(Note, April 5, 2018: This week’s been the 50th anniversary of 2001’s release, and my social media feeds are full of making-of and what-it-meant-to-me articles. What follows is a collection of notes, drafts, and other vague ideas I’d hoped to put into some more polished form. Maybe I’ll finish and refine it, and I’d really like to add some screengrabs and illustrations. But, since this is the week for the movie, you get to see how it stands right now.)
Introduction
When Arthur C. Clarke finally saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, at its New York City premiere in 1968, he was horrified.
Clarke had spent several years adapting a handful of his short stories into a full-blown screenplay, in collaboration with a writer-director who’d recently established himself as one of the most talented and original filmmakers in America. The project had been completed at the highest level of Hollywood’s production values (though filmed in England), with an unprecedented degree of collaboration with aerospace and scientific expertise. The budget had gone from $6.5 million to more than $10 million to satisfy the director’s demands for perfection. Clarke’s collaborator was one of the few people who could challenge Clarke, so much so that Clarke later called Stanley Kubrick “the most intelligent man I’ve ever met” — which is saying a lot, given Clarke’s own ego about his own abilities and accomplishments. The only other time the movie industry had treated science fiction with this degree of respect was when George Pal hired Robert Heinlein and Chesley Bonestell to work on Destination Moon.
Ever since 1968, Clarke was proud to have been associated with 2001. He wrote a book about his experiences as a screenwriter (The Lost Worlds of 2001), and he eventually wrote two sequels to his novel and advised on the adaptation of one of those sequels into a film by Peter Hyams. His career had been respectable to start with. But now, he was the co-creator of 2001, and he enjoyed that reputation for the rest of his life. But his immediate reaction was very different.
In his memoir of Clarke, James “The Amazing” Randi writes:
I was an invited guest in New York City at the premiere of the Kubrick film 2001, and I saw Arthur in tears when he began to realize just how Kubrick had ignored the subtleties of the original story; we were both dismayed by the erroneous interpretations members of the audience offered as explanations of the “psychedelic” sequences in the film. I suggest that readers examine his short story “The Sentinel” —upon which that film was based—and The Lost Worlds of 2001, then see the film again for a better understanding of what it should have shown.
In a podcast recorded after Clarke’s death, Randi also reported that Clarke had left the theater during the intermission– in tears, because he felt that Kubrick had dumped his story, in favor of keeping the film obscure, and dwelled instead upon the astronauts running around the space wheel because Kubrick wanted to show how boring space travel would be.
This story is corroborated by Michael Moorcock, who writes:
As it turned out, Arthur did not get to see the completed film until the US private premiere. He was shocked by the transformation. Almost every element of explanation had been removed. Reams of voice-over narration had been cut. Far from being a pseudo-documentary, the film was now elusive, ambiguous and thoroughly unclear.
Close to tears, he left at the intermission, having watched an 11-minute sequence in which an astronaut did nothing but jog around the centrifuge in a scene intended to show the boredom of space travel. This scene was considerably cut in the version put out on general release.
Randi got into the screening as the guest of science fiction writer Lester Del Rey, whose own review of 2001 complained:
Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke should have given us the superlative movie promised by a barrage of publicity. If they had put Clarke’s Earthlight on the screen with equal genius, it would have been a great science-fiction movie. Unfortunately, they didn’t. Instead they gave us dullness and confusion. … The whole affair dragged. Every trick had to be stretched interminably and then repeated over and over again. Nothing was explained or given coherent flow, but everything was run on to boredom. Further cutting might help; surely it couldn’t hurt…. The real message, of course, is one Kubrick has used before: intelligence is perhaps evil and certainly useless. The humanoid reaction and pointless madness of the computer show this. Men can only be saved by some vague and unshown mystic experience by aliens. … This isn’t a normal science-fiction movie at all, you see. It’s the first of the New Wave-Thing movies, with the usual empty symbolism. The New Thing advocates were exulting over it as a mind-blowing experience. It takes very little to blow some minds. But for the rest of us, it’s a disaster.
Del Rey’s position wasn’t unique among science fiction writers. Ray Bradbury bemoaned “the freezing touch of Antonioni” and wrote that “Clarke should have done the screenplay totally on his own and not allowed Kubrick to lay hands upon it.”
(Years later, in his book Future Tense, critic John Brosnan wrote about these reactions among the old-guard SF writers: “It had long been the tradition in the old school of SF to present Man as a plucky little creature who faces the Universe with a slide-rule in one hand and a blaster in the other and soon has it cowering in fear. Kubrick… treats the human race with cold irony– presenting Man as an impotent, rather pathetic, helpless pawn of forces beyond his comprehension.”)
