For those leaving arbitrary comments claiming there's no evidence for any of this (even though I cite several source in the vid) check out these vids where I go more specifically into detail about production history and the content of the movie itself ... No aliens in 2001 / meaning of the monolith ruclips.net/video/KYcekxnsjyY/видео.html 2001: Behind the propaganda (tons of production sources and footage in this) ruclips.net/video/6n1kucZVYdk/видео.html 2001: Horror of the void (tons of movie detail observations) ruclips.net/video/LcFuCfJMIZg/видео.html Want more content folks ... follow these links. Check out the current discounts on my offline vids and articles www.collativelearning.com/ Join my Film, Game & Media analysis page on Facebook facebook.com/groups/4637000646361309 ... as well as following the Collative Learning FB page facebook.com/RobAgerpublic Get a copy of my video game To The Death store.steampowered.com/app/2758570/To_The_Death/ ... and follow the game on the Ager Games RUclips channel www.youtube.com/@robagergames ... and at the To The Death FB page facebook.com/profile.php?id=61555615927786 Follow me on Twitter / X twitter.com/RobAger Signing up as a monthly supporter on Patreon gets you arround 12 hrs more content www.patreon.com/RobAger PLEASE ALSO POST YOUR RESPONSES TO THE VIDEO CONTENT ABOVE SEPARATELTY FROM THIS PINNED COMMENT, THANKS.
My brain is honestly so fried after dealing with RUclips comment sections. I could study physics for 40 years and still be told I know nothing about it all day. The arrogance is so far beyond me
@@QuixEnd Hmmm, I personally think everything should always remain up for debate by all. There are definitely a lot of things that the academic community collectively get wrong, but only change their minds when some other academic comes along and provides new evidence (and typically gets reputationally attacked for challenging their consensus). There's also an incredible arrogance present in some areas of academia, where they think that someone operating outside their hierarchy has nothing to offer and should be ignored or even chastized for offering their views. I've had lots of correspondence from academics over the years. Some of them have praised my work and talk to me like I'm a fellow traveler in the pursuit of knowledge, which I am. But some get very annoyed and try to pull academic rank, citing my lack of university certification - forgetting that most of the materials they've read are publicly available for anyone to read. Often I've done more research than they have in the given topic. I'm also not restricted by the conformist consensus and funding bias that's rife in academia, the two things that have prevented me from going down the academic route. The ultimate irony is that the academics who try to attack my interpretations of Kubrick's work usually aren't film makers. They have no experience of film making, where as I've written, directed, produced and edited on my own films and worked on other people's film shoots. They also overlook that Kubrick himself, who they usually greatly admire, wasn't academically trained. He didn't even go to film school lol.
This was an incredible video, and I very much appreciated it. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Funnily enough, this really challenges the notion that he was at all involved with any hoaxing of the moon landing, as some are wont to believe, making this a very interesting thesis.
On your theory of the real meaning behind 2001, here is a quote from William Shatner after travelling into space in real life, revealing the deepest soliloquy by James T Kirk wasn't from a scriptwriter: "I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet... I played my part in the idea that space was the final frontier, But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is, and will remain, our only home. And that we have been ravaging it, relentlessly, making it uninhabitable."
I think there is a glorified vision of space that we adopted. Kind of like the visions Roddenberry had of his old west wagon-train in the stars. But the reality is it’s essentially beyond the dangers of any frontier humans have encountered. There is almost no resource outside of those at Earth that will allow us to survive unimaginable voids. And we have to put ourselves in the hands of technology built in layers upon layers to do it. And we’re going to struggle with the harsh conditions that our technological advances are not flawless, we will push them to the point our ability to create apt technology will fail, and a great number of us will die in that process. It is the greatest frontier, the harshest frontier, and history has shown a lot of tragedy happens on frontiers.
Never heard of him before now but I can tell from his questions and responses that he's a very disarming yet shrewd interviewer. There's a lot to this interview.
But he keeps getting the twins hair colour wrong in the shining film. We were all correcting him in the comment section. He never admitted he was wrong lol. He’s not that good.
Yes, but no one should underestimate A.C.Clarke's vision. He was far more than a naive technologist! Anyone who thinks that has never read "Childhood's End" which also focuses on the transcendence of man.
@@JimTempleman all true. Childhood’s end is a deep book. But Kubrick was every bit his equal. His decision making process allowed his films to be living breathing reflections of mot only the time they were made but for the ages. A rare gift.
@@alienlovearts Agreed! As the Lotus Sutra states: "Only a buddha together with a buddha can fathom the ultimate reality of all things.” The film (& book) inspired me, and set me on my life's course of doing research in biologically based neural networks, virtual reality, and meditation to realize Silent Illumination.
I don’t necessarily “learn” something as much as expand my theories on the work. A lot of what Rob says cannot be verified, especially what he’s saying about 2001 here and the intention behind it, but it’s all very fun to think about.
@@craigmurdock4740 (responding to your comment before you changed it) A lot of it can and has been verified. There ARE letters in the Kubrick archives from IBM being angry and demanding their logos be removed from the film. The executive screening featuring a voiceover and scientists interviews that were scrapped upon release is detailed in the very well researched biographies by Baxter and Lobrutto. If you do the legwork and research the documented history of the production then you'll know a lot of it is fact. My take on the ending as a dream sequence is a theory (one that fits the details of the film more than the Clarke narrative does) and I'm open to discussion on that.
@@joefau1 Someone having an objection doesn't make them a troll. Trolling involves a certain insincerity in what is said. Craig was being sincere in his comment. Mere complaint and critique is not trolling. If you dismiss such comments as trolling, you shut down quite a lot of thinking and discussion on topics.
7:46 Whether or not you can give the novelization much credit for the real narrative, I always liked the detail that the first spacecraft shown is a nuclear weapon platform. Transitioning from the bone to this, how we went from being able to kill one life at a time, to practically everything on the planet, always resonated with me with how our evolution is measured.
also worth pointing out that the shooting script had the narrator explaining that too, and had the Star Child blowing up all the bombs at the end. It also had a scene with mission control explaining in detail why HAL malfunctioned, rather than simply the prerecoded Floyd message. It's certainly likely that they selectively pitched the vision to investors, showed them only the happier dailies and the cool sets, but seems to me like Clarke and Kubrick were on the same page - Clarke could have always quit or made a statement later, after all.
There is a more blatant thread in that in every sequence, the characters are eating. From the monkeys eating scavenged plants then meat, to the in flight meal, to sandwiches on the moon, to astronaut space food, and finally Bowman eating fine cuisine after going through the stargate. No matter how far humans evolve, our base instincts and drives remain.
I see 2001 less as a destruction of utopia fantasies, but more as a consideration of what these developments would really imply. Humans are brilliant and primitive at the same time and the universe is beautiful and terrifying at the same time. To me his message seems to be "be careful what you wish for" and not "look how stupid these technological visions are".
Agreed. It would even fit with the whole anti-technocracy thing, as Rob mentions a few times. Kubrick presents the spacecrafts as something really cool, cheery classic music and all... and then also presents the society inside being bureaucratic, stiled and cold, kinda like the coldness of space. It's not chance that HAL sometimes seems more human than the people inside the crafts.
"Be careful what you wish for" aka "more foreshadowing of the dangers of AI". The reason (explained in the sequel 2010) that HAL behaved in the manner he did was that in keeping the secrecy behind the real mission from Bowman and Poole, he was unable to solve the conflict inherent in simultaneously a) processing data accurately, and b) deliberately lying to the crew, causing in effect a psychosis. (The short version - speaking as a programmer here - we end up with the the joys of unintended side-effects and the [admittedly clichéd] "Garbage In, Garbage Out"). With the recent hype around ChatGPT and its ilk - they're only as good as the training data they are given, yet if the hype is to be believed they will be used to generate all manner of future content... yet what provides the data for the next generation? The output from this one? And what happens for the one after that? (...repeat ad infinitum...). Presumably, do we hit at some point a situation where the original data is merely reprocessed time and again, but with no new input and thus insight? Invoking a little chaos theory (and/or genetics), one small error in the (now multiple generations old) source data explodes into massively erroneous outputs and/or behaviour (just like HAL). HAL (like AI) is not necessarily the villain of the piece though - behind that is the misuse of a tool as a result of a short-sighted view that they are a panacea for all things.
"be careful what you wish for" THANK you. THAT theme, that TENSION, seems to me to be central to so much art, lit, and film (and religion & culture, really). Heidegger really goes into the questions of technology in some of his later works in a similar way. Essentially, technology (from thigh bones & screwdrivers to hibernation chambers & nukes) enables us to better obtain and efficiently utilize resources necessary for survival in an environment of competitive scarcity. Our capacity for barbarism is an often ugly, yet necessary, component of our being. It facilitates survival... yet it is corrosive to our "soul" or "spirit" (however one defines that). In other words, the risk of technology is that we can begin to see EVERYTHING as ready-to-hand; we can start to perceive and judge the value of everything based on utility, a means to an end, causing us to feel endlessly compelled to DO things, to acquire, to consume for its own sake. This only provides a fleeting satisfaction, and is so often destructive to both the people and world around us, and to our own well-being. There's nothing that should make anyone feel smug or superior in pointing that out. Rob seems to want to imply that the "superficial" element of the story is "bullshit", but I don't think it is. The universe DOES inspire BOTH awe AND terror, wonder and fear. It can be a source of succor&safety, but also violence and suffering. 2001 seems to explore the question of "what is enough? What is the right approach to being in the world, as a species with so much potential for impacting our environment, and each other?" I see the "deeper" meaning as simply showing aspects of the shadow side of that question. The whole business with "I've unlocked the REAL secret of the movie" actually falls victim to the same "ego blow" that Rob accuses others of having, I think. It's like HE has the best interpretation, in a way that involves a bit of hero worship of Kubrick, ie "look, Uncle Stan, I figgered it OUT!"
I was lucky enough to be taken to see this at the cinema, for my 9th birthday. Back in the day when a cinema trip was a 1-2 times a year treat. I loved it. All of it. Imagine you get two big screen movies a year, your TV is small, and black and white. And 2001 is one of those movies. Then of course, this year, went to see Barbie. Which thus had me from the start. Sad to say my friend didn't get the reference.
I've been a fan of Rob and the Colllative Learning site for years because of my interest specifically in Kubrick but also his analysis in other subjects. 👍🏾
almost 55 years later after this movie was released people still talk about it. what a brilliant interview and thoughts and insights about this great movie! personally i could never get my head around the ending and after watching this i still can't. but interpretations and thoughts like these make me feel like there was put another layer of paper on my stairs to be build up to eventually understand it. which i actually hope i never will - bc never ending mystery is what drives me. same as with our universe - we know so much, but still we know nothing.
They still talk about it, because there's a large enough population that bought into this bs experience of how great the movie was. Naturally, the rest of us want to try and understand what the hoo ha is. Anyway, love it or hate it, 2001 and 2010 are influential movies. Its like the hippie movement, there were only a small minority that were involved, but they dragged the whole of society into it. It seems we're always dealing with the tyranny of the minorities. Most people just want to live, ie make a living and raise a family, but they're constantly getting bullied by these small ideological groups. Kubrick got the wrong idea. Its not humanity that will destroy itself. Its these small groups of retards that will destroy humanity.
I have to say I have a hard time believing that Kubrick pandered to anyone about anything. The man was indisputably a polymath and perfectionist who in his later years was hamstrung by his own obsessive behavior. 2001 was a technical tour de force that either blew people away or left them totally baffled. No one had ever seen anything like it before.
I agree. I was lucky enough to see it in it's premiere run at Grouman's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard in Wide Screen Cinerama. I was 12. It was totally astounding, and it changed my life. After seeing it on the big screen probably 50 times [it was like going to Rocky Horror every week for us in SF in '72] and many more times on the small screen, I still am in awe of it. However it came to be finished, and however many ways it's interpreted, it is a nugget of genius in a category of its own.
I wouldn't call it 'pandering' so much as a brilliant ploy to keep investors happy, while you go ahead and make the film you really want to make. The man was always so far ahead of the curve.
In a way, Kubrick did that with every film he made. 'The Shining' is unlike any Horror film. 'EWS' redefined Erotic Thrillers and even 'Barry Lyndon' was extremely unique compared to other period pieces from its meticulous design and lighting to it's Kubrickian narration and structure etc. Sometimes it felt like he saw the landscape of Hollywood and decided his next film would contrast all of them ala 'FMJ'
The first issue with Rob's narrative is that Clark's book is a direct attack on nuclear weaponry. Kubrick is more ambiguous bc he didn't want to repeat himself from Strangelove. Clark isn't carrying the safer narrative. The next issue is that money comes from the promise of making money. Strangelove was SK's big success as an auteur. They invested because it was a safe bet. The characters were renamed but taken from the optioned novel with the exception of Strangelove himself, who was inspired by Von Braun. It followed the novel, Red Alert, but turned it into a black comedy. There's no one way comedic veiled references in the 60s threatened his career. It was the strongest it had ever been. Rob feels like he has to create a narrative that supports his genre of film analysis, but he's cutting out the legs from beneath anything he says. Here's an interesting question. Bowman is taken across the Stargate, observed, and evolved because he survived and HAL didn't. What if HAL won? Would the aliens have acted differently or would they have evolved the AI much as they did Bowman? Maybe additional evolution wouldn't have been necessary. Their arrival inspired weapons for the apemen to kill one another. If AI killed the crew, might that be seen as the next evolutionary step of intelligence on earth?
Yes, your analysis is very similar to that of AI developer Prof. Jeffrey Hinton, who now worries AI may get out of control if we don’t understand and regulate it appropriately.
Kubrick's actual explanation of the ending, that gave in an interview, is that Bowman is in a space zoo, watched by the aliens. So... yeah. We are nothing to aliens
It's not Clarke's book. He was forced into writing it the way Kubrick wanted to with a small amount of leaway. Clarke's own account, published as a book in itself, describes a lot of the pressures and conflicts between the two of them. Kubrick had authorization rights and a lot of what Clarke wrote was discarded, including decriptions of alien cities. Regarding Kubrick not wanting to repeat himself with an obvious nuclear weapon theme, yes I cited that in the interview here. Nevertheless it's still in the novel as signed off by Kubrick. "money comes from the promise of making money". This isn't always true. There are many types of media that could make money but aren't produced and distributed for various reasons. Sometimes laws prohibit it, sometimes it's morally distasteful to investors, sometimes they value their ideological campaigns more than money etc. Successful artists in media can and do get severely attacked if they upset certain people or they just happen to be convenient targets for aa particulkar narrative ... Michael Jackson and Keven Spacey are examples. Baxter and Lobrutto's biogs on SK, as well as some of the archive material in London, outline some of the conflicts that arose from Strangelove. Kubrick had even taken to carrying a knife in his briefcase for fear of attacks. A short while later he moved to UK permanently and would hardly ever fly on a plane. He would confide in some colleagues he was concerned that someone might secretly record a private conversation. His wife has talked in interviews for the likes of The Guardian about his distrust of people in power and that if he had to fly he'd send his family on a different flight. He also became so private that for years the public barely knew what he looked like. And he was heavily attacked for A Clockwork Orange straight after 2001, regardless of the financial success of both films, to the point he withdrew ACO from the UK market until after his own death ... another smart chess move. As for the film's ending ... there are no aliens. The whole alien narrative is a superficial surface story. The monolith isn't an alien artifact. It's the cinema screen itself rotated 90 degrees (watch the visuals of the film carefully - there are hundreds of clues) and we, the audience, are the trransfixed apes. Kubrick even had Clarke write a section in the novel (published) in which the monolith displays films to the apes, showing them how to progress, and explains there are thousands of monolith all over the world ... just as prints of the movie did the same in cinemas.
@@collativelearning It is very interesting, and upsetting. We all wander where are the modern Victor Hugo's, the Duma's, the Dostoyevski's... the new Rulfo's. Maybe they exist, is just that some people don't want artists showing truth. As Robert Mckee points out, Plato considered storytellers as dangerous people, because we interiorize truth through emotion. People in power never want us to feel emotions that are inconvenient for their plans: “Artists threaten authority by exposing lies and inspiring passion for change”. I now see how brave (and crazy) Kubrick was. We need more tenacious and honest storytellers
Very interesting and accurate imo. I felt he did this with almost every movie he made (after strangelove). Why I think he always made movies on established books. So he could sell that story to the executives but then make the movie about what he really wanted to make it about.
Thanks. I'd never considered that before- yet it certainly looks like that was probably one of his objectives. I'm old enough to remember what it was like back in the late 60s early 70s ( barely) and while Dr. Strangelove was widely celebrated where I lived and the people I grew up around (So. Cal. beach communities. Surfers etc..) there was the reactionary conservative society that must not have appreciated Kubrick's sensibilities and insight into their world. Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan. Almost unrelieved conservative dominance and yet liberalism flourished. The good kind of liberalism- not todays cancel culture/ identity politics/ snowflake trigger PC BS. But the actual free to live your own life, do your own thing. Not so much anymore. We've become almost a police state- moving toward A Clockwork Orange.
