2001: A Space Odyssey

Few films are as directly meditative as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Constructed around visuals and music rather than conventional dialogue, this is one of those few films that underscores its intelligence, and the intelligence it seeks to impart onto audiences, vis-à-vis pure cinematic framing. Throughout the film Kubrick absolves words of their standard power, placing rhetorical power instead in the frequent ambient sounds and the transformative energy of the photographic lens. Thus, the film exists on a scale that truly surrounds the mind and body as one watches it.

Moreover, it is this dichotomy of the mind/body split that Kubrick seeks to consider in new terms, starting with the Dawn of Man sequences. Here we see the apes struggling to survive even as they are at one with nature. However, once the mysterious monolith appears as they will throughout the film, the apes begin to learn and create (fashioning weapons here), so that nature is a construct that can be subject to domination. Thus, we arrive at a first thesis—wherein because mankind is vulnerable to the outside interference of the monolith, though that word interference has problematic rhetorical connotations, they are here able to survive attacks at a greater frequency. Violence and intelligence collide, then, contributing to the first growth.

Later growths in the film concern how that intelligence is to be used, and how humanity responds to the monolith, so that the outlets that these monoliths present are seen as reservoirs of untapped potential and transcendence, seen in new technological, ethical, and biological changes. The humans change, but then so too does the super-computer HAL 9000, and not all of these changes bode well for the future of individual humans. Yet the sense of awakening that the monoliths present allows new forms of existence where intelligence is shifted from a physical dominion into something metaphysical, so that in the end when the physical body falters, the mind can begin again, transplanted into a more perfect, more harmonious (and transparent) union as the star child at the conclusion. Yet even here the film does not end; it does not end until the camera lens brings the star child’s gaze directly to our gaze, wherein the child seems to be questioning if we too are ready for the next stage of evolution.

2001: A Space Odyssey: 10/10