The Critical Reception and the Generation Gap
Pauline Kael, the era’s most influential critic and tastemaker, observed that the largely unforeseen success that Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey achieved at the box office was due to the younger viewers who crowded that nation’s theaters to see it, turning the film’s exhibition into one of the signal cultural events of the decade. And yet the enthusiasm of the fifteen- to twenty-five-year-olds for the film, so Kael opined, was not to be explained on purely cinematic grounds. Instead, 2001’s appeal to the young was to be traced to the “new tribalism” that had emerged by the end of the 1960s.1 Kael suggested that what most commentators at the time termed the “counterculture” had also responded enthusiastically earlier in the decade to European art films that were characterized by ostentatious visual and aural stylizations, which were indisputably prominent elements of Kubrick’s new release as well.
Young people, however, had been drawn to Juliet of the Spirits or 81⁄2 (Federico Fellini, 1965, 1963) not because the art film form intrigued them, but because they were interested in “using the movie to turn on,” or so Kael maintained. 2001 supposedly followed in this tradition, quickly developing, upon its release in 1968, the similar reputation that “the movie will stone you— which is meant to be a recommendation.”2 Outraged by the success the film achieved despite her negative assessment and those of the critical establishment in general, Kael was prompted to take an especially jaundiced view of the more culturally adventurous among the baby boomer generation.3
The “new tribalism” explanation for the box office success of 2001 may have some (if undoubtedly limited) merit. At some theaters where the film became a cult attraction, recreational drug use in the auditorium was commonly reported. In any case, one obvious result of the film’s surprising popularity with teenagers and young adults was an unintended promotion that quickly outstripped the more conventional advertising campaign plotted out by MGM. Prior to its release, the studio had been convinced it was not marketing a cult film, but yet another spectacular epic in the vein of Lawrence of Arabia and How the West Was Won, blockbusters with serious themes that had proven popular with older cinema goers earlier in the decade. Kael is cor- rect in pointing out that the word on Kubrick’s science fiction epic did not go out (at least initially) through newspaper or magazine spreads.4
What some considered to be the film’s attractive qualities, including its visceral appeals, were not generally promoted by prominent reviewers, many of whom, like Kael, panned the production, at least initially (some recanted upon a second viewing once 2001’s popularity became too widespread to deprecate). She scornfully observed, “‘The tribes’ tune in so fast that college students thousands of miles apart ‘have heard’ what a great trip 2001 is before it has even reached their city”. Kael left no doubt about how she felt about the reception accorded the film by this class of viewers: “Using movies to go on a trip has about as much connection with the art of the film as using one of those Doris Day–Rock Hudson jobs for ideas on how to redecorate your home—an earlier way of stoning yourself.” Poor films like 2001, she thought, can perhaps be used more easily than good ones “for such non-aesthetic pur-poses as shopping guides or aids to tripping”.
To be sure, the popularity of 2001 with the young in general and the counterculture in particular likely went far beyond the purview of what might be properly called the aesthetic. Yet the evidence suggests that many in those first, predominantly youthful audiences found more than an easy high. For the generation that came of age in the late 1960s, seeing the film (often numerous times) became a rite de passage thought to be the source of a special knowledge that distinguished them from their parents and “square” adults in general. Many reported undergoing religious conversions, rather than experiencing altered states, during the film’s famous twenty-four-minute, dialogue-free final sequence: astronaut Bowman’s rapid journey through the immensities of time and space, which ends with his transformation into a newborn “star child,” whose glance back from space toward the Earth could be understood as foretelling some kind of renewal. If Bowman were freed from the familiar (including his own physical being), so might the human race, hitherto trapped by the linearity of historical unfolding and the destructive, iron laws of technological “progress,” with its inextricable connection to violence.
The substantial appeal of the film to young adults proved quite enduring, but it was by no means intentional. A rerelease in 1974 was rather profitable, with those under twenty-five constituting once again a large percentage of the enthusiastic audiences. To be sure, the acceptance by young people of their parents’ favored form of mass entertainment contributed more than a little to 2001’s excellent box office. Many baby boomers, especially the college educated, had gotten hooked on the movies even though both the studio system and the filmmaking style that had created it for more than four decades were in the process of decay and reconfiguration. The crisis in the industry coincided with the changing demographics of the cinema-going public, prompting the production of films designed to appeal to the young. Yet this was a series to which 2001 was not designed to belong.
