Man stripped down

Stanley Kubric is anything but gentle in his observation of humanity. One could say that he stripped down man to its bare minimum, tossed him onto a Petri dish and slid him under a microscope for the universe to examine. It is difficult to pinpoint what “2001: A Space Odyssey” can be classified under; is it a movie, or a documentary, or a forecast? Quite frankly, it’s far more than all of them.

It’s important to place this film in the setting of its timely origin, April 6th, 1968. A year, three months and ten days after this hit the cinema, Apollo 11 shot for the moon and the first footage of Neil Armstrong descending the Eagle onto the moon surface arrived nine days later. The world was stirring with galactic awe and postulations and amidst the era of the Space Race, this film emerged.

Kubric’s footages of astronauts spinning without constraint in the vacuum of outer space, interiors of space crafts with innumerable colorful buttons and 360 degree circular rooms resonate the absolute fascination with space life that people were bearing at that time. Ideas like compressed and liquidized food, automatically operated machinery and zero-gravity bathrooms were all the frenzy. What Kubric did with “2001” was that he gave the average citizen a chance to journey alongside the astronauts and experience space travel with them. Thus, he depicts space travel as a luxurious cruise among the stars, where space crafts dance to classical waltz and space-secretaries in Jetson outfits guide you from compartment to compartment. For a human being whose best idea of “advanced technology” can only be retrieved from the pages of a General Electric catalogue, the 3 minute clip of Dave jogging along the 360 degree floor of the doughnut shaped chamber is absolutely mind-boggling.

Kubric even re-enacts the distorted perception of time that space travel produces. In the world of constant motion, the speed in which things happen is delayed – thus, his film is composed of single clips that range from 30 to 200 seconds long that capture the slightest, sedate movements of a world in vacuum. On a side note, Kubric is genius when it comes to creating anticipation. For instance, I was hinged precariously on the edge of my chair, waiting frantically for Dave’s module to reach Frank’s receding body. And what does Kubric do? He takes his sweet-space-time in showing Dave’s dust-speck sized body expanding (approaching) ever so slowly. And he doesn’t care to give the audience a hint of what they should be feeling but cutting repeatedly back to Dave’s desperate and serious expression. Furthermore, you know the whole fiasco is pretty doomed because back on the main craft, you’ve got HAL “terminating life functions.” Top this with some high-tension choral music and you get a frantic Florence hollering “HURRY THE F*CK UP!”

Now there’s a million and one things one can discuss about “2001” and I feel obligated to speak of Kubric’s presentation of mankind (It seems to be a prerequisite). Really, nothing screams, “vulnerability of human life” louder than this film. In every way, man is dependent on some external force: homo sapiens could not evolve into higher intelligence without the influence of the monolith; this monolith is the source that leads man to blindly explore further into the Solar System; and the lives of these explorers are entirely controlled by HAL 9000, which demonstrates the state of the creation overthrowing the creator.

Yet on Earth, we execute so much power and control over everything. There is the media hyperbolizing the power of scientific innovation, illustrating the human race conquering the Solar System; there are governments de-meriting others, controlling peoples’ political orientations; the environment is transformed into resources that serve to fuel luxurious human lives. One questions, from where do we obtain this massive arrogance?

Kubric shrinks human beings back to its realistic size, whether the general audience wants to believe it or not. He reveals our embarrassing flaws by placing us back into the scale of the universe; we are but mere organisms and our toys. No matter how advanced we can make our computers, true knowledge is still far beyond our comprehension, and with the capacities of our lives at this rate, there is no way we will be able to attain such level of intelligence in our lifetime.

But one thing he does accredit man for is the spiritual entity that defines our humanity. It is precisely the love that Dave shared with his comrades that cannot be overpowered no matter how emotionally intelligent HAL 9000 can be created. And it was Dave’s human will and strength that pulled him through to reach Jupiter. Perhaps in this context, there is something irreplaceable about humanity, which triggers the curiosity of these extra terrestrial monoliths to keep our race under surveillance.