On 2001: A Space Odyssey: The Monolith and Its Influences

In this new reading of 2001, the monolith is used as a touchstone for considering a dozen tangents into iconoclastic cinema, the human and simian response to enigma, and the mind-bending idea that a film can actually be what it observes. Many vain attempts are made in the film to come to terms with what the monolith is, but for some reason the monolith cannot be spoken of and it can hardly be touched.

* * *

This new look at Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the first part of my book The Monolith and Its Influences, starts with the phenomenon of the film itself. The monolith is the main subject, but the monolith also functions as a nucleus that has many spokes coming out of it, much like the film’s rotating space station. When picturing the book as a whole, you should see the central monolith-enigma, with 12 or so variants or tangents sprouting out of it. Our minds could picture the hubs-and-spokes thing as a clock face, a clockwork monolith as it were. The variety of forms – quoted and imaginary dialogues, summaries, film-comparison, ape ventriloquism – requires readers to recalibrate their reading parameters, just as 2001 demands viewers to adjust their cinematic expectations. In subtle ways, The Monolith and Its Influences takes on the qualities of 2001, the book being one of those influences, suggesting ways to understand and expand on itself.

The Monolith appears.
It has caused itself to appear

– Dumont and Monad1

PART I: ASSUMPTIONS

Famished.
Arid earth.
Leaves, shoots, stems, roots.
Eating induces avid hunger.
*
Drinking.
Others arrive. Snorting. Menacing.
Stay away. Stay away.
Snarls.
Approaching. Jumping around.
Fear a loud intensity.
Retreat.
*
Dark.
Huddled against the rocks.
Athirst.
Hungry.
Stare upward. White dots of light.
Chewing our fear.

* * *

The lead ape has been identified outside the film as Moonwatcher. Not until I read Arthur C. Clarke’s source book did I start to use the moniker. Some comfort identifying the first man-ape by name (just as the name Lucy was given to a skull and bones by Pamela Alderman), if not just convenient. Better than calling him “The ape who first sees the monolith” or “the ape who threw the bone into the air.” The assumption/convenience leads to other shortcuts to comprehending the ape situation. We can be reasonably certain that the apes are struggling: one is attacked by a leopard, food seems scarce, they do not eat meat, and they were driven from a waterhole by another band of brother apes.

* * *

Awakened.
Across from the shelter. A slab stands against the landscape. Unlike anything in the landscape.
How’d it get there? What put it there? Humming grows louder.
Inside the head?
Grunts.
Wake up the others.
Climb to ledge. Humming. Getting closer.
Surround the slab.
What is it?
Keep a distance. React to the humming.
Jump down to it. Standing alone.
Another comes down.
Touch. Jump back.
Hot. Icy.
Touch again.
Cool. Unencumbered surface.
Again.
Another touches. Jump back. Touch again.
The rest jump down.
Feeling it. Others feel. All feel it. Surround it.
Feel it and press it.
Humming stronger. Coming from the slab?
Suddenly, a yellow orb appears over the slab.

* * *

As for the appearance of the monolith, we, the audience, know as little as the apes in the encampment. Even more, the very term “monolith” is not used immediately. In fact, we must wait for the last spoken words of the film by Heywood Floyd to know what we’re calling the black slab.

*

Stroll outside the encampment.
Dry. Dusty. Sand in eyes.
Look back.
The slab? Gone.
When? How?

*

Sand, dirt. Amid animal bones. Dig and scratch the ground.
Stop.
What?
Flash. A figure.
Yellow orb rising over the slab.
Grunt.
Move among the bones.
Hold large bone. Examine. Rotate.
Heavy.
Bang to the ground. Smash smaller bones. Shards fly.
Lift high above. Lower on the skull.
Image of creature flopping sideways to the ground.
Smashing bones in the ground fell the animal.
Fragments fly in eyes.

* * *

No greater assumption did I make (and not contradicted by anything I read) was the way the apes are affected by the monolith. Their first actions and the period immediately afterward suggest that the monolith did nothing for them. Only when Moonwatcher, poking through animal bones, picks up a large bone, we get a shot of the monolith with the sun rising over it. He raises the bone and smashes the bones on the ground. This leads to a shot of a tapir being felled. Then the ape tosses the bone away. Next shot has the ape and fellow apes munching animal flesh.

Among bones.
Monolith flashes on-screen for a moment.
Bones smashed.
Tapir felled.
Toss away the femur bone.

Two of these images occur in Moonwatcher’s mind. The felling of the tapir is imagined as a result of using the bone as a weapon. This mental image also supports the flash of the monolith.

For a long time, I believed – nor did I come across any contradiction to this – the ape glanced toward the encampment and happened to see the monolith at a propitious moment. It wasn’t until I read “Beyond the Infinite: A Structural Analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey” by Dumont and Monod2 that I found a better elaboration of what I saw on the screen. The image is a thought-memory when the apes first gathered around the monolith. This may seem unimportant because the monolith and Moonwatcher’s inspiration are strongly associated. However, the removal of the physical monolith from the scene makes the manner of its influence on future human beings more equivocal. Under any scenario, what the monolith is doing or supposed to be doing can’t be understood very well. Returning to my early contact with and interest in the film, the nature of alien intervention in the evolution of homo sapiens seems less directed, even less manipulated (until the thing is found on the Moon). So-called outside intervention in human development from apes would be most disturbing to anyone who believes God made humans in His image. Worse, maybe gods made creatures, but all human creatures have been peeled away.

* * *

Raw mouthful. Flesh. Tear in shreds. Taste unlike plants.
Feeling difference.
What’s the difference?
No hunger.
Raw taste.
Feeling something. Potent.
Raw intensity.

*

Thirst.
Creeping toward water. Hide behind the rise.
Hold large bones from the kill.
Moving slowly forward.
Others drink. Look up.
Noticed.
Growls. Howls. Shrieks.
Return howls and grunts. Wield bones.
Advance to water.
One grunts. Stands ground by the water.
Walks across the water. Threatens. Growls. Snarls.
Advance and swing. Bang skull. Snarlier falls. Twitches.
Others bang the body.
No motion.
Start toward others.
Gulping their fear. Pull back.
Snap at them.
Settle and drink.
Final growl.

