A litle background

I used to be a writer, well more like I used to want to be a writer. I was really into it. I wrote at least 6 short stories when I was in ninth grade. I would finish one and then read it over and then begin another one. I always planned to be published but I suffered from one thing, fear. I was afraid that my writing wasn't good and I really did not want to be shot down. SO I wrote for my self and friends. The last story I wrote in high school was my "novella" without a name. It was my magnum opus. Anyway let's get to the point of this post.

I was actually going through some of my old stuff I wrote in college and decided that I would randomly post it online because well it shows my thought processes and also because it is really bad. Some of it is fiction, some of it is non fiction. And some are papers I wrote for classes. So I think every Sunday I will post one of my older writings, unchanged, so that both you and I can get a laugh out of it.

Today's post is my paper on 2001 A space Odyssey for my Stanley Kubrick film class my senior year in college. I got a B in the class after my professor had to leave due to a heart attack.....

Jason S Perkins

English 578

Paper 1

Beja

Evolutionary Studies In 2001:

There exists a difference between a movie and a film. A movie’s first objective is to entertain the audience the best way it knows how. A film, however, looks entertainment in the mouth and laughs. Films are about getting a message across. That message is that of the director. It is possible for some films to be entertaining after being watched the first time. However, that is not the main objective of a film. A film can be a success even if it bores the audiences to sleep (Secrets and Lies). A movie that does this (The Real Cancun) is a flop. Another advantage a film has over a movie is that a film can be as confusing as humanly possible (Memento) yet still elicit positive reviews somewhere down the line. Movies that are confusing just agitate everyone forever. A film can even be panned by critics when it is first released and then get rave reviews when it is watched a decade or two later (Vertigo). A movie does not have the slightest chance of that happening (Battlefield Earth). There are very few films that bore the audience, confuse them, and get trashed by critics only to get a place in the top one hundred films of all time. 2001 A Space Odyssey is such a film. This movie bored me to death the first time watching it. As a matter of fact it bored everyone that I know. The movie is confusing on purpose, Arthur C. Clarke said "If you understand 2001 completely, we failed. We wanted to raise far more questions than we answered."¹. The film was panned by critics at first and even after a cut of twenty minutes was made the movie was still ripped into. However now it is one of the greatest movies of all time as voted by the American Film Institute.²

What makes 2001 such a great film? This film works on many different levels. It has many different layers. Some layers are thicker than others, but they are all there and that helps make the film just that. There is a lot of symbolism in this film and parallels that run throughout. This paper will look at one of these layers. The layer it will focus on is the deeper meaning of the film or how one person sees it.

Stanley Kubrick has said that the plot of 2001 “Deals with man’s contact with such superior extraterrestrial intelligences, though perhaps not quite deities.”³. This can easily be seen when actually sitting through the film. The plot is pretty straight forward but what underlies the plot is different all together. This movie is actually about evolution. Kagan writes that 2001 is like “a canal with locks linking two bodies of water at different heights. To get from the lower to the higher body of water a species moves into the lowest lock. The monolith closes the door and the species raises itself to the level of the second lock by pumping in water.” After this the monolith closes the lock and the process repeats until the species has reached the highest level. “Substitute consciousness or intelligence for water, “instinct “ for the lower body of water, “rationality” or “tool making” for the first lock, “super-rationality” or “transcendence” for the second lock, and “refining techniques” for pumping and you have 2001”⁴

Let us take a journey through this canal system. In the Dawn of Man segment of the film the apes learn that they do not have to eat the dry leaves alongside the other animals. Also they figure out that they do not have to be intimidated by other apes. All of this is due to the black monolith that appears one early dawn morning. The monolith awakens something inside of Moonwatcher that causes him to see that a bone can be used to smash. This leads to probably the greatest thing that the apes learn: that through the use of tools and ingenuity they can kill to preserve their own lives. They use this new skill of killing to eat meat instead of plants. However, they also learn that this skill can be used to take back the water hole that they were “fighting” the other apes for. The instinct of Moonwatcher is what causes him to use the bone to kill the other ape rather than to let it continue to harass him. It is also this instinct that drives him to continue to pummel the already dead body.