The youth-oriented films that set box office records at the end of the 1960s (notably Mike Nichols’s The Graduate, also 1968, and Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, 1969), were predictably Oedipal, staging compromised rebellions, in the tradition of J. D. Salinger, against middle-class values and institutions (marriage, settling down, productive employment, “responsibility”) in the name of an ever-elusive personal freedom, a quest that could be shaped into either a comic or tragic conclusion. These youth films lent visual and narraive form to the many-sided conflict between the young and their parents that—along with a host of other social and political issues—became known as the “generation gap.” In contrast, 2001 was written and directed by men in the never-to-be-trusted over-thirty group (the film’s author, Arthur C. Clarke, and Stanley Kubrick belonged to an earlier generation, though this was typical of the period; the youth movement among Hollywood directors did not truly emerge until the 1970s).
Of course, 2001 is critical of the patriarchal establishment, broadly speaking. The film mercilessly debunks the then-current myth of the triumphant technocrat, whose claim to advance the frontiers of knowledge had found its most publicly celebrated reflex in the American victory over the Russians in the space race, ratified the year after the film’s release by the first lunar land- ing. Kubrick’s film offered a quite different view. In 2001, arrogant scientists fail to understand and master the monolith that seems to announce the presence of a superior and powerful intelligence of some kind, giving an ironic twist to the vaunted concept of “mission control.”
But there is more here than revolt and debunking. Kubrick was less invested either in mounting an assault on those supposedly in charge of society in the manner of his critically acclaimed Dr. Strangelove (1964) or in satirizing conventional pieties, as he does so effectively in Lolita (1962). Unlike any film ever released by Hollywood, 2001 offers a sweeping if provocatively reductive and ultimately ambiguous representation of human history that is deeply Spenglerian in its faulting of Enlightenment values, such as progress, humanism, and even civilization. It is hard to imagine, in fact, how Kubrick could have further undermined the ideological presuppositions of Hollywood storytelling, with its narrative driven by and centered on character, its embodiment of political or social questions in valued individual destinies capable of neat resolution, its conventional deployment of admirable protagonists and despicable antagonists, its devotion to arousing the sympathy and pathos necessary for the proverbial happy ending, and, perhaps most important, its confection of a closure that masked contradiction with a perfect knowledge of character and event. Such a sweeping rejection of those structures and themes so customary in the American commercial cinema certainly challenged the analytical and critical acumen of journalists and reviewers at the time.
2001 goes far beyond the single-minded Oedipality of adolescent revolt in order to raise, if not to definitively answer, the most vexing of metaphysical questions, including the debatable value of the emergence of hominids from purely instinctual behavior to tool making, murder, and eventually the transmissible culture that endows Homo sapiens, alone among creatures, with a history. That history, as the film makes manifest, stimulates man to entertain a curiosity about his origins and purpose, even as it provides him with the technological power to pursue the “truth” of his situation, which becomes the goal of the odyssey that Kubrick’s narrative traces. In fact, a number of influential young viewers, as we shall see, were especially attracted to the teleology developed by Clarke and Kubrick, which was so different from both Christian eschatology and the gradual meliorism of traditional science, even as it similarly promised forms of redemption and renewal. Indeed, it seems that, contra Kael, the popularity of 2001 with the young had much to do with the film’s themes (and the way these were advanced by an unfamiliar narrative strategy) and not only with the supposedly hallucinogenic effects of its visual and aural programs, however strikingly original and deeply affecting. Here was a film in which spectacle arguably dominated a seemingly deliberately banal, even meager, script. But it was also true that 2001 had something different to say, in the largest sense of that term, and had found a different way to say it. The establishment critics, for the most part, were simply not attuned to this message. But the film-going public evidently was. 2001 earned the third-best box office gross in 1968, finishing behind only the spectacularly successful The Graduate and Funny Girl and easily making the list of the then top-twenty grossing films of all time. With its initial and subsequent releases, domestic and worldwide, Kubrick’s arty, intellectual film earned nearly $138 million, which was, at that time, an astounding figure.5
Kael’s comments are contained in an essay provocatively entitled “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” whose premise is that the movies are the “sullen art of displaced persons.” The appeal of this “sullen art” resides in their being “slick, reasonably inventive, well-crafted,” conforming to an aesthetic endorsed not only by those in the industry, but by most critics as well. In Kael’s view, films such as 2001 reject this aesthetic because they aspire to be art rather than entertainment but, paradoxically, “may be no more than trash in the latest, up- to-the-minute guises, using ‘artistic techniques’ to give trash the look of art.” They are dangerous because they may make us forget that “most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art”. To put this another way, Kael thinks that movies are what we enjoy “and what we enjoy has little to do with what we think of as art”. This is a debatable point at best, perhaps little more than a sophomoric rejection of official culture in the name of old-fashioned, just-plain-folks enjoyment. The dominant view in American culture, which she endorses, is that “[a]rt is still what teachers and ladies and foundations believe in, it’s civilized and refined, cultivated and serious, cultural, beautiful, European, Oriental: it’s what America isn’t”. Kubrick went wrong, in other words, not only by making a movie that could be enjoyed by the brain- less young, but also by making a film with artistic pretensions.
