156. 2001: A Space Odyssey

Song - Space Oddity (David Bowie)

Movie: 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

It's wonderful to think that the Americans and Soviets invested in the space race out of a sincere belief in the advancement of humankind. Certainly, many people at the center of their space programs subscribed to the Utopian ideals of space exploration. But it's hard to escape the fact that without the need for Cold War domination, we likely wouldn't have heard of Yuri Gagarin or Neal Armstrong. The famous match cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey expresses this idea much more elegantly than I do here. The cut, from a bone thrown in the air by a monkey who has just discovered he can use it to destroy his enemies, to a satellite circling the earth, is audacious, cheeky and effective. I couldn't see anything in the film, independently from it. Yet this is not (purely) a pessimistic film. It's both incredibly cynical and incredibly hopeful.

Every object here is presented as the absolute zenith of technology and design, with the film spending a lot of time ogling the various satellites, spaceships and other nifty inventions floating through space, set to Johaness Strauss' Blue Danube. The film fully emphasises the majesty of space and the majesty of getting things up in space to work the way we intend them to work. And not only do they work, they also look beautiful and graceful doing so. Kubrick shows them in all their glory, slowly unveiling the enormity of these things, and their mechanical complexity without ever letting them hit a snag. They move fluidly through space. And their interiors are equally stylish, looking as if they are created by the hippest 1960's designers. (Quite a pity that the funky modernism of the 1960's didn't actually make it to 2001). 

Watching this film now, these scenes are even more impressive as you get the feeling that after 2001: A Space Odyssey the (western) world stopped trying to find new ways to imagine space, astronauts and the infinity. Every new presentation of space seems to take this film as its lodestar. The conspiracy theory that Kubrick faked the moon landing is obviously stupid, but watching this film you sort of get where it comes from. Representations of space in contemporary culture are much closer to the aesthetic of 2001: A Space Odyssey than to the televised images of Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon. That is true for both fictional and non-fictional representations, for rather obvious reasons. The line between fictional and non-fictional storytelling is increasingly blurred, and that's even more so when it comes to space. A space documentary can't just go and film real footage, it has to 'imagine' much of its look. Besides, the space documentary has been popularised by Carl Sagan, who apparently helped shape the look and feel of this film. 

What differentiates most modern films from 2001: A Space Odyssey is that they try to make their characters feel as epic as space. As astronauts they are often presented as better than other ordinary human beings, clearly superior in intellect and behaviour, doing things that go beyond our wildest imaginations. While they are awed by space, they mostly are in control of the situation, unless something goes wrong. In this film they are for the longest time absolutely overwhelmed by space and modern technology, and they are presented as rather unremarkable people who, failing to comprehend the meaning of alien life forms, engage in meaningless small talk and bureaucratic briefings in which people are asked to fill in the right forms and follow the right protocols. When they eventually reach the monolith, that's supposedly the evidence of E.T.'s, they gaze at it with the same befuddled expression as the apes at the beginning of the film did. 

Those early scenes in particular emphasise the banality and insignificance of the astronauts' actions and dialogue so much they become dryly funny. I especially loved a scene in which one astronaut on his way to Jupiter receives a video message from his parents reminding him of the potential administrative hurdles connected to a raise in salary. The same 'frivolity' is later applied to a couple of death scenes to much more chilly effect. The film makes them so impersonal and sudden that it reminds you that Kubrick's reputation as a cold filmmaker is not entirely unearned. But nothing he could have done would have made those scenes, and his ideas that computers are dehumanising us, come across more effectively. The good news is that we can still outwit even the smartest supercomputer. But only when we've done so, and stop depending on technology, will we reach our true potential and be capable of going to infinity, and beyond. That (long) sequence does descend a bit too far into abstract imagery for my liking, but that's a minor complaint in a film this glorious.