* * *

This is why we could conceive of the apes’ situation as Kubrick’s desert parody of the Garden of Eden. The apes are tempted to improve themselves. Not with fruit. Into their midst a symmetrical slab appears. Made of a solid metal or stone substance. Unlike anything in the surrounding landscape. The form of its temptation might be a tree of knowledge. Unlike the self-knowledge and shame Adam and Eve feel after eating the apple, the apes become stronger and more confident. Moonwatcher tossing the bone in violent ecstasy into the air couldn’t be further from the shame Adam and Eve feel on leaving Paradise. Moonwatcher and his band find a way out of the wasteland and enter the Garden.

Is Kubrick depicting a Nietzschean affirmation of life? The ape has overcome himself. Our original sin: leaving the natural habitat and its ingrained, dead-end patterns. Before getting out of the desert, murder must be committed, echoing Cain’s killing of Abel. Territorial dispute over a waterhole. Moonwatcher and friends come with clubs, a primitive mafia. The first murder. Violence inflicted on its own species the first sign of our humanity, or at least a humanity defined by its tools, leading to human-ness.

Consider the monolith an instrument of alien gods. Do they know the future or foresee a potential future for the humanoid apes? Are the human capacities of apes a direct result of their contact with the monolith? How much can or will they intervene? It’s not a question of “teaching” the apes (a strategic reason for Kubrick to eliminate the notion of the “monolith teaching machine”). These apes couldn’t comprehend the proffered information or advice. They cannot be told to do it “this or that way.” Whoever placed it there – if “someone” placed it there – took a chance the monolith’s perfect and unnatural shape would make an impression? Could any of the ape groups have been influenced by it? Moonwatcher’s band appears the most in need. Perhaps the apes defeated at the waterhole would catch on, or eventually suffer extinction. But how exactly did the apes advance from vegetarian weaklings to inspired pack of predators who use bones as weapons to kill other apes and beasts?

* * *

Never felt this.
Regain lost ground.
Shirked up.
Shriek swagger shake.
Arms thrash.
Lose bone upward.
Ripely serious excitation.
No thirst and hunger.
How’d it happen?

*

It’s in three parts.
No, four parts.
Three.
Four.
Stop. You’re both right.
The Dawn of Man
Jupiter Mission
Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite.

The Dawn of Man has two parts, linked by Moonwatcher’s ecstatic bone toss, as the film jumps to the near future, the year 2000. Is this second part its own section or an extension of the ape section? The potential ambiguity lets us wonder whether 2001 is divided into three or four sections? Quick Google check:

Q: What are the four parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey?
A: The film is broken into four segments – Dawn of Man, Mission to the Moon, Mission to Jupiter, Re-Birth.

That’s something. Changes the last part from “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” to Re-Birth. That’s a leap. And it must believe Kubrick wants us to infer the second part: Mission to the Moon.

Here’s “individual interpretation” let out of the barn! Create your own film by dividing it the way you “think” it should be.
Google, elsewhere, also asks: What are the three parts?

Relief! Adhering to the film’s actual scheme.

* * *

If the second part of “The Dawn of Man” is its own section, why isn’t it titled?3 Why title the first and the third and fourth sections? It may be something to toss around for a while. Playing with the numbers 3 and 4. They add up to 7. They multiply into 12, an inverted 21, suggesting 2001. Kubrick numerology. I’ve spent time working out numbers in Dr Strangelove, going so far as breaking down the change Captain Lionel Mandrake needed to call the Pentagon. And don’t get me started on The Shining.

Including the “Mission to the Moon” with “the Dawn of Man” suggests that despite the extreme difference in tool-making ability and use (the bone becomes a nuclear satellite weapon), modern man is, as Nietzsche wrote, “more of an ape than the ape.” Just as the apes had reached a dead end before the monolith arrived, humans need another “way.” Our tools dominate as the desert habitat had dominated the apes. The monolith appears again at the end of “Dawn” to help humans (a fairly safe assumption) and will not appear again until the Discovery arrives in Jupiter’s orbit. After it has been unearthed on the Msoon, the monolith sends a signal that will be traced to Jupiter. Immediately before this, the scientists surround the monolith and Haywood Floyd touches it just as Moonwatcher did. The power, attraction, and mysterious attributes of the black slab unite the two parts of Dawn. How it helps, directing attention to Jupiter, is more direct than how the monolith directed the apes. I would note, also, when Floyd is en route to the Moon and stops at the satellite station, he has his own waterhole encounter, on a more refined level than the earlier one, with several Russian scientists. All this technological ingenuity and we’re still fighting over waterholes, though I remember a recent news report or magazine article proclaiming that sooner or later nations will be fighting over sources of fresh water.4

Moonwatcher, Heywood Floyd, and astronaut David Bowman could represent a single character. Mankind, in a sense, is enveloped in a 4-million-year-old circuit, coming around in a circle, trapped within a desire to get outside of ourselves. Subsequently, we enter other traps and dead ends, an evolutionary maze. In one of the shrewder images in the film, we first see Floyd on a space shuttle to the space station. He sleeps, and his arm hangs limply while his pen floats in the air near his hand like a spaceship. This limp arm suggests a previous isolated shot of Moonwatcher’s arm and hand when he crashed the bone into the pile of other bones, splintering them apart. Supporting the idea that this first space sequence belongs within “The Dawn of Man,” the film suggests a continuum between the strong arm of Moonwatcher and the limp one of the scientific bureaucrat. We have advanced and receded at the same time, as if these two images tell us the secret of the problem of relying on tools. Further, that all our progresses embody similar regressions and dead ends.

* * *

Another way to look at the bone/spaceship jump cut that furthers my feeling about the unity of “The Dawn of Man.” We have an extended time space of 4 million years plus, as well as farewell to Earth (237,000 miles approximately, if you believe the Shining Fake Moon Landing cabalists). I came across the following passage in Michel Serres’s Times of Crisis dealing with the abandonment of agriculture:

However, humanity has worked the earth and lived off it since Neolithic times. This recent break can be considered going way beyond usual history because it ends a stretch of time that started in prehistory. We can say the 20th century and especially the years between 1960 and 1970, the Neolithic period came to an end.5

2001, deliberately buried in this decade, we discover it and a signal pierces of mind. A new era has now begun for the cinematic world.

