For forty-eight years, I had kept myself ignorant about the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. I had heard the movie's theme song about 4,000,000 times, but, aside from that, I only knew that it featured classical music and a computer named HAL. I didn't know how it began, I didn't know its story, and I didn't know how it concluded.
One of the marks of my getting older is that I am less and less concerned about meaning when it comes to movies and visual art and stories, poems, and plays than I was when I was younger, especially when I was working to earn degrees in English.
I began to loosen myself from the question, "What does it mean?" when I started to enjoy abstract paintings and photographs. I'm not sure when this started, but I have vivid memories of an Expressionist show I went to in Seattle nearly twenty years ago and of visits I've made to the Portland Art Museum where I immediately went to see the "non-representational" paintings and photographs. Likewise, over the last twenty years, I've enjoyed the art of Dada, art that is purposely senseless and meaningless. Dada is all about radical incongruity.
If I ask myself what a canvas painted in blue with a thin black line running vertically from top to bottom, off-center means, I'm sunk. But, if I feel the effect of the blue, which I can't really describe, except it gives me pleasure, I'm afloat.
All of this is a way of expressing that I experienced 2001: A Space Odyssey less as a movie and more as a stream of pictures incongruous with its accompanying music, much of the time. Sometimes I experienced congruity, though.
It moved slowly. Its characters are barely developed, hardly memorable. It portrays human beings as secretive, paranoid, vengeful, and primarily self-interested. The most complex character in the movie is a computer. So, unlike most movies, that move forward by developing plot and character, largely through scripted dialogue, 2001: A Space Odyssey did not develop in this way.
It's why one of the first things I thought as the movie flowed into its fortieth minute that this is an audacious piece of work. Stanley Kubrick had the audacity to make a "feature film" that conforms with almost none of the conventions of a "feature film": it's slow, its characters are boring, it features longish passages of film time where essentially nothing happens, and it's much more oriented to the visual and the aural than to the kinetic.
And so I surrendered to its slow pace. I marveled at the pictures moving before me. I relished the music and the discordant effects I experienced. I realized this was a movie about how very ordinary and tedious humans are.
I left the Bijou Metro thinking I had just experienced 2001: A Time Odyssey every bit as much as I experienced it as a space odyssey. I don't know that I've ever had a stronger feeling of space and time in relation to each other as the movie moved between the prehistoric and the infinite, between the planets Earth and Jupiter and their moons. I experienced the movement through time as slow, but as this movement lurched toward infinity, it became psychedelic, and time and space were unrecognizable in any way I'd ever known. Maybe if I had ever tripped on acid or ingested special mushrooms I would say I did recognize this, but I experienced a new realm.
I don't know what it all means. I know the monolith inspired an odd awe in me, as did the Starchild, folded in the fetal position, wide-eyed and mysterious in a womb that looked like the moon or another planet. I don't know what they meant, if anything.
I know they roused a sense of awe and mystery in me, much as the movie's entire odyssey through space and time and music did.
I enjoyed Stanley Kubrick's audacity. I enjoyed being messed with. It felt like I was being tested. Could I endure this odyssey and, if I did, what if the overall effect was mystery? Could I endure that? Could I endure experiencing an austere, sterile future, as colorless as prehistoric skull bones, one that portrayed human progress as moving toward a lack of imagination, a dearth of beauty, unless accompanied by classical music?
I did endure it and I'm happy I didn't see it until this time in my life when, being nearly sixty years old, I watch movies less for their meaning and much more for the experience I have as I participate in viewing them.
I'd go again, mostly to keep the pictures and the music alive in my memory and to feel the bewilderment and experience the audacity of Kubrick's and Clarke's vision of the future -- which, I guess, in 2013, has become our past.
2 comments:
It has been quite a while since I have seen 2001, so I started re-watching it. Here is the link on metacafe if you want to check it out (probably doesn't compare with the visuals on the big screen). Click Here
I remember it being both boring and incredibly gorgeously photographed. I was about 14, so too young to glean any deeper meanings from much of the symbolism. Upon re-watching it with Skye (who had never seen it, and as you know is quite bright) I am enjoying the photography even more, and we are having some lively discussions about the various signs and symbols and in the film. Your choice of phrasing was quite apt. This is one of the most audacious films ever embarked upon. That is one of the reasons I enjoy Stanley Kubrick so much. He never half-asses anything. 2001 is not one of my favorites of his work, but I nonetheless respect the hell out of him for making it (And MGM for footing the bill). Particularly in the modern sausage factory of Hollywood, movies have become so incredibly formulaic, it is shocking to see a movie that bucks convention so thoroughly. It is long, boring, slow, has unlikable characters, tons of (gorgeous) static shots that seem to go on forever. Yet despite that, or even because of that, it stands alone as one of the only films that can be considered a meditative rather than kinetic experience. Just some passing thoughts. Thanks for bringing this movie back to my attention.
Post a Comment