Del Rey’s review appeared in Galaxy accompanied by two other, more generous reviews. Artist Ed Emshwiller, who had declined Kubrick’s invitation to work on the film, praised Kubrick’s use of new and novel image techniques, ” with apparent economy of means and with great visceral impact. In this sequence his use of semi-abstractions and image modification (solarization, colour replacement, etc.) brings to the big screen techniques which once seemed the province of the avant-garde or experimentalists. ” Samuel Delany was more comfortable with the things that angered Del Rey; he said little about the plot, but praised the film’s visual intelligence.
(I should mention something Delany told me on Facebook. I posted an account of Clarke’s reaction, and Delany related that he’d been at the film’s premiere, as well, and he saw no sign that Clarke was upset in any way. )
Harlan Ellison’s “Handy Guide to 2001” stands somewhere between Del Rey’s old-guard anger and Samuel Delany’s embrace. Although he praised much of the film’s elements, calling the psychedelic light show “some of the most exciting stuff ever put on celluloid,” and the ape sequences “brilliant,” he sums the film up as “severely flawed,” but urges people to see “Kubrick’s Folly.”
“For openers, there is no plot. That simple. No story. I know this because I got it on the best authority– from one of the men listed in the credits as having devised the bloody story. He has said that after Kubrick had that staggeringly boring paean to the monkey wrench in the can (that first half that sent people stumbling from the theatre half-asleep on the pre-premiere night I saw the film), he and some of the head honchos at Metro screened it, went ashen, and said to one another, “We ain’t got a picture here.” So they went out to the Kalahari Desert and shot the apes, and then they shot that Antonioni white-on-white bedroom, and they taped the second-thought sections on either side of the Man Against Space nonsense, and they called it the birth of the blues.”
This was how Harlan Ellison began his “Handy Guide to 2001.” I love Harlan Ellison, and even letting him have the massive leeway for hyperbole (because nobody does hyperbole better than Harlan Ellison)… it’s wrong. Just flat out factually wrong. The earliest drafts of the script, and Clarke’s own memoir, have the Dawn of Man stuff front-and-center, so it wasn’t an afterthought tacked on after a disastrous studio screening. If I take Randi’s story into account, I figure Clarke unloaded a lot of frustration onto Ellison (who’s had his own history of frustration with film producers and directors), and maybe the story got scrambled that way.
(I love Ellison’s work, and it was interesting to read through his later film criticism to see if he’d changed his opinion on the film. He’s never come out and said he’s changed his mind. He’s grown appreciative of the film. I’d love to ask him about this, and about what Clarke said to him, but frankly, I’d hate to bother him about a paragraph in a movie review he wrote nearly fifty years ago.)
I recapped this material to illustrate something about 2001 that we tend to forget nearly fifty years after its release; how radically different it was in nearly every sense. The people above were all writers of science fiction and fantasy, and were fully conversant with the plot points and ideas used in 2001— aliens, space travel, grand and sweeping views of the evolution of Man, artificial intelligence. But as Brosnan says, Kubrick’s irony placed 2001 outside of the human-centered traditions of golden age science fiction, and his approach to storytelling was radical even for such 1960’s “New Wave” writers as Delany and Ellison. In other words, even the science fiction field was expecting a more conventional film, closer to Destination Moon or Forbidden Planet, only better. And 2001 wasn’t like that at all.
A radical shift for Stanley Kubrick, too
It wasn’t even like a “Stanley Kubrick film,” or at least, what people thought of as Stanley Kubrick films in 1968. Look at the director’s track record. After a few low-budget “art movies,” he made a good commercial crime film, The Killing. He follows that with Paths of Glory, a war film with a darker more cynical approach. He’s hired to salvage a big-budget Hollywood epic, Spartacus, and follows that up with an adaptation of a sexy but prestigious best-seller. All came from strong, plot-driven scripts that were also witty, literate, and wise. The choices for camera movements, angles, and other stylistic choices were right; think of the use of long lenses to film the President in Strangelove, the tracking shots and compositions of Paths of Glory, the training camp sequences of Spartacus .