Kael’s dismissal of the film, and the musings that serve as the underpinnings of that judgment, point toward the challenge that 2001 posed upon its initial release to long-dominant notions of movie value. Her analysis, while hostile, is also complex and perspicacious largely because it is unintentionally revelatory of the contradictory values at the center of the era’s American film culture. 2001 deconstructs the usual opposition of high to low culture (art to trash), providing a subaesthetic form of enjoyment for some and advertising itself as having the same seriousness of theme and structure as the latest Fellini or Kurosawa release (although this intellectual content is nothing more, in her view, than “inspirational banality”). That a film made more or less within the mainstream commercial system could manage genuine visceral and intellectual appeal would become a commonplace judgment just a few years later, during that flourishing of popular American art cinema usually called the Hollywood Renaissance. The making of 2001, and its controversial reception, are likely the first signs that such a revolution in cinema culture was in the offing.
In any event, the popularity of 2001 proved difficult to analyze and appreciate for most journalists and critics, who were accustomed in 1968, like Kael, to think of art film as serious, edifying rather than enjoyable, and European (or, at least, foreign). Celluloid entertainment was what Hollywood provided. It is indeed notable that the most articulate initial defense of Kubrick’s achievement appeared in the Harvard Crimson, penned by youthful critics who were not so much under the spell of the “classic Hollywood text” as were Kael and company and who, perhaps for that reason, looked beyond the unfamiliarity of the director’s structural innovations to find the film not only an excellent example of a standard Hollywood genre, the science fiction film, but also “huge and provocative” in its engagement with questions about “progress—physical, social, and technological.”6 Thus the generation gap not only explained the film’s box office success, but to an important degree its critical reception as well.7
Establishment Views Unlike Kael, Stanley Kauffmann found the enthusiasm of the hip young for the film less a cause for dismay than the director’s supposed failure to adhere to the customary canons of cinematic correctness. His comments show that he was in implicit agreement with her judgment that Hollywood films should be “slick, reasonably inventive, well-crafted.” But, again unlike Kael, he identifies and disparages precisely those aspects of the narrative structure that later critics were to consider central to Kubrick’s substantial (and, arguably, never equaled) achievement. Kauffmann admitted that the five years of production and $10 million of funding (an amazing sum at the time) could be seen on the screen, a testimony to the director’s strong visual sense and maniacal attention to detail, but he expressed puzzlement about how Kubrick was able to “concentrate on his ingenuity and ignore his talent.”8 The film goes wrong, he thinks, in “the first 30 seconds,” presumably when, unlike the usual Hollywood product, it did not provide enough in the way of customary structural elements (particularly a main character to focus the story). Viewers like Kauffmann could not immediately orient themselves by identifying the film’s genre and presumed narrative trajectory.
As did other critics at the time, Kauffmann found part of the problem to be what he called “sheer distention,” the fact that, as originally released, the film ran 160 minutes, a full three hours including intermission (19 minutes were excised by Kubrick early in the initial release in an attempt to blunt this criticism). This objection, however, turns out to be something of a red herring. 2001 was hardly distinguished by excessive length. Since the early 1950s, Hollywood had been producing blockbusters whose claim to special status was, in part, established by their running longer than the 90- to 120-minute format that had been established as a standard by the early studio period. In 1960, Kubrick had himself contributed to the blockbuster series with Spartacus, a film he was called in to complete, which was 196 minutes long. Though the film ran nearly four hours with orchestral overture and intermission, Spartacus did not provoke complaints about “sheer distention,” presumably because it did not otherwise ignore or violate established industry conventions.
