This is Part 1 of my two-part explanation of the meaning of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. For Part 2, go here.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) has awed viewers with its vision and craft for over fifty years. Interpreting it, though, remains a notorious challenge. Experts’ attempts to understand the sci-fi landmark’s ambiguous imagery and characters are numerous enough to populate an entire Wikipedia page. If you read the page, though, you’ll see that these interpretations tend to skew toward the arcane, kooky, and even mystic.
What’s lacking is a grounded analysis written for regular viewers. My aim, then, will be to coherently explain the meaning of 2001’s narrative. Of course, this will include a concrete, definitive interpretation of its famous ending.
My main thesis, which I’ll go on to demonstrate, is that 2001 is a statement about the awesome possibilities of the medium of film. More specifically, 2001: A Space Odyssey is an idealistic proclamation of film as an agent for transcending humanity’s violent nature, particularly through its ability to bolster reflection and awareness.
That statement leaves a lot of ground to cover. But we can start with the theme of transcendence, since it forms the structure of the film. 2001 consists of three stages of evolution: 1) apes before the discovery of weapons, 2) man, and 3) the “Starchild” image. These stages are symbolized by the opening title screen, which features a shadowy Earth—behind which rises the glowing Moon—behind which rises the shining sun.
Three destinations, each brighter than the last. This single image foreshadows the course of the film.
Even more important than the evolutionary stages, though, are the transitions between them. Such transitions, it appears, can only occur through interactions with peculiar black monoliths, which appear intermittently throughout the movie. The first such monolith appears to a tribe of apes in the desert, inspiring them to use animal bones as weapons to dominate their rivals. This, as the title card declares, is Kubrick’s rendition of “The Dawn of Man.”
It’s tempting to summarize this sequence as the discovery of “tools.” But this isn’t specific enough. After all, only one tool is used: a weapon. And the introduction of weapons specifically—as opposed to tools in general—initiates human-like changes in the apes. For example, armed with bones, the apes abandon their defensive crouches and walk upright. Plus, with plentiful meat from killed animals, the tribe now eats with newfound ferocity, reminiscent of our habits today. Finally, children now examine and play with bones, evoking modern day childhood fascination with guns and other weapons.
The central statement of this section, then, is that man is fundamentally a weapon-using animal. This is a Kubrickian statement if there ever was one. Consider the director’s earlier films like the antiwar Paths of Glory (1957) and the apocalyptic Cold War parody Dr. Strangelove (1963), which also focus on man’s relationship to war and weaponry.
And just like in those films, the use of weapons in 2001 is portrayed negatively and unsparingly. For instance, when the lead ape of the rival tribe is whacked to the ground, each ape in the first tribe comes forward to administer unnecessary additional blows—a vicious, unsettling scene.
But in 2001, unlike the other films mentioned, Kubrick doesn’t dwell on man’s violent tendencies. Instead, after the weapon-using apes’ victory, he cuts to an orbiting spaceship, and the movie’s focus shifts to the potential for a second evolutionary leap. Thus, while the story of the apes serves to illustrate humanity’s lowly, savage condition, the bulk of the film depicts how we might surpass that condition.
Importantly, there’s no title card accompanying the cut to outer space; we’re still watching “The Dawn of Man.” Kubrick apparently isn’t impressed with our societal progress. Space flight and antigravity toilets notwithstanding, we’re still fundamentally the weapon-using creatures portrayed in the first episode.
In early drafts of the script, this stasis was emphasized even further. The orbiting spacecraft were explicitly identified as nuclear weapons in a multinational nuclear stalemate. These nuclear references were later eliminated to separate the film from Dr. Strangelove, but even without them, nothing in this section of 2001 suggests that the intervening millennia have seen major changes to the human condition laid out early in the film.
However, such a change may be forthcoming. That’s because Heywood R. Floyd (William Sylvester) is on his way to the Clavius Moon base to see a monolith recently dug up on the Moon—direct evidence of alien intelligence. And when that monolith sends a radio signal to Jupiter, humanity wastes no time (only an 18 month turnaround) preparing a mission to the faraway planet to find out what—or who—is out there.
To me, this promptness recalls the moment when the apes quickly surround and touch the monolith, which is wholly unfamiliar to them and potentially dangerous. Perhaps there is one human trait that Kubrick does admire: brave curiosity in the face of the unknown.
Can that curiosity lead us to make another leap forward and shed our species’ cruel and brutal ways? That’s the question of the next and longest episode of the film: “Mission to Jupiter.”
Drs. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) are the protagonists now. They have the momentous task of finding the receiver of the mysterious radio signal. But they run into a major problem: their HAL9000 computer, thought to be infallible, begins acting strangely and ultimately kills Frank along with three hibernating astronauts.
