The Great Galactic Chess Hustle: Kubrick, Bricolage, and Collective Memory

Of all the visual art forms, film is the most improvisational, requiring the most thorough collection of spare pieces. In order for a film to work its magic, it must bring together discrete strands of sensual experience – the human body, the human voice, music, constructed environments, cosmetics, costumes, ambient sounds, staged displays of violence – along with elements of text, myth, and ideology. In a Playboy interview published after 2001 debuted, Kubrick said, “The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.”

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One of the most persistent myths of the Cold War era was that the July 1969 moon landing had been faked, that what was being beamed to national and international audiences on television was actually an elaborately crafted movie, a virtual event staged by none other than Stanley Kubrick. Undoubtedly, there were certain scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) that had lodged themselves in the collective consciousness of Americans, particularly the sequence showing Dr. Heywood Floyd’s flight to the moon on a shuttle craft and a subsequent scene where a team of scientists, led by Floyd, investigate the mysterious monolith that had been discovered just below the lunar surface. The film’s special effects were advanced for the time; in fact, the clarity of the images far exceeded the grainy scenes that were later broadcast from the surface of the actual moon.

A celluloid facsimile of reality can often seem more immediately present than the world outside the theater. In that sense, film is the most compelling art form that our civilization has yet developed. It’s also perhaps the most advanced form of what the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Stauss calls bricolage. In his seminal essay “The Science of the Concrete” (1962), Lévi-Stauss distinguishes between engineering, a creative process that “questions the universe,” and the activities of the bricoleur, who “addresses himself to a collection of oddments left over from human endeavours, that is, only a sub-set of the culture.”1 An engineer is a scientifically trained designer and materials specialist; a bricoleur is a do-it-yourself hobbyist, limited to the materials at hand. Bricolage is the process that produces the knowledge base of aboriginal societies, but according to Lévi-Stauss it’s also a way of describing what visual artists do: “It is common knowledge that the artist is both something of a scientist and of a bricoleur. By his craftmanship he constructs a material object which is also an object of knowledge.”2 Of all the visual art forms, film is the most improvisational, requiring the most thorough collection of spare pieces. In order for a film to work its magic, it must bring together discrete strands of sensual experience – the human body, the human voice, music, constructed environments, cosmetics, costumes, ambient sounds, staged displays of violence – along with elements of text, myth, and ideology. In a Playboy interview published after 2001 debuted, Kubrick said, “The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.”3 By that time he had spent nearly two decades teaching himself the technological, synthetic, and cognitive elements that go into the work of a filmmaker. He was convinced that, through improvisation, his art could make the disparate elements of the given world into a new order of experience.

Typically, Kubrick began with something already written, usually a novel, but in the end the work of the original author was transformed into something uniquely his own. He was often accused of stealing credit for the scripts of his films – justifiably in some cases. Jim Thompson, the screenwriter for Kubrick’s first major film, The Killing (1956), had something of a nervous breakdown at the premiere when he discovered Kubrick had only given him credit for “additional dialogue.”4 After recruiting Terry Southern to give Dr. Strangelove (1964) a comic energy that the source novel had lacked, Kubrick eventually gave himself top billing for the script and publicly stated that Southern had been brought in at a late stage, “to see if more decoration might be added to the icing on the cake.”5 The most egregious instance was when Kubrick tried to claim authorship of the Spartacus (1960) script, in place of blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo6 – an act of Kubrickian hubris that led producer and star Kirk Douglas to describe him as “a talented shit.”7 In fairness to Kubrick, though, he conceived of film as primarily a plastic art, having more in common with sculpture and architecture than with fiction or drama. He felt that the real authorship of a film belonged to the one who visualized it. When he got into an argument with the esteemed cinematographer working on The Killing, he told the man to follow his orders or get off his set, making it clear, once and for all, that Kubrick’s own vision would always be the essence of every film he would make.8 Frederic Raphael, who wrote the script for Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and later wrote a sardonic account of the experience, says that Kubrick told him to write more than just spoken lines; he wanted a pictorial account of every scene.9 This is why the dialogue in Kubrick’s movies is often the least memorable dimension of the experience.