@Dion McGee we enjoyed the movie in the South. I saw it at the theater with my folks when it came out and everyone loved it. I was intrigued by the H bombs going off at the end, as I'd never seen one before.
Yes, I would have liked to know how he sold 'Eye's wide Shut' to the globalists, then presented a film that confirmed they are all satanic worshippers, paedos and debauchery, all drunk on their billions and power!
This is why we love your channel … we don’t want the short answer, we don’t come here for a short answer, we come here to understand more and more of the whole story !! So interesting !!!
Fantastic as always! First time I watched 2001 was way back in the 1970s as a 70mm print still in my teens. I didn't understand anything, but loved the visuals. Incredibly clean and clear. Flat screens with perfect moving images (a very complex rig of synchronized 16mm film projectors). No other movie had this during the next decades(!!!). The movie seems to tap into our faint memory of dreams and nightmares. I only knew that this was made by an absolute genius. Now I know a little more both about how it was technically made and what it means, but I feel I'm still far from being there.
I watched it in 1968 when it first came out as an 11 year old & was spellbound by the technology. As I grew up & became involved with the technology & watched the film more I became aware of the tension between HAL (AI) & humans. I'll never forget my first encounter with a computer for the blind that spoke just like HAL; it was a seminal moment when fiction started to met reality. Now it is bipedal robots that can kill humans without being told.
Fascinating supposition that the end sequence is a dream. I would add that, when we see Bowman inside the suite, every time we see him transitioning from an earlier version of himself to a later version, there is a shot where we see both versions of himself in the same frame. Also, the earlier version of himself sees the later version, but the later version does not see the earlier version. Thus, when the middle aged Bowman stands in the doorway and sees the older Bowman eating dinner, the older Bowman senses that something is back there looking at him, but when he gets up from his dinner to investigate he does not see anything. Later, we see the older Bowman look up and see the dying Bowman. They appear in the same frame, but while the older Bowman sees the dying Bowman, the dying Bowman raises his head from his pillow and sees a black monolith where the older Bowman had been eating. The fact of two Bowmans in a few shots on the surface suggests a mirror reality, and yet there are two different Bowmans when this happens, and only one of the two Bowmans sees the other Bowman, and that works against a mirror reality. If a mirror reality is not the explanation, then what is left as an explanation is a dream sequence that is progressing from young to old (the younger Bowman always sees the older Bowman, but never vice versa). Therefore, chronological time and evolution (from younger to older, and from less knowing to more knowing, and from less sophistication to more sophistication) are dreams. Transhumanist optimism - the end point being the Star Child - is a dreamlike myth - a heroic story we tell ourselves much like the Odyssey had been for the ancient Greeks.
Good stuff about the view points, cheers. Another giveaway is that the first shot of the room ios from within the pod and the computer screens flash the words NON_FUNCTION. In other words mathematical, formal logic reality don't apply here.
Watching 2001 as a child connected with me as a profoundly religious experience that has stayed with me throughout my life. For me it’s brilliance has never faded.
I also watched it as a kid, but for years felt I hadn't really understood it. Hearing it broken down here about the revolt against AI and transhumanism though, I realise that Kubrick got his messages through to me all the same. And how prescient they were.
Don't agree with many of the conclusions Rob draws from the film but that doesn't matter for me. I love hearing other's ideas and interpretations whether I concur or not and irrespective Rob's take is damned interesting. For me the final gift of all great art is the discussion and interaction it allows us to have long after it's made.
when you add up the films of Kubrick in your mind, if you watch them all and think about them and hold them together in your mind as much as possible you get an entirely bleak and quite horrifying vision of humanity and the powerful: there's a striking consistency to this across the genres the films appear to sit in. thank you Rob for making this particularly clear.
@@tomk2720 of course. Like in most things- the horrible is more noticeable, gets our attention easier than the positive. Unfortunately, the accumulative effect of the negative outweighs that of the positive, which is why the animal species are suffering mass extinctions due to the amount of destructive activity from the human race. Those of us who love nature and animals and have tried to live accordingly can't stop the plague of greed and pollution that follows human civilizations everywhere.
Only recently I had begun to realise the number of similarities between Dr Strangelove and 2001 - especially the mistrust of technology. Fascinating interview.
great clip and very interesting explanation Rob. I know this is a bit edited, but fair play to Richard Grannon letting you speak without interupting , Richard himself has the gift of the gab and is very articulate and interesting to listen to , I've watched a lot of his stuff ., but he was able to sit back and listen to let you shine. . Nice job.
I love the way the monolith is shaped like a movie theater screen and Bowman finally realizes that the audience (us) are on the other side of it observing him in the room he is put in at the end.
The monolith being a movie screen peering into the characters is a poor interpretation that I never bought for one second. The monolith can be viewed as hyper-advanced alien technology known as "stargate" in the book, or as a doorway to transcendence, or both. It was a catalyst that led ape-like beings to the next level, man. It was also a catalyst that led man (astronaut David Bowman) to the next level, transcending man: star child at the end of the movie.
@@suncat9 could a symbol signify two things? Perhaps the movie screen also acts like a catalyst for the audience. Perhaps it's our portal to transcendence and enlightenment.
what a load of bullshit it is not anywhere near the dimensions of any movie screen and Kubrick was obsessed with format idea stolen from jay weidner and it is 100% nonsense
I saw 2001 the year it came out. I was 10. My aunt had to explain the ape to space scene because I knew nothing of evolution. I remember being more scared than excited watching it even though I was a patriotic fan of the space race like nearly every boy in the States, more so because my pop was an aerospace engineer and an ex-fighter pilot instructor. I read Clarke's novelization five years later but it was emotionally sterile and didn't provoke questioning. Now 55 year later, I understand why I was so scared with the movie. I was supposed to. I am reminded of an old wisdom: "To see with the eyes of a child ..." By deepest thanks for posting this. At last I have closure to an important event in my life.
I saw it at the cinema with my dad when I was 5 . Neither of us had the faintest idea what was going on. I liked the monkeys, and got bored with the descent into the monolith and the daft hippy light show.
Arthur C Clark and Kubrick both sat in a cinema alone every day to review that day's shoots. Kubrick was always asking Clark whether the movie was on point, in relation to "The Sentinel", on which it is based.
Thanks for your work Rob. Enriches my enjoyment and understanding of films and psychology. Based on your "Meaning of the Monolith" ideas, I have thought that film and visual imaging, can deeply influence thinking and behaviors, (subconciously perhaps?) in the viewers. With malice, or without. And this might be the idea that Kubrick had to alert us to this possiblility. Kind regards, Scott Rowland
2001 was an expansion of Clarke's The Sentinel. At the time 2001 was made, I was aware of Childhood's End, and came to the conclusion it would never be made into a film because the special effects required would be impossible to pull off. How wrong I was. The 3-episode TV adaptation with Charles Dance as Karellen was spot-on brilliant. So whatever Kubrick was up to, Clarke got what he wanted too. Who took who for a ride? Or were they in cahoots? Seems to me everyone got what they wanted. As for dropping the narrative, who on earth needs a narrative? It's an adventure movie, a thriller, not a documentary. A narrative would have ruined it. Also what is wrong with Dr Strangelove or 2001 that would piss off the rich folks? Don't they have a sense of humour? What kind of movie were they wanting? Birth Of A Nation? Gone With The Wind? Even the Wizard Of Oz is subversive! I haven't heard any complaints about Forbidden Planet, which also has an anti-tech aspect, but is one of the best sci-fi movies ever, with breath-taking SFX for its time, and was an influence that led to Star Trek, funded by 2 unexpected people with vision, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.
They weren't all happy as you claim. Fred Ordway, one of the space technology consultants on the film was extremely disappointed and wrote to Kubrick giving a list of gripes that the narrative he wanted wasn't clear. Clarke didn't even know what the ending was until he saw the film and wrote his sequel novel in an attempt to exonerate HAL and steer the narrative back to what he wanted,, IBM demanded their logos be removed ... it goes on and on. Strangelove didn't piss off "the rich", it pissed off the cold war officials who the film exposed as being manipulative and delusional. That's why their media affiliates tried to brand him a commie for it. The pentagon even made an internal documentary for their employees, trying to discredit the film.
And still new ideas about 2001 come at me. Once upon a time I thought I knew everything there was to know about this movie. I didn't see this coming. Full marks for blowing my mind again.
Whether I agree with Rob Ager -- or not -- on a case-by-case basis, his insights and interpretations are always interesting. I don't know that I agree with some of his takes on Kubrick's "2001" though I can see why he sees what he sees in it. It's important to remember that Kubrick portrays the 'Dawn of Man' as a 'divine intervention' of sorts, with extraterrestrials interfering in hominin evolution via the Monolith, turning a vegetarian Ape into a carnivorous and murderous Man . . . and then, after Man has evolved -- having made use of those new traits -- to the status attained in our near future, Man himself becomes the Creator of a new kind of intelligence, an artificial intelligence (HAL 9000), and Hal 'him'-self becomes a murderer, too, even though 'he' wasn't intended to become one by 'his' creators. Indeed, HAL's 'creator' -- a "Doctor Chandra" -- had taught 'him' how to sing a song ["Daisy"], one of 'his' first memories, and the last thing 'he' forgets when 'his' mind is going. Dave Bowman, returning to Earth after he has become 'apotheosized', is at the end of his "space odyssey" . . . and how did Homer's ODYSSEY end? It ended with Odysseus returning to Ithaca in disguise as an Old Man, confronting the arrogant suitors who had been harassing his wife Penelope and taking advantage of his absence to pillage his home. Odysseus is able to string his own bow -- a feat none of the suitors could achieve -- and then shoot an arrow through a series of axe-loops. And then Odysseus SLAUGHTERS all those jerks, getting a kind of messianic revenge upon them, in order to set-to-right the situation that had arisen during his absence. Kubrick doesn't need to SHOW us the Bowman/Star-Child kicking ass and taking names when he returns to Earth -- doing to the creeps on Earth what those arrogant suitors had done to Odysseus's home on Ithaca -- when all he had to do was give his film a title which connects his 'Bowman' character to the bow-man Odysseus: "2001: a space odyssey." The (untold) ending of the film is a 180-degree reversal of what he'd done in "DR. STRANGELOVE." Instead of depicting the leaders of the world as flawed, insane, war-mongering fools who end up causing the world's DESTRUCTION, this next film depicts an Odysseus-figure poised to wreak vengeance against those very same types of leaders BEFORE they can actually wipe out human civilization. Kubrick may have been counting on his audience having at least a modicum of familiarity with the story of Odysseus in order to 'guess' how the film's finale would logically lead to an eschatological Day of Judgment, as the ODYSSEY does. A bad day to be one of those arrogant suitors. A foreseeably bad day to be the Presidents and Prime Ministers and Industry Leaders (etc.) whose policies had resulted in so much misery after countless wars, when the 'Bow-Man' returns. What he'd had to do to HAL was nothing compared to what he would feel compelled to do against the bastards who'd been abusing their authority on Earth. It's what Moonwatcher did to the leader of the opposing tribe at that pathetic waterhole four million years before -- writ large. That's MY take on "2001" anyway. I get why Rob Ager interprets it the way he does, but I think he misses the boat on this one. If Kubrick had a say in what was put into Clarke's novel, then that would include the notion that the Beings who interfered with primate evolution did so because they valued the Mind, and sought to encourage the development of intelligence on every planet they could find where Life had arisen. As beings who had already transcended their own fleshly origins, they perhaps still felt the need to 'procreate' . . . but could no longer do so. Thus, the potential intelligences they could foster on worlds like Earth would be like adopted children to parents incapable of begetting and bearing their own. Like every parent, such alien foster-parents might very well feel the need to 'raise' their children to be able to succeed in life . . . and, sadly, it seems undeniable that the world -- that every world in the Universe -- is a battleground of Evolutionary forces where survival depends upon becoming an apex predator. Even the aliens who created the Monolith had to have had such barbarous beginnings, a necessary preamble to the more transcendent state to be achieved later on. This Kubrickian 'creation myth' flies in the face of the Biblical one, where a God creates Man in a state of 'innocence', only for His created children to become disobedient sinners, and -- ultimately -- murderers (in the Cain story). In Kubrick's "Dawn of Man" story, a 'God' takes a creature (a pre-human 'Ape'-like creature) and endows it with an Idea, the notion of using a bone as a Tool to use in order to kill and eat a tapir, rather than to die off as an herbivore. And then, to use that bone-tool as a weapon to get the better of a rival, in order to re-take that precious oasis and prevent his own tribe from dying of thirst. Survival necessitates all this. Harsh, but true. Truer than the Genesis myth anyway, which is what makes Kubrick's film a kind of slap-in-the-face to all the religious types out there who cling to the myth that Man was once Innocent and, through his own faults, became a 'sinner'.
Pretty much agreed with what you've posted. In fact, I didn't know the surname Bowman had anything to do with the Odyssey! Then again, I didn't read it so yeah. That.
Great write up. Yeah, I don't know if I agree that the star child is going to open up a can of whoop ass on the "suitors", but I do agree he's not there to impassively look at Earth from space forever. For me, it feels like the film presents a collective "humanity" with the only divide presented being between the US and the USSR. So I feel like his actions will in some way rectify 1. our relationship with technology and our alienation from our fellow man, reflecting David's defeat of HAL and 2. the fracturing of humanity due to the warring of nations. Whether that will necessitate violence or just some "force" that only a star child would be capable of I don't know. For me this imbues the film's ending with a powerful sense of awe, hope, and a good bit of fear that comes along with knowing that momentous change is about to occur and not knowing the outcome of that change. Especially since change, even with good intentions (intentions of an evolved being), necessitates breaking a few eggs. That's partially why I find the people who think the ending is purely black comedy like Strangelove, hiding in plain sight the destruction, extinction, or enslavement or something of humanity at the hands of the star child so interesting. The star child, even if it is gonna do some forceful or violent things, it is still a human. The next evolutionary phase of humanity, but the star child is still at its core a cooperative being. The ambiguity of the ape scene and the ending as they relate to each other is that the ape's are a tribe that reach the next evolutionary stage as a group, while the star child is alone. Is he gonna create more star children or wipe out the less evolved humans? I think most of the contextual clues point towards your interpretation of the star child not being an elaborate doomsday device since I 100% agree with your point about the alien's actions being an act of creation and of valuing the mind and possibly future companionship with humanity.
2001: A Space Odyssey remains my favourite film of all time. It's certainly the most vast, far reaching, over-the-top, beautiful, brilliant film that it can't be anything but...and I will absolutely watch any and every youtuber's interpretation of the film until I've heard all of them. Brilliant. Beautiful.
@@sliglusamelius8578 My goodness! Seriously? Ok, quickly, the apes are there to show the moment when these particular apes learn to use a tool therefore setting of their evolution towards becoming human in a few million years... The black obelisk, it's a marker of human evolution or it's there to inspire a moment that moves apes/humanity forward a step - it can be viewed as both, The space baby? Dave Bowman enters that bizarre, Victorian-styled room and seems to immediately age - then he sees the obelisk again in front of his bed and he points at it - then? Again, he's reborn into whatever humanity is supposed to evolve into next. The obelisk again, inspires human evolution. There it is.
I like how Kubrick makes fun of the elite class and how pretensions rule their world. I can think of one specific scene in each of his movies where a character is allowed to reveal how crazy they really are.
When 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, I was so captivated by it at age 14 that I watched it 4 times (twice in one theater, and twice in another). I appreciate this backstory about one of my favorite films.
This is amazing Rob. When I watch films, I wish my brain worked like yours. As far as I get is “something isn’t right here”. The first time I remember it happening was The Shining as a kid. I watched it a few times after but when I came across your channel and bought your videos, I realized my brain doesn’t work like yours. Unfortunately
This view of 2001 didn't come in casual viewing I assure you. I had to do tonnes of production research and careful examination of the film's visual details :)
Great tidbit from the interview. Kubricks mastery of chess and knowledge of psychology are the keys to understanding his approach to filmmaking. Every film is Kubrick vs the given topic, he plays the game to fruition and presents it as a thesis to us (the observer), and he does it through pure visual storytelling. He doesn’t specify why the end result occurred, or even the logic of the game itself, he leaves that open to subjective interpretation from his audience. If Kubrick made blanket finite statements in his films, they would’ve never gotten green lit by studio executives, because theyre his opponents in the chess game after all.