PART II DENATURED

The world of the astronauts and scientists on the space station and Moon could be thought of as denatured. How is this different than being dehumanized, since one of the first definitions of denature is “dehumanize”? The latter has a stronger connotation. The process of being dehumanized comes largely from the oppression of other human beings – slavery, for example. Regarding a person as less than human is another. The people we see in space in 2001 are not dehumanized in this sense. To be denatured is to lose one’s “natural qualities,” and one can apply this to humans living in space. We never see nature, and it is only briefly touched on when Floyd’s daughter asks to have a bush baby (Galago: small nocturnal primate native to sub-Saharan Africa, called “bush baby” because of its cries and/or its appearance, and make poor pets). The loss of or separation from nature seems a “natural” progression in a technological society capable of moon travel. I would use denature as a good explanation for the assumption or long-considered view that 2001’s characters have very little emotion. The film subsequently carries this to an ironic point: the most denatured character, the very definition of having no nature, is HAL, who appears to have or express more emotion than all the characters combined. This might be a trap because HAL’s inventors endowed the computer with a sympathetic voice, and it is natural for us to take the next step and believe HAL has some consciousness. Even Dave Bowman tells the BBC interviewer that he’s unsure HAL has any real emotion. And later, Dave tells Frank that he wonders how HAL will react to beingdeprogrammed, at the very moment that the computer is reading their lips.

* * *

Incidental to the denatured humans in 2001 comes the often-made observation that the film’s dialogue is banal. The conversation in the moon bus with Floyd and two others has been criticized or viewed as a weakness. What are these viewers responding to?

“Well, anybody hungry?” asks Dr. Michaels as he brings food in a plastic case to Floyd and Halverstam.
“What’ve we got?” Floyd asks.
“You name it?”
“What’s that, chicken?”
“Something like that. Tastes the same, anyway.”
“Ham, ham, ham, ham. Yeah there.”
“They look pretty good,” says Floyd.
“They’re getting better at it all the time?”

They are approaching one of the most astounding discoveries in human history, indisputable evidence of alien life, and they are discussing processed sandwiches. The apparent banality of the scene may be an example of the remote but firm humor in 2001, first encountered when Floyd reads the lengthy instructions for using a toilet in zero gravity. However, the exchange also amplifies the denatured life of the year 2000 in space. They’ve come a long way from the apes munching raw meat, and the apes weren’t worried about the taste nor are the scientists.

 

After telling Floyd about the morale-building speech he gave back at the American base, Michaels gets down to business and shows the photos of the dig that exposed the monolith. He explains how the structure was discovered. It was part of a larger structure. Halversham then says:

“What’s more, the evidence seems very conclusive that it hasn’t been covered up by natural erosion or other forces. It seems to have been deliberately buried.”
“Deliberately buried,” Floyd muses.
“Well, how about a little coffee?”
“Oh, great.”
“Good idea.”
“I suppose you don’t have any idea what the damn thing is?” Floyd asks.
“Wish the hell we did. The only thing we’re sure of is it was buried 4 million
years ago.”
“Well, I must say,” says Floyd, “you guys have certainly come up with something.”

Again, the conversation doesn’t live up to the romantic or melodramatic notions we expect after a so-called seminal find, something that could affect how humans view themselves, from the personal to the religious to the philosophical perspective. But it does provide important exposition via inference. The ape sequence occurred 4 million years ago. Whoever placed it on Earth also took it to the Moon, but their burying it brings up many questions. How sure were “they” that humans would get to the Moon, let alone find it? In the original Clarke story, the crystal spheroid was on the Moon surface, was never on Earth, and the aliens who put it there had some (reasonable or unreasonable, is not known) expectation that it would be discovered.

Observations about this conversation are offered not as a criticism of the film but more a condemnation of a world stultified by sophisticated technology, in fact, a dominating technology, to which humans seem to be oblivious. Yet look where it’s taken us. Space stations. Moon colonies. A mission to Jupiter. But I want to return to a general desire by 2001’s audience to sentimentalize the situation. We anticipate conversation that pertains to the science fiction element: contact with alien life. Just as we might expect the characters, like Heywood Floyd, to be in perpetual awe of their life in space. Yet when Floyd telephones his daughter, he talks to her while the planet Earth appears in the background. We are wowed; he’s absorbed in a banal conversation. Also, the conversations on the space wheel, the Moon, and, soon, the Discovery, have little or no discussion of ideas, no questions about the mission. Until HAL trips up in the next part of the film. I’m not sure what we would expect these people to say to one another. Early critics took aim at the dialogue as an aspect of the film’s weakness. Who knows how impatient they were getting when the first words were spoken, words of greeting to Floyd when he enters the space wheel. Worse, the first viewers of the film had an additional 20 minutes of wordlessness, which allows us to address Kubrick’s strategy.

The absence of the spoken word and the long-drawn-out stretches of space travel, ape antics, and, perhaps, Star Gate gazing, allow us to watch what is on the screen, take it, and dwell on it for great stretches. Our way of watching a movie becomes distinctly different from anything we’ve seen before, unless one is an aficionado of experimental films.

PART III: THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY

Many films critical of our machine-dominated world have themselves employed technologically complex special effects to underwrite their mission. Besides 2001, The Matrix and Terminator films immediately come to mind. Making movies by definition means employing the very devices Luddite films warn us about. It would be hasty to say that Luddite films “hate” technology. It’s more like they are illustrating the deleterious effects of a technologically driven society. Specifically, the films show how we have increasingly allowed the machines to dominate us. We are increasingly losing touch with not only nature but our inner nature.

An informative rendering of the technological trap is found in the more light-spirited film The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980). One day in the middle of the Kalahari (suggestive of 2001’s opening shots), a band of !Kung tribesman are observed in Edenic innocence. Life is tough but the !Kung appear content finding the necessities to sustain them day to day because they have no desire for things. Where one does not want, desires cannot torment the soul. In 2001, the ape band lives in a diminished Eden and growing powerlessness if not imminent extinction (the latter is suggested in Clarke’s novel). In a sense, Kubrick dispenses with a sinless vision of prehuman man, and from this one could infer that his view of progress and the means to that progress are not completely fatalistic.