Producing and directing a film requires working with an enormous team of individual craftspeople and performers. Kubrick’s underlings were among the spare pieces that he brought together to shape his vision, and he could often be ruthless with them. Composer Alex North, for example, wrote an entire score for 2001, but it wasn’t until he attended the film’s premiere that he learned Kubrick had discarded it in favor of prerecorded classical music.10 He often purposefully kept members of his production staff off-balance by praising them elaborately one day and ignoring them the next, hoping they would redouble their efforts to return to his good graces.11 Actors who were forced to do forty or fifty takes of the same scene would accuse him of sadism. But a still photographer who worked with Kubrick claimed that he was trying to create a distancing effect, making his films into a sort of parallel reality; as biographer John Baxter puts it, “Given capable actors like George C. Scott or Jack Nicholson, Kubrick forced them by repeated takes to abandon naturalism for mannerism and hysteria.”12 In his pursuit of perfection, he was often manipulative and somewhat unscrupulous. He asked Scott to do some silly takes in Dr. Strangelove, “just to warm up,” and he promised not to use any of them. But he did use one of them, and Scott swore that he’d never work with him again.13 If Malcolm McDowell seemed to be suffering when his character underwent the Ludovico Treatment in A Clockwork Orange (1971), it’s because he was. He scratched a cornea in that scene, and he almost drowned later in the film when he got his head dunked in a cattle trough.14 But Kubrick thought it was all in a day’s work. In Barry Lyndon (1975), the character played by Leon Vitali gets an extreme case of nerves when fighting a duel with Ryan O’Neal’s title character. During lunch on the day of the shooting, Kubrick wouldn’t let Vitali eat with the crew but instead made him consume something nauseating so he’d vomit on cue a little later in the day.15 Strangely enough, he later became Kubrick’s right-hand man. He was the one who had to inform the actor hired to play the drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket (1987) that Kubrick was replacing him with Lee Ermey, a retired Marine officer who had been brought in as a consultant.16

Kubrick exercised his powers of bricolage to the fullest in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was his ultimate vision project. Kubrick’s original plan was to adapt Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 science fiction epic Childhood’s End, in which a race of Overlords come to Earth from a distant galaxy in order to guide the future evolution of man. Both Kubrick and his wife Christiane had read the book with excitement.17 When he found that the novel had already been optioned, he decided to acquire the novelist instead. Although the script was ultimately credited to both of them, Kubrick ended up playing a friendly game of three-dimensional chess with his collaborator, producing a film that was informed by Clarke’s genius but largely shaped according to Kubrick’s own design.

In The Lost Worlds of 2001 (1972), Clarke recalls that Kubrick had approached him in the spring of 1964 with the idea of making what the director called the “proverbial good science fiction movie.”18 Kubrick optioned several of Clarke’s short stories, the most important of which was “The Sentinel,” in which a lunar explorer discovers a pyramidal object on the moon, a kind of early-warning device for extraterrestrials concerned about a potential threat from Earth.19 When Clarke came to Manhattan to meet with Kubrick, the director proposed that they write an original novel as the basis for their studio proposal.20 By early July of that year, Clarke had written five chapters of the novel, which took “The Sentinel” as its point of departure.21 However, by fall the artifact had become a “teaching machine” that first appears in the Pleistocene epoch, part of an extraterrestrial strategy to groom the nascent human race.22 By December, Clarke had developed a draft that contained nearly the entire arc of the finished film. Just before New Year’s Day, Kubrick decided that the novel was finished, and he summarily (though temporarily, it turned out) terminated Clarke’s contract.23 For his own part, Clarke felt that they had “merely a rough draft of two-thirds of the book” since they had gotten their Odyssean hero Dave Bowman to the Star Gate “but didn’t know what would happen next.”24