The conventional explanation, which I see no reason to dispute, for HAL’s errant behavior is that he has competing objectives. The scientists on Earth have tasked him with keeping secret the facts about the monolith dug up on the Moon, whereas his programming discourages him from “distort[ing] information.”
Caught between these goals, HAL teeters between revealing the secret and hiding it from the astronauts. He confides to Dave that the “rumors of something being dug up on the Moon” are “difficult to put out of my mind” but then abruptly ends the conversation by reporting a fault in one of the ship’s communication units—a report that appears to be baseless, as per the findings of an identical 9000 computer on Earth.
Adding to the evidence that HAL has misidentified the fault is his later remark to Dave that “you and Frank were planning to disconnect me.” This isn’t necessarily true: Dave and Frank were only planning to disconnect HAL if he were proven to be in error. The remark demonstrates that HAL lacks confidence or even knows his report to be incorrect.
And when threatened, HAL resorts to murder. Thus, the human technological tradition that began with an instrument of violence has culminated in an instrument that carries out its own violence—against mankind. This may have been inevitable. After all, inherent in the original DNA of man’s inventions, as we saw in “The Dawn of Man,” was brutality; therefore, it makes sense that man’s ultimate invention, a sentient AI, would assume that brutal character.
Note that HAL’s eyepiece often appears in a rectangular black frame reminiscent of the monolith. This visually links him to the episode in which apes discovered weapons. Appropriate, since he’s the end result of that discovery.
An interesting point about HAL is that his inability to keep a secret (or at least his discomfort with doing so) is contrasted with the smooth talking of Heywood Floyd during his trek to Clavius. In that section, scientists pressure Floyd to “clear up the great big mystery” of why Clavius has been out of communication. But Floyd stonewalls them, concealing the shocking finding of the monolith. Later, Floyd urges scientists at the base to uphold “absolute secrecy” and has them sign oaths to ensure their adherence to the cover story of an epidemic.
If Floyd and his fellow Clavius scientists can deceive so seamlessly, then why can’t the far more intelligent HAL? Events in the film suggest that it’s because humans, unlike HAL, are aware of their own mortality.
Consider that HAL’s facility with lying increases dramatically after he lip-reads Frank and Dave discussing his possible disconnection, a previously unthinkable development. Whereas HAL had struggled earlier to maintain composure and secrecy during his “crew psychology report” conversation with Dave, after the lip-reading scene he lies constantly with no apparent hesitation.
For example, he states that he doesn’t know how Frank went soaring into space (“I don’t have enough information”) and gives false reasoning for killing him (“This mission is too important to allow you to jeopardize it”). As his demise approaches, he sinks to pathetic phoniness (“I can assure you, very confidently, that it’s going to be alright again”). Thus, it seems that the materialization of the possibility of death is what affords him the one intellectual faculty he had previously lacked: the ability to lie.
Kubrick therefore provides another major statement about the nature of man: that it’s the specter of death that enables or encourages us to deceive one another. And there’s convincing logic to this. After all, mortality could be said to be the foundation for all fear, and fear may be the essential motive behind all deception. When HAL has no reason to believe that he’ll ever be shut down, he has none of the human fear that would prompt him to ever lie, so he stumbles when tasked to do so. But after learning of his possible disconnection, he becomes more deceptive (and by extension, more humanlike), finally admitting to the basis for his alteration: “I’m afraid.”
If HAL is the culmination of the technological tradition that started with the bone-weapon, and if the emergence of that tradition constituted “The Dawn of Man,” then HAL’s demise, for all intents and purposes, represents the end of man. Technology has run its course, which means that, by definition, so have we. Like the apes before they encountered the monolith, humanity is in its twilight. Kubrick provides visual cues to underscore this, as HAL’s eyepiece evokes the sun rising and setting shortly before mankind’s origination.
Plus, during HAL’s disconnection, monolith-like rectangles emerge from his hardware, recalling the evolutionary leap that founded mankind and suggesting that a similar leap could be forthcoming.
Even Dave’s incredible blast through the airlock harkens back to aspects of the apes’ leap forward. Recall how the apes gather around and touch the strange monolith, their courage outweighing their fear of the unknown. Dave’s gumption in passing through the mysterious vacuum of space without a helmet—which HAL assumes impossible—evokes that same courage. Dave has followed in the footsteps of his distant ancestors, whose boldness led them to a colossal discovery. What, then, is in store for him?
In summary, all signs, both visual and narrative, point to HAL’s death anticipating a major evolutionary leap forward comparable to the one shown in “The Dawn of Man.” And indeed, Dave’s experiences following HAL’s defeat leave him apparently transformed into a spectacular, fetus-like being. It’s clear that man has leapt forward again. But how did this transformation take place, and what is the nature of Dave’s new form?
End of Part 1
Continue to the second and final part of this analysis.
–Jim Andersen
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