 2001, the aspect ratio of the largest face of the monolith is 2.25:1. The movie monolith's ratio is nearer 2.2:1. In movie theatres, the 70mm version of the movie was shown in 2.21:1 ratio and the anamorphic 35mm version in 2.35:1 ratio. In the novel, A C Clarke states the monolith's three spatial dimensions are in the ratio 1:4:9 but the movie version they are more like 1:4:11 taken from film measurements (I could find no record of the exact dimensions). The coincidence of the 2.2:1 ratio together with the rotation cues given throughout the movie make me believe the thesis that the movie monolith is meant to represent a screen. In the novel, it actually does function as a teaching screen for the apemen. Thus the movie is to us, the audience, as the monolith is to the apemen - a device for expanding our consciousness.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

In the novel, it actually does function as a teaching screen for the apemen.

Seems fairly clear it does the same thing in the film, right? I mean, Moonwatcher does have a flashback to the monolith right before he starts fiddling with the bone...

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Seems fairly clear it does the same thing in the film, right? I mean, Moonwatcher does have a flashback to the monolith right before he starts fiddling with the bone...

Yes, but it's much more explicit in the book. The monolith therein displays images and manipulates the apemen into performing actions, such as doing target practice with stones. The monolith in the film doesn't appear to do anything apart from freak the apemen out. We can interpret that it is manipulating their cortical pathways from the sequence you describe but it's left pretty ambiguous.

BTW the apeman in the film has no name. Moonwatcher is the name of the main apeman in the book even though I'm not sure their proto language has developed enough to assign such labels to individuals. I can't remember any details about how they communicate.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

That's the first screech in the film, but it's the second one (approximately equal length) which made me hold my ears on the LP. Bowman, not Floyd.

Right, I have no idea what you're referring to as I don't think I have the LP you seem to be referring to, which I expect Kubrick wasn't involved in producing. I don't remember hearing such a sound as you describe on the official soundtrack LP from Polydor. Perhaps your LP is one of the unofficial "Music from 2001" LPs that other companies produced. I'm discussing the movie anyway.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

The movie contains the noise as Bowman continues his LSD-style visions, which slow down slightly after the major lightshow with quick still cuts of David are shown.

I just played the last act of the 4K UHD Blu-ray now - there is no screech unless you mean György Ligeti's Atmosphères and some background ambient rumbling sounds that Kubrick probably had added. After the pod "lands" in the hotel suite/movie set, we hear another Ligeti work, Aventures, which uses fragmented voices and language as music. I believe Ligeti sued because he hadn't given permission for Aventures to be used and it had been edited and distorted. That was a little silly because the movie exposed his work to a much wider audience.

Kubrick’s Music 1: 2001: A Space Odyssey – Brendan Finan

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I guess I'm more used to that kind of music. I like it but there's no accounting for taste.

 

[publiusr]

Yes, but it's much more explicit in the book. The monolith therein displays images and manipulates the apemen into performing actions, such as doing target practice with stones.

Originally, it was clear.

I’d like to see a mini-series based on Clarke’s novelization.

I’d follow his lead for the most part. Call it The Sentinel of course.

Dream Chaser type HL-42 atop Falcon Heavy. ISS the destination…LUNOX nuclear shuttle to the Moon…simple moonbase. Synth….space music…until the lunar caves. That’s when I have the CGI really play a big role

Ligetti’s music as a shattered monolith is strewn across the miles-tall lunar cave floor….surrounded by corpses of the Shan and their God…

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

The movie and the book are really two separate beasts artistically, although connected. The book was not a novelisation. A C Clarke write it at the same time as the film in co-operation with Stanley Kubrick. I think an SF series could be based on The Sentinel and other Clarke works but I'd rather 2001: A Space Odyssey were never touched as a property. The Expanse pretty much explores the same themes, albeit in a few hundred years time. I wish I still had my copy of The Lost Worlds of 2001 by Clarke. It had additional ideas that could be mined. I lent it to someone and never got it back.

 

[Steve Roby]

I wish I still had my copy of The Lost Worlds of 2001 by Clarke. It had additional ideas that could be mined. I lent it to someone and never got it back.

I remember realizing a friend still had a book of mine after my family had moved across the country. Took a little while to notice, too, but at least it was a book that was easy to replace. It's strange that no one's reprinted Lost Worlds of 2001 in the last forty years. There are inexpensive used copies through sites like ABEbooks.com, which is something, anyway.