What you describe is essentially how all big-budget studio movies are made: You pitch a salable genre picture that appears to work within genre conventions, even if that was never your primary intention. But every frame of every movie is a reflection of countless choices, planned and unplanned, fortuitous accidents and noticed or unnoticed errors. A lot of thought and hard work goes into the content, composition, placement and duration of every image, even if the filmmakers aren't Kubrickian precision freaks. That's why movies can take years to make and only hours or minutes to watch. And the elasticity of our experience of time is another of "2001"'s concerns. But don't overlook the central theme of the film's second section: that technology itself inevitably becomes mundane, routine, commercialized, and largely automated. The dialog at the space station Hilton is mostly dull, polite small-talk or scripted formal speeches and there are familiar corporate logos everywhere (some of which, like Pan Am, no longer existed by 2001). The effect is to strip away the romance and reveal the humdrum corporate reality of it all. That's how "Man" chooses not to deal with anything "Beyond the Infinite" (like death). Dr. Floyd's trip to the orbital station is set to the comforting Strauss waltz (used like Muzak), which contrasts with the terrifying, unearthly György Ligeti music associated with the monolith in all sections of the film. Kubrick's goal was to re-introduce primal awe in the face of the unknown, which is what the last section of the movie is about. Of course, Kubrick LOVED technology (like his vaunted use of advanced low-light lenses for candlelight scenes in "Barry Lyndon") and he (not Clarke, who was no Hollywood pitch man) sold the idea of "2001" to MGM as a showcase for the widescreen Cinerama/Super Panavision 70 technology, which is how "2001" was originally released in roadshow engagements. Clarke (living in Sri Lanka since 1956) and Kubrick (in England), neither of whom liked to travel, started working on "2001" in 1964, not long after "Dr. Strangelove" was released and became a hit (eventually grossing almost $10 million on a budget of less than $2 million, 55 percent of which went to Peter Sellers' salary). Kubrick asked Clarke for a short story that they could adapt and expand into the film, and Kubrick chose "The Sentinel" (first published in 1951). While consulting, they worked simultaneously, often remotely and sometimes independently, Kubrick on the screenplay and Clarke on the "novel version," which wound up going in different directions. They were both fine with that.
Most movie productions don't involve approaching tech corporations and offering to promote their products, ideas and agendas. 2001 and Moonraker are rare exceptions to this and it's heavily documented regarding 2001. I used to be a film maker so am well aware a huge amount of effort goes into the details of the shots, bu the vast majority of it is incidental on most productions. Kubrick was very unusual in that he would personally select almost every prop and costume element, hardly ever delegating the creative choice. This is all documented in the Kubrick Archives. And Kubrick is renowned in the industry for doing far more takes than almost any other director and being far more meticulous about even the most obscure details. Cast and crew have talked about it and the archives proves it. In the second half of the movie it's not that technology becomes mundane and automated. The theme is that it becomes oppressive. It literally turns on the humans. Regarding the Hilton dialogue, there is something entirely diferent going on. Note that Floyd doesn't dismiss the "rumours" of an alien find. He promotes them. He and his colleagues do it again within earshot of two pilots on their way to the monolith excavation, ensuring the word will spread. This gets into the hidden narrative stuff, but I'll leave you to explore that for yourself. Yes, Kubrick approached MGM (a film studio, not part of the corporate tech investors). I've seen the letter from MGM in the archives introducing Clarke to Kubrick. But it was Clarke who then went touring about selling the project to tech industry. I read that in a couple of sources, including some of Clarke's own interviews. Clarke is even shown in a behind the scenes documentary, called A Look Behind The Future, that was distributed among corporations to prompt them to invest in the film. Clarke is shown with NASA scientists in their own labs, and Kubrick himself is not there. Kubrick is only shown on the 2001 set here in Britain. The last section of the film doesn't just introduce primal awe at the unknown. It introduces terror in the face of it. The whole mission to Jupiter discards the blind optimism of the first part of the movie with giant fantasy moon bases that somehow have gravity the same as Earth's. We're in 2024 now, where are these moon bases and manned solar system trips? And the room Bowman ends up in has his technological dependencies stripped away as he gains greater self-awareness (seeing himself from third person positions), which i'd say is about humankind progressing through greater self-reflection. Then the monolith as cinema screen realization kicks in, which has already been hinted at hundreds of times throughout the movie. Bowman was trapped in a room with no doors, but this realization allows him to leave thr room, and the film narrative, via the monolith / door / screen. Clarke was sandboxed and had very little idea of the very different narrative that was being mostly encoded visually. In one interview I read he talked of being immensely disappointed and in tears at the screening because the finished movie was nothing like what he'd envisioned. Read his deleted chapters for the ending that Kubrick rejected and you'll see just how different their takes on the story were. Of courrse he got a career boost and a lot of money from the movie anyway, but he tries to steer the narrative back to his vision with the 2001 sequels, which Kubrick had nothing to do with. He especially didn't like Kubrick's portrayal of AI as murderous and untrustworthy, so created excuses for HAL's "malfunction" in his sequels. With the 2001 novel it was not an equal partnership. Kubrick had authorization rights, meaning he could reject anything Clarke put forward and insert anything he wanted himself. Clarke was very frustrated and tried to get the book released before the movie came out, but Kubrick kept stalling him, ensuring the movie would come out first. See Baxter and Lobrutto's excellent and well researched accounts of all this.
The Monolith is the movie screen. When you watch a movie, it’s in the horizontal position. Therefore, the vertical position is the movie screen OFF status. The first time we see the the Monolith, it is in the OFF position because nothing is going on. The primates were sleeping, they weren’t supposed to wake up. When the Monolith rotates into horizontal position, Bowman travels from the movie into the film projector. The movie is rewinding and turns bowman back to a baby, and the movie starts over again.
I think it's interesting how anti elitism Kubrick was considering his rather privileged childhood with expensive cameras and support from his family. Very interesting life story. Would've been easy to end up an absolute elitist himself. Thankfully he ended up just being a bit eccentric and a masterful artist
Not so hard to understand. He was an artist with a vision, too brilliant not to recognize when others attempted to manipulate and prostitute his gift for their own purposes, and too much of an independent egoist to not profoundly resent it.
@@Sandra-hc4vo His dad was a doctor and even though they were considered 'wealthy' at that time it wasn't like they were in the millionaire class. Roughly upper middle class and Stanley went to public school. Not any private or prep schools in NYC. His dad didn't shower him with money. Only a good camera. Not a top of the line job. He went to public elementary school and public highschool. No college. His dad was old school, even though he had money, his son had to work to get his own money. When he was 18 he got a job at Look Magazine, then became a full time photographer there making his own money. Got married early at 20 years old, and lived in a crappy tenement on 16th. Those were terribly small apartments. My mom lived down there in the 50s and told me how they were. It wasn't like he was running around with no job and dad covered his bills. He actually played chess for money on the streets and sold photos to Look magazine to get money. Dad let him be independent, no hands out from dad. His life was considered lower middle class. He actually saved his money to fund that first documentary he did ($1500), which today would be like $15k of savings.
I saw 2001 when I was 12. I immediately 'got it' it spoke to my imagination. It has stayed with me ever since , informing my work as a creative artist. For me the film is about the terrifying ordeal of encountering the unknown , the abyss, the shadow and transcending it. Although for the purposes of narrative and visual appeal it's conveyed as and outward journey. But for me it is a representation of an inward journey and encounter with the self , not aliens, represented by the starchild. Nice interview. Thank you😊
2001: A Space Odyssey has actually gotten better and more relevant over time. This movie has so many classic scenes, there are really too many to name, but I'll try. Just for starters, the hallucinogenic ending is still a mind blowing surreal take on the nature of time, space and the fabric of reality. Hearing HAL beg for his life is still heartbreaking and pathetic. HAL committing mass murder is still horrifying (nothing but life support monitors flat lining, but thoroughly unnerving all the same). Probing the deeper meaning(s) of 2001 never ends. I've screened it many times (going all the way back it's first theatrical run in 1968), and here's my take... The Monolith is a symbol for God; something singular, omnipresent, mysterious and impenetrable, representing a supernatural higher power that seems to be guiding our existence and watching over our species. Why supercomputer HAL malfunctions is one of the key questions at the heart of the movie, and he tells us himself... "It can only be attributed to human error." So true! Since we designed HAL, he has our intrinsic nature, including (but not limited to), our tendencies to violence, killing, territoriality, and fouling things up royally. When HAL kills Frank and the hibernating astronauts he is fighting for his survival exactly like the apes at the waterhole. The implications that our creator instilled these tendencies in us (because they were essential to our survival), just as we instilled them in HAL is troubling to say the least, but who prompted the ape to pick up the bone in the first place? It was God, who created us in His image as we created HAL in ours. HAL also runs amok because he's been programmed with contradictory orders. He's hard wired never to alter or falsify information (never tell a lie), but he's also programmed to keep the nature of the mission a secret, so he's more than a little schizophrenic. He falsely reports a malfunctioning communication unit after Dave catches him being deceptive over something trivial that turns out to be something very important (the strange circumstances surrounding the mission). When he (HAL), reads the lips of Frank and Dave discussing unplugging (killing), him, he reacts like we would. Instead of admitting his mistake, he decides to kill them before they kill him. When his plan goes wrong, he begs for his life, shows contrition (and even implies he may be mentally ill), reflecting that he has also inherited some of our better nature...remorse, a conscience and a desire for redemption. Like us, he doesn't want to die, and is fully conscious that he is being killed..."My mind is going, I can feel it, please stop Dave". We can't help but feel sorry for him (at least I did, especially when he starts warbling Daisy as he slowly expires), as if he had real human feelings and expressing actual remorse. At the same time we're angry and appalled at HAL for killing the astronauts and trying to kill Dave and want him to pay for his crimes. And even though both reactions (mercy and vengeance), are directed at an inanimate machine and therefore meaningless, the point is, we have the same contradictory, irreconcilable combination of conflicting natures and impulses we programmed into HAL (perhaps explaining our own neurosis). The relationship between humans and our AI creation(s) is one of an ever merging confluence of personalities. While HAL is becoming more like us: emotional, vain, grandiose, fallible, homicidal, we are becoming more like him: emotionless, cerebral, machine-like and scientifically agnostic (replacing God with ourselves and our technology). The emotionally flat performances by Keir Dullea et al, is on purpose to drive this home. HAL comes across as more human than the humans. One of the themes of 2001 is birth. The birth of (weapon wielding), man begins the film. Next, Dr. Floyd's daughter is having a birthday. She wants a bush baby, a fuzzy, plant eating marsupial that might be at home in the Dawn of Man sequence alongside the passive tapirs who stand around waiting to be slaughtered by the newly carnivorous apemen. The apemen have advanced far enough to domesticate some animals (perhaps to recreate the lost connection to nature of urban-dwelling modern life), but we are still slaughtering and eating other animals as per usual. Then, astronaut Frank Poole gets birthday greetings from his parents, which he has zero reaction to (his dull dad goes over his taxes with him). HAL recounts the details of his birth while begging Dave not to execute him. Finally, Dave ages and dies in the faux neo-classic Eden he's landed in, only to be reborn as the Star Child, poised to kick off the next stage of human evolution. There are some great moments along the way that stand out...Dave knocking over the wine glass, showing that man is still a flawed being. The group of scientists posing with the Monolith on the moon like big game hunters in front of an elephant they'd bagged on an African safari (the original home of the former apemen/astronauts). Dave jogging around the wall of the crew quarters, air boxing. On the spaceship the camera angles are always being skewed and messed with like an MC Escher fun house. You never know what's up or what's down (of course, in space there is no up or down), as entire sets rotate and whirl in every direction. I think this is a deliberate metaphor for how many different perspectives (both literal and figurative), this film can be interpreted. Douglas Trumble's effects on Dave’s trip through the universe at the speed of light is awe inspiring, as are all his groundbreaking special effects. No wonder 2001 became a cult film with the turned on youth of the sixties, who would often actually BE tripping when they saw it (Paramount picked up on this trend and started running the tag line "The Ultimate Trip" in its promos). The Music in this movie is simply perfect. Without a doubt, Richard Strauss majestic Thus Spracht Zarathustra will forever be connected to this flick. The Blue Danube sequence is still one of the most beautiful pairings of images and music ever put on film. Kubrick shot 2001 in 65mm and his collaborators kept Cinerama's deeply-curved screen in mind, creating an exceptionally immersive experience. The Dawn of Man section is full of iconic images....The ape leader Moonwatcher discovering bones as weapons to take over the waterhole (and the world), with. The triumphant ape throwing the bone/club in the air, which then turns into a satellite, is the most famous cut-to transition in movie history. The apes encountering the monolith for the first time is so well known it's parodied and referenced in countless ways to this day. When one band of apes drives the other clan from the waterhole (after beating one of their rivals to death), they begin walking menacingly (bloody clubs in hand), toward the camera on TWO legs instead of their previous stooped over, four point brachiation, establishing beyond a shadow of a doubt that the spectacular, terrifying, age of man has indeed dawned, and, although we will advance civilization to the point of colonizing the moon, we will still be fighting over the waterhole. The scene in the space station when Dr. Floyd has to try and be cordial to the Russians who want to know what the f*ck is going on at the American's moon base (something he ain't about to tell them), illustrates that our rivalry with the Russkies will last far into the future, and it has. And of course the immortal punchline uttered by Hal..."Sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" became a ubiquitous catchphrase. I could go on and on about the depth and beauty of this movie (and I guess I have), but I'll close with this. 2001:A Space Odyssey does what a movie is supposed to do; take you to another world and make you think. It challenges the audience to contemplate its meaning instead of spoon feeding it to them. Great films should always aspire to be a work of art, and on a visual level alone, 2001 succeeds brilliantly. The attention to detail is amazing. This film took me to Jupiter and beyond the infinite and opened my mind as few films have before or since. For visionary, auteur director Stanley Kubrick and co-screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke, all the planets lined up on this absolute masterpiece that's still ahead of its time. Dah Dah Dah.....Dadum!!! Boom boom boom boom boom boom....
Yes! I thought the same. Although we advance in technology and supposed civilisation, at our core we remain these flawed animals with inherent violence and brutality. Technology does not truly advance us but it does give us greater dominion over our rivals until the point is reached where technology has dominion over us. We are starting to see this now with tv, social media, but also systems that run our lives eg banking, online accounts, communication and even customer service (not long before everything is automated), and of course the emergence of AI and who knows where that will lead?! Well Kubrick knew and he showed us.
This was great, man. You hit on a lot of the things I suspected. Kubrick was so sneaky and subversive. I think he had nothing but contempt for most of the industry people and the elites in all areas of society. This contempt I think is foundational to understanding his work--it informs his being and therefore his work. Though writing itself was his weak point, he transcended this weakness with his visual skill to say, in the purest form possible, what would have been censored anyway. He used the language of cinema to bypass the verbal filters. He was just smarter than everyone. Period. His greatness will endure for as long as there are movies and people to watch and ponder them.
damn, I never considered the ending was a dream sequence. the ending always killed the movie for me but i think you just turned it around for me with that take
From watching the videos on your site years ago, I became convinced that 2001 is about Dave realizing he's in a movie. Similar to Inland Empire and Twin Peaks season 3 episode 17. The monolith represents the movie screen, feeding information to those who encounter it. In the book, images play on the screen of the monolith. It seems like a very meta story about film teaching people things. Kubrick said he wanted the movie to subconsciously speak to the audience. That is exactly what the monolith does to the characters. At the end when Dave is in the human zoo, I take that as he is aware he is being watched by the audience, so his perception becomes a human zoo. Also, maybe the entire movie is actually a simulation taking place inside the monolith. And we're watching it. That would explain why we just stare directly at the monolith at the beginning of the film and after the credits end. The monolith bookends the entire film.
The only director to come close to Kubrick's level of genius is probably David Lynch. HAL is my favorite on screen 'villian' of all time. They just don't make films like 2001 anymore without being totally convoluted.
2001 was the only movie I remember that kept getting re-released time after time. I remember seeing it at our twin plaza cinema with my dad as late as 1976.
Guy says, “Don’t tell me what the Author’s intention was!” Isn’t that what you’re doing? I think we run into trouble thinking we’re smarter than someone else or in thinking we have some enlightened insight or understanding that only people who agree with us have? Like Freud is attributed to have said, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”.
Rob's quote from the film, "It's exactly like being asleep, except you don't dream." in reference to the hibernation aboard the spacecraft sounds a lot like being dead. Combine that with his later comments about the real food vis-a-vie the mush, further suggests that upon the death of HAL, Bowen (and mankind) is set free to be alive again, providing the seed for a new rebirth of mankind. Sort of how an area on Earth seemingly devoid of life, such as a forest after a major fire, can slowly come back to life and potentially thrive after the threat has been removed.
