2001 : Spaces and Odysseys, by Ron Sala

2001: Spaces and Odysseys 

Rev. Ron Sala

December 2, 2001 

 

When I first watched the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, I was in junior high. It was on one of the UHF stations, and I put it on while did my algebra homework. Within the first few minutes, I realized that it was going to be a challenge to spare any attention for the algebra. To this day, it remains my favorite movie, and I have the poster in my office to prove it.

I thought it would be worthwhile to reconsider this popular and influential movie in this, its namesake year. In many ways, films are our contemporary epics, modern-day myths in which we make sense of our lives and fit them into a larger context and story. I think that is especially true with 2001.

If you haven’t seen the movie, don’t worry. I can summarize it for you in a few minutes—without really giving away the ending, since nobody knows what it means anyway.

The film begins in a desolate landscape. The words, “THE DAWN OF MAN,” appear on the screen. Soon, we see a number of creatures that appear to be an evolutionary link between apes and humans. We see them competing with tapirs for meager vegetation and being the prey of leopards. There soon ensues a battle in which the ape-people are driven from a watering hole by a rival band.

Then things get interesting.

One morning, they wake up to see a “new stone” has appeared on the landscape—a perfectly smooth rectangular black monolith that towers over the man-apes as they cringe in fear before it. They come closer, jump back, come closer. Then the bravest among them dares to touch the unearthly thing.

In the next scene, one of the ape-people, who in the 2001 novel, Arthur C. Clarke calls Moon-Watcher, is sitting by the skeleton of a tapir. He looks at the monolith and then at the skeleton. Perhaps he intuits that the monolith didn’t just happen, that it was made by some intelligence. He seems to draw inspiration and does something he’s never done before. He tentatively picks a leg bone out of the skeleton. He feels the heft of it in his hand. And then, he starts beating the other bones with it, smashing them to pieces. As if looking into his mind, we see tapir after tapir fall to the ground. When next we see the other ape-people, they are stuffing their famished bellies with raw tapir meat.

But the powerful thighbone has another use coming. Moon-Watcher’s tribe, which had been chased from the water hole, returns and Moon-Watcher beats the rival leader to the ground while his stunned followers flee. Elated by his victory, Moon-Watcher casts his bone into the sky.

Then follows the biggest fast-forward in movie history. Three million years pass in an instant, and we are in 2001. Moon-Watcher’s bone disappears, and in its place we see a spacecraft high above the earth, floating by to the strains of the “Blue Danube” waltz.

Everything has changed—or has it? Two thousand one was 33 years in the future when the movie was released in 1968. It’s depicted as a glittering, high-tech world of Pan-Am flights out of the atmosphere, huge space stations spinning gracefully in orbit, and extensive bases on the moon. Everything is perfectly clean, orderly and efficient. But despite outward differences, some things seem eerily familiar to what we just saw three million years ago.

There is only one passenger on a jumbo jet to space. His name is Dr. Haywood Floyd, Chairman of the National Council of Astronautics. Like Moon-Watcher so long ago, he’s a man who lives by his wits. Unlike Moon-Watcher, however, he doesn’t have to be content merely watching the moon as it passes across the sky—he’s going there. But this is no heroic Apollo moon shot. Space travel is routine in this version of 2001. Floyd sleeps much of the way.

His nap is interrupted by a changeover at Space Station One. While there, he runs into some Russian scientists who invite him to sit down for a drink. It’s a far cry from the water hole battle of the first part of the film, but it’s a conflict nonetheless. Banal conversation has replaced the shrieks of the ape-people, but the Russians and Americans now possess tools of war far more powerful than a thighbone. (Thankfully, the Cold War continuing into 2001, with its tens of thousands of nuclear warheads trained on the world’s cities is one of the things the movie got wrong.) Dr. Floyd’s weapon this day, though, is verbal. He leads the Russians into thinking his government is covering up an epidemic on the moon. Actually, they’re covering up something far more serious—the discovery of a strange, black monolith buried on the moon millions of years ago by some unknown alien civilization. Floyd follows in Moon-Watcher’s footsteps and touches the second monolith. Just at that moment, the monolith emits a signal to Jupiter.

It might be useful to pause at this point to ask how the 2001 of the film compares to the 2001 we know? It might be fairly said that we have known two 2001’s this year—before and after the infamous date of September 11th. I’ll speak of the first now and second a bit later.

To start with, there’s the obvious point that, in the real 2001, you can’t hop a Pan Am flight to the moon. In fact, you can’t take Pan Am anywhere, since that airline went bust ten years ago. More broadly, we’re left with the disappointing reality that manned space exploration is currently only something in history books. As that clever cheese commercial points out, it’s been a long time since we’ve been to the moon—a quarter century, in fact. The Space Shuttle (which, incidentally, looks a lot like the space plane in the movie) is nice, but it’s basically 1970’s technology and is only used for orbiting earth. It’s like NASA is cruising around the mall in a ’77 Oldsmobile Toronado when it could be flying down Route 66 in a solar racecar. Whenever the issue of space exploration comes up, it’s always pointed out that we have lots of problems down here on earth to solve, and we certainly do. But the space program has yielded many benefits: advances in computer technology, communications, agriculture, and ecology to name a few.

