rev., Sep 13, 2021.
Posted, February, 2022, in memory of Douglas Trumbull, special effects.
Having attempted to nail down the dream structure of Alien (1979), at long last it seems time to drop back another decade into the past, and consider 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969), a movie I have seen at least 20 times, likely because the first time I saw it, maybe in 1971, when I was 18, I was utterly flummoxed. As per my usual, I will simply do a walk about, and see where things shake out.
Starting with an astrological concept, that by a sudden certain alignment of the stars, some events of historic importance may happen, the movie begins with a bookend which is only picked up later on, the theme song along with it
as the sun comes into alignment with other planets, it is supposed that something of importance must be happening. And, to start things off, the important thing is the emergence of man.
as a dream structure, I relate the sun’s everpresence to the High Light. This is an inner light that hangs up above in one’s purview during vigilogogic attempts to get to sleep, and remains so bright that even if you do eventually fall asleep, if it does not dissipate, it makes dreaming brittle and uncertain, prey to easily being splat into nightmare. This light does seem to flow through all the movie, in keeping with Kubrick’s ongoing critique of the officialdom of the current culture. In the Dawn of Man sequence, the sun is seen to shine at dawn or dusk from far off at the far horizon of a desert landscape. It is almost as if at sea, but there is a mountain way out there too.
and then it from far but kind of immersed in the haze, evoking the idea of a day woken up to with dread, not wanting to. It is also a Presence, switching to ON the fear vector
another theme that emerges is that, like filmmakers dealing with the American west, in the modern period, that is, up to 1975, a monumental view was taken. The idea is to draw up from the barreness some landmarks forms that give one bearing and signal that the events taking place are monumental too. Monument Valley was made use of in American Westerns to signify that the settling of the West, and the work of cowboys, was an act of nation-building, upon whose shoulders, so to speak, “we” stand. By contrast, in a few spaghetti westerns the same monuments are made use of almost as if to say keep away, this is a land of the dead. This same second take seems apparent here as I note that most of the forms Kubrick focused on have a pareidolic dimension
and again
this one seems like a reclining woman
while this one seems like a male
it is also true that when Kubrick chooses to pull in and picture only the goings on of life at a particular watering hole, that is, a haunt, that being the original meaning, the ring of rock is also of a nature to encourage one to think, we are always under attack, being watched, and therefore wary of outsiders.
and, indeed, that is exactly what happens, another clan of man-apes tries to take over the watering hole
and for that reason the peaks, the lookout points, are associated with male power.
indeed, when predators get their prey they take it up top to eat it with eyes open on any interlopers looking for a handout.
in their waterhole, then, the early man goes through three phases, one, they more or less co-exist with tapirs, irritated by their presence, but do not think there is much they can do about it.
then, two, they fight with another clan for the watering hole, but only by means of making threatening gestures, scaring them off.
then again, three, the head man sits with his troop on a cliff in the night, wary, he strikes a Don’t Make a Move, or what’s going on pose, somehow, afraid.
then they wake up to something terrible, a great change has occurred. He sees something, foreign
it is the monolith, they are terrified
then mystified
then, after one of them breaks the ice with a touch, kind of adorational of it, in an instant cult. It becomes the new watering hole
it seems like, as there is an alignment at the beginning of the movie, 1969, so there was an alignment at the dawn of man; so there is to be another alignment at the end of Hal. And, so, Kubrick adopts a view of history as bestowed upon passive man by extraterrestrial forces which pervades the UFO community and cults like Uranius etc being highlighted in a show at Jeffry Deitch right now. This belief also found a resting place in theosophical thought, with Blavatsky’s theories about ancient origin peoples; but, it is also true, is a core belief in the explanation of man’s origin in just about every traditional world religion from the Nile to the Colorado. I suppose if at the age of 18, though just getting into Joseph Campbell, the Bible was the only origin of the world or creation story you had heard, this theory of the origin of life would be controversial, or at least far out. This notion is also supported by a catastrophe view of change, that is, things plod along for eons and eons, then, suddenly, there comes a spike, a transformative moment which leaps forward, and Kubrick’s explanation for that is alien interference in human evolution. The idea here is then that the hum of the monolith, the touch of it, the adoration of it, by a vibe, jolted through the mind of the man-apes at present, to cause them to suddenly think of things in a way that brought on new ideas. I have mentioned in a call out to Philip Guston that in his 70s works he seemed to reach a new stage of existentialism. I attributed it to the working at night, which has a way of establishing a “feast day of the brain” every time you wake up, because the mind has been softened by sleep to allow of associational links that the rational mind either would reject or simply did not see. Seeing things in a new solving way like this is the climax of a type of dream recognized since the middle ages, the fantasmata.
