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More Ruminations on Kubrick's 2001 - Part 1

Page history last edited by John F. Felix 9 years, 2 months ago

 

I.                               Introduction

A.               In space, no one can hear your broadcast to Jupiter

When I was young, growing up during the late Gemini and early Apollo missions, I knew that there was no air in space, and almost none on the moon, so there was no medium to transmit sound waves, and therefore no sound. My parents didn’t take me to see 2001 until probably I was 10 years old, in the early 1970s. I thought it was a major error when the group at TMA-1 suddenly reacted to the activation of the lunar monolith as though they could hear it through their helmets. Shows you how smart kids are, and how oblivious to the obvious they can be. Clearly, the transmission is being picked up by their helmet radios, and would sound very loud to them, and to the audience, but alas we were in a drive-in movie and the monolith was only coming over the ancient window speakers.

B.                Match cut: forty years in the future

Almost forty years later, I still notice that I don’t notice many things. One of the things many others pick up, continuity errors in a movie or TV show, for example, usually escape my notice. I hope that I can discern a major error now, better than I could back then. You can judge how successful I’ve been in trying to say something intelligent about Kubrick’s masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

II.                            The Dawn of Man

A.               I won’t answer the most interesting question (yet)

The monolith was in the presence of Moon-Watcher when he was playing with the animal bones. The sequence is that the monolith somehow influences the near-man ape to make the connection between holding the club, smashing with it, and killing animals for food. You have to assume that his tribe was specifically chosen. This is reinforced by the alignment that seems to activate the monolth, something that is rare and fortuitous, and seems to have been pre-programmed to occur exactly when it did. The interesting question for speculation arises as to why Moon-Watcher’s group, then, was specially chosen.

B.                The hominids received tools?

1.                  In my view, the tool is not what the monolith gifts our ancestors with

The near-man apes had some basic, rudimentary skills and abilities, which is why the band was chosen, according to the novel. They had a basic, though undeveloped, dexterity to make/use of tools, which was what the monolith was testing for, and they had curiosity that overcame fear. All that the monolith really needed to do was to install rationality, in the most basic sense, of putting two and two together so to speak. Once the monolith succeeded, it’s next mission was to be buried, or bury itself, on the moon to await the desired outcome.

2.                  Does the superintelligence know about the moral dilemma of tool use?

The hominids now ancestral to modern humans possessed, in addition to the ability to use tools, the distinct possibility of survival. It is at that point that the monolith abruptly is seen no more. After it leaves, the hominids face their first moral dilemma, but this, probably inevitable, fact is either unplanned by the superintelligentsia that place the device there, they are deliberately experimenting with the moral choice of whether or not the hominids use their tools against each other, in other words, to make war, or they are morally indifferent to the events that lead on from their gift.

a)                The human choice to murder

The choice the man-apes now face is whether it is okay to kill the “Others” who drove them from the waterhole, since killing seems a very good thing when it provides food, so why not to procure water? It is implied, to my thinking, that tool use would not have occurred had not the monolith been present, so perhaps the chosen species that led to us was not ready for the “forbidden knowledge.” Ready or not the superintelligensia pushed the apes over the edge onto the road to humanity, so there are two levels of moral choice here: both the alien’s choice to influence the natural course of evolution on earth, regardless of the consequences, and the ape-man’s choice to use his new-found knowledge for good or evil.

b)                Beyond good and evil

The indifference of the aliens to the consequences is reinforced by the sudden leap of four million years to the events leading up to the next encounter with the monolith. We are then left with a clear picture that the whole of human history was unimportant to these aliens, as if cold and calculating scientists were at work and were only interesting in the results of Phase 1, whether or not a race would develop space travel after receiving the ability to reason. One website maintained that the aliens, because they ignored the moral consequences of their actions, were actually bad people for doing so. I think we are “beyond good and evil” here.

c)                 Still yet another interpretation

You could reasonably argue that there is no moral dilemma at all, at least for the newly ‘evolved” hominids, because once they were pushed over the line onto the road to humanity, they were no longer the same race as the “Others.” Moon-Watcher and his band of tool users were now “human,” while the “Others” were mere animals, no different from the animals they learned to kill for food, and now posed a threat to their survival, like the leopards, over water rights. Much later, when the weapons were eventually turned upon themselves, did they then pass into the sphere of actual morality. How long did that take to manifest itself? Perhaps not until our own race of modern humans, since the hominid fossil record is notably conflict-free. You might also be able to let the aliens off the hook, since warfare may actually be a rare trait among the races they have nudged toward technology in their day. But really I don’t think it was coincidence that Moon-Watcher’s band was chosen, because they were near extinction, and the aliens were no doubt observing. Having been bested by another band, the experience was fresh in their minds, so the moment to strike a blow for technological progress may have been perfectly planned to bring about the next logical association, once the practicality of killing animals was established, of killing the “Others.”

d)                An error in logic?