When it was released in the United States in 1984, Jamie Uys’s The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980) achieved the highest box office ever for a foreign film. The film satirizes Western civilization’s over-dependence on technology, yet its tone is never severe, dogmatic, or apocalyptic. We could better serve it by creating a different category, like “civilization versus noncivilization” movie, as it points out the dangers of being hypercivilized and of humans having lost their better instincts. A narrator introduces us to a Kalahari desert tribe, the !Kung (in their language an exclamation point refers to a click of the tongue while the word is pronounced). They survive in a harsh desert, generally in a pleasant state of mind because there are few things to tempt them. Most importantly, there’s nothing to suggest there could be anything much better. Their situation seems little different from the apes in 2001, except that the !Kung are not dominated or threatened by another tribe or in a desperate circumstance.6

Into their camp drops an empty Coke bottle, the ultimate symbol of our civilization’s productivity and waste. In a stark parody of “the Dawn of Man,” the bottle becomes an instrument of great change. The narrator says that it is the hardest object they have ever found, and the group finds many uses for it and gets great happiness from those uses. They deem the bottle a gift from the gods. Uys’s comedy reveals parallels that allow us to probe the facets and meaning of the monolith, perhaps making it less mysterious. The first of these would be the source of the unnatural object that has such significant impact.

Who are these “gods” of the !Kung? They soar above the desert and create jet streams in the sky. We never get a theological perspective from the Bushmen.7 It is hard to say how much the gods are respected, but in the film the gods are us. As long as we remain unknown to the natives, our reputation as being larger than life (the !Kung’s life) remains solid. The gods (of the title) aren’t very far from the denatured world of the second half of “The Dawn of Man” and the “Jupiter Mission” when humans have reached the apotheosis of scientific, engineering, and technological progress. But the “god” who dropped the Coke bottle is engaging in a sophisticated form of littering. The satirically plausible analogy would have 2001’s ancient aliens dropping a piece of junk among a band of apes, causing the evolutionary change. Further, their taking the monolith and burying it could be seen as using the Moon as a landfill! The sound emitted by the unearthed (or unmooned) monolith suggests the reason it was buried: humans begin a quest to find out who’s been leaving this junk. It should be remembered that all the monolith means to Heywood Floyd and the scientific/political community is that it confirms the presence of extraterrestrials, not necessarily how the monolith has had an effect on human development. We might see the aliens directing human destiny, that is, acting godlike. To an extent, the humanoid apes have been given the initial rudiments to develop a soul.

How much the Biblical God intervened in human history may be, with significant exceptions, overestimated: dispatching Adam and Eve from Eden; banishing Cain; the burning bush; giving Moses the Ten Commandments. The truth is that God gradually disappears from the Scriptures,8 and finding Him may be as difficult as tracking aliens bestowing gifts. Kubrick remarked on this in his 1968 Playboy interview:

I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001 but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don’t believe in any of Earth’s monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe. Given a planet in a stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the interaction of a sun’s energy on the planet’s chemicals, it’s fairly certain that life in one form or another will eventually emerge. It’s reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact, countless billions of such planets where biological life has arisen, and the odds of some proportion of such life developing intelligence are high. Now, the Sun is by no means an old star, and its planets are mere children in cosmic age, so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the universe not only where intelligent life is on a lower scale than man but other billions where it is approximately equal and others still where it is hundreds of thousands of millions of years in advance of us. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia – less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe – can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities – and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.9

Typically, Kubrick reveals his clear thinking without giving up much about the film’s intentions. The alien intervention may be nothing more than prods or pokes. Our potential meeting with them is obscured by the passage through the Star Gate and ending in a Louis XVIth decor-ed bedroom. Kubrick’s remarks set up the parameters of the alien contact theme, but he refuses to comment on the intervention. Nothing in any of his films suggest that we should accept the premise that the word of anyone is good enough for us to believe unquestioned.10 Kubrick’s “intriguing scientific definition of God” struck religious groups in an unexpected way:

The National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures even bestowed on the film its 1968 award for “Best Film of Educational Value.” Both Kubrick and Clarke were bemused by the positive response the film received from religious groups. As far as they were concerned the film was about an alien species directing human evolution, not God. But for certain religious audiences, the important point of the movie was the recognition that evolution is too complex a process to happen without external intervention. Kubrick and Clarke called it advanced alien technology, religious communities called it God.11

Aliens directing human evolution might be an overarching concern of the film’s plot, and a hobbyhorse for Arthur C. Clarke, but the lack of specifics or specific techniques associated with the monolith makes much of this a secondary concern. Contact with aliens, on Earth or beyond Earth, has nearly always had the aliens being superior to humans. It’s nearly inconceivable to believe differently.

* * *

When do things go wrong in the !Kung tribe with the gift from above? Ironically, they find the bottle too useful. Everyone wants it for different tasks and they fight for possession. This causes the adults and children alike to have emotions like envy and selfishness that they had never experienced. They feel a shame analogous to Adam and Eve’s after eating the forbidden fruit. However, they preserve their innocence by casting the bottle out of their paradise. Their leader, Xi (N!xau), initially tries to solve the Coke bottle problem by throwing it back into the sky and nearly clunks himself on the head. After a tribal council, he resolves to take it to and throw it over the edge of the Earth. The removal of this original sin is possible because the group’s small size allows it to detect more quickly and unequivocally the noxious aspect of this godsend. I mentioned how it’s nigh impossible to think of aliens being inferior to humans, and the same could be said for the near improbability of people rejecting a technique or method that would remarkably better their physical existence, especially if one lived in the Kalahari. The apes in 2001 don’t have the consciousness or sense or foresight to deliberate over the effects of using animal bones (tools) to better their collective existence. However, in our history, there have been many institutions and rulers who have rejected obvious progresses. The Roman emperors and papacy come to mind, although their motives were self-serving.