I also find it interesting that at the end Bowman is dressed in all black and I think that represents that he is a primitive ape just like the former apes because he's finally unrestricted by technology. Very symbolic of Kubrick. He's also eating real food instead of mush, just as the apes were finally able to feast after not being restrained by the leopard anymore
The talk about dreams was interesting. There is a strange Alice Through the Looking Glass moment in the green hotel room sequence. When Frank was still in his spacesuit, he walks into the bathroom. Keep track of the camera point of view. The best way is to note the right side of his helmet with its oxygen hose. When he looks at himself in the bathroom mirror, something odd is definitely going on.
Brilliant Rob, absolutely exceptional coverage. Your insight and background knowledge of this medium is remarkable. Also, what you said here about Kubrick’s films pissing influential people off and conveying hidden messages makes me ponder Eyes Wide Shut all the more.
Together with 'The Shining', I have always been confused with '2001', esp with the ending scenes. So thank you for providing a way of interpreting the movie. Fascinating.
Interesting discussion about dreams. I'd not heard that before from Ager's analyses. Also a good point about how the music evolves from banally delightful to terrifying. We might also point out that while the studio exec's minds were prepped for the film by 10 minutes of science talk, his viewers' minds were prepped by several minutes of eerie music by a musician from Transylvania (Ligetti)
1.) Arthur C. Clarke... "Any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." 2.) Childhood's End, book by Arthur C Clarke. 3.) He is credited as to creating the telecommunication satellite.
This makes sense of an old personal argument that I had with a friend that had only read the book. I'd only seen the movie. We had very different ideas of what the story meant.
I was 12 years old when this Film came out and it inspired me in both interest in Space Travel and Film making. My career has been in the Film Industry and I keep current re Space travel. Kubrick has been I feel the Greatest film maker of all time. From 2001 to Barry Lyndon . I don't know where of how he got his information from but as far as 2001 goes he was spot on. He was pointing out that our "evolution " has been guided and helped, True ! Ai is inevitable but needs to be, shall I say kept in check . True! There is a Stargate or Portal near Jupiter. True ! He was definitely ahead of the game.
Yes, Kubrick basically made Clarke his bitch, but also King. It was great, imo, because he was a better film-maker than they were authors (even though they were great too). It's like he just looked for great starting ideas to build off of, germs of inspiration, and also needed to claim to be adapting books to film in order to get the means to make a movie of his own vision.
Kubrick was a chess player. Study the game between Hal and Poole, then watch Bowman move through the grid and become different black and white pieces watching each other at the end. It's a new layer with a slightly different interpretation.
I think the psychologist may be right in his description of how Kubrick fooled his investors. But I think what makes 2001 such a great artwork, is that it can be interpreted in many ways. And basically I think it is beyond intellectual explanation - or rather, can be interpreted on many levels.. It shows us some of the grand dilemmas of technology without giving big clear answers, but a strong emotional appeal that reaches down into the core of at least my self-experience. I saw it as a fifteen year old boy when it premiered in London in the end of the 1960s (I was visiting London from my home country Norway), and it it me deep down. It was the defining movie of my teenage years. I have reflected much upon why it hit me so strongly, and since this channel is run by a psychologist, I think some of my fascination for space stems from my childhood experience of being an abandoned child. I think the scenes depicting the lonely astronaut tumbling trought immense, hostile space spoke directly to my feeling of being lost. But of course, there was much more to it. The display of immense forces, uncontrollable by men - now very topical with the climate crisis, but also the scary forces in our own subconscious (my grandmother was Norway's first female psychoanalyst, in the circle around Wilkhelm Reich), and the genial use of the fin de siècle-music Blue Danube to make the "dance of the spaceship and the space station" into a walzing metaphor of an earlier techno-optimistic time with dark clouds on the horizon - this and more: there is so much artistic brilliance and so much strong expression on multiple levels in this movie that transcends intellectual analysis.
The film was created during the height of the Cold War when there was serious talk on both sides about deploying orbiting “sentinel” nuclear weapons in Earth orbit as a doomsday retaliatory “insurance policy.” That same tension is reflected in the strained dialogue between Floyd and the Russians he meets on the space station.
Thanks for this. Stimulating, at least. I first saw 2001 on TV when I was 9 or 10 years old. My mother gushed over the movie, and how she saw it with my grandfather, who was born in 1902, had a Ph.D. in Chemistry, and several patents to his name. My grandfather was born in rural Iowa and talked like an eloquent John Wayne. After he and my mother saw the movie, bought two more tickets and they sat through another viewing, right then and there. He loved it that much. When I saw it, it wasn't presented to me as some artistic/arty Magnum Opus, just a well-done movie that stuck to the nature of space and space travel -- its hostility, isolation, and silence. So the 'aesthetic' choices they made, with music and that surreal sequence at the end. . .these were called for. Space is dangerous, awe-inspiring, and mind-bending. I know I'm getting off track from the message of this video, here; except to say that the hard science and poetic message intoned in the movie still resonated. The quick cut from the bone to the satellite -- and I think just about everyone knows it's a war satellite -- explained how humanity's technological development is rooted in war-making; the first 'technology' in the movie wasn't used to build a house or crack open a nut, but to pummel living creatures to death, including members of the same species. Etc. Etc. Have a good day.
Excellent analysis. I see the underlying framework of the film as representing a progression from matter to mind to spirit. This trichotomy runs throughout. E.g. look at how food progresses thru the film: at first the apemen subsist on very basic, unprocessed food then when the monolith infuses them with reason they invent the first technology which, besides leading to murder and nuclear satellites, moves them up from plant to animal food. This subsistence at the material level. As reason (mind) progresses it changes the food also -- from the tasteless sandwiches eaten on the way to the moon monolith to the pap that is eaten on the way to Jupiter. Once Bowman transcends a purely rational, technological way of relating to the world, as this video points out, his food becomes something other than mere nutrition but becomes tasty and inviting (i.e. human). Look at the progression of human interaction. Families of proto-humans huddling close together in fear, to the tecnologically enabled video call to a far distant daughter on her birthday, to the delayed video feeds to Bowman and Poole -- progression from a purely material existence to a tecnology built on the rational mind drives people further apart. At the end, the transcendent starchild returns to earth, to human contact. Look at the three types of humans portrayed: primitive, feral apemen; --> dehumanized technocrats and spacemen (my uncharitable belief is that Keir Dullea and Gary Lockhart (are those the right names?) were chosen for their parts because of how bland they were as actors) --> urbane and refined Bowman in "evolution chamber". This tripartite structure of evolution is fundamental to the film. It see the film as a plea for humanity to see the dangers of a purely rational approach to the world and to strive to integrate the material and mental aspects of their being into something spiritual. It's not for nothing that the opening music is a reference to Nietzsche. I think back to the ending of Strangelove when Dr. Strangelove loses control of his mechanical hand and it starts to strangle him. On the surface it's a funny bit, but underneath a warning that a purely rational approach to life = death. I am always struck by the final image of the film. I think many people would describe it as the starchild gazing down at the earth, but if you watch it closely the camera changes position slowly so that the absolutely final image is the starchild starting directly and imploringly at the audience as if to say "This is a warning to you. Please take it to heart and change the way relate to the world."
To add on to the dream theory, the way the scenes shift and change, but continue to follow the perspective of Bowman, very much resembles how dreams tend to be.
Thanks to Rob's research, I now approach all of Kubrick's films as being doubly encoded in this manner - a surface narrative and then the real message.
I first saw 2001 in 1974 on the only 70mm theater in my State and I was thrilled by it. I was almost twelve years old and was already a fan of written science fiction so I was enthralled from start to finish. 13:30
In the release version of the movie, there is still at least one IBM logo visible on the cockpit display of the Orion III space plane as it rendezvous with the space station.
There are other instances where the IBM logo is visible. One example is on the pads that Bowman and Poole use to view the BBC interview. In addition, HAL is formed by a simple one-letter shift down from IBM in each character. That seems unlikely to be a coincidence. Besides the Cyclopean eye that Odysseus has to blind to escape, I guess there might be some literary reference to Prince Hal (Hamlet), but one can stretch these interpretations too far. The deception and looking glass themes that another commentators mentioned are intriguing though. The Clavius base cover story is a dig at the regular use of disinformation being used and accepted as normal. I'll have to watch the bathroom mirror scene again to see if Kubrick did use that to indicate that Bowman had gone through the looking glass. My interpretation would be that he is seeing himself unreversed as we the audience see him. It's a step along the way to the revelation that one can make oneself anew and see the world through different eyes.
I'm sure a lot of the politics and trickery are somewhat true. But having read the book, the message of the movie is quite true to the message of the book. This guy is projecting his own opinion on the movie.
Kubrick viciously skewered the hierarchy of warmongers in Paths of Glory. In Full Metal Jacket, he examined the dehumanizing aspect of war. Strangelove was his satirical look at political and military leaders. The end of 2001? In my opinion, after Bowman passes through the Stargate, he is in a construct supplied by an alien intelligence. In that environment, he passes through the stages of his life while being observed. Near his death, he once again sees the monolith at the foot of his bed and is guided through his reincarnation by the benevolent intelligentsia.
In the Clarke book the alien civilization has either collapsed or moved beyond requiring technology, implying their obelisks are left over AI, completing the program they were designed for.
The ending of 2001 is dream-like, and like symbolic dreams it has a deconstruction of past events, sometimes with Dave acting as a proxy for HAL, seeing from HAL's point-of-view, and sometimes as the Dave that HAL witnessed, but in more of a Human idiom. He graduates through thesis and antithesis towards a synthesis and is reborn. The ambiguity of this sequence is a feature, as we can each find something relatable yet tantalizing in it. And the musical choice of Zarathustra is suitable in its being both an opening stanza and a complete crescendo. This is a film that never ceases to provide new rewards on each viewing.
Brilliant, Rob. My study of esoterica has led me to Anthroposophy and the art of its modern adherents, well one of them in particular anyway. It occurs to me that the imagery in 2001: ASO may be quite anthroposophic. I've asked the artist whose work interests me in this way to consider the film. Could be quite interesting.
Absoluyely fascinating! I make sure to watch on Christmas day each year. A visual feast, and so many layers. "Now my favourite movie is even better" - I agree!
I knew Kubrick was a genius, but this info places him at a level rarely seen, especially in the entertainment industry. Thanks for the great analysis and information.
I feel like Arthur C Clark is being sandbagged here. This video makes it seem like he was a pawn in the creation of this film. He was pivotal in creating the structure of this film. Stanley Kubrick, as much as I love him, could not have come up with what was required to tell this story. He was a great story teller, but he almost always needed someone else to create the story he wanted to tell.
I didn't think the ending was about an escape from technocracy so much as it was a visual depiction of cyclical "regression" after a technologically advanced society reaches its nadir. Reaching for Jupiter & Beyond was the highest stage of technological development the society depicted would reach, & everything that happened after the defeat of HAL was a visual representation of that society's collapse when the "grand mystery of the beyond" turned out to be emptiness, a void, literally incomprehensible spans of time & space that we can't overcome. Viewed as a cycle within a cycle, the visual narrative of the film works in this manner, too 🤷 after the end you just start back over at the beginning of the film & the cycle repeats. This film is about cycles.
There's merit to that. In the novelization Bowman sees his whole life unwinding like a movie, can't remember if it went backwards. I agree the film returns to the beginning at the end. Bowman arrives and can help the next apes, sorry "humans", to evolve.
Aliens helped us evolve, and set an alarm to be triggered once we got to the Moon. That was from Clark's short story "Sentinel". It also seems to pit technology against magic... how we used our technology to face the aliens' magic, and the science that is so advanced it appears to be magic!!
Love Robs take on kubrick, from his use of psychology to technology. Im a huge kubrick fan and Robs analysis has helped me delve deeper into the genius of kubricks work. He was my dads favourite director and passed on that love to me. The first kubrick film i ever saw was barry lyndon when i was 12 and i just knew that this mans work transcends his surface narratives. Thanks for all the content Rob.
Your postings over the years changed my mind about the film. Background: I worked on NASA projects as an engineer. I had dinner with Arthur C. Clarke in 1970. Watching the movie was a big part of why I chose to work in the space program. The movie “worked” on me. To quote Howard Beal in the movie Network, I felt like “I have seen the face of god” (no easy feat for an atheist lol). Thanks for showing me a completely different interpretation of the movie. I still believe in “the promise of space”. We humans are explorers. We will explore space (subject to the laws of physics and the slow speed of light). And, unfortunately, our evolutionary primitive instincts will always make us dangerous to others and to ourselves. I wish I could be cryonically frozen for a few centuries and see if we’re still here. And if we are, what is our world like. I wish I could still participate in the space program. And I wish I could viscerally feel the awe that I felt when I first saw the movie. Despite the negatives you rightly point out, our future, I believe, is in the stars.
Kubrick's depiction of the asteroid belt is the only accurate depiction in film. It's mostly empty space and the sole asteroid passing by is more like what it's like.
Rob will you ever do a video about the late, great James Cagney? I would love to hear your analysis and thoughts about Angels with Dirty faces. It's 84 years later and people still to this day wonder if his character Rocky Sullivan turns into a coward at his execution or if he pretends to be as a favour to his friend as a last minute request in order to help stop a young group of teens seeing him as a hero
@@collativelearning Ha I have both of those on DVD! Classics. I will look forward to it for sure tho if you ever have time to put some material together about some of his films. So influential and ahead of their time
I just want to say I've been watching your videos for i think a decade now, and i really enjoyed hearing you discuss the movies in this sort of podcast format!
![Twenty One Pilots - The Line (from Arcane Season 2) [Official Audio]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/XCz7WUotXs8/mqdefault.jpg)
For those leaving arbitrary comments claiming there's no evidence for any of this (even though I cite several source in the vid) check out these vids where I go more specifically into detail about production history and the content of the movie itself ...
No aliens in 2001 / meaning of the monolith ruclips.net/video/KYcekxnsjyY/видео.html
2001: Behind the propaganda (tons of production sources and footage in this) ruclips.net/video/6n1kucZVYdk/видео.html
2001: Horror of the void (tons of movie detail observations) ruclips.net/video/LcFuCfJMIZg/видео.html
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Love you Rob❤ Great stuff as always
My brain is honestly so fried after dealing with RUclips comment sections. I could study physics for 40 years and still be told I know nothing about it all day. The arrogance is so far beyond me
@@QuixEnd Hmmm, I personally think everything should always remain up for debate by all. There are definitely a lot of things that the academic community collectively get wrong, but only change their minds when some other academic comes along and provides new evidence (and typically gets reputationally attacked for challenging their consensus). There's also an incredible arrogance present in some areas of academia, where they think that someone operating outside their hierarchy has nothing to offer and should be ignored or even chastized for offering their views.
I've had lots of correspondence from academics over the years. Some of them have praised my work and talk to me like I'm a fellow traveler in the pursuit of knowledge, which I am. But some get very annoyed and try to pull academic rank, citing my lack of university certification - forgetting that most of the materials they've read are publicly available for anyone to read. Often I've done more research than they have in the given topic. I'm also not restricted by the conformist consensus and funding bias that's rife in academia, the two things that have prevented me from going down the academic route.
The ultimate irony is that the academics who try to attack my interpretations of Kubrick's work usually aren't film makers. They have no experience of film making, where as I've written, directed, produced and edited on my own films and worked on other people's film shoots. They also overlook that Kubrick himself, who they usually greatly admire, wasn't academically trained. He didn't even go to film school lol.
@@QuixEnd time to bring back the lobotomy.
This was an incredible video, and I very much appreciated it. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
Funnily enough, this really challenges the notion that he was at all involved with any hoaxing of the moon landing, as some are wont to believe, making this a very interesting thesis.
On your theory of the real meaning behind 2001, here is a quote from William Shatner after travelling into space in real life, revealing the deepest soliloquy by James T Kirk wasn't from a scriptwriter: "I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet... I played my part in the idea that space was the final frontier, But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is, and will remain, our only home. And that we have been ravaging it, relentlessly, making it uninhabitable."
Nice.
Wow, that is really well put. Shatner is a national treasure.
@@collativelearning p
I think there is a glorified vision of space that we adopted. Kind of like the visions Roddenberry had of his old west wagon-train in the stars. But the reality is it’s essentially beyond the dangers of any frontier humans have encountered. There is almost no resource outside of those at Earth that will allow us to survive unimaginable voids. And we have to put ourselves in the hands of technology built in layers upon layers to do it. And we’re going to struggle with the harsh conditions that our technological advances are not flawless, we will push them to the point our ability to create apt technology will fail, and a great number of us will die in that process.
It is the greatest frontier, the harshest frontier, and history has shown a lot of tragedy happens on frontiers.
Z
Fun fact: The bone (a weapon) becomes a space missile (a weapon) pointed at Earth. Thus, did we really evolve? Pure genius.