I believe we should always question our bad assumptions, and once in a while, our very good ones. One assumption is that the “Others” would never use tools on their own, after having observed Moon-Watcher’s band kill their leader with one. To assume that, I believe, is to commit an error in logic, in fact. It is then logical to conclude that killing the “Others” would be, in fact, the first actual murder, and not the simply disposing of a competing animal. But then the question arises, what exactly did the monolith really bequeath humanity? If the “Others” could master tool use by imitation like, I’m assuming, the others in Moon-Watcher’s band, then it seems that tool use would have been discovered at some point by some band of African near-man ape at any time. To force nature’s hand in such a way paints the aliens in a very bad light indeed, or am I making another unwarranted assumption, that the members of Moon-Watcher’s band were not directly affected by exposure to the monolith as well?

C.               DOM as a type of “Garden of Eden” inversion

1.                  The straight serpent

The garden is inverted into a desert. A first couple, and an abundance of easily obtainable food, is inverted to a starving band of not-quite-human apes, preyed upon by predators and robbed of their water rights by another band of nearly human fellow creatures, and in danger of dying out completely. The monolith suddenly appears, a serpent inverted in form, but not in function, for the offer is the same: knowledge.

2.                  Moral inversion

The knowledge is accepted, and the story again is inverted. Instead of being cursed with a life of hardship, the apes are now tool users who possess an abundance of food and presumably, the good life ensues, with no end in sight until the space age. Of course, the Eden story does not end with humanity’s “sin,” but continues through the Cain and Abel story. Here man is depicted in his continued moral decline through murder, etc., but morality itself is inverted in 2001.

3.                  Blame aliens

In Eden, after the “fall,” humanity begins the blame game: Man blames Woman blames Serpent. God is not to blame, even though it is clear the whole thing was a test. Can the apes be blamed when their particular serpent gives them the means to avert starvation and extinction? Can humanity then be blamed for making war with the very tools which they would not have had otherwise without outside intervention? The monolith is itself a tool and merely fulfilled its function. It cannot be blamed. The aliens, however, can be blamed for the next four million years of bloodshed.

III.                          The superintelligensia

A.               Semiotics and Steganography

What of this outside force that is represented by the monolith? I highly recommend the following site: collativelearning.com, by someone who has some really intelligent things to say about the monolith and what it does represent, through semiotic and steganographic analyses. Read the essays on the site, then watch the youTube videos (also available through the website), which are more like encapsulated summaries of the text. I cannot take credit for any new insights here, really only the attempt to further explore the implications of some of his perceptive observations, without making much further reference to the insights of the website’s author Rob Ager.

B.                The monolith as cinema screen reworked

1.                  The monolith as cinema screen is Mr. Ager’s central and unique insight.

If you want to know who the aliens are, it is Kubrick and his audience looking through the lens of the director’s vision. The answer to why the aliens seem so unconcerned about the consequences of gifting the apes with tools is that we are dealing with meta-fiction, in that the story-teller can do anything in the story, i.e., he can create plot twists, kill off characters, jump millions of years forward or backward in the story, because it is, afterall, just a fictional story.

2.                  The observer

a)                The uncertainty principle

The observer cannot help influencing the outcome of the experiment. The apes see the audience as the impenetrable surface of a cinema screen shifted 90 degrees, and just as the movie itself are images implanted in our heads by Kubrick meant to change and validate our perceptions, the apes are changed into human ancestors by the images projected by the monolith directly into their brains. By the end of the film, we have deepened our insight and hopefully evolved by participating with Kubrick in the unfolding of the story.

b)                The journey

The evolution takes place when the monolith/screen is no longer opaque. We journey through it to the other side along with Bowman, to the fictional universe, and back again, and partake of the same evolutionary process that the fictional characters undergo. Not only is the monolith a metaphor for the cinema screen, it is a metaphor of the cinema experience for the audience itself. We’re meant to grasp subconsciously that we are both outside and “inside” Kubrick’s story, being changed by the images in the same way the monolith operates.

c)       Alignment

Watch the Monolith change into the cinema screen before your eyes!

3.                  The observed

a)                The meaning of the monolith is the same for Dave as for the movie audience

Kubrick brings us first to the Renaissance room, which the book explains as something downloaded from Dave Bowman’s mind, but which I’ve always thought was part of the signal broadcasted by TMA-1. It has the appearance of a television or movie set, and I believe this is meant to reinforce the meta-fictional level of interpretation. Now that Dave has made the realization, along with the audience, that the monolith is a cinema screen, Dave is now on the outside of the movie about his universe. He experiences the time shifts like the audience would, as a series of cuts to himself growing older each time. In the bed scene filled with symbolism on multiple levels, he reaches out to the monolith and makes the final evolution into the Star Child, and passes through it to his fictional world transformed into a being that can now control the story.

b)                The potential to master our own individual worlds

Some other reviews of 2001 on the web have made this observation: the movement of the camera forward from the Star Child’s perspective also widens the monolith and literally transforms it from a vertical to a totally black horizontal projection before the very eyes of the movie audience, who momentarily see without consciously realizing it, an horizontal monolith. The Star Child eventually looks back at us in the “real world” through the two-way screen/monolith and sees us, and we see him floating in space above his own earth that now completely belongs to him. He has obtained the power of Kubrick to make his destiny whatever he wishes, because his journey outside has given him new abilities, as Neo receives in The Matrix. That is the ultimate human evolutionary potential, to be masters of our own destinies, and makers of our own worlds.

 

 

Copyright © 2009 by John F. Felix. All rights reserved.

 

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