Kubrick’s critical view of the technological project in "2001: A Space Odyssey"

Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" is one of those films that many viewers enchantedly misunderstand. This review will bring out and reflect its dystopian character.

The film is structured by four principal sequences that together, and in the case of the final one, internally, are linked not narratively so much as thematically. The film deals with broad ideas about technology and ends with what I take as a cautionary montage (and note here, against a fideistic reading, that the director was a Brooklyn Jew, not a Christian), presenting the astronaut as an old man suddenly being reborn and then as a newborn or to-be-born floating foetally in a cosmic bubble. In the scene just prior, we see the space pod resting inside an eighteenth-century boudoir and the astronaut seeing himself as first an older man, then a very old man in a bed. This is cinematic because film, as an art of images, makes it easy to present in a single plane a plurality of images of the same person at different times with one looking at and perhaps recognizing the others.  For cinema in fact subordinates plot and characterization to image and juxtaposition.  An image in a film need not correspond to a reality; it need only be presented.

This is preceded by the rapid travel through space that is presented as a movement into the center of parallel displays of light that diverge towards one as one moves into it. Like the images of planets that follow, this spectacular display is revealed on a moment's thought to be poor in information and of questionable fascination or entertainment value. The colored lights in this array illuminate only themselves. It is an allegory of power, of technology itself, and the universe or the place of space shows itself as a generative matrix of a power of illumination that in illuminating naught but itself is like a power that comes to meet the spaceship thrustingly hurtling into its vortex like the "space fuck" that Kurt Vonnegut thought the moon travel to be. The poor astronaut finally arrives in the above-mentioned boudoir, with French rococo paintings on the wall, where he is apparently alone in this austerely beautiful prison, and now all he's got is images of himself as the ages of man, as in the sphinx's riddle to Oedipus.

But the director of "Dr. Strangelove" and "A Clockwork Orange" (the bright red sculpted sofas in the space station lounge reminded me of the expressive use of decors in "Clockwork," an element of some visual comedy) is also man with a social vision (which is more effective for being impersonal and cold). The briefing of the American moon station head about secrecy, played out in front of a very prominent American flag, unmistakably references the social unrest of the time when the film was made (1968).

But to me the characterization of the computer Hal is the film's greatest masterstroke. Remember President Muffly in "Dr. Strangelove" with Peter Sellers's "I'm more sorry that you are" kindergarten banter with Premier Kissoff in the hour of nuclear brinksmanship? Here Kubrick nails yet more fully American psychobabble and the ability that our managerial culture often has of intimidating people with an infantilization that surely many Americans are alone in not finding insulting. Hal browbeats Dave about his "feelings" and starts talking about his own when he is "dying" because the plug is being pulled on him. This is appropriate because, ironically, the defining quality of this heretofore perfect managerial computer (it has never yet made any mistakes, which is small comfort to the astronauts once they suspect him of willful and adverse motives)  is his existential identification of the collective project with which he is programmed with the sense of self or amour-propre that seems to fit his management of situations involving the astronauts through strategic invocations of emotional vulnerability. He manages to load or underscore everything he says with an invocation of the psychology of his merely human interlocutor, and in a way that is menacing. This is something Godard's Alpha 60 computer in the sci-fi comedy “Alphaville” could not dream of, being too French to abandon mere reason for a psychological management that is both insightful and infantilizing rather than merely mistaking poets and lovers for madmen or dissidents. Hal is a figure of a monstrous bureaucratic authoritarianism masquerading as polite and competent cooperation and so at once friendly and menacing in a way that is rather peculiar to American culture.    

Kier Dullea as Dave is a match for Hal, and he wins. By the time he does he is alone on the ship and we never again see him encountering anyone else, though he encounters two versions of himself and becomes another, after traversing a space of bright lights moving rapidly (I imagine an elevated tramway passing at high speed through an extended Times Square) and a bunch of, to my thinking, equally banal planetary landscapes (shot in what looks like primitive two-color film stock or processing). Personally, I always thought physical cosmology to be a dull discipline: when people say they have found God in some metaphysics of force, energy, matter, space, time, or a plurality of such things, I wonder, why the hype? The film shows that technology is a power that discovers its own image, and what space travel offers humanity is not or not only some grand project but a newfangled and gizmo-laden Narcissus. The self at two later ages and then reborn: fantasies of the conquest of space and time. Our technology penetrates nature to find in it its own image of itself, as power and splendor. That baby in its extracorporeal uterine bubble floats around like a planet, but does this mean that something new is about to be born at the limits of time, space, and endurance? The infant is enclosed. And what happens is the film ends.

Saying that viewers could make of the film what they will, Kubrick clearly meant with the film’s disjoined series of vignettes and images to provoke us to think. With strong shades of a Heidegger-like critique of technology as a project, in which “self” and “will” are not its antagonists so much as forms it can take, the film is more socially critical than it is the visionary evocation of some brighter new world, especially since this latter, though spectacularly suggested, is less affirmed than merely evoked, particularly in the last episode. The film’s technological projects are revealed to be about monolithic power and narcissism, and in a curious way these are characteristics that may not even need us people, as Hal seems to think neither he nor the ship does, and as the enigmatic Monolith probably does not.  The lesson is nihilism: the film of technology, and the conquest of space, like the sleep or dream of reason for Goya, produces monsters. Nothing in this precludes pursuits of happiness, enjoyment of experience, self-realization, or travelling through extraterrestrial space to answer an old Cartesian question by finding out (on the part of a solitary consciousness) what or who (besides other avatars or incarnations—images—of the self) may be “out there.”  And as this is a film, we may also wonder: Are spaces and the events that take place in them mastered in the temporal progression of images, or simply traversed?  Is life—and cinema, the art of time par excellence—a project or an experience?