The guy opposite Rob is brilliant for letting Rob speak and get his thoughts out. Not many interviews / discussions are like that!
Really recommend Richard Grannon :)
Never heard of him before now but I can tell from his questions and responses that he's a very disarming yet shrewd interviewer. There's a lot to this interview.
@@savednorwegian Ditto !
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But he keeps getting the twins hair colour wrong in the shining film. We were all correcting him in the comment section. He never admitted he was wrong lol. He’s not that good.
On so many levels 2001 is more relevant than ever and will continue to be. A truly visionary piece of art for the ages.
Yes, but no one should underestimate A.C.Clarke's vision. He was far more than a naive technologist!
Anyone who thinks that has never read "Childhood's End" which also focuses on the transcendence of man.
@@JimTempleman all true. Childhood’s end is a deep book. But Kubrick was every bit his equal. His decision making process allowed his films to be living breathing reflections of mot only the time they were made but for the ages. A rare gift.
@@alienlovearts Agreed! As the Lotus Sutra states: "Only a buddha together with a buddha can fathom the ultimate reality of all things.”
The film (& book) inspired me, and set me on my life's course of doing research in biologically based neural networks, virtual reality, and meditation to realize Silent Illumination.
I must be pretty shallow then because the entire movie bounced off of me as dull take off on Chariots of the Gods!
@@robertrochester4032001 was pretentious space propaganda for NASA. And this Rob Ager guy is a gatekeeper for Hollywood lowlifes.
Don't forget that when Dave shuts down HAL, he does so with the simplest of human tools: a screwdriver.
Yeah, his equivalent of an ape smashing a bone against a predator's head.
people don't realize a humble screwdriver is technology.
@@JamesHawkeRUclips Nor do they about a pencil.
Ah ah a screwdriver, I think he stole that from Doctor WHO
It really was a key, not a screwdriver.
Of course IBM was pissed off. HAL is IBM, each letter moved by one place in the alphabet, H-I A-B L-M
👍😎 KUBRICK YOU BRILLIANT DOG! 😆👌
Rob is incredible. Every time he shares his thoughts on Kubrick and his films I learn something new. Thank you Rob for all of your hard work!!
I don’t necessarily “learn” something as much as expand my theories on the work. A lot of what Rob says cannot be verified, especially what he’s saying about 2001 here and the intention behind it, but it’s all very fun to think about.
@@craigmurdock4740 Thats you doggy I " learn "A TON of shit from him.
@@craigmurdock4740 (responding to your comment before you changed it) A lot of it can and has been verified. There ARE letters in the Kubrick archives from IBM being angry and demanding their logos be removed from the film. The executive screening featuring a voiceover and scientists interviews that were scrapped upon release is detailed in the very well researched biographies by Baxter and Lobrutto. If you do the legwork and research the documented history of the production then you'll know a lot of it is fact. My take on the ending as a dream sequence is a theory (one that fits the details of the film more than the Clarke narrative does) and I'm open to discussion on that.
Don't listen to the trolls I love your videos so much thank you.
@@joefau1 Someone having an objection doesn't make them a troll. Trolling involves a certain insincerity in what is said. Craig was being sincere in his comment.
Mere complaint and critique is not trolling. If you dismiss such comments as trolling, you shut down quite a lot of thinking and discussion on topics.
7:46 Whether or not you can give the novelization much credit for the real narrative, I always liked the detail that the first spacecraft shown is a nuclear weapon platform.
Transitioning from the bone to this, how we went from being able to kill one life at a time, to practically everything on the planet, always resonated with me with how our evolution is measured.
also worth pointing out that the shooting script had the narrator explaining that too, and had the Star Child blowing up all the bombs at the end. It also had a scene with mission control explaining in detail why HAL malfunctioned, rather than simply the prerecoded Floyd message. It's certainly likely that they selectively pitched the vision to investors, showed them only the happier dailies and the cool sets, but seems to me like Clarke and Kubrick were on the same page - Clarke could have always quit or made a statement later, after all.
the bone was the first tool , the spacecraft was another. tools can be wepions. beautiful subtle imagery.
There is a more blatant thread in that in every sequence, the characters are eating. From the monkeys eating scavenged plants then meat, to the in flight meal, to sandwiches on the moon, to astronaut space food, and finally Bowman eating fine cuisine after going through the stargate.
No matter how far humans evolve, our base instincts and drives remain.
I see 2001 less as a destruction of utopia fantasies, but more as a consideration of what these developments would really imply. Humans are brilliant and primitive at the same time and the universe is beautiful and terrifying at the same time. To me his message seems to be "be careful what you wish for" and not "look how stupid these technological visions are".
Agreed. It would even fit with the whole anti-technocracy thing, as Rob mentions a few times. Kubrick presents the spacecrafts as something really cool, cheery classic music and all... and then also presents the society inside being bureaucratic, stiled and cold, kinda like the coldness of space.
It's not chance that HAL sometimes seems more human than the people inside the crafts.
"Be careful what you wish for" aka "more foreshadowing of the dangers of AI".
The reason (explained in the sequel 2010) that HAL behaved in the manner he did was that in keeping the secrecy behind the real mission from Bowman and Poole, he was unable to solve the conflict inherent in simultaneously a) processing data accurately, and b) deliberately lying to the crew, causing in effect a psychosis. (The short version - speaking as a programmer here - we end up with the the joys of unintended side-effects and the [admittedly clichéd] "Garbage In, Garbage Out").
With the recent hype around ChatGPT and its ilk - they're only as good as the training data they are given, yet if the hype is to be believed they will be used to generate all manner of future content... yet what provides the data for the next generation? The output from this one? And what happens for the one after that? (...repeat ad infinitum...). Presumably, do we hit at some point a situation where the original data is merely reprocessed time and again, but with no new input and thus insight? Invoking a little chaos theory (and/or genetics), one small error in the (now multiple generations old) source data explodes into massively erroneous outputs and/or behaviour (just like HAL).
HAL (like AI) is not necessarily the villain of the piece though - behind that is the misuse of a tool as a result of a short-sighted view that they are a panacea for all things.
"be careful what you wish for"
THANK you. THAT theme, that TENSION, seems to me to be central to so much art, lit, and film (and religion & culture, really). Heidegger really goes into the questions of technology in some of his later works in a similar way. Essentially, technology (from thigh bones & screwdrivers to hibernation chambers & nukes) enables us to better obtain and efficiently utilize resources necessary for survival in an environment of competitive scarcity.
Our capacity for barbarism is an often ugly, yet necessary, component of our being. It facilitates survival... yet it is corrosive to our "soul" or "spirit" (however one defines that). In other words, the risk of technology is that we can begin to see EVERYTHING as ready-to-hand; we can start to perceive and judge the value of everything based on utility, a means to an end, causing us to feel endlessly compelled to DO things, to acquire, to consume for its own sake. This only provides a fleeting satisfaction, and is so often destructive to both the people and world around us, and to our own well-being.
There's nothing that should make anyone feel smug or superior in pointing that out. Rob seems to want to imply that the "superficial" element of the story is "bullshit", but I don't think it is. The universe DOES inspire BOTH awe AND terror, wonder and fear. It can be a source of succor&safety, but also violence and suffering. 2001 seems to explore the question of "what is enough? What is the right approach to being in the world, as a species with so much potential for impacting our environment, and each other?" I see the "deeper" meaning as simply showing aspects of the shadow side of that question.
The whole business with "I've unlocked the REAL secret of the movie" actually falls victim to the same "ego blow" that Rob accuses others of having, I think. It's like HE has the best interpretation, in a way that involves a bit of hero worship of Kubrick, ie "look, Uncle Stan, I figgered it OUT!"
I was lucky enough to be taken to see this at the cinema, for my 9th birthday. Back in the day when a cinema trip was a 1-2 times a year treat. I loved it. All of it. Imagine you get two big screen movies a year, your TV is small, and black and white. And 2001 is one of those movies.
Then of course, this year, went to see Barbie. Which thus had me from the start. Sad to say my friend didn't get the reference.
I was treated to this film on my 10th birthday in March 1970. Talk about over my head... I still don't quite get it.
I've been a fan of Rob and the Colllative Learning site for years because of my interest specifically in Kubrick but also his analysis in other subjects. 👍🏾
almost 55 years later after this movie was released people still talk about it. what a brilliant interview and thoughts and insights about this great movie! personally i could never get my head around the ending and after watching this i still can't. but interpretations and thoughts like these make me feel like there was put another layer of paper on my stairs to be build up to eventually understand it. which i actually hope i never will - bc never ending mystery is what drives me. same as with our universe - we know so much, but still we know nothing.
They still talk about it, because there's a large enough population that bought into this bs experience of how great the movie was. Naturally, the rest of us want to try and understand what the hoo ha is. Anyway, love it or hate it, 2001 and 2010 are influential movies. Its like the hippie movement, there were only a small minority that were involved, but they dragged the whole of society into it. It seems we're always dealing with the tyranny of the minorities. Most people just want to live, ie make a living and raise a family, but they're constantly getting bullied by these small ideological groups. Kubrick got the wrong idea. Its not humanity that will destroy itself. Its these small groups of retards that will destroy humanity.
I have to say I have a hard time believing that Kubrick pandered to anyone about anything. The man was indisputably a polymath and perfectionist who in his later years was hamstrung by his own obsessive behavior. 2001 was a technical tour de force that either blew people away or left them totally baffled. No one had ever seen anything like it before.
Kubrick was a true cinematic genius. His genius was combined with special effects genius Douglas Trumbull while making "2001."
Agreed.
Sometimes a great movie is just a great movie.
I agree. I was lucky enough to see it in it's premiere run at Grouman's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard in Wide Screen Cinerama. I was 12. It was totally astounding, and it changed my life. After seeing it on the big screen probably 50 times [it was like going to Rocky Horror every week for us in SF in '72] and many more times on the small screen, I still am in awe of it.
However it came to be finished, and however many ways it's interpreted, it is a nugget of genius in a category of its own.
I wouldn't call it 'pandering' so much as a brilliant ploy to keep investors happy, while you go ahead and make the film you really want to make. The man was always so far ahead of the curve.
In a way, Kubrick did that with every film he made. 'The Shining' is unlike any Horror film. 'EWS' redefined Erotic Thrillers and even 'Barry Lyndon' was extremely unique compared to other period pieces from its meticulous design and lighting to it's Kubrickian narration and structure etc. Sometimes it felt like he saw the landscape of Hollywood and decided his next film would contrast all of them ala 'FMJ'
The first issue with Rob's narrative is that Clark's book is a direct attack on nuclear weaponry. Kubrick is more ambiguous bc he didn't want to repeat himself from Strangelove. Clark isn't carrying the safer narrative.
The next issue is that money comes from the promise of making money. Strangelove was SK's big success as an auteur. They invested because it was a safe bet. The characters were renamed but taken from the optioned novel with the exception of Strangelove himself, who was inspired by Von Braun. It followed the novel, Red Alert, but turned it into a black comedy. There's no one way comedic veiled references in the 60s threatened his career. It was the strongest it had ever been.
Rob feels like he has to create a narrative that supports his genre of film analysis, but he's cutting out the legs from beneath anything he says.
Here's an interesting question. Bowman is taken across the Stargate, observed, and evolved because he survived and HAL didn't. What if HAL won? Would the aliens have acted differently or would they have evolved the AI much as they did Bowman?
Maybe additional evolution wouldn't have been necessary. Their arrival inspired weapons for the apemen to kill one another. If AI killed the crew, might that be seen as the next evolutionary step of intelligence on earth?
Yes, your analysis is very similar to that of AI developer Prof. Jeffrey Hinton, who now worries AI may get out of control if we don’t understand and regulate it appropriately.
Kubrick's actual explanation of the ending, that gave in an interview, is that Bowman is in a space zoo, watched by the aliens. So... yeah. We are nothing to aliens
It's not Clarke's book. He was forced into writing it the way Kubrick wanted to with a small amount of leaway. Clarke's own account, published as a book in itself, describes a lot of the pressures and conflicts between the two of them. Kubrick had authorization rights and a lot of what Clarke wrote was discarded, including decriptions of alien cities. Regarding Kubrick not wanting to repeat himself with an obvious nuclear weapon theme, yes I cited that in the interview here. Nevertheless it's still in the novel as signed off by Kubrick.
"money comes from the promise of making money". This isn't always true. There are many types of media that could make money but aren't produced and distributed for various reasons. Sometimes laws prohibit it, sometimes it's morally distasteful to investors, sometimes they value their ideological campaigns more than money etc. Successful artists in media can and do get severely attacked if they upset certain people or they just happen to be convenient targets for aa particulkar narrative ... Michael Jackson and Keven Spacey are examples. Baxter and Lobrutto's biogs on SK, as well as some of the archive material in London, outline some of the conflicts that arose from Strangelove. Kubrick had even taken to carrying a knife in his briefcase for fear of attacks. A short while later he moved to UK permanently and would hardly ever fly on a plane. He would confide in some colleagues he was concerned that someone might secretly record a private conversation. His wife has talked in interviews for the likes of The Guardian about his distrust of people in power and that if he had to fly he'd send his family on a different flight. He also became so private that for years the public barely knew what he looked like. And he was heavily attacked for A Clockwork Orange straight after 2001, regardless of the financial success of both films, to the point he withdrew ACO from the UK market until after his own death ... another smart chess move.
As for the film's ending ... there are no aliens. The whole alien narrative is a superficial surface story. The monolith isn't an alien artifact. It's the cinema screen itself rotated 90 degrees (watch the visuals of the film carefully - there are hundreds of clues) and we, the audience, are the trransfixed apes. Kubrick even had Clarke write a section in the novel (published) in which the monolith displays films to the apes, showing them how to progress, and explains there are thousands of monolith all over the world ... just as prints of the movie did the same in cinemas.
@@collativelearning It is very interesting, and upsetting. We all wander where are the modern Victor Hugo's, the Duma's, the Dostoyevski's... the new Rulfo's. Maybe they exist, is just that some people don't want artists showing truth.
As Robert Mckee points out, Plato considered storytellers as dangerous people, because we interiorize truth through emotion. People in power never want us to feel emotions that are inconvenient for their plans: “Artists threaten authority by exposing lies and inspiring passion for change”.
I now see how brave (and crazy) Kubrick was. We need more tenacious and honest storytellers
Very interesting and accurate imo. I felt he did this with almost every movie he made (after strangelove). Why I think he always made movies on established books. So he could sell that story to the executives but then make the movie about what he really wanted to make it about.
Absolutely. The "adaptation of a novel" became his ongoing cover story. :)
Your name is like my name!
Thanks. I'd never considered that before- yet it certainly looks like that was probably one of his objectives.
I'm old enough to remember what it was like back in the late 60s early 70s ( barely)
and while Dr. Strangelove was widely celebrated where I lived and the people I grew up around (So. Cal. beach communities. Surfers etc..) there was the reactionary conservative society that must not have appreciated Kubrick's sensibilities and insight into their world.
Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan. Almost unrelieved conservative dominance and yet liberalism flourished.
The good kind of liberalism- not todays cancel culture/ identity politics/ snowflake trigger PC BS.
But the actual free to live your own life, do your own thing.
Not so much anymore.
We've become almost a police state- moving toward A Clockwork Orange.
@Dion McGee we enjoyed the movie in the South. I saw it at the theater with my folks when it came out and everyone loved it. I was intrigued by the H bombs going off at the end, as I'd never seen one before.
Yes, I would have liked to know how he sold 'Eye's wide Shut' to the globalists, then presented a film that confirmed they are all satanic worshippers, paedos and debauchery, all drunk on their billions and power!
This is why we love your channel … we don’t want the short answer, we don’t come here for a short answer, we come here to understand more and more of the whole story !! So interesting !!!
Fantastic as always! First time I watched 2001 was way back in the 1970s as a 70mm print still in my teens. I didn't understand anything, but loved the visuals. Incredibly clean and clear. Flat screens with perfect moving images (a very complex rig of synchronized 16mm film projectors). No other movie had this during the next decades(!!!). The movie seems to tap into our faint memory of dreams and nightmares. I only knew that this was made by an absolute genius. Now I know a little more both about how it was technically made and what it means, but I feel I'm still far from being there.
Perhaps people say it it a 'great' film because they do not understand it? Then again, what if the film was style over meaning?
I watched it in 1968 when it first came out as an 11 year old & was spellbound by the technology. As I grew up & became involved with the technology & watched the film more I became aware of the tension between HAL (AI) & humans. I'll never forget my first encounter with a computer for the blind that spoke just like HAL; it was a seminal moment when fiction started to met reality. Now it is bipedal robots that can kill humans without being told.
