2001: A Space Odyssey

By Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clark

Satire, Tool Use and War

In much of Clarke's work, technology, when not troubled by "human error" or created in the interests of destruction, is so often painted a distinct shade of moral positive. Kubrick's attitude towards it is, however, is more ambiguous, to the point that it seemed to have rubbed off on Clarke. The message in 2001 is that, whilst it is the use of tools - the basis of technology - that makes us human, they ultimately alienate and dehumanise us and pave the way for our destruction.

When the first monolith appears to the man-apes it spurs on their minds to grasp the "awesome and brilliant concept" of using natural artefacts as tools to help gain food and defeat enemies. From there on in, humanity's course is set: "The tools they had been programmed to use were simple enough, yet they could change this world and make the man-apes its masters." And the monolith itself is clearly a super- advanced tool in the hands of its alien controllers, working towards the advancement of Mind. In should also be born in mind that the alien's own transcendence has come via their mastery of technology, indeed their becoming technology: "First their brain, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and plastic... In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships."

Incidentally, we know now that humans are not in fact the only animals to use tools - chimpanzees have been seen to use a range of natural artefacts, and even some species of birds use rocks to smash open eggs for food. What makes us human is, in fact, far more complex than simply the ability to hit an tapir over the head with a femur bone, and since the Sixties a great deal of work has shown the crucial importance of the need for social as well as technical intelligence in developing our brainpower. Once again the truth is "far stranger."

But Clarke marks out the man-ape's future as the masters of the earth and beyond, with an apparent inherent drive towards achievement; with a reach that exceeds their grasp: "Of all the creatures who had yet walked on Earth, the man-apes were the first to look steadfastly at the Moon. ... when he was very young, Moon-Watcher would sometimes reach out and try to touch that ghostly face rising above the hills. He had never succeeded, and now he was old enough to understand why. For first, of course, he must find a high enough tree to climb." Eventually man finds that high tree in the form of rocket propulsion, so whilst Floyd, Bowman and Poole might seem as different as is possible from his man-ape ancestors, they is essentially pursuing similar goals, with similar intents - to reach out beyond his current grasp. Mankind is still throwing things up in the air.

However, by this point in man's evolution, technology seems to have sapped man of his fire. We have become dependent on and weakened by our tools, which now not only define what is possible, but also fix the limits of what we dream may be possible. Though Kubrick forces the viewer to marvel at the grace and achievement of his spacecraft, space stations and moon bases, the humans contained in them are all subdued and flat, eating grim looking processed space-food and exchanging limited and banal dialogue. The prosaic dialogue has been seen as Kubrick's satirical comment on the futility of the spoken word in a future defined not by human passions but by technical ability. The humans in 2001 are played by apparently uncharismatic and relatively unknown actors: outside the firmament, Kubrick cast no stars in 2001. The flatness of the central performances have contributed to the criticism levelled against the film, but it is a deliberate ploy rather than, as some supposed, a weakness in Kubrick's direction. (Though to be fair to his critics, Kubrick's perfectionist approach has, in many of his films that demanded more passion, unnecessarily subdued performances with perhaps one too many takes forced out of his wearied actors).

For Kubrick the corporate nature of technology is also keenly observed (perhaps to the point of satire). The space consultants on 2001 had managed to convince various corporations that their inclusion in the film would be good publicity - IBM, Boeing, Pan Am, Bell Telephone, General Dynamics, AT&T, Hilton and more all have their logos scattered throughout the movie. But this was no simple 'product placement' as we are now increasingly used to in our cinemas - none of the companies paid any money for their inclusion. Beyond the effect of verisimilitude, Kubrick, has a secondary purpose - to show the ubiquity of the corporation and their brands as symbols of their increasing controlling interest in our lives (perhaps Kubrick's most accurate prophecy). Incidentally, when IBM leaned that the plot of the film involved a murderous computer, they ordered their trademark to be removed from many of the sets (it still remains on the console of the Pan-Am space-plane), and they were at first less than amused by the fact that HAL was a letter down in each case from IBM. In fact Clarke has continuously denied that this is anything more than a coincidence (HAL's mentor Dr Chandra even denies it in 2010: Odyssey Two), but IBM are now "quite proud" of the association - all part of HAL's rehabilitation (see later). But IBM or no IBM, it is clear that Floyd exists in a world of government and corporate cover- ups - a slightly sinister and undemocratic rendering of the future - and it is ultimately this secrecy that Clarke reveals as the true culprit of HAL's malfunction. As a contrast, when 2010 was filmed in 1983, it was among the first films to use extensive paid product placement for a range of corporations (including at one point for Pan-Am with a clip from 2001). Kubrick's satirical touch had been co-opted and fed back on itself.