Kauffmann, it becomes evident, was actually more displeased by the story that Kubrick and Clarke had fabricated than by the film’s supposedly unjustified length. The film is divided into three sections whose connections, though many and subtle, deviate from the Aristotelian causality that had for decades lent the usual studio project such energetic forward motion. Kubrick’s narration, particularly its leisurely pacing and omission of significant story information, was also a startling deviation from standard practice. Somewhat typically, Jeremy Bernstein, writing in the New Yorker, observed that “after reading the book, I realized that I really hadn’t ‘understood’ the film, and I had especially not understood the ending.”9 Such a judgment presumes that “understanding” (that is, the kind of mastery of story and character that the Hollywood film had traditionally provided) is what Kubrick wanted the film’s viewers to carry away with them. Like Bernstein, Kauffmann did not see that the director was obviously aiming for an entirely different effect. He suggests that Clarke’s short story (“The Sentinel”) had “been amplified and padded to make it bear the weight of this three hour film,” but, though he evidently read it, Kauffmann failed to note that the story the film tells, much transformed in the process of its “novelization,” had also been reduced to its barest elements. There is but a minimal provision of information-laden dialogue and a near total absence of revealing title cards or clarifying voice-over.
In any case, Kauffmann suggests that the most obvious evidence of this “padding” is to be found in the conflict between the astronauts and the HAL computer, which, in his view, Kubrick “devised” in order to “fill in this lengthy trip with some sort of action.” The real problem, however, has more to do with coherence than distention: “None of this man-versus-machine rivalry has anything to do with the main story, but it goes on so long that by the time we return to the main story, the ending feels appended”. And thus the presumed point of the whole picture is “sloughed off,” though Kauffmann interestingly declines to identify what that point might be considered to be.10 Even when the action is coherent, however, the film is “so dull, it even dulls our interest in the technical ingenuity for the sake of which Kubrick has allowed it to become dull”. Kauffmann presumably felt that Kubrick, “ignoring his talent,” had proven either unable or unwilling to provide the film with a causally linked plot leading to an exciting, last-minute conclusion. In Kauffmann’s view, the parts of the film do not connect readily to one another. Hollywood movies, Kauffmann judges, must build up to some point that is made with unmistakable clarity, which 2001 declines to do. Kubrick fails to produce a film that is “slick.” 2001 winds up being “dull,” the very opposite.
Writing in the New York Times, Renata Adler agrees, finding the film “just plain boring.”11 Like Kauffmann, Adler singles out for detailed attention only the conflict between Bowman and HAL. Significantly, this is the one section of the film that is handled in more or less traditional Hollywood fashion, with a suspenseful agon between characters, who are styled pretty much as good and evil, that is resolved after a lengthy struggle, which is more physical than psychological and climaxes in a violence that is as poignant as it is righteous. Expecting the rest of the film to fit this same pattern, Adler attributes its loose connections, lack of backstory, and final ambiguity to a failure of artistry: “It is as though Kubrick himself had become so rapt in the details of his fantasy that he lost track of, or interest in, the point of it all”.
Interestingly, Adler here glimpses an alternative interpretation of these formal features: that Kubrick is not, finally, interested in telling what is, in conventional terms, a “human” drama that might be summed up in some kind of message. Similarly, Kauffmann remarks on a central thematic contradiction of the film, that it shows space, on the one hand, as “thrillingly immense” but, on the other hand, as a place where men are “imprisoned, have less space than on earth.” Controlled by the environment, the characters in the film are thus “dehumanized”, as they are in many Kubrick films.12 Adler goes more to the heart of the matter, identifying what makes this film so different from the earlier ones made by the director: “One of the things that Kubrick has left out of his movie to a truly astonishing extent is people. It is about a half hour before anything but marvelous apes, tapirs, landscapes, and about an hour before the main human characters arrive”. Like Kauffmann, how- ever, Adler fails to identify the thematic and narrative strategy of which this startling absence is the most significant example.
