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beyond warning about the perils of science. Kubrick s vision can be seen as naive or
complex, which is the essence of ambiguity, yet I cannot convince myself that this
is enough to make my journey worthwhile. Music touches the sublime, but it cannot
compensate for what is missing from the film.
Analysis
Undeniably this is an ambitious work; differences of opinion hinge on how far Ku-
brick achieves his ambition. Problem areas for commentators are the film s structure,
the obscurantism, the banal dialogue, the dominance of the machine, the role of
humour and the use of music.
2001: A Space Odyssey (GB/US, 1968) " 111
The structure has more than academic significance, as Alexander Walker makes
clear:
The way the usual time sequence of narrative cause and effect have been thrown out
of the film is only the first of many things that unsettle a conventional audience. . . . For
finding the meaning is a matter not of verbalizing but of feeling it in the images drawn
from past and future time, in the involvement with the experience of space, and in ap-
prehending what is happening rather than being fed cut-and-dried information. It is a
whole new concept of cinema. [Walker s italics]10
This is a bold statement which deserves challenging. Events follow a temporal se-
quence, so Walker has to concede that narrative structure is not completely aban-
doned.11 Logically, the Dawn of Man section opens the film. The voyage to Jupiter
takes place because of Floyd s encounter with the monolith, or so HAL suspects.
Narrative breaks down as Bowman reaches his destination. The problem until this
point is not the lack of narrative, but the weakness of the links between sections.
The most successful transition is from the Dawn of Man section to Floyd s journey
to the space station, the cut from bone to spacecraft recalling the transformation
from bird of prey to fighter aircraft in Powell and Pressburger s A Canterbury Tale.
Elsewhere, inter-titles make an uneasy afterthought, emphasizing Kubrick s abrupt
changes of direction and doing little to clarify the action. The monolith launches the
narrative and provides a motif linking the inner sections. Its place in the outer sec-
tions is so tenuous that it could as well be another afterthought. The conjunction of
Earth, moon and sun performs a similar function.
Walker maintains that audiences need to feel the images and apprehend what is
happening rather than being fed information, which is an implicit acceptance of the
subjective approach. Cinema has evolved ways for audiences to anticipate what they
will see, including genre (we know what to expect from a Western), the star system
(we know what to expect from John Wayne) and the grammar of editing (the pur-
pose of intellectual montage is to suggest connections). Rather than accepting that
2001 introduces something new into cinema, it can be questioned whether Kubrick
is transgressing conventions or failing to exploit them successfully.
One pointer to obscurantism is the difficulty of trying to summarize what hap-
pens in the film. Should a viewing need to be supplemented with details from the
novel and interviews with the director? Most commentators mention the star-child
seen in the final frames, but this name cannot be gleaned from watching the film.
Similarly, the relationship of Dave to the old man has to be inferred. Kubrick did
not help matters by refusing to discuss the ending on the grounds that it was highly
subjective. He conceded that God was at the heart of the film, but this does nothing
to introduce clarity.12 An emphasis on technology obscures the fact that rebirth is a
concept common to all religions. Kubrick looks back not only to the first use of tools,
but to society s earliest stories. As he provides no accepted religious context, the film
112 " Movie Greats
invites a range of religious and quasi-religious interpretations. There is room for Tim
Hunter to claim it as anti-Christian and anti-evolutionary for proposing that man is
controlled by an ambiguous and capricious extraterrestrial force.13
The film s philosophical origins are equally elusive, with suggested inspirations
including Yeats s poem Sailing to Byzantium and C. S. Lewis s Ransom trilogy.14
Given that Richard Strauss s music takes its title and ethos from Nietzsche s Also
sprach Zarathustra, it is reasonable to assume an association between the film and
Nietzschean philosophy. Nietzsche borrowed from Zoroastrian mythology, in which
Zarathustra rises on the first day of the new millennium; the film s ending can be seen
as a reworking of this idea. In examining these links, Leonard F. Wheat stresses the
film s allegorical nature, identifying a triple allegory involving Nietzsche, Homer s
Odyssey and Clarke s merging of man and machine.15 Wheat has been criticized by
Carl Freedman for making too much of these links, which prompts the question of
what is left if Nietzsche, Homer and Clarke are excluded.16 Does the film still lodge
in the mind if it is shorn of its mythological connotations, or does its paucity of ideas
become apparent?
The disparate sections of 2001 never add up to a coherent whole. Too often plot
lines are taken up and discarded. The appearance of the Russians betokens a politi-
cal dimension which never develops. How do the populace live and do they believe
the cover story of an epidemic at Clavius? We are never told, so the political and
economic implications of the Jupiter voyage remain unknown. Dr Floyd disappears
from the narrative abruptly, arousing the suspicion that he was only there to further
the plot. Loose ends cannot be disguised by the inventive use of music.
The banal dialogue is often cited as a failing, but if banality serves an artistic
purpose, does this make it acceptable? Kubrick is quoted by Jerome Angel as saying:
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