Fascinating supposition that the end sequence is a dream. I would add that, when we see Bowman inside the suite, every time we see him transitioning from an earlier version of himself to a later version, there is a shot where we see both versions of himself in the same frame. Also, the earlier version of himself sees the later version, but the later version does not see the earlier version.
Thus, when the middle aged Bowman stands in the doorway and sees the older Bowman eating dinner, the older Bowman senses that something is back there looking at him, but when he gets up from his dinner to investigate he does not see anything. Later, we see the older Bowman look up and see the dying Bowman. They appear in the same frame, but while the older Bowman sees the dying Bowman, the dying Bowman raises his head from his pillow and sees a black monolith where the older Bowman had been eating.
The fact of two Bowmans in a few shots on the surface suggests a mirror reality, and yet there are two different Bowmans when this happens, and only one of the two Bowmans sees the other Bowman, and that works against a mirror reality. If a mirror reality is not the explanation, then what is left as an explanation is a dream sequence that is progressing from young to old (the younger Bowman always sees the older Bowman, but never vice versa). Therefore, chronological time and evolution (from younger to older, and from less knowing to more knowing, and from less sophistication to more sophistication) are dreams. Transhumanist optimism - the end point being the Star Child - is a dreamlike myth - a heroic story we tell ourselves much like the Odyssey had been for the ancient Greeks.
Good stuff about the view points, cheers. Another giveaway is that the first shot of the room ios from within the pod and the computer screens flash the words NON_FUNCTION. In other words mathematical, formal logic reality don't apply here.
@@collativelearning Wow
I love when Rob unleash his Liverpool accent in all his glory! 🏴
Is it true that his Dad is Paul McCartney? I read that somewhere
@@mikerivera7509 but...Paul die in a car crash in 1966, right??? 😁
Watching 2001 as a child connected with me as a profoundly religious experience that has stayed with me throughout my life. For me it’s brilliance has never faded.
This
I also watched it as a kid, but for years felt I hadn't really understood it. Hearing it broken down here about the revolt against AI and transhumanism though, I realise that Kubrick got his messages through to me all the same. And how prescient they were.
What was with the apes and the obelisk and the baby in space?
Don't agree with many of the conclusions Rob draws from the film but that doesn't matter for me. I love hearing other's ideas and interpretations whether I concur or not and irrespective Rob's take is damned interesting. For me the final gift of all great art is the discussion and interaction it allows us to have long after it's made.
Glad to see that at least one other person here isn't buying this guy's wild speculations - hook, line, and sinker.
when you add up the films of Kubrick in your mind, if you watch them all and think about them and hold them together in your mind as much as possible you get an entirely bleak and quite horrifying vision of humanity and the powerful: there's a striking consistency to this across the genres the films appear to sit in. thank you Rob for making this particularly clear.
I'd call it clear eyed realism. The human race IS a horrorshow.
He's the even more creative genius version of Adam Curtis
Gay ass
@@dionmcgee5610 well its both extremes isn't it.
@@tomk2720 of course. Like in most things- the horrible is more noticeable, gets our attention easier than the positive. Unfortunately, the accumulative effect of the negative outweighs that of the positive, which is why the animal species are suffering mass extinctions due to the amount of destructive activity from the human race.
Those of us who love nature and animals and have tried to live accordingly can't stop the plague of greed and pollution that follows human civilizations everywhere.
Only recently I had begun to realise the number of similarities between Dr Strangelove and 2001 - especially the mistrust of technology. Fascinating interview.
great clip and very interesting explanation Rob. I know this is a bit edited, but fair play to Richard Grannon letting you speak without interupting , Richard himself has the gift of the gab and is very articulate and interesting to listen to , I've watched a lot of his stuff ., but he was able to sit back and listen to let you shine. . Nice job.
I love the way the monolith is shaped like a movie theater screen and Bowman finally realizes that the audience (us) are on the other side of it observing him in the room he is put in at the end.
Wish it was in Landscape though,..... Mwhahahahahahahahahahahahhaha
The monolith is cube worship, the Roman god of Saturn, saturnalia. Do you remember what the Moon rockets were called?
The monolith being a movie screen peering into the characters is a poor interpretation that I never bought for one second. The monolith can be viewed as hyper-advanced alien technology known as "stargate" in the book, or as a doorway to transcendence, or both. It was a catalyst that led ape-like beings to the next level, man. It was also a catalyst that led man (astronaut David Bowman) to the next level, transcending man: star child at the end of the movie.
@@suncat9 could a symbol signify two things? Perhaps the movie screen also acts like a catalyst for the audience. Perhaps it's our portal to transcendence and enlightenment.
what a load of bullshit
it is not anywhere near the dimensions of any movie screen and Kubrick was obsessed with format
idea stolen from jay weidner and it is 100% nonsense
Look at you Rob. Being interviewed! Killing it. Nice
Truly remarkable the way the movie supports so many incredibly meaningful interpretations.
I saw 2001 the year it came out. I was 10. My aunt had to explain the ape to space scene because I knew nothing of evolution. I remember being more scared than excited watching it even though I was a patriotic fan of the space race like nearly every boy in the States, more so because my pop was an aerospace engineer and an ex-fighter pilot instructor.
I read Clarke's novelization five years later but it was emotionally sterile and didn't provoke questioning.
Now 55 year later, I understand why I was so scared with the movie. I was supposed to.
I am reminded of an old wisdom: "To see with the eyes of a child ..."
By deepest thanks for posting this. At last I have closure to an important event in my life.
I saw it at the cinema with my dad when I was 5 . Neither of us had the faintest idea what was going on. I liked the monkeys, and got bored with the descent into the monolith and the daft hippy light show.
Arthur C Clark and Kubrick both sat in a cinema alone every day to review that day's shoots. Kubrick was always asking Clark whether the movie was on point, in relation to "The Sentinel", on which it is based.
Thanks for your work Rob. Enriches my enjoyment and understanding of films and psychology. Based on your "Meaning of the Monolith" ideas, I have thought that film and visual imaging, can deeply influence thinking and behaviors, (subconciously perhaps?) in the viewers. With malice, or without. And this might be the idea that Kubrick had to alert us to this possiblility. Kind regards, Scott Rowland
Yes, that monolith interpretation reminds me of McLuhan's "Medium is the Message"
2001 was an expansion of Clarke's The Sentinel. At the time 2001 was made, I was aware of Childhood's End, and came to the conclusion it would never be made into a film because the special effects required would be impossible to pull off. How wrong I was. The 3-episode TV adaptation with Charles Dance as Karellen was spot-on brilliant.
So whatever Kubrick was up to, Clarke got what he wanted too. Who took who for a ride? Or were they in cahoots? Seems to me everyone got what they wanted. As for dropping the narrative, who on earth needs a narrative? It's an adventure movie, a thriller, not a documentary. A narrative would have ruined it.
Also what is wrong with Dr Strangelove or 2001 that would piss off the rich folks? Don't they have a sense of humour? What kind of movie were they wanting? Birth Of A Nation? Gone With The Wind? Even the Wizard Of Oz is subversive! I haven't heard any complaints about Forbidden Planet, which also has an anti-tech aspect, but is one of the best sci-fi movies ever, with breath-taking SFX for its time, and was an influence that led to Star Trek, funded by 2 unexpected people with vision, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.
They weren't all happy as you claim. Fred Ordway, one of the space technology consultants on the film was extremely disappointed and wrote to Kubrick giving a list of gripes that the narrative he wanted wasn't clear. Clarke didn't even know what the ending was until he saw the film and wrote his sequel novel in an attempt to exonerate HAL and steer the narrative back to what he wanted,, IBM demanded their logos be removed ... it goes on and on.
Strangelove didn't piss off "the rich", it pissed off the cold war officials who the film exposed as being manipulative and delusional. That's why their media affiliates tried to brand him a commie for it. The pentagon even made an internal documentary for their employees, trying to discredit the film.
Both gentlemen are absolutely brilliant. These types of interview are an absolute pleasure.
Thank you Rob.
And still new ideas about 2001 come at me. Once upon a time I thought I knew everything there was to know about this movie. I didn't see this coming. Full marks for blowing my mind again.
Whether I agree with Rob Ager -- or not -- on a case-by-case basis, his insights and interpretations are always interesting. I don't know that I agree with some of his takes on Kubrick's "2001" though I can see why he sees what he sees in it.
It's important to remember that Kubrick portrays the 'Dawn of Man' as a 'divine intervention' of sorts, with extraterrestrials interfering in hominin evolution via the Monolith, turning a vegetarian Ape into a carnivorous and murderous Man . . . and then, after Man has evolved -- having made use of those new traits -- to the status attained in our near future, Man himself becomes the Creator of a new kind of intelligence, an artificial intelligence (HAL 9000), and Hal 'him'-self becomes a murderer, too, even though 'he' wasn't intended to become one by 'his' creators. Indeed, HAL's 'creator' -- a "Doctor Chandra" -- had taught 'him' how to sing a song ["Daisy"], one of 'his' first memories, and the last thing 'he' forgets when 'his' mind is going.
Dave Bowman, returning to Earth after he has become 'apotheosized', is at the end of his "space odyssey" . . . and how did Homer's ODYSSEY end? It ended with Odysseus returning to Ithaca in disguise as an Old Man, confronting the arrogant suitors who had been harassing his wife Penelope and taking advantage of his absence to pillage his home. Odysseus is able to string his own bow -- a feat none of the suitors could achieve -- and then shoot an arrow through a series of axe-loops.
And then Odysseus SLAUGHTERS all those jerks, getting a kind of messianic revenge upon them, in order to set-to-right the situation that had arisen during his absence. Kubrick doesn't need to SHOW us the Bowman/Star-Child kicking ass and taking names when he returns to Earth -- doing to the creeps on Earth what those arrogant suitors had done to Odysseus's home on Ithaca -- when all he had to do was give his film a title which connects his 'Bowman' character to the bow-man Odysseus: "2001: a space odyssey."
The (untold) ending of the film is a 180-degree reversal of what he'd done in "DR. STRANGELOVE." Instead of depicting the leaders of the world as flawed, insane, war-mongering fools who end up causing the world's DESTRUCTION, this next film depicts an Odysseus-figure poised to wreak vengeance against those very same types of leaders BEFORE they can actually wipe out human civilization.
Kubrick may have been counting on his audience having at least a modicum of familiarity with the story of Odysseus in order to 'guess' how the film's finale would logically lead to an eschatological Day of Judgment, as the ODYSSEY does. A bad day to be one of those arrogant suitors. A foreseeably bad day to be the Presidents and Prime Ministers and Industry Leaders (etc.) whose policies had resulted in so much misery after countless wars, when the 'Bow-Man' returns. What he'd had to do to HAL was nothing compared to what he would feel compelled to do against the bastards who'd been abusing their authority on Earth. It's what Moonwatcher did to the leader of the opposing tribe at that pathetic waterhole four million years before -- writ large.
That's MY take on "2001" anyway. I get why Rob Ager interprets it the way he does, but I think he misses the boat on this one. If Kubrick had a say in what was put into Clarke's novel, then that would include the notion that the Beings who interfered with primate evolution did so because they valued the Mind, and sought to encourage the development of intelligence on every planet they could find where Life had arisen. As beings who had already transcended their own fleshly origins, they perhaps still felt the need to 'procreate' . . . but could no longer do so. Thus, the potential intelligences they could foster on worlds like Earth would be like adopted children to parents incapable of begetting and bearing their own. Like every parent, such alien foster-parents might very well feel the need to 'raise' their children to be able to succeed in life . . . and, sadly, it seems undeniable that the world -- that every world in the Universe -- is a battleground of Evolutionary forces where survival depends upon becoming an apex predator. Even the aliens who created the Monolith had to have had such barbarous beginnings, a necessary preamble to the more transcendent state to be achieved later on.
This Kubrickian 'creation myth' flies in the face of the Biblical one, where a God creates Man in a state of 'innocence', only for His created children to become disobedient sinners, and -- ultimately -- murderers (in the Cain story). In Kubrick's "Dawn of Man" story, a 'God' takes a creature (a pre-human 'Ape'-like creature) and endows it with an Idea, the notion of using a bone as a Tool to use in order to kill and eat a tapir, rather than to die off as an herbivore. And then, to use that bone-tool as a weapon to get the better of a rival, in order to re-take that precious oasis and prevent his own tribe from dying of thirst. Survival necessitates all this. Harsh, but true. Truer than the Genesis myth anyway, which is what makes Kubrick's film a kind of slap-in-the-face to all the religious types out there who cling to the myth that Man was once Innocent and, through his own faults, became a 'sinner'.
Pretty much agreed with what you've posted. In fact, I didn't know the surname Bowman had anything to do with the Odyssey!
Then again, I didn't read it so yeah. That.
Great write up. Yeah, I don't know if I agree that the star child is going to open up a can of whoop ass on the "suitors", but I do agree he's not there to impassively look at Earth from space forever. For me, it feels like the film presents a collective "humanity" with the only divide presented being between the US and the USSR. So I feel like his actions will in some way rectify 1. our relationship with technology and our alienation from our fellow man, reflecting David's defeat of HAL and 2. the fracturing of humanity due to the warring of nations. Whether that will necessitate violence or just some "force" that only a star child would be capable of I don't know.
For me this imbues the film's ending with a powerful sense of awe, hope, and a good bit of fear that comes along with knowing that momentous change is about to occur and not knowing the outcome of that change. Especially since change, even with good intentions (intentions of an evolved being), necessitates breaking a few eggs. That's partially why I find the people who think the ending is purely black comedy like Strangelove, hiding in plain sight the destruction, extinction, or enslavement or something of humanity at the hands of the star child so interesting. The star child, even if it is gonna do some forceful or violent things, it is still a human. The next evolutionary phase of humanity, but the star child is still at its core a cooperative being. The ambiguity of the ape scene and the ending as they relate to each other is that the ape's are a tribe that reach the next evolutionary stage as a group, while the star child is alone. Is he gonna create more star children or wipe out the less evolved humans? I think most of the contextual clues point towards your interpretation of the star child not being an elaborate doomsday device since I 100% agree with your point about the alien's actions being an act of creation and of valuing the mind and possibly future companionship with humanity.
2001: A Space Odyssey remains my favourite film of all time. It's certainly the most vast, far reaching, over-the-top, beautiful, brilliant film that it can't be anything but...and I will absolutely watch any and every youtuber's interpretation of the film until I've heard all of them. Brilliant. Beautiful.
No. What was with the apes and the obelisk and the baby in space?
@@sliglusamelius8578 My goodness! Seriously? Ok, quickly, the apes are there to show the moment when these particular apes learn to use a tool therefore setting of their evolution towards becoming human in a few million years...
The black obelisk, it's a marker of human evolution or it's there to inspire a moment that moves apes/humanity forward a step - it can be viewed as both,
The space baby? Dave Bowman enters that bizarre, Victorian-styled room and seems to immediately age - then he sees the obelisk again in front of his bed and he points at it - then? Again, he's reborn into whatever humanity is supposed to evolve into next. The obelisk again, inspires human evolution.
There it is.
I like how Kubrick makes fun of the elite class and how pretensions rule their world. I can think of one specific scene in each of his movies where a character is allowed to reveal how crazy they really are.
His disdain for the ruling class is even more notable for the fact that he was likely smarter than damn near all of them!
Would be fun to compile them here : ruclips.net/video/KMEViYvojtY/видео.html
I got that feel from Barry Lyndon as well
All people in 2001 behaves like they're all on beta blockers and Zoloft...
@@ingvarhallstrom2306 what about the hairy ones?
When 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, I was so captivated by it at age 14 that I watched it 4 times (twice in one theater, and twice in another). I appreciate this backstory about one of my favorite films.
This is amazing Rob. When I watch films, I wish my brain worked like yours. As far as I get is “something isn’t right here”. The first time I remember it happening was The Shining as a kid. I watched it a few times after but when I came across your channel and bought your videos, I realized my brain doesn’t work like yours. Unfortunately
This view of 2001 didn't come in casual viewing I assure you. I had to do tonnes of production research and careful examination of the film's visual details :)
@@collativelearning just joined your patreon as well. Looking forward to it
No worries, I was like that too. I wouldn't say my brain works like Rob's, but the 10 years of watching and reading his material taught me A LOT
@@biglapo13 Thanks for the support !
@@collativelearning you familiar with Jay Weidner and the Apollo connection etc etc?
I read that Kubrick and Clarke considered the screenplay to be written by Kubrick and Clarke and the novel by Clarke and Kubrick.
Great tidbit from the interview. Kubricks mastery of chess and knowledge of psychology are the keys to understanding his approach to filmmaking. Every film is Kubrick vs the given topic, he plays the game to fruition and presents it as a thesis to us (the observer), and he does it through pure visual storytelling. He doesn’t specify why the end result occurred, or even the logic of the game itself, he leaves that open to subjective interpretation from his audience. If Kubrick made blanket finite statements in his films, they would’ve never gotten green lit by studio executives, because theyre his opponents in the chess game after all.
that is probably one of the best summing ups of Kubrick ever made ... impressive!
got to be Chat GPT
Yeah, whatever, I would have loved to see him direct a Silver Surfer movie without using space.