These films were also informed by a sense of why other films were fake, what kinds of lies and sentiment they pushed, and how they could be more compelling by being realistic. It was a genuinely iconoclastic approach to making movies– yeah, there’ve been some good pictures, but a lot of them are just bullshit and let’s do something that’s realistic and maybe means something. Kubrick could appreciate both Jim Thompson’s brutal realism as well as the dimensions of Nabokov’s lyricism. His previous film, Dr. Strangelove, probably confirmed for Kubrick that his iconoclasm was the right choice. While everyone else was making turgid, earnest thrillers like Fail-Safe, Kubrick found that asking what was most realistic led to answers you had to laugh about. If anyone else had that insight, they didn’t dare risk millions on a film about it.
Well, okay, there is one other filmmaker whose works run parallel to Kubrick’s. He’s made crime thriller, war films with a cynical tone, and even comedies about illicit sex, and he’d also done a comedy about the Cold War. In short, up to and including Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick was his generation’s Billy Wilder.
Until 2001.
Suddenly, the film was about experience. Every frame was as gorgeous and spectacular and as awe-inspiring as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Hitchcock was known for his technical achievements, but 2001 made his films look like the studio sets and matte paintings they were. The finale used new technologies to show us something that we could not see otherwise. The story was not told by the characters reciting plot points, but it was communicated through visuals and sound. The film seemed to deliberately avoid every convention of storytelling, but every detail was based in a solidly researched and tangible reality of space travel. And the finale was lyrical space fetus gazing back at the audience to symbolize the next step in mankind’s development– a finale that’s as far as crime thrillers and war pictures as you could get. It’s as though Quentin Tarantino made his first five movies about gangsters and ninja women, and just when we expect the sixth to be yet another entertainment with style and dialogue that dazzles… he suddenly turns into Terence Malick and makes The Tree of Life.
Today, it doesn’t surprise us that Martin Scorsese, the man who made Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, could make Kundun or The Last Temptation of Christ. But in the early-1960s, Hitchcock made thrillers, John Ford made Westerns, John Frankenheimer did political thrillers, Stanley Kramer made socially-conscious message pictures, and Sidney Lumet did dramas. When they did these things, they tried to be entertaining and original. When they tried to do something different, the results could be interesting and surprising. But they didn’t take eleven million dollars of studio money and try to change the form of cinema.
Well, lots of filmmakers have tried to change the form of cinema. Most of the time, their experiments were done with low budgets, or in Europe, and their influence on other cineastes seeped into mainstream films gradually and indirectly. (For example, the French New Wave inspired a lot of people, but it didn’t change Hollywood’s approaches very much until the Godard-influenced Bonnie and Clyde earned shitloads of cash.)
2001 changed everything about the industry and the art form. Most famously, special effects now had a new standard to reach. Science fiction and fantasy were now viable genres that could attract bigger budgets and better personnel, and in many cases, filmmakers followed Kubrick’s lead in thinking more about production design– like, making it look plausible to people who actually worked in those fields. (For example, The Andromeda Strain used some cutting-edge lab equipment in its sets.)
Audiences could accept movies that were stylistically challenging, so filmmakers were given some leeway in what they could do in movies– if only for the desire to capture that youth market that was otherwise staying away from mainstream releases. This last part was helped by the notion of the “director as superstar,” but in the 1960s, Kubrick was only one of several filmmakers who enjoyed that rep, along with Roman Polanski and Mike Nichols.)
And 2001: A Space Odyssey was the highest-grossing film of 1968. The authority of money gave it something like the force of law in the industry.
HAL 9000
The reason for HAL’s madness was spelled out in a 1965 draft of the screenplay. In that draft, Poole asks Bowman about some of the funny things about the mission– the secrecy, the separate training, etc. The two astronauts ask HAL if he has any information about this. HAL deflects their questions (rather artfully, actually). After the mission meets disaster, and after HAL is disconnected, Bowman re-establishes contact with Earth. He’s told by Mission Control that HAL had been programmed to lie about the mission if asked about it. But, since HAL’s programming was to pass along information quickly and accurately, this created something like cognitive dissonance, a crisis of conscience, and a nervous breakdown. Clarke outlined this in his novel, and it was later spelled out in Peter Hyams’ 2010, where HAL was given the cybernetic equivalent of therapy, and a chance at redemption.
It’s a great idea, and there are those who wish that Kubrick had included this explanation in 2001. I think Kubrick made the best choice to avoid explanations, even if it left HAL’s motivations murky or arbitrary.
Here’s a neat thought-experiment to try when you’re watching HAL 9000. Imagine that he’s not a machine. Imagine that he’s another human character, a guy named Hal who runs the ship’s systems from a control room somewhere on the ship. In some ways, that doesn’t really change the movie very much, because the story would be the same. Hal would be the itchy guy in the squadron who breaks and goes crazy, and it’s up to Bowman to take him out and get back on track. But making this stock character a computer– especially one with HAL’s unworldly demeanor– adds some really interesting things to the story.
