Kubrick, Violence, and 2001

I’m reading a short piece by Ian Watson about his work with Stanley Kubrick on the proposed film “A.I.” Kubrick never made the film, though Spielberg picked up the concept and made a version of it for release in 2001 - coincidentally the title of Kubrick’s famous space epic released in the late sixties, fuel for many LSD-fueled cinema experiences back then.

Though I’ve idolized him for decades for his work, I realize taht I would not have liked to spend much time around Stanley Kubrick; Watson’s description of his experience working with the man, as well as other accounts I’ve read, suggest that he was grouchy, picky, angstsy, sometimes pushy. I recall in reading about the making of 2001 that Kubrick almost killed stuntman Bill Weston, then hid from him for 2-3 days to avoid inevitable confrontation.

There’s a lot I don’t know about Kubrick the person, but Kubrick the filmmaker played a role in shaping by world-view. I’ve seen most of his films, but the first I remember seeing was “Lolita.” I was barely a teenager when it was released. I saw it at a drive-in theater a couple of years after it was released, and probably ‘way before I could understand Humbert Humber’s angst. I was precocious, but not that precocious.

However I definitely grasped the next film, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” I’d actually read Peter George’s “Red Alert,” so I was primed for the film. It has a particular vibe, and I’ve felt a similar vibe from all the Kubrick films. Not sure how to describe it - clean, sophisticated, knowing. I think the vibe was Kubrick, that you could feel him in the flow of frames regardless of subject or locale. You can feel the vibe in his photos, too. It’s in the light.

Of all the Kubrick films, “2001: A Space Odyssey” is the one that got deepest into my skin. Because I was science-fictionized, brainy and weird, people asked me to explain the film when it was a just-released. I saw the film summer 1968 in Scottsdale, Arizona, at a Cinerama theater. And saw it again the following December in Odessa, Texas - a 70mm release. Then again in 70mm in Austin, Texas. Every time, the people I saw it with had questions.

What does it mean, they wondered? And I thought it was cinematic poetry, that the viewer would bring meaning to it, it didn’t have to mean any one thing. However, especially in Clarke’s thinking, there was a more prosaic meaning, it was a fictional story, a novel with a succession of events that were anchored, in his mind, to literal meaning. In his story, aliens who are godlike but not gods, never visible, encourage and manipulate the evolution of the human species. Perhaps the aliens are the source of deity myths, but they’re logical, not supernatural, just far advanced.

Given this explanation, the star-child is likely an advanced being produced from Dave Bowman’s DNA. And in the sequel, “2010,” Bowman appears as Bowman, apparently having grown into conventional human form. But from what I’ve read Kubrick avoided prosaic explanation of those last minutes of his arguably most ambitious film.

Looking back over my life, it’s tiny, microsopic, compared to the Immensity. I’m just an atomic particle of something far beyond my grasp. My first flash of enlightenment on that point came as I stood next to a busy highway in my late teens, looking at the stars in the night sky - I don’t recall why I was standing there, but I do remember that flash of realization: at some level all things are one, and my life is just an effect with many interdependent causes, submicroscopic compared to the larger whole of reality in process.

What did Stanley Kubrick see when he stared at the sky at night? His expansive vision for “2001: A Space Odyssey” seemed to transcend the personal/subjective while reaching for the stars and possibly beyond. To this day, I don’t know where the hell Dave Bowman went or how he bent time, how long it took him to age as he did, how and why he transformed into the “starchild” seen at the end of the film. And why the original intention was to have the starchild hovering above the earth and detonating an orbiting nuclear warhead. That was Clarke’s ending, but Kubrick dropped it, evidently because it would seem too much like the end of his prior film, “Dr. Strangelove.”

The film starts at the dawn of time, with Kubrick’s depiction of apes a coarse, unsubtle, primitive but peaceful. (NOTE: See update posted below this article: I did some rethinking.) Exposed to a monolith that appears, apparently set in place by godlike aliens, the apes become competitive, warlike. In battle an ape, using a bone as a weapon, pounds over bones... a bone flies into the air, and fades into a spacecraft in transit from the earth to the moon. This bit of Kubrick cinemagic appears to suggest that human technological advancement has its origins in competition and war.

How else might we see the apes at the dawn of mankind? Could it be that they were more subtle, thoughtful, nuanced in their action and appearance? Why assume that they were coarse, that they were brutes? Why assume that their advancement was driven by competition, not cooperation? Kubrick advanced a prominent Western bias, an assumption that human evolution is a fight - ultimately a fight won by the white European who is propelled into space at the forward end of human evolution. (If Kubrick was filming in the 21st century, might there be more diversity in casting? We’ll never know. But in Kubrick’s films in general, there’s a lack of diversity.)

