![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Speaking of 2001: A Space Odyssey...
I just watched a YouTube video about how the whole collaboration with Clarke was a big con job: Kubrick wanted to make a movie about how space and technology were horrifying nightmares, but he needed a front to mollify investors and the studio, so he claimed it was going to be an optimistic epic of discovery and got Clarke on board as the acceptable face of technocracy, then slipped his message into the movie's cold vibes and scary plotline. The guy basically sees Clarke as having been exploited purely to sell the movie.
2001: A Space Odyssey: How Kubrick Fooled Us All
2001: A Space Odyssey: How Kubrick Fooled Us All
There's some truth to it. Certainly before 2001 was released, the publicity for it was all about the meticulously researched futurism of the movie's middle section, and made it sound like "How the Solar System was Won"; the psychedelic last act was completely hidden from view and I don't think there was even any mention of the Dawn of Man sequence or HAL murdering everyone. And it's clear that Kubrick's vision of space exploration is coming from a much darker and more skeptical direction than Clarke's. You can see that in the evolution of the storyline in The Lost Worlds of 2001: everything dark and meaty and confusing about it is coming from Kubrick.
But even though Stanley Kubrick is more of a poster child for auteur theory than just about any other director, I guess I don't quite subscribe to it to the extent of dismissing the entire source material for the movie as a front. I see it as more embodying a kind of dynamic tension between Clarke's nerdish techno-futurism and Kubrick's anti-establishment attitude. If he'd just filmed one of Clarke's early drafts, it would have been a lesser film, something more like 2010: The Year We Make Contact (a decent movie, but it ain't 2001). But if it had just been a Kubrickian satire, something like another Dr. Strangelove in space, I think that would have been less interesting too. Strangelove is one of my favorite films but he'd already made that.
Also, I think there's another aspect this misses: I think Kubrick was intentionally trying to make a trippy film this time around, and he knew something people often miss, which is that Arthur C. Clarke was a trippy as hell author when he felt like it. There was a melancholy and cosmic mysticism that crept into his writing and a tendency to focus on arresting, sometimes puzzling imagery. I think Kubrick wanted that in his film, without so much of Clarke's lecturing, rationalistic side. The discussion of transhumanism in the video as a kind of malevolent nerd religion strikes me very much as looking backward from a 1990s-2000s perspective, rather than what was going on in the late 1960s.
But even though Stanley Kubrick is more of a poster child for auteur theory than just about any other director, I guess I don't quite subscribe to it to the extent of dismissing the entire source material for the movie as a front. I see it as more embodying a kind of dynamic tension between Clarke's nerdish techno-futurism and Kubrick's anti-establishment attitude. If he'd just filmed one of Clarke's early drafts, it would have been a lesser film, something more like 2010: The Year We Make Contact (a decent movie, but it ain't 2001). But if it had just been a Kubrickian satire, something like another Dr. Strangelove in space, I think that would have been less interesting too. Strangelove is one of my favorite films but he'd already made that.
Also, I think there's another aspect this misses: I think Kubrick was intentionally trying to make a trippy film this time around, and he knew something people often miss, which is that Arthur C. Clarke was a trippy as hell author when he felt like it. There was a melancholy and cosmic mysticism that crept into his writing and a tendency to focus on arresting, sometimes puzzling imagery. I think Kubrick wanted that in his film, without so much of Clarke's lecturing, rationalistic side. The discussion of transhumanism in the video as a kind of malevolent nerd religion strikes me very much as looking backward from a 1990s-2000s perspective, rather than what was going on in the late 1960s.
no subject
But this dude insists that you must reject the entire science-fiction plot of the movie as a smokescreen for monolith-as-movie-screen being the one and only correct interpretation, which is just odd. For one thing, it's pretty well-established that the thing was shaped like a pyramid or tetrahedron for a big chunk of the story development.
Re: trippiness
Clarke could definitely go trippy, E.g. Childhood's End. He wouldn't, though, just leave weird stuff on the page. There was always a reason for the bizarre things that happened. Surreality for its own sake wasn't interesting to his methodical mind. Yes, the universe is stranger than anything we expect, but it's not irrational.
What did strike me on this viewing is how incorrect a lot of the movie was. Humanity did not evolve because of weapons - it advanced because of far greater social cooperation than any other mammal. Fire for cooking was the big technological advance, not clubs. Chimps are actually much more violent. Nuclear weapons were already outlawed in space by 1968 because it's a really terrible idea to have them out of your direct physical control. HAL's AGI is still not close, in spite of what the AI hypesters would have you believe. Computers are not rated by their capacity to always be correct; every system is riddled with bugs. Human spaceflight is not a big deal, although space navigation, earth sensing, reconnaissance, communication, and astronomy certainly is.
Yet 2001 is easily the best SF movie ever! It touches on all the main themes: exploration, aliens, robots, transcendence. It's just hard to do this stuff even with a genius author and director at work.
Re: trippiness
The story's concept of human evolution now seems a bit quaint--primates were probably using tools long before the Australopithecus stage, and the idea (clearer in the book) that proto-humans weren't even really into collective violence before they got uplifted really doesn't square with what we know about other primate species.