2001 (1968)

Call me dull, but I don’t get what Kael thinks is art. She tells us a lot about what isn’t art, but that doesn’t help us understand what can be considered art. I also can’t tell if she hates “trashy” cinema or not: At times, she defends their emotional significance to the audience, but she also seems to look down upon the audience’s need for such emotional pleasures. She writes, “The wellspring of [movies’] art, their greatness, is in not being respectable” (p. 357), and although she explains that the fun of trash is that you don’t have to take it seriously, she still complains that people have “begun to talk about trash as if it were really very serious art” (p. 354). According to her description, the line between trash and art is very blurred; she doesn’t clearly define what she means, and I thus can’t take her very seriously when she criticizes certain audiences.

Her commentary on 2001: A Space Odyssey is provocative, and I appreciate her perspective. But she is crazy. One thing that particularly annoyed me was her assertion that the film “celebrates the end of man,” when, in the next sentence, she explains that in the film, “. . . Death and life are all the same” (p. 362). If the film presents life and death as the same thing, how can it celebrate one over the other? It’s all the same, and she seems to be ignoring the point that she makes herself in order to further her ulterior motive of bashing the film.

Her interpretation of 2001, that it is a “celebration of cop-out,” is shallow; the monolith is representative of evolutionary steps, but I disagree with Kael about who or what controls the monolith. She concludes that “there’s an intelligence out there in space controlling your destiny from ape to angel, so just follow the slab,” implying that whatever intelligence controlled the monolith in the context of the film translates to a higher power controlling evolution in reality (p. 362). However, I interpret the aliens as representing not some power that rules our destiny but as the natural order of things. The monolith and all the mystery surrounding it are physical representations of the inevitability for humans to evolve. What else can humans do than take advantage of whatever changes occur? Kael perceives the film as advocating human apathy because “it’s all out of our hands,” but really, I believe that the film is a challenge for humans to continue advancing. It’s not about the beginning or the end of man: It’s about the struggle to achieve metaphorical immortality with our intellectual advances.

Kael also complains that human life is not valued in this film, that characters die and no one cares; this is an unfair accusation. Must every movie explicitly express the value of human life? 2001 looks at humankind from a broad perspective—almost like a fictional documentary— and it is not the purpose of this movie to focus on individuals, or else the protagonist of the film would not have changed at every evolutionary step, i.e. the apes in the beginning would have been the entire damn movie.

Kael again is pursuing an ulterior motive, this time, to attack the director. “It isn’t accidental that we don’t care if the characters live or die; if Kubrick has made his people so uninteresting, it is partly because characters and individual fates just aren’t big enough for certain kinds of big movie directors” (pp. 362, 363). Really? Is she really making that loose of a connection in order to attack “big movie directors?” Or is she actually egotistical enough to insist that all individual lives count in the grand scheme of things? If they do, I don’t think we’d die so easily anyway. How Kubrick does represent individual lives is in relation to how much individuals contribute to the advancement of humankind. Kubrick has Dr. Bowman “defeat” HAL because someone has to take the next step in human evolution, and HAL, despite being almost perfectly human, does not possess the physical flesh needed to do it. Thus Kubrick saves Dr. Bowman so that he can contribute to humanity. That’s not to say that individual lives are not important to us as humans; however, the forces of nature could care less about our individual lives, just as Kubrick doesn’t dwell on individual characters because his movie is not about individual people but about all humankind.

The one thing that I can certainly conclude from “Trash, Art, and the Movies” is that one woman’s trash is indeed another woman’s art.