A shiny rectangular slab appears for the apes, and seems to catalyze their evolution. Interestingly, the most obvious sign that the apes have grown more intelligent is their sudden realization that competition is possible, that one tribe can use violence to take from another tribe. The common perception is that MoonWatcher the ape and the members of his tribe have discovered the first tool, but it must be meaningful that the first took is a weapon. We see the apparently first-ever attack, Moonwatcher leading his tribe to take possession of a waterhole, pummeling an opponent with the bone/tool/weapon. He slings the bone into the air, and that bone represents the progress of technology, fading to a much more sophisticated weapon, a nuclear weapons platform orbiting earth at the dawn of the 21st century.

In this vision of the future, humans are traveling via a space station to moon bases by the year 2001. Americans on the moon have located a slab, just like the one that apparently influenced Moonwatcher’s tribe - buried 4 million years ago near the lunar crater Tycho. The slab, now uncovered, emits a shrill signal. The signal is apparently transmitted to an area near Jupiter. Realizing this, and realizing this suggests the existence of an alien race, humans decide to pursue the signal, building an AI-operated spacecraft, Discovery One, for that purpose. Two crew members and the AI, Hal, oversee operations while three scientists are stored in suspended animation.

A key aspect of the plot: Hal goes rogue, siezes control of the ship, attempts to kill all the puny humans, thinking in his synthetic mind that they would fubar the mission. One astronaut, Dave Bowman, survives, dismantles Hal, and pursues the rest of the mission. Seeing yet another slab in space orbiting Jupiter, Bowman sets out in a pod to explore it, and is whisked through a stargate, apparently across galaxies, and dropped into an environment where the aliens observe him as he ages, and transform him into the embryonic starchild who returns to earth. At the end of the book, the starchild detonates orbiting nuclear weapons, saving humans on earth form self-destruction. But in the film, the starchild’s purpose remains unknown as credits scroll and the Blue Danube waltz plays.

The aliens appear to be beneficent, so what can we assume about their manipulation of the human race? Since Kubrick didn’t want to interpret, and disregarding the Clarke book which is a bit more straighforward, I’m going to suggest a way to interpret the film as an overview of human evolution catayzed by godlike aliens.

The alien intervention wasn’t meant to manifest as violence, but that was the initial impact of the catalyzed intelligence in the apes. I.e. the violence emerged as a characterisic of the apes, and not as a characteristic imposed by the aliens.

We then skip human evolution into the near-future, and we see that humans have not let go of violent tendencies, though the violence is more subtle and sophisticated. However it’s potentially catastrophic via nuclear weaponry. We even see violence emerge as an aspect of the human-created AI, which, like Moonwatcher, uses its intelligence to kill. So I think what Kubrick is saying here is that the apes that evolved into humans had an innate propensity to violence that is never lost throughout human evolution, that in 2001 we still have wars, however cold, and we still create ever more sophisticated weaponry.

But the god-like aliens are ready to intervene again. With what result? Can they curb the tendency to violence... is that the next evolutionary step?

I just did an online search with the terms “Kubrick” and “violence.” The search overview tells me that “Stanley Kubrick made some of the most iconic, controversial, and deeply analytical films about violence in cinema history. Rather than utilizing action for simple thrills, he used violence to explore the darker aspects of human nature, war, and the power dynamics of society and the state.” It goes on to discuss some of his films that explored the subject of violence: certainly “A Clockwork Orange” and “Paths of Glory,” also “Dr. Strangelove,” “Barry Lyndon,” “Full Metal Jacket,” and “The Shining.” No mention of “2001,” though. I’m not surprised - only now am I realizing that “2001” should be included among these films, and might be the most insightful and expansive exploration of violence ever.

Here’s another piece I wrote 25 years ago about “2001,” called “2001 Blues.” [Link]

UPDATE: I realize an error in my thinking here, based on an assumption that the prehistoric apes depicted were relatively peaceful. In fact they weren’t, they tended to squabble. So I think what Kubrick is saying is that violence was inherent in those creatures, and that it persisted even as we became toolmakers, developed intelligence, and became “civilized.” It makes more sense that the propensity was already there, and we haven’t got past it. h/t Joanna Bryson for helping with this clarification.