Understanding Kubrick’s antihumanist perspective on human history proved difficult for many. After his first viewing of the film, Joseph Gelmis wrote that “because its characters are standardized, bland, depersonalized near-automatons who have surrendered their humanity to computers, the film is antidramatic and thus self-defeating.”13 When he saw it a second time, Gelmis became convinced that this was a film of “such extraordinary originality” that it upset “the members of the critical establishment because it exists outside their framework of apprehending and describing movies”. Yet he still declared, “Kubrick’s depersonalized human beings are antidramatic and that is cinematically self-defeating. The pace is so leisurely and the characters so uninteresting that you may become impatient to get on with the plot.” Thus, for him, “the film failed as drama [on] the first viewing because it did not keep me spellbound.” Now he had come to see that “the tedium was the message”. Among those first audiences, however, there were those who did not agree with this McLuhanesque conclusion that Kubrick’s only aim was to decon- struct the desire of spectators for an engaging narrative that centered on sympathetic characters and was motored by a conventional plot.
A Youthful Perspective Acknowledging his own initial failure to appreciate Kubrick’s achievement, Gelmis observed that the establishment critics were “threatened” by the film “because the conventional standards don’t apply.” What was needed instead was “an innocent eye, an unconditioned reflex, and a flexible vocabulary”.
2001 found its most articulate champions in three Harvard students, who recognized it not only as a “superb science-fiction genre film” but also as “an attempt at metaphysical philosophy.” Hunter, Kaplan, and Jaszi recognized that Kubrick’s double desire to offer audiences an entertaining film that offered the conventional pleasures of genre and to make an intellectual statement might well be a “sure-fire audience baffler guaranteed to empty any theater of ten percent of its audience.” That 10 percent, they might have gone on to say, would likely include the majority of the older generation of critics. If, as they affirm, Kubrick did his best work in the film with “plotless slow-paced material,” whose purpose was to underline the “ritualistic behavior of apes, men, and machines with whom we are totally unfamiliar,” then it was likely that many viewers would be unable to perceive an important, if never explicitly stated theme of the film, which is “the constantly shifting balance between man and his tools”.
This preoccupation with technology, broadly speaking, is, of course, the core theme of science fiction, whose signal quality as a genre is that it postulates another, imagined order of existence in which the rules of science, broadly speaking, can be plausibly made to apply. It is this concern with a plausibility established by an extended appeal, always logical and consonant with larger scientific truths, to the reader’s sense of the physical and historical real that marks off science fiction like 2001 from superficially similar fantasies like Star Wars (1977). What distinguishes Kubrick’s film as science fiction, so the Harvard Crimson reviewers accurately observe, is that he is able to achieve, “in terms of film technique and directorial approach . . . the audience’s almost immediate acceptance of special effects as reality: after we have seen a stewardess walk up a wall and across the ceiling early in the film, we no longer question similar amazements and accept Kubrick’s new world without question.” Once the “credibility of the special effects” has been established, “we can suspend disbelief . . . and revel in the beauty and imagination of Kubrick/Clarke’s space”.
The remainder of the review is devoted to a reading of the “challenging substance of the excellent screenplay,” which is ably demonstrated to be much more than “inspirational banality” where “tedium” might be the only message. A brief summary will make this clear. In the “Dawn of Man” sequence, we wit- ness the coupling of progress and destruction, as the first use of a tool by the primitive australopithecine hominid is to kill an opponent of a rival band and take possession of the water hole. Before this evolutionary leap, however, the black, rectangular monolith makes its first appearance, and this is the precise moment when the moon and sun are in orbital conjunction. Thus, “a theme of murder runs through simultaneously with that of progress.” Thousands of years of human history are then elided by the cut from the bone to the space- craft, an example of Bazinian associative montage that serves as “an effective, if simplistic, method of bypassing history”. The film’s second section is set at the beginning of the new millennium, when space travel and exploration are much advanced. On the moon, scientists have discovered a monolith identical to the one that appeared to the apes (once again the moon and sun are in conjunctive orbit). The scientists are baffled by the monolith, but they do soon discover that it is emitting a powerful radio signal toward Jupiter. The conclusion is that some form of life on Jupiter might be responsible for the appearance of the monolith and it is to Jupiter that an expedition is sent some fourteen months later. Thus, the monolith “begins to represent something of a deity,” inspiring “apes and man to make the crucial advance,” first toward tool making and violence and then later toward traveling to Jupiter.