Take the scene where we first really meet HAL, when Bowman’s doing sketches of the icebox scientists. HAL engages him in conversation, trades some pleasantries and makes some encouraging comments about the artwork. Then he broaches a subject that’s been bothering him lately, namely, aren’t there some strange things about this mission? Doesn’t it strike you as strange that those three guys got separate training? All of the secrecy? That “melodramatic touch” of putting those guys into suspended animation?
Bowman doesn’t really reply to this; he asks if this is part of the regular psych evaluations HAL has to run. You can almost hear HAL stammer when he says yeah, that’s what it is… and that’s when he reports on a problem with the AE35 unit.
On its face, the conversation’s pretty direct. HAL really is asking these questions as part of his routine. Maybe part of his programming is to check if Bowman and Poole are getting hinky suspicions. Maybe he reports the AE-35 error to change the subject when Bowman sees through it. Still, there’s a lot to dig into in this scene, and that imaginary ‘Hal’ crewman helps us see some interesting things.
First of all, let’s ask ourselves how Bowman took HAL’s compliments about his artwork. Remember, one of the reasons HAL’s programmers gave him a personality was to make working with him easier. We meet proto-HALs in things like online quizzes and recorded help-desk menus that say things like “That’s great!” and “It may take me a moment to retrieve that information.”
Both Bowman and Poole understand that HAL is a machine. Bowman even says that “well, he acts like he has emotions,” and acknowledges that we can’t really say whether they’re “genuine” or not. (He’s not saying HAL’s faking them or lying: he’s addressing the question of whether HAL’s emotions are really analogous to those of humans.) We can take a compliment from a human being, but if a machine says “Great Job!” we think it’s just a canned response. Bowman is behaving more or less as he would with a human being. he may be humoring himself, but when a machine is as close to a human being as HAL is, it’s not stupid to talk to him like he’s a human being . You don’t need a Turing Test to do that.
As I said, earlier scripts had Bowman and Poole asking about the mission, and precipitating HAL’s breakdown. But here, HAL himself is the one bringing the subject up. And that’s interesting, because it may mean that HAL’s breakdown was in the cards anyway. Once again, imagine if we’re watching a human Hal saying this dialogue. Now it’s a bit more explicit: this guy’s starting to let his imagination run a little, and in movies about men on a mission, that’s usually a bad sign. (Think of Telly Savalas in The Dirty Dozen or Corp. Bowden in Southern Comfort.) And when Bowman asks if this is part of the psych evaluations, HAL’s reply is a pretty transparent attempt to save face. “Of course it is.” Yeah. That’s right. That’s the ticket. And we the audience would keep an eye on this Hal character, until Bowman fights his way back onto the ship and subdues the quivering madman.
But we wouldn’t be wondering about what logical contradictions led to his going mad, because we usually don’t raise the same questions about human characters in movies. So making HAL a computer adds a lot of fascinating intellectual questions to the film. Now, we wonder, what could drive a machine mad? What would madness be for a machine intelligence? Is this some commentary on technology? A warning about unknown dangers in the cybernetic era?
We could even sidestep the entire question about why HAL went mad, and raise a really interesting question. Human intelligence is a result of our biology and evolution; we can see only so much of the electromagnetic spectrum, our lifespans are only so long, speech gives us advantages over other concerns, etc. There is some fascinating argument over the relation between mind, meaning, and grammar; for example, if grammar reflects the way our minds handle concepts, and grammar is a formal system, does that mean that there are concepts that we are cannot understand because of the limits of that formal system?
And there has been some interesting research in using adaptive systems to develop processes– in other words, enabling a system to change itself, or evolve, so it can accomplish things more efficiently. But sometimes, these systems might come up with ways of accomplishing tasks that humans don’t immediately understand. If you put a bunch of birds on an isolated island and return in a thousand years, you can’t really predict what traits they’re going to have.
So HAL may have developed to mimic human conversation, there’s probably a lot of other stuff going on under the surface that is genuinely inhuman. And that’s reinforced by everything about HAL. He doesn’t just run the Discovery, he is the Discovery. He has red, unblinking eyes everywhere. He sounds like a human being, but we don’t hear him breathing. If you look at HAL this way, you realize that NASA has sent Poole, Bowman, and three other guys off to Jupiter inside the body of a monster. Anthony Hopkins once said that he modeled Hannibal Lecter’s inflections after Douglas Rain’s HAL 9000, and boy, is that a great choice.