I also found out that Julie Mehretu works at night, through insomnia
As such, the work of the universe of on the monolith, storing in it its power of working things out, evolution, that is, is contained inside it. It represents the creative core of life in the universe, or the whole universe pressed into a hard object. In my terms, given my graphs, as I see that the ape man take a proskynetic posture to it, and reach up, and rub it, and such, it is a blocking mechanism which fills entirely the core of consciousness from the top of vigilogogy to the bottom of hypnagogy, a monster, whose ignition, that is, relating to other or all levels, can, indeed, create a whirlwind of associative synchroetherrhoe (my word: everything flowing together at once), in which some new leap forward is suddenly made. Something like this
the ape-men pressed down to the splat, bottom of nightmare state, by its presence, by that pressure, there is an ephialtic need to bounce or jump out, and that, Kubrick seems to be saying, the need to wake up from nightmare, might be the core psychodynamic function which underwrites the need for violence (this could also combine with twinfire, if indeed they “saw themselves in a new way,” by way of that). The looking up, then, it patterned on the reported experience of people taking drugs, paralyzed below, looking up at wonders, this one, however, ominous, the wind begins to howl
we see a particularly pareidolic rock, as if almost coming alive
(this feature of the movie, which I have never commented on before, suggests that Kubrick knew something of the relationship that the Nilotes created with the earth in the form of imagining the hills as the bodies of the gods, Gebel barkal is the most famous example, in whose front form they saw the wedjet snake crown and in the whole of which they saw the head of Amun Ra
This was one of those ideas that I had preceding the literature on Egyptian art, because of the nature of paradigm block out, formalism would not allow of it, except in a formalist way, but soon enough it has been proven, there is now a whole subgenre of Egyptian scholarship devoted to exploring what it meant that Egyptians saw their gods lying on the ground in front of them. So, here, the idea means perhaps that this is a place where the power can rub off on man and an advance made, that is, the pareidolas reinforce the notion of the power of the monolith.
And, sure enough, idle apeman one day knocking about in the bones of a dead tapir, picks up a bone, notices that if you hit other bones they bounce, then that if you hit a few times hard they break, suddenly has his species changing eureka moment, you can use a tool as a weapon to kill
we get the monumental birth of man, in 60s jargon a hopelessly violent creature (these were the days when people believed that every man could be a murderer or a rapist, rape culture revisionists have revived these primitive ideas).
then we see that the next time the other tribe comes for water, you can do more than just scream at them, you can hit him and kill him, and chase the others away, a weapon gap has opened up
victory, and he tosses the weapons into the sky
for it to then leap into space, the year 2001. The date, of course, was a bad miss, we are nowhere near creating anything like what they have in this 2001 in the 2001 that was twenty years ago. Indeed, thinking of the 20th anniversary, it brought down a building that was built soon after 1969 and became a symbol of a more aggressive nationalist capitalism, US as world power. This reminds me that because the Taliban have taken back the country, some press was given to the blowing up of the twin buddas of the Bamiyam valley
which I saw in a conceit at the time as the source idea for a copycat version of a double gigantic form take down directed at the US and the symbol of US capitalism, the WTC, another example of twin towers.
then, too, I imagined a Taliban having the idea at a campfire not unlike the above nighttime wariness in which he envisions the WTC as King Kong did, his homeland towers, reflected back on the idea of defending Afghanistan, and so the plan was hatched.
But, in reality, not even on the map yet, in terms of creating as real the dream of this movie. Does this make any difference? Not entirely. In the recent commercial launches, I commented on the Bezos shot
as as humbling of oneself for one’s arrogance in thinking that the similar effects in 50s sci fi movies were primitive, when, now, they are the way to go.
Here too, but it does mean that this is more of a dream of places inside the human imagination, than an exploration of real space. That is, everything in the movie visualized is simply a construction built in a place in the human mind, whether explored as yet or not. This opens the movie to a hypnagogic reading, as follows.
I have said that in many ways I like the first part of the movie, the arrival for the secret meeting, more than the core of the movie, which is the Hal story. In this sequence horror movie star William Sylvester, likely unknown to general audiences, is flying up to a space station. Here is a gravity joke, ha ha, his hand just floats as he sleeps.
but is it a joke? One of the persistent problems in getting to sleep is where do I put my arms and hands, do I tuck them up in my other arm close to my body, or do I let them drop off the edge of the bed, and just hang there (it seems that in a bad night of sleep due to sinuses last night I dropped my hand off to the side and touched off an avalanche of notebooks that I keep piled on my nighttable! I did not hear it, though woke up in a fright that I had also broken my glasses, they were fine). What this means is, note, Sylvester is always being shown as asleep. This is not hypersleep, but sleep is nonetheless used as a metaphor for space travel here too. This implies that everything happens inside the head rather than outside in outer space.