Clarke is less unkind about his people, if not necessarily the acts they end up committing, than the often misanthropic Kubrick. Floyd, Bowman and Poole are all blessed with back-stories to flesh them out as characters, and whilst the dialogue in the book is sparse and mostly matter-of-fact, Bowman, far from what one might expect from an unfeeling 'techie', spends much of his time wandering "at will through the ship's inexhaustible electronic library". Here he allows his mind to be taken on historical adventures through the written (or at least electronically stored) word: "And he began to read the Odyssey," writes Clarke, as if we had not been paying attention to the title, "which of all books spoke to him most vividly across the gulfs of time." But Clarke does convey the capacity for mayhem that tools gain in the hands of humanity. Rather than being more optimistic than the film as many have claimed, the book often elucidates the violent and destructive urges that plague man from his simian ancestry to his stellar future.

Clarke and Kubrick began work on 2001 only two years after the Cuban missile crisis, and fresh on the heels of Kubrick's apocalyptic comedy Dr Strangelove (subtitled, "Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"). Despite the emergence of some level of détente, there were not many willing to point towards a future of world peace. The two tribes of man-apes facing each other across the waterhole had become two superpowers staring each other out over the world stage. "The spear, the bow, the gun and finally the guided missile had given him weapons of infinite range and all but infinite power. But now, as long as they existed, he was living on borrowed time." Like the man-apes who, before he arrival of the monolith, the superpowers could not dislodge each other as neither groups had an offensive advantage over each other, so it seemed with the superpowers, except stalemate was replaced with Mutually Assured Destruction. "Honour had been satisfied; each group had staked its claim to its own territory." Moreover, by the time that 2001 was released, thousands of American soldiers had been brought home in body- bags from the jungles of Vietnam. By 2001 Clarke writes that, despite a world population topping six billion and facing food shortages ("even the United States had meatless days"), "With the need for international co-operation more urgent than ever, there were still as many frontiers as in any earlier age. In a million years the human race had lost few of its aggressive instincts; along symbolic lines visible only to politicians, the thirty-eight nuclear powers watched each other with belligerent anxiety." Heywood Floyd seems unperturbed by this, concluding that "the newspapers of Utopia... would be terribly dull."

Whilst the film, seen in the glow of psychedelia, New Age philosophy, and the peace and love movement of the late Sixties, appeared to many to broadcast a message of hope in the karmic reincarnation of Bowman, the book allows more room for pessimism, albeit conveyed with a certain ambiguity. An early version of the script had described how Moon-Watcher's thrown bone becomes and orbiting nuclear weapon, and when Bowman (a name derived from the weapon of an archer) returns to earth as a Star- Child, the nuke catches his attention: "There before him, a glittering toy no Star-Child could resist, floated the planet Earth with all its peoples. He had returned in time. Down there on that crowded globe, the alarms would be flashing across the radar screens, the great tracking telescopes would be searching the skies - and history as men knew it would be drawing to a close. A thousand miles below, he became aware that a slumbering cargo of death had awoken, and was stirring sluggishly in his orbit. The feeble energies it contained were not possible menace to him; but he preferred a cleaner sky. He put forth his will, and the circling megatons flowered in a silent detonation that brought a brief, false dawn to half the sleeping globe."

After Moon-Watcher has killed one of the Others, we are told that, "Now he was master of the world, and he was not quiet sure what to do next. But he would think of something." And so it is with the Star- Child, despite millions of years of evolution and the intervention of an alien intelligence: "Then he waited, marshalling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something."