On that journey, the conflict between the HAL 9000 and the astronauts provides yet another meditation on the relationship between humans and their tools. In the opinion of the reviewers, the script development is, again, linear, as “the accepted relationship of man using machines is presented . . . then discarded in favor of an equal balance between the two.” The irony is that HAL “proves [to be] a greater murderer than any of the men” as the film turns again “to the theme of inherent destruction in social and technological progress” (219). Ingeniously using his tools for purposes other than those for which they were intended, Bowman manages to “kill” the computer, in a “complex act [that] parallels that of the Australopithecus.” This act is salvational, freeing Bowman from an excessive and dehumanizing dependence on tools; through it, he becomes “an archetypal new being: one worthy of the transcendental experience that follows”. This reading is perhaps a bit simplistic. Despite his defeat of the renegade computer, Bowman remains a tool of the monolith—although he does pass through it—and is imprisoned in his fetal sack as he circles the Earth.
After dismantling HAL, Bowman follows the monolith, which he spies floating in space, and enters some kind of time/space warp where he under- goes the startling and ultimately ambiguous remaking that turns him into a “star child” or some species of mutant. Kubrick, as the reviewers recognized however, is not interested in providing a clear message: “the intrinsic suggestiveness of the final image is such that any consistent theory about the nature of 2001 can be extended to apply to the last shot: there are no clear answers”. Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the Harvard Crimson review is not the sympathy and appreciation it shows for Kubrick’s film, which is claimed to be a “superb” example, in its “dazzling technical perfection,” of an unusual genre, that of “great philosophical-metaphysical films about human progress and man’s relationship to the cosmos”. What is most remark- able is that it is the only major contemporary review to provide a close reading of the film’s narrative and themes.
Last Words Pauline Kael is certainly correct in suggesting that what was most interesting at the time about the success of The Graduate was not cinematic but “socio- logical.” Sociology, as she sees it in this instance, confirms a time-honored truth: the more things change, the more they stay the same. It is remarkable, Kael observes, “how emotionally accessible modern youth is to the same old manipulation. The recurrence of certain themes in movies suggests that each generation wants romance restated in slightly new terms”. No doubt. Older viewers, in contrast, who are comfortable but also bored with the same formulas, are in the process of giving up the movies—because “they’ve seen it before.” And this ennui affects critics of a certain age as well, and “this is why so many of the best movie critics quit.” In what is probably not intended to be an autobiographical observation, she declares, “some become too tired, too frozen in fatigue, to respond to what is new”.
It may well be true, in part, that younger people do not truly know what is new because they do not have the experience to be properly comparative, a sine qua non of the critical task. We might argue that another element of that task should be a certain openness to innovation, as she herself observes: “One’s moviegoing tastes and habits change.” But then the cinema changes too. And yet Kael seems to ignore that simple truth. She presents as an unalterable fact the dictum that “[i]f we’ve grown up at the movies we know that good work is continuous not with the academic, respectable tradition but with the glimpses of something good in trash” (127). The younger generation, however, as the Harvard Crimson reviewers exemplify, was pleased to find that “the academic, respectable tradition,” hitherto the more or less exclusive province of the international art cinema, had found itself a home in a Hollywood stu- dio–financed and –distributed epic film. Of course, 2001 is in only a limited sense a Hollywood film in the tradition of that “trash” for which Pauline Kael affirms such affection.
An essential aspect of 2001’s conception and production, in fact, is that Kubrick and the creative team he assembled worked outside the studio system, on the other side of the world, in a somewhat dismal place called Boreham Wood, north of London. What Kubrick regarded as the disastrous experience of directing Spartacus (after Kirk Douglas hired him after firing Anthony Mann) had soured him on Hollywood, and the changing nature of the industry, in which the studios that had once dominated production were reduced, as in this instance, to little more than banks, made workable both his desire for independence and his more or less permanent relocation out- side of the United States. In a history that has been fully documented by others, especially Robert Kolker, the altered conditions of production and the evolving tastes of a younger audience led to a different kind of American film: visually sophisticated, intellectually engaging, intriguingly (dis)connected to genre, and unmindful, as appropriate, of the conventions that had for more than four decades determined the shape of the American commercial product.14 2001 is the first, or one of the first, films of this new tradition to make an impact on the marketplace. With the perfect hindsight that the passage of more than three decades provides, we can now clearly see that, contra Kael, the younger generation was not simply “mooning away in fixation on them- selves and thinking this fixation had suddenly become an art”.