Then too there is all arrivings and departings, very much the structure of a picaresque action movie, or even a superhero movie. One suspects the space annihilating presence of the rings of Saturn (though I made a mistake in memory, it is Jupiter that lords over 2001). Kubrick uses Strauss to make of all a waltz, many 60s Freudian 101ists saw sexual intercourse in every encounter between, well, here, rubber over very very tiny dick and whole shebang of female apparatus including the fallopians
but, then, what kind of shots do we get, we get out of the window shots, comparable to the more common type, out of car windows, and, as per my recent analysis of that sort of shot in the past year, this is the Raven’s Gate shot, meaning that at all times in space we are gazing on the possibility of instant death, that is, all space in its utter blackness and stillness as rendered in this movie is the devil’s road.
then, there is another kind of shot, and that is reception. This is an extreme version of the same. But as if creates a frame for death, defied by entry.
but, then, much more interesting to me (and notice we are not obsessed with the bottom of things here, that is, this is not space as more of the underthebottom, we go into the center of things here, meaning that the emphasis is always upon the being in-between of life there). This then lends itself to the third and to me most interesting aspect of Kubrick’s treatment of space craft, the half-life form. As noted in several essays recently, the half-life outlet is a form of the Raven’s gate seen from inside out, it posits that what is beyond that is half-life compared to what is within. Just as materiality depletes in ambience to the periacqueductal and to the phantom peripteral, so life force depletes to half-life force in immediate contact with ambient space. Kubrick seems to have told his designers, consider the idea, but then build it into the very structures of the ships travelled to and from. That is, come in a bit from the half life itself, and show that it has eat into the structure of things from the outside, to create whole network of half-life forms all operating apparently independently in a way that all but makes you look upon these forms as one would the windows in a large apartment building opposite, a trope in many movies, an idea then in general which forces us to acknowledge the depletion of personal force in a mass world. So, in this shot, the approach, the hatch, all very interesting, but the fascinating thing is the opening below, with staff busy doing whatever.
that is, this control room, below
and in this shot, greater interest in the opening on the other side, a half-life space
here
then when he gets by another ship to the moon base, it is veritable warren of these little marginal cubbyholes
this is reinforced by the fact that Sylvester is a bureaucrat come for a meeting and he speaks in the false polite language of the office world, all bland courtesies and the like. This is one of the very sweetest spots in Kubrick’s critique of the world, men who become just mouthpieces for the government, the idle chatter, the disingenuous politeness, it saturates his movies, even up to The Shining, where I argue that Jack is playing at being the man that he thinks this odd job forces him to be, so here, these men are fairly screaming, forced to be polite in address
the half-life shot is, in its singular form, an outlet of the hypnagogic power of a scenario, so that the power can get out into the wider world. It is a place of reverse agency, running against agency, to explode the energy out. But, but, the multiplicity of these spaces in this scenario, the drizzling of such depleted personages throughout this long drawn out maze involved in getting up to take a simple meeting, this attests to Kubrick’s 1969 version of a critique of what I would call today the overpower of the interstitium, that is, a system of technological development so vast and complicated and tricked up with so much hyperfunctionality that no one person can ever hope to understand it, and thus the failures it suffers. What this means for me is that Kubrick’s actual mindset is grounded in the symbolic level of hypnagogy, but as if fed from negative energy pouring down into it from the rings of Saturn emitted from the mainstream console of rational consciousness, and by this action, in this movie, in his mind, this power as if eats away at in the manner of termites the central core, creating theses little marginal half-life places (also a very popular trend in painting and art now, see my treatment of Stephanie Heinze). Something like this
I fear this means I think that Kubrick is working with a vision of space that is culturally grounded in the comic book imagination, which, as per my treatment, hollows out dream space, to then create negated flip forms of a hollowed out and empty world, as if that was a critique of it. His movies are always about how try as we might to be polite the hauntings of the interstitium and the whirr of the rings of Saturn (though this is a Jupiter movie) are ever eating away us, it is a kind of cannibalism by termites (two things, is this then a formicariam? and isn’t the wormhole sequence simply an eating away of THIS, the interstitium? NOT SPACE………).
That said, being a formalist, Kubrick felt that following Sylvester through his zigs and zags in the swiss-cheesing of the system is entertainment enough, and it is, but there will be no stewardesses, and flying today is not nearly the calm and ethereal process it is here, not since the sharing era where every person must air their every private grievance for all to hear in public space even to the point of fighting the revolution flight by flight in the air.
but, the, of course, the special skill of Kubrick is then setting up this utterly sterile world, and notice that just like the doctor in The Shining, the listeners listen in with caution and dread, absolutely still, while he is politely interrogated as to the rumors of a plague up on Clavius (it is a planted story to hide the real truth, of the monolith). Lovely Kubrickian scene, filled with menace and dread
especially when he presses the issue, against politeness and protocol, as tense a conversation as in the restroom with the caretaker in The Shining
then we move further on, things are getting red. An interesting trait of the movie is that with cling shoes humans have conquered gravity and as a result of outlets that spin them up and down, while they are always upright to themselves, things are pictured in space as having no up and down, but for humans under control (by contrast with recent findings that space is going to truly mess up human balance systems, not to say anatomy, turning us into big-headed snakes with no bones).
and now we approach the moon, we see that this odd spaceship is rather spermatozoan shaped
but really looks like the krell, in Forbidden Planet (1956), ominous red eyes up top, a big, masked face, with the implication of a large opening maw (I also call krell any static imaging that comes across into dream from consciousness of the interstititum above, the half-life form may well be a kind of krell form as well, then)
End of part 1.
rmarts 