which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.

[zustifer]

2001 (1968), Stanley Kubrick. August 10th, 10pm. View count: I think this is the fourth viewing for me. Maybe the fifth.

Friday morning I was up at 5am, but I fucking stayed up through 2001. By the time it got to the analog psychedelia I'd been woken up by the rest of it, so even that pretty undeniably draggy section of the film DID NOT BEST ME.

This time around I was struck by the prevalence of perpendiculars in the visuals. Even things like the little shuttles were shown more often from a completely orthographic angle, not to mention the obvious things like the sun/earth poking over the top of the monoliths, the moon shuttle aligning itself to the space station, and the vertical or horizontal axes of the colored-lights sequence. I don't really have a lot of evidence that this was anything other than just a visual theme, but it was still pleasant (the only halfway decent match I can make is that perpendiculars are a sign of Humans Being on the Right Path, but I'm not terribly confident in that).

I was having some thematic/motivation trouble with HAL. Was HAL vying for SpaceBaby status with humanity, only to be beaten out by the filthy humans? Trying to get to Jupiter alone would seem to support this, but then he could have just panicked and been acting in a more immediately self-preservative way. (I have not read the books or seen 2010; maybe this is discussed, but I daresay that Kubrick's work should and does stand on its own.) I enjoy the idea that machine intelligence was the original target of the third monolith, but it was thwarted.

I suppose this brings up the usual question of what exactly the monoliths' role is, causative, predictive, or what. Are they a generic set of milestones placed beforehand, with no regard to who might discover them, or are they actively pushing the intelligences that encounter them? A combination seems to make the most sense; when an intelligence reaches a certain point, a monolith appears and ensures that they pass the milestone. Which could still support the HAL/human thing; they did seem to have a similar level of uplift-readiness.

I spent some time thinking about whether killing a rival is a requirement for levelling up, and it seems to me that it is. Given only the information in the movie, it's possible to conclude that a Butlerian Jihad sort of event is about to take place, after the communications blackout lifts (and presumably someone discovers the abandoned craft with HAL's brain all over the floor), where all the machine intelligences are destroyed and humans graduate to SpaceBabyhood. Killing machines can be learned observationally, as killing rival tribes with zebra bones can be learned.

Anyway, blah blah unwanted speculation. Obviously the production design is essentially second to none, with so much gorgeous it's all over you screen. The space suits are freaking excellent, the pods, the interior of every single space in the movie. It's all insanely well-thought-out and -realised. The color schemes are consistent and well-chosen. It's just a beautiful movie. Most people's complaints about it are pacing-related, and this is understandable, it's just not... optimal. This is a film that teaches you how to relate to it. Once you adjust to the scale of the time, you can apprehend it properly. Long shots always, always (er... with the exception of the damned landscapes at the end which just DO NOT go away) are beautifully composed, interesting things that never fail to leave you with things to examine. You are allowed to take the time to note the angles of objects in regards to one another, to study the background, to try to read the monitor screens. There is always something to absorb in more detail. Everything is so planned. I mean, it's Kubrick.

I noticed for the first time, this viewing, that in the shot with old David Bowman in the bed, pointing upward at the monolith, the lens is short enough that there is a tiny amount of distortion in the edges of the shot, which is at a low angle, for once. This makes the monolith appear to be bending/tilting slightly toward him. I enjoyed that.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I found the 2001, 2010, and 2061 books good. Let's not talk about 3001, it was just plain dumb.

HAL went crazy because he got bad orders.

You're way off with the Jihad reference. Clarke is not nearly that complex a writer.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Oh, boo.
Well, honestly, my prediction powers have never been very great; I wasn't actually attempting to work out the actual later events, just wandering around. But that is sort of sad that humans were the cause of HAL's fuckup.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Well, i think you'd really like the 2010 book. Things Occur that should make you happy.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Okay, sold. Will pick it up next time I see it as the used bookstore (meaning probably the next time I go).

[optic-options.livejournal.com]

psychedelia = http://seriss.com/people/erco/2001/

[graydon.livejournal.com]

This is a film that teaches you how to relate to it. Once you adjust to the scale of the time, you can apprehend it properly.

Yes! It's one of the handful of films I can watch over and over, sinking deeper into the production each time.

(I must sadly concur that Clarke is not that complex a writer, and that 2001-the-written-work didn't seem to me to contain any sort of Jihad subplot. But neat interpretation. I haven't been able to fix an opinion on how much of a Kubrick film's meaning stands on its own -- or stands anywhere close to the surface of the silm -- without extensive comparative interpretation, even research. He is clearly a master of the aesthetic craft near the front of the films, but the deeper meanings often seem either intentionally obscured or actually nonexistent. I can never tell which: whether I'm stupid for not always seeing the "obvious", whether he's being puzzling because he's a major nerd and it's cooler to discover what's going on by slow investigation, or whether he has no idea what's going on anyways and doesn't care if it makes any sense because he's so absorbed in the craft. Either way, fun to watch!)