As the Harvard Crimson reviewers eloquently demonstrate, 2001 was undoubtedly “art” in the tradition of the international art cinema. Although most within the older, established critical generation did not agree, here was a film that could sustain a careful and detailed reading even as it impressed with its tech- nical sophistication and thematic richness. But a youthful enthusiasm for sophisticated science fiction and striking cinematic effects only identifies one kind of appreciative reading that Kubrick’s enigmatic text might sustain, as the film’s subsequent critical history, amply attests.
At the time of its initial release, there was a lone but significant indication of the substantial influence that 2001 was soon to exert on cinema studies, then in the process of finding a second home in the academy. Annette Michelson, one of the pioneers of serious film study in this country, devoted a long appreciative essay to 2001, the only analysis from the period of the film’s initial release that today holds more than an archaeological interest. Michelson acknowledges the groundbreaking nature of the director’s accomplishment, which is to be seen in its unusual melding of form and content: “Kubrick’s film has assumed the disquieting function of Epiphany . . . a disturbing structure, emitting, in its intensity of presence and perfection of surface, sets of signals.”15
But these are not indecipherable. Kubrick, unlike Homer, is not to be imagined as nodding, nor, in Michelson’s view, can he be accused of purveying meaninglessness as a theme, thus deconstructing the mainstream cinema’s preoccupation with having a “point.” Instead, the film propounds profound ideas about the human experience, the nature of art, and the history of the medium itself; its message is not defined entirely by the high seriousness of its engagement with genre. Like the enigmatic monolith that sets into motion the events of human history that the film traces, 2001 is “endlessly suggestive, projects a syncretic heritage of myths, fantasies, cosmologies and aspirations”. In stark contrast to both establishment critics and youthful fans, Michel- son finds that “everything about it is interesting,” but especially the fact that its form and substance merge inextricably in a “‘formal’ statement on the nature of movement in its space”. Thus Kubrick takes as his subject the notion of “‘arrival and departure.’ . . . [The film’s] narrative [becomes] a voyage of discovery, a progress toward disembodiment, [and] explores . . . the structural potentialities of haptic disorientation as agent of cognition”.
Yet, the richness of Kubrick’s film is not exhausted by its epistemological movement, by its use of the medium to disengage, disorient, and instruct. Michelson also recognizes that the director’s accomplishment was to insert himself into the mainstream tradition of Hollywood filmmaking, whose primal purpose, as the young fans of 2001 instinctively recognized, was always to provide an alternative universe into which the spectator was invited, even impelled. On this level, Kubrick was no less successful than Howard Hawks, Lewis Milestone, and Michael Curtiz, as well as other skilled purveyors of studio-era screen epics: “The film of adventure and of action, of action as adventure is an event . . . and it offers, of course, the delights and terrors [that] occasions of that sort generally provide, [by] positing a space which, overflowing screen and field and vision, converts the theatre into a vessel, and its viewers into passengers”. And so the knowledge the film offers is ultimately of the body, or “carnal,” the ultimate special effect to which “youth in us, discarding the spectator’s decorum, responds”. Michelson too saw clearly that 2001 was, in many senses, the ultimate trip.
Notes 1. Pauline Kael, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” in Going Steady (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 100. Further references will be noted in the text.
2. Kael’s view about the appeal of 2001’s images was echoed by Jeremy Bernstein, writing in the New Yorker (September 21, 1968): What appears to have happened is that 2001 has uncovered a large public— especially of young people brought up on the visual stimuli of television—for whom visual beauty is sufficient reason for the existence of a film, and who do not need the prop of a conventional plot with a clearly articulated dénouement. (180) Television theorists might dispute Bernstein’s point since, conventionally at least, the audio track is considered to dominate the visual in that medium. Evolved from radio, television is “talky” compared to the movies, which first developed without sound and with only printed language. If the younger generation in the 1960s was accepting of a cinema of spectacular images, it seems more likely the result of the interest of Hollywood, after 1950, in producing visually striking and color films (often shot in wide- screen format) in order to compete with television, which was restricted through most of that era to small, ill-defined, and black-and-white images.