Although the Dawn of Man episode and the discovery of the monolith on the moon both originated from ideas in Clarke stories, “Encounter in the Dawn” and “The Sentinel” respectively, the central crisis of the film, HAL’s rebellion, originated with Kubrick. In August 1965, Clarke traveled from his home in Sri Lanka to England, where the Kubrick family had their permanent residence, and learned that the director had made a couple of key decisions about plot development. First, he wanted the ship’s computer, then called Athena, to turn aggressive; science advisor Fred Ordway accordingly sent an inquiry to IBM to determine whether a computer could become “slightly hypochondriacal.”25 Second, Kubrick wanted Bowman and Frank Poole, the pilots of the Jupiter-bound spacecraft, to be ignorant of the mission’s actual objective, which was to find out why the monolith had sent a signal from the moon to the giant planet. They would be unaware, like most of Earth’s population, that an alien artifact had been discovered, proof that a vastly superior intelligence existed somewhere in the universe. Clarke pushed back against the notion that the navigators would need to be kept ignorant of the key facts,26 but clearly Kubrick imagined that the conflict between the computer and the crew members would be rooted in the computer’s superior knowledge base and its need to keep certain facts hidden.

Once Clarke accepted this plot element, he was prepared to explain HAL’s dysfunction in terms of the computer’s neurotic guilt, both in the voiceover narration he had composed and in the novel that he eventually published.27 In the final cut of 2001, though, Kubrick chose to leave the narration out, much to Clarke’s dismay.28 The effect of this was to leave the viewer with a less technical, ultimately simpler explanation for the crisis. The knowledge gap between HAL and the astronauts reflected Earth (and specifically American) authorities’ anxiety about the potentially catastrophic impact of the discovery of the monolith, proof that humans were not alone in the cosmos. The passive-aggressive Heywood Floyd clearly states these concerns during his meeting with leaders of the American moon base at Clavius, speaking of the “extremely grave potential for cultural shock and social disorientation . . . if the facts were prematurely and suddenly made public.” In the Playboy interview, Kubrick cited remarks that Carl Jung had once made about the prospect of humans encountering extraterrestrial intelligence, claiming that “we would find our intellectual and spiritual aspirations so outmoded as to leave us completely paralyzed.” Kubrick, for his part, wasn’t as pessimistic, though he added that Jung’s view was “one that’s widely held and can’t be summarily dismissed.”29 This is where Kubrick seems to have located the film’s central problem: the issue of whether human civilization was prepared for the next step in its development. The suspicion and secrecy embodied by Floyd and the other U.S. authorities in the film represent a failure of imagination, one that would have deadly consequences for most of the spaceship’s crew.

It was more than just a failure of imagination, of course. It was clear that in Kubrick’s telling, Cold War rivalries would still be in play some thirty-three years in the future. In one of the film’s first scenes with dialogue (half an hour into the running time), Floyd, recently arrived at the circular space terminal, is invited to have what seems like a friendly conversation with some Russian space officials. The lead scientist in the group has some civil but pointed questions for Floyd about the fact that communication lines to the American base had been down for over a week and a Russian vessel was denied an emergency landing. The scientist finally asks Floyd, point-blank, whether the rumors of an epidemic on the base are true. Floyd hesitates awkwardly before finally saying, “I’m not at liberty to say.” He’s uncomfortable with lying (the epidemic is just a cover story) but also unwilling to share any knowledge of the monolith with the Russians. Presumably, it’s not just the effect on Earth culture that American authorities are concerned about: like the primitive humans in the Dawn of Man episode who (under the monolith’s tutelage) have discovered that the bones of tapirs are an effective weapon against a neighboring colony competing for scarce resources, American officials are unwilling to share any information that may give them an advantage over their superpower rivals.