* * *

Most of The Gods shows Xi’s encounters with civilized people who have apparently been progressively dumbed down by their technological improvements. We are proved to be “crazy.” Only after he overcomes civilization’s barriers can he accomplish his mission: tossing the Coke bottle over the end of the Earth. The comedic film follows three separate plot lines. First, Xi encounters the odd rituals of the technological world on his way to getting rid of the evil object, the Coke bottle. The second has Mr. Stayn, a scientist working in the game reserve, meeting Miss Thompson, a schoolteacher to whom he’s attracted, but Stayn cannot do anything right around women. The third has Sam Boga lead an unsuccessful military insurrection whence he’s pursued into a neighboring country. Boga takes Miss Thompson’s class hostage during his flight. Mr. Stayn and Xi, who temporarily works as a guide, help free the hostages, capture Boga and his men, and Stayn finally is able to relate his feelings to Miss Thompson. Little about the plot informs the anti-technology themes, except that most of the characters appear slightly ridiculous. In no small measure, The Gods suggests that civilized people are emotional cripples, due in great part to their alienation from the simple, basic things needed to survive. The world has become too complicated and contrived.

Director Jamie Uys specializes in capturing the quirky aspects of human and animal life. His first major feature, Animals Are Beautiful People (1974), serves as a good introduction to the mood created by The Gods Must Be Crazy. It starts with the narrator of both films, Paddy O’Byrne. Listening to him gives me the feeling that the two films are attached at a very basic level. His voice gives Gods a documentary feel. What he says about the Bushmen in the Kalahari has the same authority as when he describes the animals in the Namib desert. In Animals, Uys depicts the various fauna and reptiles in an anthropomorphic way. He views nature through a human lens to demonstrate that humans are little different from animals. Likewise, he pokes fun at civilization in Gods, showing it to be an elaborate, confusing version of the tribal Bushmen.

Looking back at both films, I can’t help feeling there’s a missing dimension. The animals shown in the 1974 film have come under increasing attack, and many face extinction. The feel-good formula of Animals Are Beautiful People doesn’t work as well anymore. The same with Gods. Native peoples in the Kalahari or the Arctic or Brazil have also been facing extinction, and to enjoy the film one cannot think too deeply about the fate of the !Kung.

PART IV: GOING TO THE APES

Memorial Day, 1968. Two friends and I went to the Theater 1812 on Chestnut Street, Philadelphia. We got there and saw that the Indianapolis 500 was being shown on live circuit and the first 2001 show wouldn’t be until late afternoon. Distraught but not discouraged, we decided to see another movie that had also excited our interest, Planet of the Apes. Only a few blocks away. This might have been enough for one afternoon. It war around five o’clock. Should we stay in town even though the film wouldn’t get out until eight? Hesitating, but not for long, we walked back to Theater 1812.

Both movies had superficial resemblances. Each presented apelike beings, one with apes evolving into humans, the other with humans having succumbed to apes in the future. At the time, Planet of the Apes was lauded and eventually rewarded with an Oscar for its ape outfits. I didn’t understand why 2001’s apes weren’t also given consideration if only because those apes looked more like apes! Ape costumes aside, the opening segment testified to the realism of the film and the impact it would have on a generation of moviegoers who have returned to the film many times. The realism supplied an overwhelming impression that 2001 speculated seriously about the fundamental nature of mankind. What made human what they are. Was our evolution actually affected by aliens? What made humans so violent? Was there any redemption for our violent nature? We are given a doomsday premise in Planet of the Apes. As in 2001, humans have come to the end of the line, their destruction symbolized by the disembodied Statue of Liberty.

In his book Flying Saucers, Carl Jung notes that the belief in extraterrestrial life represents a search for a transcendent answer to life’s complexities and mysteries. The decades of the 1960s and ’70s had a notable idealistic and spiritual (evangelical and New Age) flair, such that this time has been called the Third Great Awakening. The response to 2001, in part, was governed by a mystical element. For me, the story of the film touched a similar nerve, especially in the way it held back much tantalizing information. Unlike Planet of the Apes, there was no definite moment of revelation. Only if one knows how to look would one find an answer. Much of my initial thought about the film focused specifically on figuring out how 2001 settled these many uncertain issues. Planet of the Apes offers little speculation.

When one finally learned about Kubrick’s decisions to suppress any kind of narration or the appearance of images on the monolith inside the apes’ encampment, it was apparent that few answers would be forthcoming. Why did he do this? This story of evolution was not meant to solve the mystery of a missing link or a prime mover (be it an alien, God, or an evolutionary leap). Kubrick had chosen “outside” intervention to stimulate the ape, but how it became stimulated and evolved comments on the baroque way the monolith had affected the apes. The monolith did not whisper into the ape’s ear or provide instructions for making tools.

* * *

A film enters our lives, and we may or may not have responded to or been changed by it. Now, the monolith appears. The ape commonly known as Moonwatcher touches the slab. An eerie sounding track from György Ligeti fills this moment with near mystical momentousness. Later, amid the bones of dead animals, a bone in hand, Moonwatcher recalls the strange, unnatural shape of the monolith. Recalling it and using the bone as a tool/weapon coincide. That’s the stimulus. But it is enough. The enemy apes at the waterhole would have a big surprise waiting for them!

* * *

Passing from Planet of the Apes to 2001 has greater meaning in retrospect. One didn’t realize the gulf between the two moviegoing experiences. More than a gulf or difference or even chasm, because of their similarities: projection of the future, altered evolution, prominence of apes. Not that Planet of the Apes lacked impact and production values. It outdistances previous science fiction films. The same with 2001. It would take time to distinguish them as cinematic entities. Planet of the Apes is a quintessential science fiction film, whereas 2001 has become an entity unto itself, not a genre destructor but simply genreless.12

The best illustration of this last point would be to examine their respective impacts on the moviegoing world. Planet of the Apes spawned four sequels, one a year from 1970 to 1974. Immediately afterward, there was a television series from September to December 1974, 14 episodes. Then in 2001, Tim Burton produced a successful remake, over $300 million box office, starring Mark Wahlberg. Surprisingly, sequels didn’t emerge from this success. However, 10 years late, Rise of the Planet of the Apes created a prequel to ape domination and attracted an even larger box office ($481 million). Then came Dawn of (2014) and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), matching Rise’s success. This new series also garnered favorable reviews, something the original Apes sequels couldn’t. Planet of the Apes’ general idea persists and testifies to continued interest, if not demand, for science fiction action, a not-so-distant relative of the fantasy action of Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Marvel franchises.