You can really hear the Scouse when you're in a real life conversation. This is awesome. Usually is. Thank you
Rob, your dream interpretation blew my mind. Every time I watch an analysis of yours, it gives me more to think about.
What you describe is essentially how all big-budget studio movies are made: You pitch a salable genre picture that appears to work within genre conventions, even if that was never your primary intention. But every frame of every movie is a reflection of countless choices, planned and unplanned, fortuitous accidents and noticed or unnoticed errors. A lot of thought and hard work goes into the content, composition, placement and duration of every image, even if the filmmakers aren't Kubrickian precision freaks. That's why movies can take years to make and only hours or minutes to watch. And the elasticity of our experience of time is another of "2001"'s concerns.
But don't overlook the central theme of the film's second section: that technology itself inevitably becomes mundane, routine, commercialized, and largely automated. The dialog at the space station Hilton is mostly dull, polite small-talk or scripted formal speeches and there are familiar corporate logos everywhere (some of which, like Pan Am, no longer existed by 2001). The effect is to strip away the romance and reveal the humdrum corporate reality of it all. That's how "Man" chooses not to deal with anything "Beyond the Infinite" (like death). Dr. Floyd's trip to the orbital station is set to the comforting Strauss waltz (used like Muzak), which contrasts with the terrifying, unearthly György Ligeti music associated with the monolith in all sections of the film. Kubrick's goal was to re-introduce primal awe in the face of the unknown, which is what the last section of the movie is about.
Of course, Kubrick LOVED technology (like his vaunted use of advanced low-light lenses for candlelight scenes in "Barry Lyndon") and he (not Clarke, who was no Hollywood pitch man) sold the idea of "2001" to MGM as a showcase for the widescreen Cinerama/Super Panavision 70 technology, which is how "2001" was originally released in roadshow engagements. Clarke (living in Sri Lanka since 1956) and Kubrick (in England), neither of whom liked to travel, started working on "2001" in 1964, not long after "Dr. Strangelove" was released and became a hit (eventually grossing almost $10 million on a budget of less than $2 million, 55 percent of which went to Peter Sellers' salary). Kubrick asked Clarke for a short story that they could adapt and expand into the film, and Kubrick chose "The Sentinel" (first published in 1951). While consulting, they worked simultaneously, often remotely and sometimes independently, Kubrick on the screenplay and Clarke on the "novel version," which wound up going in different directions. They were both fine with that.
Wow sir. Thank you for the amazing commentary.
Most movie productions don't involve approaching tech corporations and offering to promote their products, ideas and agendas. 2001 and Moonraker are rare exceptions to this and it's heavily documented regarding 2001.
I used to be a film maker so am well aware a huge amount of effort goes into the details of the shots, bu the vast majority of it is incidental on most productions. Kubrick was very unusual in that he would personally select almost every prop and costume element, hardly ever delegating the creative choice. This is all documented in the Kubrick Archives. And Kubrick is renowned in the industry for doing far more takes than almost any other director and being far more meticulous about even the most obscure details. Cast and crew have talked about it and the archives proves it.
In the second half of the movie it's not that technology becomes mundane and automated. The theme is that it becomes oppressive. It literally turns on the humans.
Regarding the Hilton dialogue, there is something entirely diferent going on. Note that Floyd doesn't dismiss the "rumours" of an alien find. He promotes them. He and his colleagues do it again within earshot of two pilots on their way to the monolith excavation, ensuring the word will spread. This gets into the hidden narrative stuff, but I'll leave you to explore that for yourself.
Yes, Kubrick approached MGM (a film studio, not part of the corporate tech investors). I've seen the letter from MGM in the archives introducing Clarke to Kubrick. But it was Clarke who then went touring about selling the project to tech industry. I read that in a couple of sources, including some of Clarke's own interviews. Clarke is even shown in a behind the scenes documentary, called A Look Behind The Future, that was distributed among corporations to prompt them to invest in the film. Clarke is shown with NASA scientists in their own labs, and Kubrick himself is not there. Kubrick is only shown on the 2001 set here in Britain.
The last section of the film doesn't just introduce primal awe at the unknown. It introduces terror in the face of it. The whole mission to Jupiter discards the blind optimism of the first part of the movie with giant fantasy moon bases that somehow have gravity the same as Earth's. We're in 2024 now, where are these moon bases and manned solar system trips? And the room Bowman ends up in has his technological dependencies stripped away as he gains greater self-awareness (seeing himself from third person positions), which i'd say is about humankind progressing through greater self-reflection. Then the monolith as cinema screen realization kicks in, which has already been hinted at hundreds of times throughout the movie. Bowman was trapped in a room with no doors, but this realization allows him to leave thr room, and the film narrative, via the monolith / door / screen.
Clarke was sandboxed and had very little idea of the very different narrative that was being mostly encoded visually. In one interview I read he talked of being immensely disappointed and in tears at the screening because the finished movie was nothing like what he'd envisioned. Read his deleted chapters for the ending that Kubrick rejected and you'll see just how different their takes on the story were. Of courrse he got a career boost and a lot of money from the movie anyway, but he tries to steer the narrative back to his vision with the 2001 sequels, which Kubrick had nothing to do with. He especially didn't like Kubrick's portrayal of AI as murderous and untrustworthy, so created excuses for HAL's "malfunction" in his sequels. With the 2001 novel it was not an equal partnership. Kubrick had authorization rights, meaning he could reject anything Clarke put forward and insert anything he wanted himself. Clarke was very frustrated and tried to get the book released before the movie came out, but Kubrick kept stalling him, ensuring the movie would come out first. See Baxter and Lobrutto's excellent and well researched accounts of all this.
The Monolith is the movie screen. When you watch a movie, it’s in the horizontal position. Therefore, the vertical position is the movie screen OFF status. The first time we see the the Monolith, it is in the OFF position because nothing is going on. The primates were sleeping, they weren’t supposed to wake up. When the Monolith rotates into horizontal position, Bowman travels from the movie into the film projector. The movie is rewinding and turns bowman back to a baby, and the movie starts over again.
You’re off the rails.
Good ideas too often overwhelm common sense.
You know you're commenting this theory on the channel that came up with it.
@@1000000man1 I heard this idea 3 years ago.
I think it's interesting how anti elitism Kubrick was considering his rather privileged childhood with expensive cameras and support from his family. Very interesting life story. Would've been easy to end up an absolute elitist himself. Thankfully he ended up just being a bit eccentric and a masterful artist
Not so hard to understand. He was an artist with a vision, too brilliant not to recognize when others attempted to manipulate and prostitute his gift for their own purposes, and too much of an independent egoist to not profoundly resent it.
And a rapist pedo 👀
i have wondered how he was able to support himself enough to get started.
@@Sandra-hc4vo
His dad was a doctor and even though they were considered 'wealthy' at that time it wasn't like they were in the millionaire class.
Roughly upper middle class and Stanley went to public school. Not any private or prep schools in NYC.
His dad didn't shower him with money. Only a good camera. Not a top of the line job.
He went to public elementary school and public highschool. No college.
His dad was old school, even though he had money, his son had to work to get his own money.
When he was 18 he got a job at Look Magazine, then became a full time photographer there making his own money.
Got married early at 20 years old, and lived in a crappy tenement on 16th. Those were terribly small apartments. My mom lived down there in the 50s and told me how they were.
It wasn't like he was running around with no job and dad covered his bills.
He actually played chess for money on the streets and sold photos to Look magazine to get money. Dad let him be independent, no hands out from dad.
His life was considered lower middle class. He actually saved his money to fund that first documentary he did ($1500), which today would be like $15k of savings.
It's also a very short life story. Sadly another reminder not to go against the elites.
I saw 2001 when I was 12. I immediately 'got it' it spoke to my imagination. It has stayed with me ever since , informing my work as a creative artist. For me the film is about the terrifying ordeal of encountering the unknown , the abyss, the shadow and transcending it. Although for the purposes of narrative and visual appeal it's conveyed as and outward journey. But for me it is a representation of an inward journey and encounter with the self , not aliens, represented by the starchild. Nice interview. Thank you😊
2001: A Space Odyssey has actually gotten better and more relevant over time. This movie has so many classic scenes, there are really too many to name, but I'll try. Just for starters, the hallucinogenic ending is still a mind blowing surreal take on the nature of time, space and the fabric of reality. Hearing HAL beg for his life is still heartbreaking and pathetic. HAL committing mass murder is still horrifying (nothing but life support monitors flat lining, but thoroughly unnerving all the same). Probing the deeper meaning(s) of 2001 never ends. I've screened it many times (going all the way back it's first theatrical run in 1968), and here's my take... The Monolith is a symbol for God; something singular, omnipresent, mysterious and impenetrable, representing a supernatural higher power that seems to be guiding our existence and watching over our species. Why supercomputer HAL malfunctions is one of the key questions at the heart of the movie, and he tells us himself... "It can only be attributed to human error." So true! Since we designed HAL, he has our intrinsic nature, including (but not limited to), our tendencies to violence, killing, territoriality, and fouling things up royally. When HAL kills Frank and the hibernating astronauts he is fighting for his survival exactly like the apes at the waterhole. The implications that our creator instilled these tendencies in us (because they were essential to our survival), just as we instilled them in HAL is troubling to say the least, but who prompted the ape to pick up the bone in the first place? It was God, who created us in His image as we created HAL in ours. HAL also runs amok because he's been programmed with contradictory orders. He's hard wired never to alter or falsify information (never tell a lie), but he's also programmed to keep the nature of the mission a secret, so he's more than a little schizophrenic. He falsely reports a malfunctioning communication unit after Dave catches him being deceptive over something trivial that turns out to be something very important (the strange circumstances surrounding the mission). When he (HAL), reads the lips of Frank and Dave discussing unplugging (killing), him, he reacts like we would. Instead of admitting his mistake, he decides to kill them before they kill him. When his plan goes wrong, he begs for his life, shows contrition (and even implies he may be mentally ill), reflecting that he has also inherited some of our better nature...remorse, a conscience and a desire for redemption. Like us, he doesn't want to die, and is fully conscious that he is being killed..."My mind is going, I can feel it, please stop Dave". We can't help but feel sorry for him (at least I did, especially when he starts warbling Daisy as he slowly expires), as if he had real human feelings and expressing actual remorse. At the same time we're angry and appalled at HAL for killing the astronauts and trying to kill Dave and want him to pay for his crimes. And even though both reactions (mercy and vengeance), are directed at an inanimate machine and therefore meaningless, the point is, we have the same contradictory, irreconcilable combination of conflicting natures and impulses we programmed into HAL (perhaps explaining our own neurosis). The relationship between humans and our AI creation(s) is one of an ever merging confluence of personalities. While HAL is becoming more like us: emotional, vain, grandiose, fallible, homicidal, we are becoming more like him: emotionless, cerebral, machine-like and scientifically agnostic (replacing God with ourselves and our technology). The emotionally flat performances by Keir Dullea et al, is on purpose to drive this home. HAL comes across as more human than the humans. One of the themes of 2001 is birth. The birth of (weapon wielding), man begins the film. Next, Dr. Floyd's daughter is having a birthday. She wants a bush baby, a fuzzy, plant eating marsupial that might be at home in the Dawn of Man sequence alongside the passive tapirs who stand around waiting to be slaughtered by the newly carnivorous apemen. The apemen have advanced far enough to domesticate some animals (perhaps to recreate the lost connection to nature of urban-dwelling modern life), but we are still slaughtering and eating other animals as per usual. Then, astronaut Frank Poole gets birthday greetings from his parents, which he has zero reaction to (his dull dad goes over his taxes with him). HAL recounts the details of his birth while begging Dave not to execute him. Finally, Dave ages and dies in the faux neo-classic Eden he's landed in, only to be reborn as the Star Child, poised to kick off the next stage of human evolution. There are some great moments along the way that stand out...Dave knocking over the wine glass, showing that man is still a flawed being. The group of scientists posing with the Monolith on the moon like big game hunters in front of an elephant they'd bagged on an African safari (the original home of the former apemen/astronauts). Dave jogging around the wall of the crew quarters, air boxing. On the spaceship the camera angles are always being skewed and messed with like an MC Escher fun house. You never know what's up or what's down (of course, in space there is no up or down), as entire sets rotate and whirl in every direction. I think this is a deliberate metaphor for how many different perspectives (both literal and figurative), this film can be interpreted. Douglas Trumble's effects on Dave’s trip through the universe at the speed of light is awe inspiring, as are all his groundbreaking special effects. No wonder 2001 became a cult film with the turned on youth of the sixties, who would often actually BE tripping when they saw it (Paramount picked up on this trend and started running the tag line "The Ultimate Trip" in its promos). The Music in this movie is simply perfect. Without a doubt, Richard Strauss majestic Thus Spracht Zarathustra will forever be connected to this flick. The Blue Danube sequence is still one of the most beautiful pairings of images and music ever put on film. Kubrick shot 2001 in 65mm and his collaborators kept Cinerama's deeply-curved screen in mind, creating an exceptionally immersive experience. The Dawn of Man section is full of iconic images....The ape leader Moonwatcher discovering bones as weapons to take over the waterhole (and the world), with. The triumphant ape throwing the bone/club in the air, which then turns into a satellite, is the most famous cut-to transition in movie history. The apes encountering the monolith for the first time is so well known it's parodied and referenced in countless ways to this day. When one band of apes drives the other clan from the waterhole (after beating one of their rivals to death), they begin walking menacingly (bloody clubs in hand), toward the camera on TWO legs instead of their previous stooped over, four point brachiation, establishing beyond a shadow of a doubt that the spectacular, terrifying, age of man has indeed dawned, and, although we will advance civilization to the point of colonizing the moon, we will still be fighting over the waterhole. The scene in the space station when Dr. Floyd has to try and be cordial to the Russians who want to know what the f*ck is going on at the American's moon base (something he ain't about to tell them), illustrates that our rivalry with the Russkies will last far into the future, and it has. And of course the immortal punchline uttered by Hal..."Sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" became a ubiquitous catchphrase. I could go on and on about the depth and beauty of this movie (and I guess I have), but I'll close with this. 2001:A Space Odyssey does what a movie is supposed to do; take you to another world and make you think. It challenges the audience to contemplate its meaning instead of spoon feeding it to them. Great films should always aspire to be a work of art, and on a visual level alone, 2001 succeeds brilliantly. The attention to detail is amazing. This film took me to Jupiter and beyond the infinite and opened my mind as few films have before or since. For visionary, auteur director Stanley Kubrick and co-screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke, all the planets lined up on this absolute masterpiece that's still ahead of its time. Dah Dah Dah.....Dadum!!! Boom boom boom boom boom boom....
Excellent! I hadn’t heard all of the birth themes before. It absolutely repeats over and over.
I take it you haven't read the other books then
@@XiahouJoe I did, but I still think the original book and movie stand alone, and that's was exclusively what my essay was analyzing.
Yes! I thought the same.
Although we advance in technology and supposed civilisation, at our core we remain these flawed animals with inherent violence and brutality.
Technology does not truly advance us but it does give us greater dominion over our rivals until the point is reached where technology has dominion over us. We are starting to see this now with tv, social media, but also systems that run our lives eg banking, online accounts, communication and even customer service (not long before everything is automated), and of course the emergence of AI and who knows where that will lead?!
Well Kubrick knew and he showed us.
@@tomfield4062 ok head cannon gotcha i do that to with certain IPs.
This is very timely. I think we all need to resist technocracy collectively and strive to be the best human version of ourselves.
This was great, man. You hit on a lot of the things I suspected. Kubrick was so sneaky and subversive. I think he had nothing but contempt for most of the industry people and the elites in all areas of society. This contempt I think is foundational to understanding his work--it informs his being and therefore his work. Though writing itself was his weak point, he transcended this weakness with his visual skill to say, in the purest form possible, what would have been censored anyway. He used the language of cinema to bypass the verbal filters. He was just smarter than everyone. Period. His greatness will endure for as long as there are movies and people to watch and ponder them.
damn, I never considered the ending was a dream sequence. the ending always killed the movie for me but i think you just turned it around for me with that take
From watching the videos on your site years ago, I became convinced that 2001 is about Dave realizing he's in a movie. Similar to Inland Empire and Twin Peaks season 3 episode 17.
The monolith represents the movie screen, feeding information to those who encounter it. In the book, images play on the screen of the monolith. It seems like a very meta story about film teaching people things. Kubrick said he wanted the movie to subconsciously speak to the audience. That is exactly what the monolith does to the characters.
