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2001: Wierd as ever

This weekend I went out with some guys from my Bible study to a tiny burger joint tucked into the lobby corner of a fancy hotel. Afterwards we went to the Ziegfeld theater, a beautiful historical theater that normally shows first-run movies. This winter they’ve been showing old movies. We went and saw 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The character HAL 9000 is as cool as ever. It’s one of the only science fiction movies that does space right… weightlessness and all. It’s also one of the most incomprehensible movies ever made. I read the book, which Arthur C. Clarke wrote at the same time he was working on the screenplay for the movie with Kubrick, so I know a little more about what’s going on.

If you consider that movies are a series of images instead of your standard plot/story arc, you’ll be alright. The end of the movie is a trippy kaleidoscope of psychadellic nonsense if you just walk into the movie. The book is a little more descriptive about what happens to astronaut David Bowman. He falls into a star gate, and is transported across the galaxy where he sees wild otherworldly vistas and strange starscapes. Kubrick’s film version is a lot more poetic, but since I realized what he was trying to capture, I can say he got the sense of it down.

Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick were both non-theists, and it’s apparent that they were trying to create a story and a work of visual poetry that fulfilled the sense of divine longing that all people have without the need to bring in a personal God. They definately succeeded in capturing that feeling, but they failed in trying to keep the longing for God out of it.

The whole movie seems very lonely and distant. None of the characters ever seems to connect with any other character. Dialogue is stiff. Indeed, the only really animated character is HAL 9000, a computer. In the end of the movie, we see David Bowman living out the rest of his days in solitude. Kubrick uses some nifty visual tricks where Bowman gradually sees himself growing older and older, until he’s a frail man lying in bed, reaching out to touch the rectangular black monolith, a mysterious alien artifact that definately represents a divine force in the movie.

The monolith was present at the beginning of Man’s evolution, and it’s here now at the end, where Bowman falls into it and evolves into the Star-Child who, in the very end, looks down at the Earth that was his cradle.

It’s not a philosophy that I agree with, but I do think it points out that even those who don’t believe in God long for transcendence. The world is a lonely place. People are cut off from each other. We need something beyond ourselves to come to us and cause us to be re-born. I don’t think Kubrick or Clarke actually believed it’s an alien artifact. I think they have no idea what it is, and so have to tell their story and capture that feeling in a very vague way.

I believe that thing is a personal God who is deeply worried about the world and concerned for our lonely ramblings. Same longing. Truer solution.