Roger Ebert has argued that 2001: A Space Odyssey is fundamentally a metaphysical film making an ontological point: As we venture into space we are changing our place in the universe and therefore affecting the structure of reality itself:
Only a few films are transcendent, and work upon our minds and imaginations like music or prayer or a vast belittling landscape. Most movies are about characters with a goal in mind, who obtain it after difficulties either comic or dramatic. “2001: A Space Odyssey” is not about a goal but about a quest, a need. It does not hook its effects on specific plot points, nor does it ask us to identify with Dave Bowman or any other character. It says to us: We became men when we learned to think. Our minds have given us the tools to understand where we live and who we are. Now it is time to move on to the next step, to know that we live not on a planet but among the stars, and that we are not flesh but intelligence.
The makes science central to it. It is not a “skin” over an action that could just as easily be clothed in magic, as we see in the Stargate franchise.
If we think of 2001 as a standard plotted film, the opening section about violence among the apes is extraneous. There is no causal thread extending from it into the rest of the film. Drop it from the film and nothing thereby is rendered mysterious. The link between it and the rest of the film – other than the purely formal link in the match-cut between the bone and the space station – is that monolith, which is like one found on the moon and another orbiting Jupiter. What are we to make of them? I supposed we can interpret them as evidence of some higher intelligence at work in the universe – Arthur C. Clarke’s book does so explicitly – but I prefer to think of them as a kind of Hitchcockian McGuffin, something of little value or significance in itself, but which is there in the film for what the characters (and the audience) make of it. The Maltese Falcon in the movie of the same name is a good example.
The monoliths prompts us to line things up and so to see that man-in-space differs as much from terrestrial-man as terrestrial-man does from apes; and the difference is of the same kind. They are different kinds of being. They exist in the world in a different way.
I see all that fancy jazz at the end in much the same way – the psychedelic trip, Bowman in that fancy bedroom, middle aged and then old. It’s McGuffin crossed with Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt (defamiliarization, estrangement) with a little bit of Sophocles thrown in (riddle of the Sphinx). It denies us the ease of ordinary plotting and forces us into metaphysics.
What I find particularly interesting is the conjunction of more or less routine space travel – for that is what we have in 2001; traveling from the earth to low earth orbit is no big deal – and artificial intelligence in the form of HAL. We’ve got man-no-longer-confined-to-earth conjoined with intelligence-no-longer-confined-to-man. They are part of the same metaphysical package. Dorothy, we are no longer in Kansas.
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All of which is to say that 2001, released in 1968, a year before the Apollo moon-landing, marks a singularity in human history, a point after which everything is changed And it is a singularity driven, it would seem, by technology, our capacity for space travel and artificial intelligence. It would be two decades before Verner Vinge popularized the notion of a technological singularity.
Art was there first.
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Question: Is HAL our first example of an artificial intelligence going crazy? I have no particular reason to think that it is, but it’s the earliest example I can think of at the moment.
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Do we slot 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) with Disney’s Fantasia (1941) and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011) because all three set out to delineate the metaphysical structure of the world? I find the juxtaposition with Fantasia particularly delicious on two counts: 1) one is a cartoon while the other is live action – but this a trivial matter, isn’t it? 2) the music. Fantasia was conceived as a way to present high-brow classical music to the masses and so the score consists of well-known piece of classical music. While Kubrick had commissioned a score from Alex North, he ended up using several piece of classical music – though the Ligeti pieces were not well known to the general pubic.
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Previously in this series: Science in science fiction 1: The Stargate world [Media Notes 33].
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