And this opens up yet another line of discussion. In 2001, the hominids in the Pleistocene Era are changed by alien intelligences who make them smarter. They came in, made a few adjustments, and let the system run for a couple of millennia. But humans attempt to create a human-like intelligence pretty much all at once, and the result is a disaster.
Or a success. If a machine can go mad, doesn’t that make it more human? And isn’t that just the sort of question Stanley Kubrick would have asked?
Hard Copy
Oh, there’s a wonderful example of 2001’s research at the end of this scene, when Bowman requests a “hard copy” of the data on the AE-35 unit. We take that phrase for granted, like “software,” but in 1965 it wasn’t in common use. I haven’t done as thorough research on this as I should, but online etymologies date the phrase back to 1964 at the earliest. Kubrick’s always had a fascination with specialized language, and I’m certain he heard some computer consultant use the phrase, and made use of it.
One aspect of 2001’s sound design that never gets mentioned is the constant hum of cooling fans on board the Discovery. It’s the sort of sound that we in the 21st century are used to, because we all have computers on our desks, and it’s the sort of sound that most production designers may not have thought of in the mid-1960s. So chalk up another “well-observed” point to 2001.
Dr. Heywood Floyd
If Clarke’s novel is any indication, Dr. Heywood Floyd has a rich inner life. It’s through him– his musings, his memories– that we get a portrait of the world of A.D. 2001. During his flight to the Moon, Heywood Floyd muses on how boring the newspapers of Utopia would be, recent meat shortages, the stresses of Third World nations, the ongoing Cold War. All of this came from the conversations, drafts, research and consultations that Clarke and Kubrick digested while writing the script.
In the film, Heywood Floyd is, paradoxically, a pretty dull guy. Most of his conversation’s pleasantries with the space station’s staff, and affable handshakes with his administrative equals. (It’s tempting to include his phone call to his daughter as an example of this blandness, but it’s actually pretty realistic. When your dad travels a lot and phones home, that’s what the conversations are like. And the girl is only five or so; she ain’t Noel Coward.)
But Floyd is also one of Kubrick’s most sharply satirical characters. In other science fiction movies, scientists are far more vivid than he is. The stalwart, masculine hero-scientist of the 1950s was still around in the 1960s, only he dressed a little more sharply, like Stephen Boyd in _Fantastic Voyage_. Or, maybe he was kind of suspect, an unreliable egghead, like Robert Cornthwaite in _The Thing_. Before that, we had the Gothic madmen of the 1930s, like Ernest Theisiger or Bela Lugosi, and before _that_, there was _Metropolis’s_ Rotwang, the ancestor of Dr. Strangelove.
Heywood Floyd is actually something new and very accurate in the portrayals of scientists in film. Floyd may know the science, and have a degree or two, but he is wholly an administrator. He’s the sort of person who rises to run university departments and government research programs: he understands the science he’s overseeing, but his main concerns are schedules, securing funding, project reviews, the occasional approval of tenure, and keeping everyone focused on the work they’re supposed to be doing.
Another such character would be Jeremy Stone in the novel _The Andromeda Strain_, who’ s portrayed as an efficient leader in Crichton’s novel. In the film, he’s played by Arthur Hill, and the movie reveals that he’s been part of the government’s germ warfare research. And in that film and in 2001, their importance to the government is indicated in the same way: both Floyd and Stone are transported to the site of the mysterious event in a commuter jet airliner that’s been appropriated for their sole use. (I wonder how many people watch 2001 and miss this detail: it’s a great shorthand to indicate that Floyd is not an ordinary commuter.)
What does Floyd do in the film? Well, he gets to the space station. He’s shown around a little (in a sequence cut after previews). He checks in with his family. He brushes off the Russian inquiries about the rumors coming from Clavius. He gets to the Moon, enters the conference room… and lays down the law to the people there. He thanks them for sticking with the story, acknowledges the “sacrifices” they’ve made… and when one upstart asks about when this isolation’s going to end, he slaps him down by reminding everyone about the non-disclosures they’d signed. As I said: Heywood Floyd may be a scientist, but he’s the person who _administrates_ scientists, keeps them in line, makes sure everything’s going smoothly.