Beside Planet of the Apes, 2001, despite its huge box office and critical success (reaching its apogee in 2022 by being voted the #1 film in the BFI Directors poll), seems like a lonely adult actively seeking refuge and popular anonymity. A sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, appeared in 1984, based on Arthur C. Clarke’s Odyssey 2. It didn’t reach Ape box office, but fairly respectable, just not enough to greenlight more movies, although Clarke had written two more books. 2010 could be compared to the Ape sequel because the appeal lay in the science fiction genre elements: viewers wanting to know what happened to Bowman, HAL, and the monolith, as well as hoping for explanations. Director and scenarist Peter Hyams appeals to the sense of having a purposeful result to all this “2001 business” by providing a plot effecting peace between the United States and the Soviet Union (all we need is Klaatu to check in every 10 years to make sure the truce holds). In Hyams’s zeal to complete the 2001 circle/cycle, he alienated most Kubrick loyalists by making this sequel so literals by pursuing a science fiction element.13 The antithesis of what a Kubrick film does. 2001 takes the path not taken most of the time in cinematic art. Few films can actually take this way; for if all films evaded genre, there would be no film industry. We must embrace the Ape films and even 2010.

INTERLUDE

Monolith : the apes :: the film : the audience of the film. Who receives the monolith: a matter of chance and randomness. Reappearance of the monolith represents our subsequent viewings of 2001. If we are so inclined, we dispatch our intellects on an interpretive journey. Interpreting-understanding 2001 means some form of progress, a progress not guaranteed to last. Viewing after viewing of the film may result in stagnation or staleness of our interpretations. Or a surfeit of interpretations gets us there.

* * *

Are the humanoid apes only getting one chance to overcome their apeness? There won’t be a second chance or lesson from a future monolith? No sequels? Aliens : humanoid apes :: Kubrick :: the audiences. Nature of Kubrick and his intentions:

1. Continual anti-authoritarian message.
2. Mistrust anyone who says they know what is what (Nietzschean dismissal of disciples expressed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra): Do Not Follow Leaders.14
3. Attitude toward alien intervention: skeptical over motives – subsequently, he minimizes what the Aliens/monolith “tell” humans.
4. Monolith more a suggestion: apes are free to ignore it (in fact, why did the apes who lost the second waterhole battle get left out of the loop?).
5. Moonwatcher and friends hog the message-information-technique: His clan uses new techniques to develop a political agenda!! Us versus Them becomes the primary structure of human contact.15
6. The monolith’s “use” changes: first buried on the Moon, then floating around Jupiter’s moons. The film’s evolution into allegory.
7. Envision HAL as that which becomes an independent reality – thus having it both ways: HAL as doing its own thing as a machine programmed by humans and a machine that acts with some premeditation. Not an either/or. Likewise, no final answer for the identity of those who placed the monolith on Earth and the Moon – nor does it really matter from the film’s point of view.

* * *

What has our progress wrought? By the year 2001, our tools dominate us and have denatured the human species. We are too clever for our own good. On his flight to the Moon, scientist Heywood Floyd stands before the restroom on the spaceship pondering the long list of instructions on how take a crap in zero gravity. The look on his face suggests that he might hold it in until he reaches the Clavius moon base. 2001 influences films made before it. The film becomes one’s religion after a while. A religion without “shalts” and “wilts.” Kubrick: 2001 :: Jesus Christ: Christianity (or founder: organization).

* * *

“Anecdote of the Monolith”
I placed a monolith in a desert patch
and symmetrical it was
made the apes surround it
took dominion over the species
the monolith was bare and black
like nothing else before or after
Then it appears on the Moon in a different aspect
the astronaut-scientists surround it
and take a picture of themselves before it
When an ear-shattering sound explodes in their helmets
And again floats in space in an absence of context
nearly disappearing in plain sight
Finally, at the bottom of the bed it stands tall
Dave reaches forward and points
a baby forms on the bed then catapults into the monolith
the job is done

* * *

The bone Moonwatcher grasps is not just a bone. Are consciousness and violence born simultaneously? The bone makes a fine weapon. Others apes want the weapon. Dawn of mimetic desire.

* * *

The Pieta. Dave’s pod holds Frank. Recognizing the Michelangelo statue initiates an association with Christ. The Redeemer. Frank is a willing sacrifice of the technological power that powered the astronauts to Jupiter. Dave will devolve this mechanistic power, redeem humankind, and open the gates to new capabilities.

* * *

Much is made of the future envisioned in 2001. Perhaps its importance, as such, is reflected in the film’s realism but not as something predictive. Place this “future” in the same scrap heap with the aliens, as well as HAL as “an independent thinker/killer.”

* * *

Stop living in the eternity of the machines. A plotting of concepts vs. a plotting of events. A tale told by a hominid ape.

* * *

Keep returning to the influences of the monolith.

Part V: CHANCE OF IT BEING THERE

“I understand.” – Chauncey Gardner

Chauncey Gardner’s name is derived from Eve Rand’s (Shirley MacLaine) mishearing him saying “Chance the gardener.” The garden wisdom that mesmerizes the public keynotes his naturalness, his absence of pretense and phoniness. However, the name “Chance” strikes more deeply into the universe clued by television. Whenever he watches television, he both apes what he watches (a practice he hilariously follows in the real world when given the message for Rafael) and changes channels from what he watches. Everything catches his attention, but he cannot stay with anything for very long because of boredom or Benjy Compson-like jerkiness caused by unconscious responses to the images on the screen. The arbitrariness of what he watches might represent a model of a universe that itself is naturally arbitrary; man, the natural animal man, becomes that very universe of unmeaning and senselessness.

