But, for whatever it’s worth, I did enjoy the experience. My relatively recent obsession with catching up on the canonized classics (which either date from before my time or which I missed and subsequently never caught up on) stems at least in part from a desire to get firsthand exposure to the primary sources of collective pop culture. I’m vaguely aware of a lot of things because of their influence on other things I’m much more familiar with. 2001: A Space Odyssey was probably one of the largest looming works on the list, and I’m not only happy to have filled in the gap for its own sake, but happy to have spent the time and energy to do so. The retroactive ability to connect certain dots now, for instance from Kubrick to George Lucas a decade later, is a bonus.
Speaking of Star Wars, the influence of 2001 is obvious, but I do think it’s funny that there are commonly repeated anecdotes about Lucas’s directorial nuance (or lack thereof) and how the vast majority of the instructions he gave to his actors were repetitions of the instructions “faster” and “more intense”. Whereas 2001 could not possibly embody more the polar opposite of those characteristics. Kubrick’s epic is glacially slow and deliberately oblique.
And normally, as you’ve no doubt surmised, I’m not a huge fan of the slow and the oblique. In fact, during the Dawn of Man segment of 2001 I found myself wondering if the whole two-and-a-half hour movie might not have benefited from some severely tighter editing. That same argument could be made throughout the subsequent segments as well, but I found myself caring less and less as the movie went on. I just became more and more fascinated by the artifact that Kubrick was so meticulously creating, and if he wanted to take his time revealing it to me, or even insist that I focus on certain aspects of it well beyond the natural inclinations of my addled attention span, so be it. I’m not sure that I would ever want to sit down and watch the whole film again; it’s definitely not the kind of movie that would suck me in on a Saturday afternoon if I were flipping around on cable and came in on the middle of it. (Which, incidentally, is one of my personal criteria for greatest personal favorite flicks, so I’m still a little surprised that 2001 polls so well as one of people’s favorite films of all time, but to each their own, I suppose.) But the fact that Kubrick constructs an entirely non-existent world and captures it on film in such realistic detail, eschewing most of the grammar of narrative storytelling in the process, putting something on-screen that is somehow both fantasy and verisimilitude, is really impressive. It’s a visionary achievement, and indisputably it is high art, full stop.
It’s tempting to good-naturedly mock the film for being dated at this point, purporting to show “the future” (most of it set 30+ years after the era in which it was made, which of course is over a decade ago for us now) and getting it almost entirely backwards or wrong: we still don’t have moon bases or commercial space flight or interplanetary hibernation-sleep missions, but we do have smartphones, which make the notion of using a pay videophone booth to call someone’s landline and missing them because they were out seem quaint. But I really, unironically loved the retro-futurism of the fashions and furnishings on the space station, and when you combine those with the psychedelic starfield visual effects in the Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite segment, I think there’s some serious merit in nominating 2001, amongst all of its other well-deserved superlatives, as the most 60’s movie of all time (defining “the 60’s” in the usual manner as the cultural zeitgeist in the U.S. and U.K. between about 1964 and 1972, it goes without saying).
And I cannot possibly comment on the legacy of 2001 without coming around at last to HAL, who embodies basically all the things I’ve been talking about here. The 1960’s grappling with technology in the Space Age (and the incipient Computer Age), the unreal (or as-yet-unrealized) object that Kubrick had to invent out of nothing, the mannered and precise approach to communication, all of it. I was especially intrigued by the way that HAL manages to maintain screen presence, even without dialogue, and the weird pareidolia effect that turns an unwavering red diode and an oblong plate into a kind of recognizable yet alien face for the character. That alone would be worth the price of admission. And of course, HAL is the single element of the movie most people would bring up if you asked them to start free-associating off 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that” and so on.
(Semi-random tangent: one of our college friends was recently posting tons and tons of old photos to Facebook, and my wife was checking them out. One set revolved around my 21st birthday, which several of my friends were good enough to organize and document for posterity. They took me around campus to various locations where, over the previous three years, I had engaged in memorable bouts of alcohol-fueled hijinks. Each location had been set up in advance with a sign on the ground, where a human body had been traced chalk-outline style (but in magic marker) and then filled in with quotes and reminisces about the misadventure being commemorated. Also each marker-outline had little spirals and stars around its head, in the cartoon visual shorthand connoting inebriation. The spirals and stars got progressively bigger and more numerous on each drawing, until the final one which bore the huge announcement: “MY GOD IT’S FULL OF STARS” Which is from 2001, right? I knew that back in 1995, before I had seen the movie, because everyone knows that. Except, surprise, the line isn’t in the movie. It’s in the novel, and it’s in the sequel 2010, effectively retconning it into the earlier story, but it’s not in the actual film. And now you know!)
HAL has countless descendants in sci-fi of the ship’s-computer-with-disembodied-voice lineage, and rightly so. I suspect that HAL stands out all the more brightly because he is so straightforward in every respect, while the rest of the movie embraces ambiguity. HAL speaks plainly and literally, and he’s seemingly the only force in the movie capable of taking action that brings about direct results for clear reasons. (The major exception, of course, being Dave taking HAL offline in self-defense.) But at the same time, it’s something of a shame that HAL winds up as the major cultural takeaway from 2001. Understandable, since everything else in the movie, and particularly the ending, is so elusive. HAL is easy, and quotable; the mysteries of existence are trickier still.
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