It should also be pointed out that it would be a very prudent idea to get some people off this planet. Earth lives in a dangerous neighborhood. It’s highly likely that another major meteor impact, such as the one that seems to have put an end to the dinosaurs, will strike our planet again. In any case, our sun is forecast to expand and destroy Mercury, Venus, and possibly earth, in five or six billion years—if we, in our collective stupidity don’t destroy this planet first. It would be worthwhile to find a few uninhabited backup worlds for earth’s people, plants, and animals. As they say in computing, Save early and often.

There are also intangible benefits to space exploration. Though the space race of the ’50s and ’60s was in many ways a byproduct of the Cold War, it was also an inspiration to a generation who took on barriers of race, gender, and nationality even as astronauts and cosmonauts were taking on thrust and gravity.

What a day that must have been in 1969 as the world were glued their televisions watching the first human set foot on another world. I wouldn’t know, since I was busy being conceived just about then. (I was born during the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, whatever that means astrologically).

The movie 2001 came out a bit earlier, in 1968, the year Apollo 8 made the first orbit of the moon.

What happened to Clarke and Kubrick’s dream?

In an epilogue to 2001, written in 1983, Arthur C. Clarke asserts,

By 2001, it seemed quite reasonable that there would be giant space-stations in orbit round the Earth and—a little later—manned expeditions to the planets.

In an ideal world, [Clarke continues] that would have been possible: the Vietnam War would have paid for everything that Stanley Kubrick showed on the Cinerama screen. Now we realize that it will take a little longer.

But Clarke and Kubrick were more accurate in some other areas. They envisioned an electronic pad that would enable its user to view video images and well as read the newspapers of the world. Our laptop computers can do both of these and much, much more. Very soon new flat notepad computers will be on the market that will even more closely resemble the movie’s idea. There’s also the videophone that allows Dr. Floyd to talk with his little daughter back on earth. The same is done routinely through Internet videoconferencing.

And let’s not forget our Space Station Alpha. It’s not as plush as the space station in the movie and sometimes the door gets in a jam, but it is international—just like its cinematic equivalent. Clarke and Kubrick correctly foresaw that Russians, Americans, and the other peoples of this planet would eventually cooperate in space.

Clarke’s vision of 2001 was not all glittering space stations, though. In his book, he presents a future that is in some ways better, other ways worse, and in still others quite close to the one in which we live.

Clarke also writes of rumors of other threats: hypnosis by satellite, compulsion viruses, and blackmail by synthetic disease. He even says that, “Every time Floyd took off from Earth, he wondered if it would still be there when the time came to return.”

Getting back to the film, humans, as curious in 2001 as their ancestors were three million years ago, launch their first-ever mission to Jupiter to see who or what that signal from the monolith on the moon was aimed at. The crew consists of Bowman and Poole, two astronauts in charge of getting the ship to the giant planet, a few other crew members in suspended animation for the duration of the trip, and the HAL 9000 computer, which is super-intelligent and claimed by its creators to be conscious. The computer observes the crew with glowing red electronic eyes placed around the ship and speaks to them in a smooth, calm, human-sounding voice. Bowman and Poole are really little more than space janitors; HAL the computer is responsible for the bulk of ship’s operations. In fact, HAL seems more human than the crew, most of whom are in hibernation and the other two who seem to have the personalities of faded wallpaper. In the three million years since the ape-people, humanity has gone from creatures living in a completely natural (and often hostile) environment, to ones living in the completely artificial environments of ships in space that see to their every need.

But then things get interesting.

HAL begins to show signs of malfunction, although no computer of his type has ever been known to make a mistake. Bowman and Poole decide the prudent thing would be to turn off the higher functions of HAL’s apparently faulty brain, while leaving his automatic functions in tact. HAL, as a self-conscious entity, doesn’t like that idea and uses his control over the machinery of the mission to kill every member of the crew except Bowman, who finds himself in a tiny space pod, locked out of the main ship, without a space helmet.

It’s only then that the robot-like astronaut begins to show any emotion. He’s angry and afraid and knows that unless he can get back in the ship and defeat the computer, he’ll certainly die. Bowman launches himself through the freezing vacuum of space, struggles through the airlock, and shuts HAL down.

In the real 2001, we don’t have to face computers with human-like minds and personalities, but we may well during the course of this century. Already, the greatest human chess player, Gary Kasparof, has lost to IBM’s Deep Blue computer. The problem of HAL can be seen in more general terms, though. HAL, as a computer, is a human creation. He was created to serve human needs. As such, he is a tool—the finest humanity has ever produced. But, from the beginning, the film has demonstrated to us the ambiguous relationship of humanity to its tools. The bone that Moon-Watcher picked up was an inert artifact of nature, until his human mind (if we can call it that) made it into a tool with which to slaughter tapirs to feed his tribe. It may well have been that they would have starved if it had not been for that primitive technological advance. But the very same tool could also be a weapon. With that weapon, Moon-Watcher beat and perhaps killed the leader of the other tribe. Was his act justified? The question is difficult to answer. Moon-Watcher and his fellow ape-people have not even developed language. They live in a world of fight or die, without negotiation. The bone is a tool, a weapon, a means of life—and death.