At the end when Dave is in the human zoo, I take that as he is aware he is being watched by the audience, so his perception becomes a human zoo.
Also, maybe the entire movie is actually a simulation taking place inside the monolith. And we're watching it. That would explain why we just stare directly at the monolith at the beginning of the film and after the credits end. The monolith bookends the entire film.
I love that Kubrick fooled IBM in the way you explained. Smooth Operator!
I love that a 55yr old sci fi movie is still relevant. This thing sets the standard.
The only director to come close to Kubrick's level of genius is probably David Lynch. HAL is my favorite on screen 'villian' of all time. They just don't make films like 2001 anymore without being totally convoluted.
2001 was the only movie I remember that kept getting re-released time after time. I remember seeing it at our twin plaza cinema with my dad as late as 1976.
@@jamesbrice6619 it's absolutely beautiful to watch on the big screen.
Tarkovsky, Refn, Mallick, Ostlund, Lynch, Noe
@@tylerlyons4943 Terence Malick...The Tree of Life👌
@@jamesbrice6619 Are you from Boise?
Guy says, “Don’t tell me what the Author’s intention was!”
Isn’t that what you’re doing?
I think we run into trouble thinking we’re smarter than someone else or in thinking we have some enlightened insight or understanding that only people who agree with us have?
Like Freud is attributed to have said, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”.
Great to see Rob and Richard in conversation together. Hope there are many more of these :-)
Rob's quote from the film, "It's exactly like being asleep, except you don't dream." in reference to the hibernation aboard the spacecraft sounds a lot like being dead. Combine that with his later comments about the real food vis-a-vie the mush, further suggests that upon the death of HAL, Bowen (and mankind) is set free to be alive again, providing the seed for a new rebirth of mankind. Sort of how an area on Earth seemingly devoid of life, such as a forest after a major fire, can slowly come back to life and potentially thrive after the threat has been removed.
I also find it interesting that at the end Bowman is dressed in all black and I think that represents that he is a primitive ape just like the former apes because he's finally unrestricted by technology. Very symbolic of Kubrick. He's also eating real food instead of mush, just as the apes were finally able to feast after not being restrained by the leopard anymore
The talk about dreams was interesting. There is a strange Alice Through the Looking Glass moment in the green hotel room sequence. When Frank was still in his spacesuit, he walks into the bathroom. Keep track of the camera point of view. The best way is to note the right side of his helmet with its oxygen hose. When he looks at himself in the bathroom mirror, something odd is definitely going on.
Yeah if I remember rightly doesn't the view of him switch to the other side of the mirror?
Brilliant Rob, absolutely exceptional coverage. Your insight and background knowledge of this medium is remarkable.
Also, what you said here about Kubrick’s films pissing influential people off and conveying hidden messages makes me ponder Eyes Wide Shut all the more.
I can’t help thinking it was personal.
See Jay Dyers break down of, Eyes wide shut, he goes deep.
Together with 'The Shining', I have always been confused with '2001', esp with the ending scenes. So thank you for providing a way of interpreting the movie. Fascinating.
Interesting discussion about dreams. I'd not heard that before from Ager's analyses.
Also a good point about how the music evolves from banally delightful to terrifying.
We might also point out that while the studio exec's minds were prepped for the film by 10 minutes of science talk, his viewers' minds were prepped by several minutes of eerie music by a musician from Transylvania (Ligetti)
1.) Arthur C. Clarke... "Any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
2.) Childhood's End, book by Arthur C Clarke.
3.) He is credited as to creating the telecommunication satellite.
4.) Rendez-vous with Rama.
This makes sense of an old personal argument that I had with a friend that had only read the book. I'd only seen the movie. We had very different ideas of what the story meant.
I was 12 years old when this Film came out and it inspired me in both interest in Space Travel and Film making. My career has been in the Film Industry and I keep current re Space travel. Kubrick has been I feel the Greatest film maker of all time. From 2001 to Barry Lyndon . I don't know where of how he got his information from but as far as 2001 goes he was spot on. He was pointing out that our "evolution " has been guided and helped, True ! Ai is inevitable but needs to be, shall I say kept in check . True! There is a Stargate or Portal near Jupiter. True ! He was definitely ahead of the game.
Yes, Kubrick basically made Clarke his bitch, but also King. It was great, imo, because he was a better film-maker than they were authors (even though they were great too). It's like he just looked for great starting ideas to build off of, germs of inspiration, and also needed to claim to be adapting books to film in order to get the means to make a movie of his own vision.
Kubrick was a chess player. Study the game between Hal and Poole, then watch Bowman move through the grid and become different black and white pieces watching each other at the end. It's a new layer with a slightly different interpretation.
A lot of presumptions. But, everyone has the right to their personal opinion.
I think the psychologist may be right in his description of how Kubrick fooled his investors. But I think what makes 2001 such a great artwork, is that it can be interpreted in many ways. And basically I think it is beyond intellectual explanation - or rather, can be interpreted on many levels.. It shows us some of the grand dilemmas of technology without giving big clear answers, but a strong emotional appeal that reaches down into the core of at least my self-experience. I saw it as a fifteen year old boy when it premiered in London in the end of the 1960s (I was visiting London from my home country Norway), and it it me deep down. It was the defining movie of my teenage years. I have reflected much upon why it hit me so strongly, and since this channel is run by a psychologist, I think some of my fascination for space stems from my childhood experience of being an abandoned child. I think the scenes depicting the lonely astronaut tumbling trought immense, hostile space spoke directly to my feeling of being lost. But of course, there was much more to it. The display of immense forces, uncontrollable by men - now very topical with the climate crisis, but also the scary forces in our own subconscious (my grandmother was Norway's first female psychoanalyst, in the circle around Wilkhelm Reich), and the genial use of the fin de siècle-music Blue Danube to make the "dance of the spaceship and the space station" into a walzing metaphor of an earlier techno-optimistic time with dark clouds on the horizon - this and more: there is so much artistic brilliance and so much strong expression on multiple levels in this movie that transcends intellectual analysis.
The film was created during the height of the Cold War when there was serious talk on both sides about deploying orbiting “sentinel” nuclear weapons in Earth orbit as a doomsday retaliatory “insurance policy.” That same tension is reflected in the strained dialogue between Floyd and the Russians he meets on the space station.
Thanks for this. Stimulating, at least.
I first saw 2001 on TV when I was 9 or 10 years old. My mother gushed over the movie, and how she saw it with my grandfather, who was born in 1902, had a Ph.D. in Chemistry, and several patents to his name.
My grandfather was born in rural Iowa and talked like an eloquent John Wayne. After he and my mother saw the movie, bought two more tickets and they sat through another viewing, right then and there. He loved it that much.
When I saw it, it wasn't presented to me as some artistic/arty Magnum Opus, just a well-done movie that stuck to the nature of space and space travel -- its hostility, isolation, and silence. So the 'aesthetic' choices they made, with music and that surreal sequence at the end. . .these were called for.
Space is dangerous, awe-inspiring, and mind-bending.
I know I'm getting off track from the message of this video, here; except to say that the hard science and poetic message intoned in the movie still resonated. The quick cut from the bone to the satellite -- and I think just about everyone knows it's a war satellite -- explained how humanity's technological development is rooted in war-making; the first 'technology' in the movie wasn't used to build a house or crack open a nut, but to pummel living creatures to death, including members of the same species.
Etc. Etc.
Have a good day.
Excellent analysis. I see the underlying framework of the film as representing a progression from matter to mind to spirit. This trichotomy runs throughout.
E.g. look at how food progresses thru the film: at first the apemen subsist on very basic, unprocessed food then when the monolith infuses them with reason they invent the first technology which, besides leading to murder and nuclear satellites, moves them up from plant to animal food. This subsistence at the material level. As reason (mind) progresses it changes the food also -- from the tasteless sandwiches eaten on the way to the moon monolith to the pap that is eaten on the way to Jupiter. Once Bowman transcends a purely rational, technological way of relating to the world, as this video points out, his food becomes something other than mere nutrition but becomes tasty and inviting (i.e. human).
Look at the progression of human interaction. Families of proto-humans huddling close together in fear, to the tecnologically enabled video call to a far distant daughter on her birthday, to the delayed video feeds to Bowman and Poole -- progression from a purely material existence to a tecnology built on the rational mind drives people further apart. At the end, the transcendent starchild returns to earth, to human contact.
Look at the three types of humans portrayed: primitive, feral apemen; --> dehumanized technocrats and spacemen (my uncharitable belief is that Keir Dullea and Gary Lockhart (are those the right names?) were chosen for their parts because of how bland they were as actors) --> urbane and refined Bowman in "evolution chamber".
This tripartite structure of evolution is fundamental to the film.
It see the film as a plea for humanity to see the dangers of a purely rational approach to the world and to strive to integrate the material and mental aspects of their being into something spiritual. It's not for nothing that the opening music is a reference to Nietzsche. I think back to the ending of Strangelove when Dr. Strangelove loses control of his mechanical hand and it starts to strangle him. On the surface it's a funny bit, but underneath a warning that a purely rational approach to life = death.
I am always struck by the final image of the film. I think many people would describe it as the starchild gazing down at the earth, but if you watch it closely the camera changes position slowly so that the absolutely final image is the starchild starting directly and imploringly at the audience as if to say "This is a warning to you. Please take it to heart and change the way relate to the world."
To add on to the dream theory, the way the scenes shift and change, but continue to follow the perspective of Bowman, very much resembles how dreams tend to be.
Brilliant extract - going to watch the full thing!
Go scouser!
Thanks to Rob's research, I now approach all of Kubrick's films as being doubly encoded in this manner - a surface narrative and then the real message.
I can’t watch it too often, but this might have been the greatest movie ever made! And Rob is brilliant for understanding it the way he does.
I first saw 2001 in 1974 on the only 70mm theater in my State and I was thrilled by it. I was almost twelve years old and was already a fan of written science fiction so I was enthralled from start to finish. 13:30
In the release version of the movie, there is still at least one IBM logo visible on the cockpit display of the Orion III space plane as it rendezvous with the space station.
There are other instances where the IBM logo is visible. One example is on the pads that Bowman and Poole use to view the BBC interview. In addition, HAL is formed by a simple one-letter shift down from IBM in each character. That seems unlikely to be a coincidence. Besides the Cyclopean eye that Odysseus has to blind to escape, I guess there might be some literary reference to Prince Hal (Hamlet), but one can stretch these interpretations too far. The deception and looking glass themes that another commentators mentioned are intriguing though. The Clavius base cover story is a dig at the regular use of disinformation being used and accepted as normal. I'll have to watch the bathroom mirror scene again to see if Kubrick did use that to indicate that Bowman had gone through the looking glass. My interpretation would be that he is seeing himself unreversed as we the audience see him. It's a step along the way to the revelation that one can make oneself anew and see the world through different eyes.
I'm sure a lot of the politics and trickery are somewhat true. But having read the book, the message of the movie is quite true to the message of the book. This guy is projecting his own opinion on the movie.
Kubrick viciously skewered the hierarchy of warmongers in Paths of Glory. In Full Metal Jacket, he examined the dehumanizing aspect of war. Strangelove was his satirical look at political and military leaders. The end of 2001? In my opinion, after Bowman passes through the Stargate, he is in a construct supplied by an alien intelligence. In that environment, he passes through the stages of his life while being observed. Near his death, he once again sees the monolith at the foot of his bed and is guided through his reincarnation by the benevolent intelligentsia.
In the Clarke book the alien civilization has either collapsed or moved beyond requiring technology, implying their obelisks are left over AI, completing the program they were designed for.
The ending of 2001 is dream-like, and like symbolic dreams it has a deconstruction of past events, sometimes with Dave acting as a proxy for HAL, seeing from HAL's point-of-view, and sometimes as the Dave that HAL witnessed, but in more of a Human idiom. He graduates through thesis and antithesis towards a synthesis and is reborn. The ambiguity of this sequence is a feature, as we can each find something relatable yet tantalizing in it. And the musical choice of Zarathustra is suitable in its being both an opening stanza and a complete crescendo. This is a film that never ceases to provide new rewards on each viewing.
Brilliant, Rob. My study of esoterica has led me to Anthroposophy and the art of its modern adherents, well one of them in particular anyway. It occurs to me that the imagery in 2001: ASO may be quite anthroposophic. I've asked the artist whose work interests me in this way to consider the film. Could be quite interesting.
Absoluyely fascinating! I make sure to watch on Christmas day each year. A visual feast, and so many layers. "Now my favourite movie is even better" - I agree!
Rob really good in podcast format. Who would have guessed ? 😂
I knew Kubrick was a genius, but this info places him at a level rarely seen, especially in the entertainment industry. Thanks for the great analysis and information.
Rob should do a Dark City analysis. That movie is bonkers.
I feel like Arthur C Clark is being sandbagged here. This video makes it seem like he was a pawn in the creation of this film. He was pivotal in creating the structure of this film. Stanley Kubrick, as much as I love him, could not have come up with what was required to tell this story. He was a great story teller, but he almost always needed someone else to create the story he wanted to tell.
I didn't think the ending was about an escape from technocracy so much as it was a visual depiction of cyclical "regression" after a technologically advanced society reaches its nadir. Reaching for Jupiter & Beyond was the highest stage of technological development the society depicted would reach, & everything that happened after the defeat of HAL was a visual representation of that society's collapse when the "grand mystery of the beyond" turned out to be emptiness, a void, literally incomprehensible spans of time & space that we can't overcome.
Viewed as a cycle within a cycle, the visual narrative of the film works in this manner, too 🤷 after the end you just start back over at the beginning of the film & the cycle repeats. This film is about cycles.
There's merit to that. In the novelization Bowman sees his whole life unwinding like a movie, can't remember if it went backwards. I agree the film returns to the beginning at the end. Bowman arrives and can help the next apes, sorry "humans", to evolve.
Aliens helped us evolve, and set an alarm to be triggered once we got to the Moon. That was from Clark's short story "Sentinel".
It also seems to pit technology against magic... how we used our technology to face the aliens' magic, and the science that is so advanced it appears to be magic!!
If you shift the letters in HAL one forward, it becomes IBM.
And as HAL is dying it describes its birth place, which is the same as IBM's first "talking" computer in the early 1960's.
Love Robs take on kubrick, from his use of psychology to technology. Im a huge kubrick fan and Robs analysis has helped me delve deeper into the genius of kubricks work. He was my dads favourite director and passed on that love to me. The first kubrick film i ever saw was barry lyndon when i was 12 and i just knew that this mans work transcends his surface narratives. Thanks for all the content Rob.
Rob, you not only hit it out the park, you hit it out of the solar system!
Your postings over the years changed my mind about the film.
Background: I worked on NASA projects as an engineer. I had dinner with Arthur C. Clarke in 1970. Watching the movie was a big part of why I chose to work in the space program. The movie “worked” on me. To quote Howard Beal in the movie Network, I felt like “I have seen the face of god” (no easy feat for an atheist lol).
Thanks for showing me a completely different interpretation of the movie.
I still believe in “the promise of space”. We humans are explorers. We will explore space (subject to the laws of physics and the slow speed of light). And, unfortunately, our evolutionary primitive instincts will always make us dangerous to others and to ourselves. I wish I could be cryonically frozen for a few centuries and see if we’re still here. And if we are, what is our world like. I wish I could still participate in the space program. And I wish I could viscerally feel the awe that I felt when I first saw the movie. Despite the negatives you rightly point out, our future, I believe, is in the stars.
The more I learn about Kubrick the more I love the guy. Dude was insane.
The 200 IQ and mastery of chess become more and more evident as I delve into his films.
@@jetnova3788 you will delve into my films
THOROUGHLY enjoyed this interview
Great interview!
More of this please.
Kubrick's depiction of the asteroid belt is the only accurate depiction in film. It's mostly empty space and the sole asteroid passing by is more like what it's like.
Rob will you ever do a video about the late, great James Cagney? I would love to hear your analysis and thoughts about Angels with Dirty faces. It's 84 years later and people still to this day wonder if his character Rocky Sullivan turns into a coward at his execution or if he pretends to be as a favour to his friend as a last minute request in order to help stop a young group of teens seeing him as a hero
I like Cagney. If I was going to do a vid on his films though I would pick The Roaring Twenties. I love that one. White Heat was great too.
@@collativelearning Ha I have both of those on DVD! Classics. I will look forward to it for sure tho if you ever have time to put some material together about some of his films. So influential and ahead of their time
@@collativelearning Cagney was a legend. White Heat = 'made it Mar, top if the Wor....'
B O O M !
@@collativelearningwhite heat was phenomenal. I’d love to hear your analysis
I just want to say I've been watching your videos for i think a decade now, and i really enjoyed hearing you discuss the movies in this sort of podcast format!