Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey": The Meaning Revealed! (Maybe…)

2001. We are living in the final days of the Year of our Lord 2001, and so I suppose it is natural that as the year draws to a close one wishes to say a few words about a famous film by that name: 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Written by science fiction laureate writer Arthur C. Clarke (from a short story called The Sentinel, actually) and filmed by laureate director Stanley Kubrick, the movie blew people away when it was first launched back in the late 1960's. Of course, the real 2001 has not turned out much like the idea of "2001" in the movie, but that's okay; it's still a classic 5-star movie. I am going to occasionally (irreverently) abbreviate the title to 2001:ASO in this review of the movie in general and at a few of its aspects in particular.

It is said that when Stanley Kubrick first screened 2001:ASO for some Hollywood types back in 1968, handsome hunk actor Rock Hudson sat in the darkened theater watching the science fiction movie, and halfway through the screening he said aloud to the folks around him, "I don't get it…", and he got up and walked out. It is also said that several of his Hollywood colleagues got up and walked out with him. Too bad.

Now Rock Hudson was no dummy. He knew how to work the star system and become a famous and skilled Hollywood star. He knew how to schmooze the moguls. He gave us many memorable parts himself on the silver screen (Bick Benedict in Giant comes to mind.) He was smart enough to hide his homosexuality in an age when being openly gay was the kiss of death in 1950s America. He knew how to stay on Elizabeth Taylor's good side too, no small feat in itself, unless your name is Michael Jackson. So why didn't Rock and his fellow thespians et al. "get" 2001:ASO back in 1968?

For the same reason a lot of people still don't get it and push this movie aside from their consciousness today, even in 2001 and beyond. It's a tough movie to figure out at first. I myself have been trying to figure it out for 40 years, and I'm a lifelong science fiction fan too. I've read Arthur C. Clarke's space stories since I was knee-high to a West Texas jackrabbit. But all this time I've been confused by the story's meaning.

And so have a lot of other people. But it's not because people are dense, it's probably because people are just not in Kubrick/Clarke's culture. In some ways that's not a bad thing. If you can get people to puzzle over a movie's meaning for 40 years they will not forget your movie. And if they don't forget a movie and talk to their friends about it it not only insures its longevity as a hot item but it's good for the box office too. But a lot of us reallydon't understand 2001:ASO.

As I said, it's probably a cultural thing. I have this fantasy of sitting next to a 25-year-old Brigitte Bardot in a movie house watching French films. I lean over to melt-in-your-eyes Brigitte and say "Sweetheart, I don't get all this stuff…why is he humming to himself as she leans over him pouring water on his feet?" Brigitte leans back to me and says in her most feminine whisper, "Dahhling…eef you understood we worldly-wise French you would understand perfectly what eez happening…we are not so narrow-minded as you stoffy Americaines…ha-ha-ha...". From that moment on I don't give a flipping franc about the movie anyway I am so absorbed in fantasy Brigitte's disarming and delicious presence causing my heart to race in the seat beside me, but that is a hormonal thing for which I can't be held responsible. The point, though, is that my fantasy B.B. is right: we only understand a movie if we understand the intellectual and emotional culture of which it is a part. A friend of mine who is Mexican from Mexico City says the same thing about Amores Perros; it helps to be Mexican to get the full meaning. He's probably absolutely right. I guess it helps to be an American Redneck to get the full "meaning" of a movie like Porky's too. But I digress.

To understand 2001: A Space Odyssey you have to know a few things about the history of the human race. Actually, you have to know more than just about the human trace; you have to know some of the theories about what kind of beings there may have been before human beings. Now I know I have a few good Christian fundamentalist friends who will read this and say "Wait just a King-James minute. The Bible says that man was created in 4004 B.C. God said it, I believe it, and that settles it." I suspect that there are fundamentalists in other religions who would echo a similar sentiment. But I am among those (liberal?) Christians who just happen to believe that God used a process of developing human beings over thousands, yea millions of years called evolution to accomplish the divine purpose. Many educated secular people believe in the evolutionary process as well, and it has been largely accepted in most scientific and academic places around the world today the same way that people went from the idea of a "flat Earth" to a "globe-planet Earth" a few hundred years back.

Anyway, there are two ways people have looked at human evolution. One way says that evolution of the human species was gradual, a sort of cell-by-cell adaptation process across the years. The other way says, "Unh-uh. Nope. No way. Human beings evolved in stages. You come to a place in ancient history and they just sort of jump from one evolutionary form to another." Call it the Jump Theory. I've always liked the Gradual-Change Theory of evolution idea myself, being a sort of slow-to-do-anything, including change, type of person. But here is where I think we begin to get the meaning in the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey. Remember: you have to get into the intellectual/emotional culture of Kubrick/Clarke (or is it Clarke/Kubrick?) to get all of this. Stay with me on this.

Let's say that the makers of 2001:ASO were into the Jump Theory. Okay, what made the "jumps" from one form of evolutionary stage to another? No one can say for sure. Christian persons like me believe that (a supernatural) God caused changes to happen in the human evolutionary timeline, but in the science fiction culture of the creators of 2001:ASO, there is an apparently natural being or presence or intelligence who puts these big black "road markers" called monoliths smack dab in humanity's evolutionary pathway, and whenever humans run into (actually, just touch or come near) one of these humming black monoliths BOOM!, a change takes place and that which was pre-human becomes human, and eventually the human itself becomes a post-human being (the so-called baby-in-the-bubble "Star-Child") at the end of humanity and at the end of the movie.

This is a kind of thinking outside the box of Judeo-Christian thought and even most secular humanistic thought. Which is why people from Rock Hudson on through recent history "don't get it" when it comes to "understanding the meaning" of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Kubrick/Clarke story is finally, about how that which is once human is defined as human because of our interaction with tools and machines, but that some day that which is human will move beyond the tool-machine stage into a cosmic stage where we interact with something else. Of course, they (conveniently) don't say what it is, but it is something.

Life beyond tools. Hmmm. I suppose...that's where the trip through the "star gate" is taking us, according to Clarke/Kubrick. So throw away your Sears catalogue and blow up your computer. Kiss your '57 Chevy and your P.D.A. goodbye. Star-Childhood awaits.

So in 2001, I think maybe I finally understand the movie "2001." Maybe. There have been a lot of theories about this movie, but that's where I come out. At least in 2001. In 2002, I may see it differently. Stick around and we can talk about it.

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