Being There’s (1979) ultimate satiric point might well be that what the world finds most profound, most insightful, becomes the gateway to an arbitrary society. No one will then be able to answer why study this or that or why observe this or that law. All has become chance. Our parents met by chance, as all parents met by chance, and what we are becomes the sum of a universe of chance happenings. All meaning dissolves within this universe of chance. And we come to believe all viewpoints are valid. All life devolves to chance. To an extent everything can be explained away. Society, the world, melts into the indistinct.

The televisual (Chauncey Gardner) brings us closer to the world and, simultaneously, keeps us distant from it. Metaphorically, we have fallen in love with television and become its mistress. When Ben (Melvyn Douglas) consents to, in fact insists on, Eve’s affair with Chauncey (Peter Sellers), she (like us) becomes a willing mistress drawn to this thing that gives her (us) everything except itself. One is reminded of Sterling Hayden’s line to Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove (1964) explaining his moral and sexual fatigue: “I don’t avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.” Television’s gravity and all-inclusiveness seem to be taking us somewhere, to places our spouses, our “real” lives, can’t take us, can’t do for us. As willing mistresses, we ignore our master’s indifference to our truest, basic needs. We wait for television to respond. We grow older, duller, more fallen. Meanwhile, we virtually become televisions. Chance/Chauncey has virtually pioneered a new version of the American Dream. Only, the revolution will not be televised because Chance has preempted it with his own revolution. We live to become a personality (individual) remote yet close, detached but knowing empathy. What’s not acknowledged by television (Chance) does no exist. The beauty of it all is that we never recognize that we have ceased to exist.

* * *

Chance is about to leave his house after more than 50 years inside. Kicked out. Completely unfamiliar with his surroundings, which turn out to be in a rundown section of Washington, DC. In an overcoat and hat, he carries a large suitcase. Music wells up. Familiar music but in a jazzier form. “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” Richard Strauss styled into jazz-funk by Brazilian Eumir Deodato. Composed in 1973, winner of a Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance, it strikes one as an aural joke. It calls to mind immediately 2001 and contrasts the idiot with 2001’s aural trope of human progress. On my first several viewings I considered it humorous, superficial, and insignificant to the film’s meaning. I had never heard of Deodato until I purchased a jazz fusion disc with pieces from Weather Report, Chick Corea, and others. The penultimate piece was “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” I had written several articles on Being There, and after hearing Deodato’s rendition, I focused on Hal Ashby’s intention of using it beyond creating a snarky allusion to Kubrick’s film Could I take the inference literally? Was there a meaningful connection between Chance and the monolith?

* * *

The two films offer critiques of our technological society. As mentioned earlier, 2001 shows the extent humans are shaped by their tools and techniques. The monolith comes to represent the medium for our means to escape an evolutionary dead end. Being There focuses on television. In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger finds danger in technology’s ability to reveal aspects of the world and that man might misinterpret this revealing for the truth. He also writes that the televisual represents the essence of technology. That’s why the world of television excretes its own ethos and endures separately from television’s content (McLuhan’s contention in Understanding Media). Television becomes like life, a life stated in Being There’s final words as “a state of mind.” Television as an ethos affects us whether we watch television or not. Television becomes the means by which humans are separated from nature (a primary fear of Heidegger, who noted how we have become distanced from most of the things we use every day, that is, we are far down the chain from the making of those things), to the point of becoming denatured. Chance might seem the most extreme example of this. He was born mentally deficient and did little else than watch television. He is a blank slate, a human slab of indifferent meaningfulness. A walking, talking monolith. His metamorphosis might seem ironic, given the exaltation given to 2001’s monolith’s potential, but we haven’t seen how others will respond to him.

He encounters Eve Rand, who takes him to her mansion, starting a series of events that move Chance to being considered a presidential candidate. This happens because he’s a blank slate. He knows nothing except what he can repeat, either from television shows or the occasional remark made by someone nearby. For example, he has tended a garden his entire life and repeats general statements about gardening that listeners apply to their lives, the economy, or politics. The absence of any meaning is applied to the present context by Benjamin Rand, the president (Jack Warden), a television interviewer, and the television audience. His blankness becomes irresistible. Not unlike the ways 2001’s monolith becomes a tabula rasa for interpretation. The desire to make something out of it often fits into our view of the world (I accept that I do this) or a need to find a savior. I say the latter because of Being There’s ending, when Chance, walking in the woods, comes upon a small lake and begins to walk on the water. He saves our society, removes our spiritual and material dead ends. Being There satirizes a society becoming incapable of discerning gibberish from clear thinking.

Chance as monolith shades the ostensible progressions humans make from ape to human to superhuman (post-human). Does the Star Child represent a desirable end, an answer to the crisis encompassing modern human life? How much can we trust the Star Child, or is it another form of Chauncey Gardner? We don’t know the Star Child’s game plan. Or is it merely an exaggerated metaphor for the necessity for humans to overcome themselves? Perhaps eliminate themselves? What’s more enigmatic: the monolith or the Star Child?

* * *

Chance as monolith. If he doesn’t represent progress for mankind, do we leap to the opposite conclusion: the regression of our society, the same society empowered by technology and enfeebled by television? Not much different from what we see in 2001. The technological connective tissue between 2001 and Being There might simply be a pretext to look for the monolith’s deeper significance. The importance of a man being called Chance can’t be overlooked.

The natural and the gratuitous merge in Chauncey Gardner. Chance as monolith represents a latent gratuitous element of the slab’s arrival in the ape camp. The chance of it not achieving its desired (by the aliens) end is further aggravated by the discovery of it buried on the Moon. Monolith qua monolith epitomizes the precariousness of human existence and the inspiration it triggers to steer humans from the precipice of extinction. Put most simply: Will the black symmetrical slab make an impression? Seeing the monolith represent 2001 itself puts the film in the same mystifying category. You either get it or not. You may not get it immediately, but at some point in the future, purely through a chance viewing, it will inspire a different response.16

* * *

The poignancy of having the monolith representing chance or the gratuitousness of life struck me slowly. It started with my reading a commentary on Full Metal Jacket that mentioned the scene when Cowboy gets shot by the sniper. His buddies carry him out of the sniper’s range and vainly try to stop his bleeding. We’re focused on their effort and Cowboy’s final gasps of breath. Behind them, a short distance away, a fire burns out of a stone or brick wall, the building obliterated. To many who have delved deeply into the Kubrick canon, the burning wall equivocally evoked a monolith. Given the chance, anyone connected with the film dismissed its presence as an accident and unintentional, by Kubrick or other production members. No meaning where none intended. I mostly agreed with this. Beyond its appearance in the bombed-out wasteland of Hue during the Tet Offensive, no one has elaborated on the burning monolith’s significance or purpose then and there in Full Metal Jacket. Perhaps the sighting titillated Kubrick-philes as a self-reflective reference to 2001, like the presence of the 2001 soundtrack in the music boutique in A Clockwork Orange. From bits of dialogue to repeated images, the burning monolith became part of the Kubrick kaleidoscope of citation excitation. The timing of its appearance, however, prompts me to elaborate on its purpose, intended or not.

