The space program is one more step toward our becoming something evolutionarily greater than mankind. To Kubrick space travel is the perfect expression of mankind beginning to physically and perhaps metaphorically transcend our human-ness. From what I've read Kubrick admired astronauts and the space the space program, thinking of them as some of the ultimate expressions of mankind's greatness as a species. The space program was a very optimistic, aspirational effort in our society.
I think it's helpful to try to think about the film from the artist's point of view: Where was his mind at the time? What were his values? What was his world view?Īt the time Kubrick made 2001, we hadn't yet landed on the moon. Sometimes we cannot quite put an experience into words, and we might only be able to put what we got out of an experience in terms of how it made us feel. Ingmar Bergman explained his films in this way, too. I think he's saying that film should be a non-verbal experience, and the totality of meaning one can find in that experience, if it is crafted rightly, transcends verbal explanation. That would be to dishonor his work as an artist. Kubrick has a meaning, and I would imagine that he wants people to "get it", but he's not going to explain it in a verbal way.
#Odyssey meaning movie#
I don't think Kubrick was making a movie devoid of meaning, an empty box into which people can place their own meaning with no relation to what he intended.
#Odyssey meaning free#
So when Kubrick is saying that the viewer is free to speculate about the film and that he won't spell things out for people in a verbal way. The way I understand it is this: He felt we could communicate much deeper ideas with film if we tried, but we hadn't been taking advantage of the power of the medium to "speak" in terms that go deeper than what can be verbalized, cannot be encapsulated in "verbal roadmaps". He hoped that 2001 would scratch a little deeper than anything that had come before it. He felt that films up to that point hadn't even scratched the surface of what film could communicate.
If you read interviews with Kubrick from this time, he is very interested in film as a language. When you talk about interpreting the ending of 2001, you're really talking about interpreting the meaning or intent of whole film. If you don't agree, that's totally fine.) There is no spite or anger here just offering a different perspective which I think is more legitimate than what is offered in this article. That is not the spirit in which I write this. (I realize this long of a response could be interpreted as an angry, vehement rant. See, it doesn't matter what 2001 means to everyone.
Kubrick wants you to have a complicated answer to what the movie meant to you. Sure, it might be what happens, but I think the meaning of the movie goes deeper than that. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia-less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe-can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities-and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans." Now, the Sun is by no means an old star, and its planets are mere children in cosmic age, so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the universe not only where intelligent life is on a lower scale than man but other billions where it is approximately equal and others still where it is hundreds of thousands of millions of years in advance of us. It's reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact, countless billions of such planets where biological life has arisen, and the odds of some proportion of such life developing intelligence are high. Given a planet in a stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the interaction of a sun's energy on the planet's chemicals, it's fairly certain that life in one form or another will eventually emerge. I don't believe in any of Earth's monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe. "I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001 but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God.
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