[graydon.livejournal.com]

For example: people often write much more subtle interpretations like this which I find simultaneously totally believable but also a bit of a shame, if the correct observation of the film is so completely hidden from the majority of critics.

But maybe making critics look stupid was a nice secondary hobby for him. It's probably not hard, and probably really gratifying.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

That was a rocking writeup, although I haven't seen Eyes Wide Shut. I guess I should, huh.
The whole accessibility thing is often an issue; how can anyone get your message if it's too obtuse, or too weird to sit through? But... you don't have to get everyone, especially if you're Kubrick. Eh, it's a weird medium.
And this writeup is but a way of looking at it, not necessarily the be-all/end-all of the movie's meaning. What movies allow you to see is a valid thing to take away.

[graydon.livejournal.com]

I had ... extremely mixed feelings about Eyes Wide Shut. But after that review I'm tempted to see it again. I felt it was a lot like a Lynch film: I spent half the time working hard trying to figure out how many layers of narrative and reference the director was trying to work into each scene, and walked away annoyed. Annoyed with myself, because I knew there was a lot I missed; and annoyed with the director both for being obscure, and for perhaps having a less-than-exciting "real" plot dressed up in many layers of "cleverness". And most annoyed by not being able to tell whether that was the case, for certain.

(For example, much as I loved the surface layers of Twin Peaks, the actual story right down at the bottom was depressingly dull. I felt like I'd done a lot of work for nothing! And while I still cannot work out, after many pages of interpretations and reviews, what was going on exactly in Lost Highway, I feel that most of the explanations I've seen have a very unsatisfying and boring "real" plot.)

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

I think I value the structure of events as well, so I enjoyed Twin Peaks (up until the second season), but we just watched Mulholland Drive, so I know what you mean about the actual story not being too exciting on occasion. But I have to think about that some more.

[graydon.livejournal.com]

I'm tempted to pretend I have a "deep" appreciation of Lynch films. But in honesty, the things I find most pleasurable about them are pretty simple:

• Rejecting (or at least perverting) cinematic cliches
• Selecting actors that are a pleasure to watch doing almost anything
• Being nice and loose with objectivity, trying to keep the thought processes of the characters involved in everything

He often overdoes it, though. Or builds up sort of sick characters that feel icky to be inside the heads of. I think Kubrick has a slightly more forgiving view of human weakness: less intrinsically sadistic and cruel, more just intrinsically thoughtless and destructive. Maybe that's too minor a distinction; but it's one I can't decide about, myself.

[jwgh]

The zebra bone is mankind's first tool and HAL is the ultimate human-created tool -- in each case moving on to the next level entails violence and maybe even genocide. (I think in one of Clarke's versions of the story the Space Baby triggers thermonuclear war on the Earth, destroying all non-ascended humans, taking this even a step further.)

As others have said, HAL goes crazy because it's been ordered to gather and share information freely while also being instructed to not inform Bowman and Poole of the actual purpose of the mission. Killing everyone solves this conflict, although I think HAL is not entirely conscious of what it's doing along those lines, at least to begin with. I think this might be explained in the book.

I think your analysis of the role of the monoliths is right on.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Clarke kept changing his mind about the story, certainly during production, but then even the sequel novels make radical changes to the continuity, essentially every time. The movie of 2001 and the book of 2010 are almost consistent, but not quite.

By 3001, if you read closely I think it implies that 2001 didn't even happen in 2001, and the monoliths behave completely differently.

So I think people seeking to interpret the film are justified in ignoring the books completely if they want to.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

As for Hal, my personal reading of his motivation in the movie is simply that, maybe partly because he knows the real mission and the two unfrozen humans don't, he decides that he's more capable than the humans at carrying out the mission. Hal fakes the AE35 failure intentionally, to isolate the astronauts from Earth so he can keep them in the dark and take over. He mistakenly assumes they'll trust him. When he realizes they're plotting to take him out instead of acquiescing, he panics and switches to plan B, kill 'em all. I don't think this was Clarke's thinking, though.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, the movie implies that the frozen guys didn't know the real mission either, which makes this reading even more plausible. Note the strong implication that dying Hal's last act was to roll Heywood Floyd's recording--in the end he still wants the job done.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Or maybe I'm wrong about the frozen guys; I forget what Floyd said exactly.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Just read a transcript of it again in a review on Michael Berube's blog, and, yeah, it sure sounds to me as if Kubrick was implying that not even the frozen dudes had been briefed about the monolith. It's strange because most discussions of the film I've read imply the reverse, that poor Hunter, Kaminski and Whitehead basically knew the true purpose of the mission, and were frozen to help keep Bowman and Poole in the dark. Maybe Bowman and Poole just thought they knew.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...But I've misremembered something again: they were named Hunter, Kaminski and Whitehead in the book; in the movie, the third name is Kimball, a name with interesting E. E. "Doc" Smith associations.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Oh, that was what I'd thought too; from the way it was emphasized that they were trained separately, I figured that the implication was that they had more information. But that's not really supported, is it.