Cowboy (Arliss Howard) and the Lust Hog squad take cover behind a building. Doc J and Eightball have already been killed by a sniper. Cowboy stands where a hole has been blown in the wall. The camera focuses through the hole where the sniper fires. Cowboy falls with an explosion of blood and is carried away. He’s the latest in a chain of leaders who have been shot and killed. The first mentioned victim is JFK, brought up by Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) during boot camp when he asks who shot Kennedy. Hartman will be the second victim, shot by Private Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio) in the lavatory. The platoon leader, Crazy Earl (Kieron Jecchinis), died after picking up a booby trap. I elaborated on this trend in the film, suggesting we should be wary of anyone thrust in a position of leadership or authority, where our lives are in their hands. Joker had previously asked Cowboy, who took over the squad after Crazy Earl, whether they were lost, which greatly irritated Cowboy: “Joker, shut the fuck up.” He then leads the squad into a trap.

The circumstance of Cowboy’s death interests me enough to relate it to the burning monolith. It is pure chance that he exposed himself to the sniper; his death bears extra indignity and pity because of this. And it should be enough, except that he dies under a burning block of bricks resembling a monolith. What, if any meaning, can we take away?17 The confluence of a luckless death with a monolith throws some purpose on the monolith’s positioning and, subsequently, how it may have functioned in 2001. I asked in Part I how the aliens could have been certain of the monolith’s ability to affect the apes. Further, instead of leaving it on Earth, they decide to bury it on the Moon. The chance of something happening, transforming, seems remote. And one might wonder what the aliens have to gain. They leave a trail ending with Bowman traveling into infinite space and ending up in a bedroom. If that’s all part of the plan, their power of foresight must be commended.

Kubrick’s films abound with plans, not the least being his personal plans to complete his films. He has much in common with one of his most significant planners, Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), in The Killing. Johnny steals over a million dollars from a racetrack. Interestingly, his clockwork-like plan, including his use of non-hoodlums, is compromised from the start by Sherry (Marie Windsor), wife of the racetrack cashier, George (Elisha Cook Jr.). She reveals enough to her hoodlum boyfriend, Val (Vince Edwards), who will let Johnny rob the track and then take the money from Johnny and his crew. While frustrating the plan, Val’s own plan is impinged by bad luck when Johnny is delayed coming to the rendezvous. Weaving through many obstacles, Johnny and his fiancée reach the airport and are about to board a flight across the country with most of the cash. Waiting to board, a more gratuitous and unlikely element collapses Johnny’s future. A dog, Sebastian, gets scared by a plane’ propellers and runs onto the tarmac, causing a cart to swerve and the suitcase falls to the ground. The money flies in a tornado-like circle, the wind whipped by the same plane that scared Sebastian. Maybe I should have put the following in a footnote, so as not to be seen as reading too much into the scene when Johnny picks up the bag of money in a shabby cabin rental. He enters and the bag sits three feet tall on the bed. He had originally tossed it blindly out a second-floor window, the plan calling for Randy, a cop, to be waiting below and take it to the cabin. For a moment the bag stands there like a cloth monolith. In hindsight, its appearance is a signal that Johnny is at a crossroads: the plan will proceed like clockwork, or it will disintegrate because of forces that can’t be anticipated. However, those forces, like unreliable partners such as George or criminal predators like Val, still didn’t prevent him from getting the bag of money. No, another kind of arbitrary force, beyond destiny or fate, an unanticipated element hidden far behind the regular unexpected desires of humans, in the guise, this time, of Sebastian. It’s similar to the workings of Plan R in Dr Strangelove. By not anticipating a lunatic general sending bombers to the USSR, you can’t condemn the plan because of one little slipup. Except the slipup meets another unanticipated element, the Doomsday Machine, whose plan it was to intimidate any form of nuclear attack.

Perfect plans always come up short. For all we know, the aliens may have been unshakably optimistic in their monolithic device. Indeed, we can never know how well they succeeded. Their Astral Foetus may be exactly what they wanted. Only they know how the monolith’s going to work. The Earth’s greatest problem seems to have stemmed from the effect of the monolith on the apes. Once out of the prehistoric Eden, did humans not live up to the alien standards? Dave Bowman did overcome the machine intelligence that stifled human emotions by separating us from nature; no more will humans be subjugated to tools and machines. He had to or he would never have gone beyond the Infinite.

* * *

In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a massive black slab, the monolith, stands at the center of the film. In this new reading of 2001, the monolith is used as a touchstone for considering a dozen tangents into iconoclastic cinema, the human and simian response to enigma, and the mind-bending idea that a film can actually be what it observes. Many vain attempts are made in the film to come to terms with what the monolith is, but for some reason the monolith cannot be spoken of and it can hardly be touched. For the last half-century, many critical witnesses have taken turns to talk about the film. But as can be shown, Kubrick’s film defies interpretation every time, leaving us to wonder how any commentator can have learned so little from this legacy of failure to still think that 2001 is accessible hermeneutically. This new reading joyfully accepts defeat at last and asks openly: What are we left with now? Fortunately, once the critical effort to outflank the artifact is abandoned, and once our claims-to-meaning as such are laid to rest, a superabundance of sensory and emotional vitality returns to our experience of this film. It is a return to the body after too long a period of living in the desolation of the mind.

* * *

Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the film.