2001

Just before Xmas Michael Bérubé posted an edited version of an essay he wrote in 1993 about 2001: A Space Odyssey (aka my favourite film ever):

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is not a political film. A quarter century after its release in April 1968 (its public debut took place on the day before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.), 2001 is usually remembered for its images, for the music, or for its groundbreaking special effects–all of which are widely and routinely cited in the general culture. The mysterious monolith turns up in New Yorker cartoons (“it’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand”), “Thus Spake Zarathustra” becomes a staple of Sesame Street phonetics lessons, the balletic representations of space flight provide material for a Lenny Kravitz video and an episode of The Simpsons. Much of the movie’s audience might hesitate to ascribe a “plot” to 2001 at all, much less a “plot” in the “political” sense; the movie’s initial reviews tended to center on the monolith and on HAL, and rereading those reviews today chiefly affords one the spectacle of watching dozens of puzzled film critics circle curiously around this large, black slab in their midst.

[…] My sense is that most people would think it takes a strange critical mind to see the movie as a commentary on the Cold War and the rise of the national security state. But all I’ll be doing here is uncovering one of the film’s premises, a subtext it doesn’t need to elaborate insofar as it takes that subtext for granted (as does its audience). To date, there hasn’t been any discussion of what 2001 might have meant to the politics of national security and manned space exploration in 1968. I think that critical silence is itself readable, and that it testifies not only to cultural work the film has done, but also to the possibility that some forms of textual politics may be most powerful when least explicit. […]

It’s an interesting essay, particularly for the view Bérubé takes about HAL’s motivation. Well worth a read.