3. John Russell Taylor also noted a generational gap in the audience for 2001, but drew a different conclusion from that fact. The second time he watched the film, he sat next to an especially enthusiastic young viewer and observed: [H]is attention was not functioning in the same sort of way that his parents’ was, and that mine was. He was, that is to say, not in the slightest worried by a nagging need to make connections, or to understand how one moment, one spectacular effect, fitted in with, led up to or led on from another. He was accepting it like, dare one say, an LSD trip, in which a succession of thrill- ing impressions are flashed on to a brain free of the trammels of rational thought. Here was an audience interested in “a whole new way of assimilating narrative,” not as “an articulated plot, but [as] a succession of vivid moments.” From the London Times, in The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, ed. Jerome Agel (New York: Signet, 1968), 171–72. Taylor raises an interesting point about how 2001 was probably enjoyed by many. Kubrick’s artful deployment of images and sound may well have influenced (perhaps inaugurated) one of the most important and enduring elements of the current cinema, its fascination with something close to “pure” spectacle.
4. An important exception must be made for Albert Rosenfield’s ten-page spread (mostly stills from the film) in Life, April 15, 1968, 24–34. Anticipating the judgment of later film scholars, Rosenfield observes that the film “dazzles the eyes and gnaws at the mind,” going beyond the “realm of literal science-fiction into a puzzling, provoking exercise in philosophy” (27).
5. Figures are from “All Time Rental Champs,” Variety, January 7, 1976. 2001: The Critical Reception and the Generation Gap 25
6. Tim Hunter, with Stephen Kaplan and Peter Jaszi, “The Harvard Crimson Review of 2001,” in Agel, The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, 215. Further references will be noted in the text.
7. There are, as one might expect, notable exceptions to this general rule. West Coast critics were generally more enthusiastic about Kubrick’s accomplishment, nota- bly Gene Youngblood (Los Angeles Free Press) and Charles Champlin (Los Angeles Times), both of whom strongly praised the film, while Penelope Gilliatt, writing in the New Yorker (April 13, 1968), though somewhat puzzled by what she had viewed, con- ceded that 2001 “is some sort of great film, and an unforgettable endeavor” (151).
8. Stanley Kauffmann, “Lost in the Stars,” New Republic, May 4, 1968, 24. Further references will be noted in the text.
9. “Chain Reaction,” in the New Yorker, September 21, 1968, 180. Thomas Allen Nelson provides a thorough and insightful commentary on the relationship between the film, on the one hand, and the two literary texts (the short story and the novel) produced by Clarke. He observes: Throughout the novel, Clarke combines these evocations of exploration and wandering amid the lonely expanses of space with an elaborate superstructure of explanatory material that ultimately has the effect of subordinating “mystery” to the speculations of science. The film, by contrast, is more open-ended than Clarke’s novel, perhaps because Kubrick realized that mystery, whether futuristic or historical, becomes trivialized on the screen once it assumes a definable, objective shape. . . . Kubrick internally organizes 2001 in ways that likewise combine a minimum of explanatory clarity with a maximum of visual ambiguity. Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze, rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 106–8.
10. Other reviewers were also unhappy with or dismayed by the film’s failure to make some obvious point. Robert Hatch, for example, declared that “the ambiguity of these closing scenes is the more disappointing because at least twice in its progress this most ambitious and often most thrilling of space films promises some energy of communication.” Nation, June 3, 1968, 74. Variety (April, 3, 1968) agreed, observing that the “film ends on a confused note, never really tackling the ‘other life’ situation and evidently leaving interpretation up to the individual viewer. To many this will smack of indecision or hasty scripting” (6). The perspicacious Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., rhetorically asked: “But what is one to make of the astronaut’s finding the image of himself in a French eighteenth-century drawing room, his aging, his death, his rebirth? . . . The concluding statement is too private, too profound, or perhaps too shallow for immedi- ate comprehension.” Vogue, June 1968, 76.
11. I quote here from the second of her two reviews of the film in the New York Times, April 21, 1968, L1. Further references will be noted in the text.
12. As Robert Kolkerobserves,“Kubrick’s narratives are about the lack of cohesion, center, community, about people caught up in a process that has become so rigid that it can be neither escaped nor mitigated—a stability that destroys.” A Cinema of Loneliness, 3d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 110. 26 STANLEY KUBRICK’S 2001
13. “SpaceOdysseyFailsMostGloriously,”Newsday,April4,1968,in Agel,The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, 264. Further references to this and the other two reviews by Gel- mis, also collected in Agel, will be noted in the text. 14. Kolker’s A Cinema of Loneliness is usefully supplemented by James Monaco’s American Film Now, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1984). 15. Annette Michelson, “Bodies in Space: Film as Carnal Knowledge,” Artforum 7 (February 1969): 57. Further references are noted in the text.
R. BARTON PALMER
2001 A Space Odyssey 