In the 2001 of the film, we see the same ambiguity. The spaceship that replaces the bone: Is it a tool or a weapon? There is a hint in the novel that there are orbiting nuclear weapons in this 2001. Is this ship carrying these? Or is it on some more benign mission? Unlike the ape people, Dr. Floyd has the gift of language, but he carefully uses this tool as a weapon, using language not to communicate but to mislead.

HAL was designed to be a tool for the crew of the spacecraft, but as a conscious entity, he has become, in turn, the user of tools—the ship and language. Also, he has the power to turn them into weapons, and does. Why does HAL turn against the crew? Is he malfunctioning? Has he gone insane? Does he want what is at the end of the journey for himself? Does he resent his role as servant to the astronauts? Is he trying to explore the full ramifications of his consciousness? The film is very ambiguous. Even Arthur C. Clarke will admit that the book that he wrote is only his interpretation of the film that he and Kubrick collaborated on.

What seems clearer is the effect of HAL’s actions on astronaut Bowman. Though he was on a mission to where “no one has gone before,” he was strangely nonchalant. He could rely on the ship, the computer, his fellow astronaut. Every day was predictable. And then disaster struck. Things got interesting. More interesting than he would have wanted, but interesting nonetheless. It was only when placed in mortal danger that he became the hero of this drama—a lone human on the sea of space. It was only after HAL’s attack that it became Bowman’s odyssey. It was only then that he began to fill the shoes of brave Odysseus and confront his own Cyclops with his electronic eye.

Perhaps that, for me, is the greatest parallel between the 2001 of fiction and of fact. None of us wanted what befell us in the latter part of this hard year. We mourn the dead and the death of some part of innocence in all of us. No more than that beleaguered astronaut do we comprehend what sin or madness prompted the murderous drives of our adversaries. Our tools—jumbo jets and sky-scraping buildings have been used as weapons against us. We have lost some of our security, but lost, too, some of our apathy. Every move counts now: how we care, how we think, and how we resist.

All of the problems of the first 2001, the year we knew before September 11th, are still with us: homelessness, AIDS, racial profiling, homophobia, environmental degradation, and many, many more. But also, the dreams of that pre-9/11 year are with us too. The exploration of outer space is one dream, but also the exploration of inner space—the workings of our bodies and minds, and even what some call our souls. There is also the dream of exploring the spaces between us as human beings—between sects, classes, nations, and races.

Turning dreams into realities demands all our hands and hearts. Helen Keller wrote, “I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, [she writes] not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.”

These are hard times, but they lift us up to the dignity of those who struggle for life and that more abundantly. We will not allow terrorists to destroy us or our dreams.

It is in something like a dream that the film’s final sequence begins, the one fans have been debating for over 30 years. Bowman reaches Jupiter, discovers a giant monolith floating in space, and finds himself and his pod hurtling through a tunnel of light. After this long, strange trip to some far-flung corner of the universe or other dimension, Bowman comes to land in, of all places, a hotel room—or at least some space designed to look like one. We see progressively older images of Bowman until, at last, he’s a very elderly and frail man lying in bed. A black monolith appears, Bowman points at it, and then the old man is gone. In his place, a fetus floats in the air, which we soon see high above the earth. The film ends.

Arthur C. Clarke and the late Stanley Kubrick never claimed to have magic powers to see the future. They were and are men of art and science who enjoyed taking playful guesses at what the time to come would bring. The last part of their film, which seems to depict the next stage in humanity’s progress, they wisely realized could only be done justice though symbols. 2001: A Space Odyssey can be viewed as a creation myth and eschatology for a humanistic age, using the device of a series of black monoliths to stand in for that inexplicable force that helps the race along—call it evolution, mystery, God, Goddess, or what you will. Likewise, the fetus at the end of the film, referred to as the Star Child, could be seen as the potential in each of us and all of us.

We are entering upon the Christmas season, in which many celebrate the arrival of a heavenly child. But the image goes far back before Christianity. Either that heavenly child—call him or her what you will—is part of each of us or the myth has no meaning. The Star Child is me, and it is you too. Our birth is miraculous and our capacity for rebirth and renewal is always with us. Humanity is ever recreating itself, ever ready to face all the challenges that come before us.

These present horrors will not last forever. Nothing does. Keep dreaming. There is always a future, always an odyssey. What we shall do in it and who we shall become, as Arthur C. Clarke would say, “not even the gods know yet.”

Let it be!



1 http://www.fao.org/WAICENT/faoinfo/economic/giews/english/fo/fo0109/FO01094.htm#P533_15635



2 http://www.worldwatch.org/mag/1996/96schi.html



3 http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/experience/the.bomb/deployment/



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