On the Jupiter mission, then, HAL has an advantage over the men running the ship comparable to Floyd’s advantage over the Russians. Instead of embracing this knowledge gap the way the U.S. authorities do, though, HAL is profoundly conflicted over it. His main concern is that the astronauts might not trust him fully, as they need to do, since he is the only one fully informed and completely reliable. He decides to test them by becoming purposefully unreliable and finding out whether they’ll blindly follow his judgment. The first sign of this occurs in the chess match between HAL and Poole. Kubrick had once earned his living as a chess hustler on the sidewalks of New York,30 and here he has HAL practice a subtler kind of hustle. First the computer makes what appears to be a notational error when describing the movement of the black queen (“queen to bishop three” as opposed to the correct “bishop six”), then he convinces Poole that he’s been mated, whereas he would have been able to delay checkmate for at least two more moves. By accepting HAL’s erroneous description of the game, Poole has actually “passed” the test. Next up is Bowman. HAL starts what seems like a casual conversation, showing an interest in Bowman’s sketches of hibernating crew members, then begins prodding him with hints about a secret element of the mission. When Bowman doesn’t take the bait, HAL suddenly predicts a failure of the Earth communication system and has Bowman perform a spacewalk to remove a supposedly defective part. When the component is brought on the ship and found to be perfectly fine, HAL recommends putting it back, letting it fail, and then determining the actual source of the alleged problem in the ship’s antenna. Contrary to HAL’s hopes, though, Bowman is suspicious, and he creates a pretext to get Poole into one of the space pods so they can discuss the situation without HAL hearing them. Unfortunately, the astronauts forget that HAL can read lips. When HAL finds that the crew members distrust him and are thinking of disconnecting him, he prepares to murder them and the sleeping passengers. The straightforward explanation isn’t that HAL has gone crazy but that he’s rationally convinced the humans pose a risk to the mission. HAL’s name is an acronym for Heuristic and Algorithmic. Computer scientist Marvin Minsky, who coined the moniker, defined heuristics as “tricks or techniques that might work on a problem,” whereas algorithms are based on “inviolate rules, If A then B, and A, therefore B.”31 HAL’s heuristic capabilities allow him to engage in creative problem-solving in order to satisfy the demands of his algorithmic reasoning; he arrives at the decision to kill through the kind of data processing he was built for.

The first three major segments of the film – the Dawn of Man, the lunar mission, and the Jupiter mission – all take place under the shadow of the monolith, and all of them raise the question of man’s relations to his tools: bones in the case of Moonwatcher’s proto-human colony; secret empirical findings in the case of Floyd and his cohorts; an advanced ship and computer in the case of the Discovery crew. The next evolutionary step beyond the human civilization of the year 2001 can only be taken when Bowman seizes control of the ship, embarks from it at the helm of a pod, and advances toward the transformation that the monolith is intended to facilitate. Until October 1965, neither Clarke nor Kubrick knew exactly what would happen once Bowman reached the monolith in orbit around Jupiter; in a journal entry from that month, though, Clarke says he proposed that “Bowman will regress to infancy and we’ll see him at the end as a baby in orbit” and reported that Kubrick was “very enthusiastic.”32 The reason for Kubrick’s endorsement seems clear. The final chapters of Childhood’s End depict the Overlords nurturing a new generation of terrestrials from infancy, making them into a new link in the universal Overmind. Clarke’s new plot development reprised the novel’s final act in a way that was different enough to seem original. Nonetheless, Kubrick ended up getting the thematic essence of Childhood’s End without paying for the rights, which is what he apparently wanted all along.