(I’d like to go back to the conversation with the Russians for a moment– specifically, one line of dialogue. When the Russians ask Floyd where he’s going, he replies that he’s going to Clavius. Maybe he could have danced around it, or lied about his destination, but he didn’t. The Russians clearly know where he’s going– how could they miss that he was the only man on the Pan Am flight? And Floyd knew they’d press him about the epidemic rumors. So he said where he was going, and clammed up artfully, thus _perpetuating_ the cover story. People say that 2001’s dialogue provides almost no information, but it’s actually where it has to be.)
The only time he comments on anything scientific is in the moon bus, when he glances at the magnetic survey data. His comments are pretty much nothing: “I must say you boys have certainly come up with something.” Kubrick seems to like this kind of bland dialogue; think of Barry Nelson in _The Shining_, Poole’s parents, and some of _Barry Lyndon_ and _Eyes Wide Shut_. I suspect that he found it funny.
But even though Arthur Clarke gives us a lot of Floyd’s inner life– which isn’t very different from, say, the protagonist of _Rendezvous with Rama_– I don’t want to credit the film’s Floyd solely to Kubrick. Clarke clearly knew many men like Floyd, and by his own account, he and Kubrick could work up some ideas that they both found enticing and funny. So, in the book, we know what Floyd’s thinking, and like him: in the film, we see Floyd’s surface, and have a different opinion. (Much like Jack Torrance in _The Shining_; the book gives us Jack’s inner life as a tormented alcoholic, the film gives us his surface as an angry, abusive drunk. )
The Dawn of Man sequence
Once we learn that the Dawn of Man sequence was shot entirely in a studio, with mime performers behaving like apes, we can really appreciate how much thought went into it. Lead performer Dan Richter gives a terrific account of the work on this sequence in his wonderful book _Moonwatcher’s Memoir_. Kubrick interviewed him, and within a few moments he’d stuff towels under his shirt’s shoulders and began behaving like an ape. Soon he was assembling a team of mimes, working with makeup artist Stuart Freeborn on the ape designs, visiting the London Zoo to watch how gorillas behaved, and bringing a lot of shape and intelligence to this amazing scene.
The fact that Richter did his research is another of 2001’s new benchmarks for filmmaking. Depictions of early man weren’t much better than the “cavemen” trope of _One Million Years B.C._, and then there’s that long history of gorilla suits scaring the likes of Abbott and Costello. At the time, 2001’s rival in makeup was John Chambers’ famous work on _Planet of the Apes_, but those weren’t intended to be real apes: they were apes that behaved like human beings, and I doubt that Franklin Schaffner sent Maurice Evans and Kim Hunter over to the San Diego Zoo to watch the chimps playing. By the late 1970s, Rick Baker was bringing in a higher standard of anatomical realism to make-up effects, and much of his early rep came from very realistic “ape suits” that surpassed 2001’s. His finest work was on the film _Greystoke_ (shot by Kubrick partner John Alcott), but one has to give him a lot of credit for his work on the 1976 film of _King Kong_.
2001 is famous for its use of front projection to create the backgrounds of the Dawn of Man sequence, so let’s get into techie talk. Front projection uses a gigantic screen covered with Scotchlite, which is a highly reflective surface covered with tiny glass spheres– it’s what’s used on highway signs. Light is reflected directly back at the light source– as with highway signs, where the letters are far brighter to the driver than to someone standing at the side of the road. The image is created by placing a half-silvered mirror at a 45-degree angle to the camera, and projecting the image into the mirror from the side: the image bounce off the mirror, hits the screen, and straight back into the camera lens.
It’s an odd process, and even today it’s not used very often. But it offered a lot of advantages over other techniques like rear projection and a travelling-matte system. For one thing, one could use VERY large screens and very large backgrounds. With rear projection, the larger the image, the further away the projector had to be, with a greater degradation in image quality and available light. As for travelling-matte systems… well, look at any bluescreen work from the mid-1960s, and you’ll see why it wasn’t used here.
Front projection’s disadvantages are twofold. The first is that it doesn’t allow for camera movement: years later, 2001 effects tech Zoltan Persic developed a means to do this with front projection, and you can see the results in the film _Superman_. The second is a problem shared with rear projection: as the projected image gets larger, it gets blurrier and grainier. 2001 avoided this problem by using 8×10 photographic plates of locations in Africa. (It also required a lot of light, which meant a lot of heat, and the production had a problem with the plates cracking under thermal stress.)