The second part of the movie deals with Dr. Heywood Floyd and his trying to figure out a way to deal with a new monolith that has been found on the moon. It is due to the earlier monolith that humans now have the capability to travel to the moon, or so the film wants you to believe. This is shown in the cut from the bone that Moonwatcher throws into the air that becomes a satellite when it is coming back down. This is meant to show that that one instance of a tool being used has brought forth a great era where tools are used in everyday outings and also for more sophisticated purposes. It is the refining of the older processes that causes the new processes to be accomplished. In this segment of the movie we see that Floyd likes to be in charge of situations with the little banter around the coffee table with Russians. Another trait that humans seem to share. When Floyd gets to the moon and sees the monolith he reaches out and touches it. Nothing happens until the sun strikes the monolith and when that happens a screeching sound is emitted.

This leads into the third part of the film, Jupiter Mission 18 months later. This sequence brings forth HAL 9000 a very intelligent super computer with no known defects. However this time, on this mission, HAL starts acting weird and gives some advice that may or may not be right. This leads to Frank and Dave having a conversation about disconnecting HAL which Hal does not care for in the least. HAL is already a super computer that is beyond what humans could think about. He has gone through this evolution process already. As HAL realizes that he is to be disconnected he takes drastic measures and kills Frank and the other crew members who were frozen. This is just Hal resorting to his basic instinct of survival. HAL then leaves Dave out in space and this causes Dave to use his ingenuity and the tools he has to get inside of the ship and “kill” HAL by pulling out his memory modules. Here Dave resorts back to primal instinct to kill in order to preserve his life. While Hal dies he devolves back into an ordinary computer. Actually he becomes more like a child. Somehow all of the water from the canal has found a way to escape and the locks have been opened for Hal and he rushes back down to the lowest level. However this also helps push Dave up another level in his own canal. HAL’s death sets off a message from Floyd and then leads into the final sequence Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite.

.This sequence is nothing more than Dave traveling into the final monolith over Jupiter. While traveling through this monolith Dave is inside a star gate that stretches into forever. When finally it does stop he finds himself in a room with an older version of himself. As he explores the room he keeps looking at and then becoming older versions of himself until he finally is too old to live and is in his death bed. On his bed we see him reach out and try to touch the monolith that has appeared at the end of his bed. He then dies and is reborn as a star child that travels to Earth to begin something anew. This is akin to the final level of the canal. At the very top one realizes that tools are of no use and basic earthly functions are worthless in the long run. Dave has transcended and is beyond the thought of all others.

However this brings forth a question about transcendence. In order for Dave to become free of this plane and fulfill his destiny he had to die and be reborn. HAL did a very similar thing when he died also. However Hal was a being that was already beyond his own species. Computers do not have consciousness yet Hal was very conscious of himself and his feelings. HAL was actually a very evolved computer. Maybe his evolutions came a bit too soon and that is why he had to die. While Dave came at just the right time and has earned the right to become a super-being. Is this possible? Maybe the monolith had this all planned from the beginning. Maybe the monolith is the ultimate form of evolution. Supreme knowledge may come at a cost and the cost could be loss of vital functions. Is it a coincidence that HAL’s memory modules were shaped like little monoliths? As said earlier Hal could have already been a very highly evolved entity that was not ready for his evolution.

All in all 2001: A Space Odyssey is not the type of movie that you go out with your friends and see on a Saturday night. However it is the type of film you see when you want to think about something. Who knows what the real meaning of this film is? Is it transcendence? Is it that we are not alone? Maybe this is a film about mankind in general and how if we try and move too quickly into the future it will catch up to us and kill us all. Or maybe it is just a study on how we as a species can overcome all obstacles set before us and reach a perfect state in the evolutionary plane. Maybe there are many meanings to the film. Maybe there is only one. I think that Kubrick wanted us to just get into the canal and start pumping water until we are high enough to sail through the lock and into the next level. Then maybe we will see the true meaning. Maybe that is the true meaning of the film.

1 IMDB trivia

2 AFI top 100 movies of all time

3 Kagan p 146

4 Kagan pp 159-160

Yea so that's my first Kubrick paper and I don't understand half of the metaphors I used. Especially the whole canal thing. Well enjoy your nights and look out for monkeys and bones and computers and big headed babies in canals and stuff. Until next time

"It's better to burn out than to fade away"

Perkins out

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