Even though Clarke and Kubrick agreed on the story’s climax, their ideas of how to depict the falling action still differed considerably. In the completed novel, published in July 1968, several months after the film’s release, Clarke includes eight additional chapters after Bowman’s entry into the Star Gate. In technically sophisticated language, he recounts Bowman’s passage through a narrow rectangular tunnel lit with stars, over the surface of an elaborately sculpted world with no atmosphere and a flat horizon, out again into open space infinitely far from the known solar system. After Bowman skims the undulating surface of a giant red star, he reaches “the polished floor of an elegant, anonymous hotel suite,”33 where he’s transformed into the star child. In the final chapter, Clarke’s superhuman baby returns to Earth in a kind of spectral form, hovering over the planet, destroying an orbital nuclear launcher, then trying to decide “what to do next.”34 Kubrick, on the other hand, preferred a more symbolic version of the ending, relying heavily on opaque special effects: psychedelic imagery created from aerial shots with transposed colors, Douglas Trumbull’s technologically advanced slit scan footage, and the Pollock-style paint-drop images that Kubrick had shot in a Broadway brassiere factory, which he jokingly referred to as his Manhattan Project.35 As early as October 1964, he had imagined a Victorian or Louis XIV environment within the Star Gate, an idea that culminated in the final ten minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.36 This kind of rococo interior was something that recurred frequently in Kubrick’s work: in Paths of Glory (1957), the French high command conducts its cruel deliberations in a Versailles-style palace; in Lolita (1962), a spacious, art-strewn mansion is the setting for Humbert’s murder of his rival Clare Quilty; spacious decadence appears in various forms later, in A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining (1980), and Eyes Wide Shut. In the completed 2001, the kind of “French hotel” décor that art director Tony Masters designed is full of unused space and echoes, Kubrick specialties. All along, he wanted the odyssey to culminate in a strangeness that was weirdly familiar yet disorienting and bizarre. Instead of ranging out into actual space again, as the novel does, the film wraps up with concrete but metaphorical images of aging and rebirth, concluding with a mysteriously watchful fetus in a globular placenta, juxtaposed against an image of Earth from space.

When asked by Charlie Kohler of The East Village Eye to explain the “essence of the ending,” Kubrick refused. “I don’t want to,” he said, because “the power of the ending is based on the subconscious emotional reaction of the audience, which has a delayed effect.”37 Most viewers at the original screenings didn’t wait for the delayed effect to kick in. At the New York premiere of the film, there were groans, catcalls, and walkouts: Kubrick counted 241 people leaving at the intermission. Clarke overheard someone saying, “Well, that’s the end of Stanley Kubrick.”38 Prominent critics like Renata Adler and Andrew Sarris went home and wrote scathing reviews. After a miserable evening, the Kubrick family retired to their rented Long Island mansion; but when they woke the next day, they began hearing reports of ticket lines stretching over several blocks.39 The film was an immediate hit with the general public, especially younger audience members, many of whom had heard it was a great movie to get high to. Unlike the New York critics and industry professionals who dismissed the film, these audiences were prepared to enjoy it on a visceral, visual, sonic level. What they knew right away was that the movie was innovative, unprecedented, mind-blowing.

It had a cathartic effect because it fit the temper of the times. President Johnson had just decided not to seek another term; Bobby Kennedy had joined Gene McCarthy on the campaign trail. When the film debuted, the much-anticipated first moon landing was only fifteen months away. In December 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts would take pictures of a gibbous Earth against a lunar foreground, a real-life replica of a shot from the lunar monolith scene in 2001. It was the highest-grossing film of the year because it gave moviegoers their first glimpse of a future that was just beginning to unfold. More than that, though, it helped them assimilate the changes that were happening in real time. It prepared them to confront the discontinuities they would be faced with in the space age, drawing on their intuitive sense that the counterculture was bringing new forms of consciousness into play. This effect was heightened by the presence of a kind of mundane reality in the first half of the film. Early in the Clavius section, we see Dr. Floyd strolling through a space station dotted with well-known commercial logos. Later, we watch a space stewardess carrying a tray along a Velcro-lined corridor, then slowly marching up a circular passage until she’s upside down. On the ship to Jupiter, the astronauts are seen heating up TV dinners and sitting down to unappetizing mass-produced meals. It’s as if Kubrick wanted viewers to be lulled into thinking that the world of the film existed under the same systems of production and control as the world they lived in, only to be jolted in the final sequences, forced to recognize that the norms of mass society were already being undermined by forces beyond the control of industrial civilization.

When history, unspooling from day to day and night to night on the news, became too unreal for some people to accept, is it any surprise that they thought it was a movie? 2001: A Space Odyssey was an available source of conspiracy theories because it was already a collective memory. Using the methods of bricolage, Kubrick had made his film into an object of social knowledge: it became a part of what everyone knew.

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Except where noted, all images are screenshots from 2001: A Space Odyssey.