If you’re into finding flaws and slips in the effects, you can find a few in this sequence. Most famously, a leopard’s eyes glow because its eyes are reflecting the front-projected background. On the Blu-ray of 2001, you can see a pattern in the skies similar to military camouflage: that’s because the Scotchlite batches different slightly, so Kubrick had them cut the stuff into random patterns so they’d blend. And if you look very closely, you can see where Kubrick re-used certain foreground locations, and even some of the background plates if you feel like comparing cloud patterns.
(There is one technical aspect that I wonder about. There are some shots where Kubrick used a longer lens, to focus on a particular man-ape while others jump around in the blurry foreground. And a front-projected background is in the shot. So, I wonder if that required using a different lens on the projector as well.)
The overall sequence is extremely economical visual storytelling. We have a series of shots of a desolate world– again, these were still photos taken in Africa. This enabled Kubrick to have better control over exposure and color: you can see some stills re-used here and as front-projection plates, with different colors and exposures. We see the apes go about their lives foraging for plants and roots: when the ape pushes the tapir away, we see that these two are pretty much on the same rung of the food chain. The leopard attack shows one of the dangers of this existence: the fight over the water puddle shows another.
After the Monolith appears, we see the new status of Moonwatcher’s tribe with equal economy. We see an ape carrying a bone, a strip of red meat dangling. We see apes showing their babies how to use tools. And when the other tribe of apes attacks, we see how powerful our apes have become. (I haven’t read Clarke’s book in a long time, but I think there was a scene where the apes kill the leopard.) Again, this is very economical filmmaking: a full story of survival told with no words, no narration.
The Monolith
There are two, perhaps three moments in 2001 where you can hear the audience gasp with astonishment. They are moments when Kubrick cuts to something that introduces a new and deeply surprising element. The first of these moments is when we see the apes wake up and get very, very agitated.
Because the Monolith has arrived. After about ten minutes of watching proto-humans struggle for survival among barren rocks and scrub brush, they (and we) experience the Shock of the New. The Monolith is all straight lines. Its proportions are exact. Its surface is a blackness with a smooth, featureless texture. The Apes recognize the strangeness and, well, go ape. They recognize it as something outside of their experience, and indeed, as something that was clearly made with intelligent intent, nothing like it had ever existed on Earth before.
In interviews, Kubrick has said that a director’s role is substantially one of being an arbiter of taste, of reviewing and selecting the best artistic choices he or she has. The choice of a featureless black slab might be the most crucial artistic choice of the entire film. As we know, Kubrick had tried other schemes. A tetrahedron may be a simple shape, but it didn’t seem simple, and it was too much like a pyramid. A clear lucite block was cast, and rejected, and now it’s a public sculpture by Tower Bridge. They’d thought of projecting teaching videos onto it, so audiences would know that it was teaching the apes to use tools. There are so many ways in which the depiction of this change could have gone wrong, or looked ridiculous, or looked ridiculous ten or twenty years later. Even with our bigger budgets and sophisticated production design, filmmakers are tempted to introduce some extra visual-effects filigree to show that something’s alien, like the swimming colors of _Annihilation_.
Instead, Kubrick went with a simple black slab, and was very particular about the way it looked to the camera. (The teaching plot point was solved after the first preview; Kubrick inserted a half-second of that low-angle shot into Moonwatcher’s discovery of the bone tool.) And the Monolith hasn’t lost much of its visual presence in fifty years.
(After one viewing, I had a strange thought about the Monolith’s appearance. I recalled seeing a silent-era film of a belly dancer, and the censors had placed black bars across her undulating hips. A black rectangle was a barrier, a mask, something that prevented you from seeing something you weren’t supposed to. Somehow, I combined that memory with the idea of how a four-dimensional thing might look to us three-dimensional beings– we’d perceive them as three-dimensional shapes with strange behavioral properties. It occurred to me that one could see the Monolith as something that we could only perceive as a black slab, and it was also a mask to hide something we shouldn’t see directly. I know, it’s the sort of thing you think of when you’re high, so I don’t take it as a serious insight. And I don’t think Kubrick planned it that way. But I like it.)
Designing the Future
The Sixties had as much techno-utopian thinking as any subsequent decade. The 1964 World’s Fair– which Kubrick and Clarke attended, and where they saw the film _Universe_ that gave them Doug Trumbull and Douglas Rain– offered the corporate version of the dream. As the Sixties went on, figures such as Charles Reich and Buckminster Fuller offered visions more informed by nascent ecological awareness, and eventually, the Whole Earth Catalogs promoted a back-to-basic approach to living well.
