How to Finally Understand 2001: A Space Odyssey
Today’s PJ Lifestyle Bookshelf selection comes From Ed Driscoll’s “Far from Complete: Great Books Missing in the Kindle Format” article:
Filmguide to 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Carolyn Geduld. Speaking of when Stanley Kubrick’s enigmatic 2001: A Space Odyssey left so many audiences baffled in the late 1960s, co-screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke was fond of saying, “Read the book, see the movie, repeat the dosage.” Right idea, and while Clarke’s novelization of 2001 is available on Kindle, it’s not necessarily the best book for cracking the film’s mysteries. If I had to hand one baffled 2001 viewer the Cliff’s Notes to the movie, it would be Geduld’s book from 1973, which thoroughly charts out the film’s plot and leitmotifs.
The flat-panel news and information devices the astronauts read while eating dinner in 2001 directly inspired the iPad and Kindle. Now that technology has finally caught up Kubrick’s 1968 vision, shouldn’t the book that places them into context be accessible on those devices as well?
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I’d love to read this. A Google search shows that the book is widely quoted in other works about 2001. Unfortunately, it’s out of print and Amazon advertises it as available only through other sellers. They only have the “request a Kindle version” for books they actually carry. We’d probably have to contact the author and/or Indiana University Press and ask them to approach Amazon about making it available in Kindle.
I have no idea how that would work. Email campaign to IUP? There’s a Carolyn Geduld on Facebook, but I’m not sure she’s the right one.
How to understand “2001?” Sorry, I have no interest in psychoactive mushrooms.
I remember watching 2001 in a New York City theater back in ’69 or ’70. At one point toward the end I blurted out (loud enough for one nearby to hear) “What the hell?!” “Shsh!” was all I got in response. Nice to know years later I wasn’t the only one confused.
I thought the monolith was a multipurpose tool, either observing or actively helping uplift humans.
The alien observation/teaching entity leaves, and leaves a monolith on the Moon to let them know when a next stage, a technological capacity is reached, as a kind of alarm clock.
Another alarm clock is set around Jupiter. There is a strong implication the aliens are guiding mankind’s evolution, perhaps even created us. Bowman is sent back to Earth to kickstart yet another stage.
The symbolism confused me….those apes in the beginning [no punning intended] and then that embryo image at the last.
The Director of Snark lurking just under the surface in me would’ve reversed that.
However, loved the Blue Danube musical score swelling appropriately, and the Pan American Airways logo on the space craft. [as a former PAA employee....sigh...]
First saw it in Bangkok in 1969, so those two surreal environments became juxtaposed. Went back to the hotel and brooded with Scotch-in-a-tumbler.
Clarke’s BOOK and Kubrick’s movie have little in common beside the name. The spacecraft isn’t even going to the same planet; in the book, the monolith is in orbit around Saturn, but the movie goes to Jupiter instead. In the book, the explanation of the transit through the wormhole is explanatory; the movie version settles for a surrealistic color blur.
Read the book. THEN see the movie. If you saw the movie first, then repeat book/movie.
It’s really quite good.
Kubrick’s “2001″ was not meant to be understood. He was being enigmatic and baffling on purpose. Like Patrick McGoohan with the final episode of “The Prisoner,” he wanted to confuse people and start arguments and bar fights.
Clarke did his best to provide some after-the-fact rationalizations in his novel, and even managed to come up with a reasonable explanation for HAL’s behavior in his 1982 sequel, “2010: Odyssey Two.” But he admitted on at least one occasion that he didn’t understand the movie either.
Actually *THE BOOK* 2001: A Space Odyssey, written by Kubrick and Clarke together, is easy to follow and makes logical sense. It not only deals with some big and interesting questions, there’s a poetic beauty reflecting wonderment at the scope of the questions and their possible answers. Once you’ve read it, all of Kubrick’s avant garde film making experiments come into focus, since you know the story he’s attempting to tell.
The movie, if nothing else, was a stunning technical achievement for it’s time. It was also beautiful in its imagery and the incredible musical score.
If you take Clarke’s other work into account it makes perfect sense. Some might consider what follows to contain spoilers.
2001 was only the first of three novels in the series. While the movie was different, the underlying theme remains constant. That being: some kind of alien force is monitoring life on Earth and its evolution. The Monolith is the local monitoring station. It relayed its findings to another, larger Monolith around Jupiter (in the movie), which then forwards up the chain of command (never defined beyond this point). In the third novel, it is implied that what happened at Jupiter had little to do with humanity but was something happening on schedule. The problem facing humanity was in fact that where ever the “bosses” were, they were many thousands of light years away with the implied time lag. The bad news: the Monoliths had decided eons in the past that life on Earth needed another reboot, meaning mass extinction event. However, humanity had advanced significantly in that time and even if the Monolith sent an update, they would be told to wipe out life on Earth and they would do so because they were merely computers and would do as they were told.
Now, this plays into Clarke’s vision of humanity’s future. Clarke was very much a hard science guy, as noted in his idea of human progress above as technical in nature. However, there was what I considered his most horrific novel “Childhood’s End.” Essentially Clarke’s hopeful vision is for humans to be slaughtered by a cosmic energy being and the minds of the last generation of children consumed by it and incorporated into this thing which had slaughtered countless civilization before humanity, except for this one race which it could not eat and instead made them its slaves. Not exactly what most people consider a good future. This goes together with the 2001 series in that humanity is dictated to by a superior alien race and its technology and one day it will either decide to kill us or make us pets, or food.
Since one can impose his own perspectives on to any work of fiction (or history), I took took my cues from the opening musical fanfare ‘Sunrise’ from Richard Strauss’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ as my guide. And in keeping with my Straussian fixation, I’ve always thought that the closing sequences with the transformation to the new man would be better depicted with the closing of another Strauss Romantic potboiler, ‘Death and Transfiguration’; but only in the lush overblown Berlin Philharmonic version with Herbert von Karajan.