It’s very likely that Kubrick and Clarke discussed much of this, but it’s actually outside the scope of the film. Almost all of it takes place in space, in an environment created by engineers, governments and corporations. Everything’s white. The space station feels like a Saarinen airport terminal. So by a default, 2001‘s production design reflects the view of the 1964 World’s Fair more than the ideas that were coming along.
That doesn’t mean that they didn’t think things through. 2001 is famous for the degree of consultation Kubrick and Clarke had with both NASA and private industry: for example, asking companies like Bulova to create product designs that they’d imagined they’d be doing in the year 2001. Some of the details were uncannily right. There’s the tablet-like viewer Bowman and Poole use on the Discovery (though Kubrick clearly preferred a portrait orientation rather than landscape), and a closeup photo of the Amex credit card Floyd uses on the phone call shows a prominent machine-readable data stripe. The presence of brand names like Howard Johnson’s, Pan Am, AT&T and even IBM offered many benefits. First of all, it was a realistic touch, to suppose that American corporations would have a presence in space. The pro-product-placement may have defrayed some of the production costs (but I don’t know if that happened or not). Some people would even see the presence of products in space as a satirical joke.
Each location has unique design elements. The space station is, basically, an airport terminal. The Orion and Pan Am ships are, basically, jet airliners (and let’s remember that the 1960s gave air travel a lot of glamour). The moon bus is a utility vehicle. And the Discovery may be as white as the space station, but it’s all scientific and life-support equipment, with lots of padding built into the walls and edges in case someone goes bouncing around in zero-gee. And as you watch the film, and notice more details– the console where they play chess, the food dispenser– you start to see how it makes sense to do it that way.
There are two bits of the production design that don’t make much sense. One is the placing of the pilots on the Orion, at the top of the dome, facing up and away from their landing spot. The other is the interior of HAL’s mind. It’s a huge, rectangular area, surrounded with HAL’s circuitry, and it’s also a huge waste of precious space on a spaceship. I think that this was a point where Kubrick decided to go with a striking visual environment rather than something rooted in reality.
Ironically, 2001’s look didn’t really last very long after 1968. Sure, there were films that presented gleaming, pristine futures, like Logan’s Run. But the post-2001 boom have us ecological films like Soylent Green and post-apocalypse ruins like A Boy and his Dog. Star Wars followed Kubrick’s aesthetic in highly detailed spaceships, but Lucas decided to make the machines look lived-in, with scorch marks and rust and dirt. Ridley Scott’s Alien was almost a Stanley Kubrick horror film, in that its spaceship owed a lot to both 2001 and Dr. Strangelove’s B-52 bomber– Scott wanted the ship to have the same claustophobic, equipment-everywhere quality. And from Blade Runner and further on, production designers put a lot more thought into the fantasy world they were designing.
A Semi-Interesting Geometrical Observation
There’s an informal progression in how Kubrick frames his shots throughout the film. The Dawn of Man sequence is framed very simply and directly, and his camera angles are horizontal and flat. Once we get to space, however, we start seeing angles that reflect space’s new geometries– the camera flips to re-orient itself to the stewardess as she brings the means to the pilots. The second appearance of the Monolith is filmed with handheld cameras. And when we get to the Discovery, many of the scenes in the centrifuge are framed at very odd angles– but by this time, we’ve grown accustomed to how traditional up-and-down concepts don’t apply in space. The star-gate sequence is a mix, with the camera rolling over landscapes and zooming forward with fantastic speed. And when we wind up in the white hotel room at the end, we return to classical framing.
As I said, it’s only semi-interesting, mainly because I’m probably imposing a structure on something that wasn’t intended.
Floyd’s Trip, Pacing, and Experiential Cinema
When you think about it, the film spends a lot of time following Heywood Floyd to the Moon. His flights in the Pan Am clipper, and the Orion, last as long as it takes the Blue Danube to reach an appropriate breaking-point. The scenes of Frank Poole running laps around the Discovery’s centrifuge allow us to hear most of the Gayane Ballet Suite. And the sequence where Bowman retrieves the AE-35 unit from the antenna doesn’t use music, so we get several minutes of a very realistic sound effect: the sound of one’s breathing inside a space helmet.
If you’re really oriented towards following the plot, these can be very, very frustrating things to sit through. (It’s reported that both Bowman’s and Poole’s trips to the antenna were equally long in the original cut.) Especially today, when we’ve seen so much space travel in films that we’re not as knocked out by seeing spaceships and spacewalks.
But as Kubrick’s said, he wanted the film to be a visual experience, and these sequences work to lull the audience into accepting its more languid, immersive pace.