Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey came out in 1968 and envisions a future that is now almost 25 years into our past.
But this is not a film to be taken so literally, for if you do, you not only do the film a great disservice but also yourself. As always, *spoilers ahead*, so read on at your own discretion.
In the past 57'ish years that the film has existed in the world, I'm sure there have been a gazillion-bajillion interpretations of the film. I have read/watched/heard none of them. This is simply my interpretation. I make no claims of uniqueness or profundity. I admit freely that the film has affected me deeply, keeping me awake and triggering an existential angst that I thought I had put to rest ever so easily. Alas. If you haven't seen the film, I recommend you stop reading this or anything else about the film and just go watch it instead. Let's start our own odyssey.
Our prehistoric ancestors were simple beings. Yet there's so much of their blueprint within us. Our most primal instinct, an instinct that we share with all living things, is timeless - from the dawn of Man to the evolution of sentient machines, it is the one unshakeable quality that makes us alive. It is the instinct for self-preservation. The fight for survival.
The _fight_ for survival. What an appropriate choice of words. Through the film, Kubrick posits (and I agree) that all survival is anchored in violence. For me to survive any number of other living beings must die. The very act of breathing, of finding sustenance, of accessing shared resources like water and shelter are marked with violence. This has been an undeniable truth since prehistoric times. Even though, as Yuval Noah Harari would point out, evolution and the passage of time has made us less violent (apparently we are living in the least violent era of human existence, all the genocide and wars in the world notwithstanding), it still is very much a building block of our basic nature.
This violence is something Kubrick posits we will pass on to machines when we program them to be sentient and "human-like". It is inevitable. It will outlast and outshine every other moral/social instinct of love, loyalty, honor etc. For when it comes down to it, we will let everything go, to survive.
It is this instinct for self-preservation that powers all our development and our myths. The monolith, to my mind, is just that - a tangible representation of our own awe and wonder. What we fictionalised into God. We fear it, study it, bury it, dig it back up, fling it in out into outer space, go seeking it to understand it... and at the end, in our very last moments, we fling an accusatory finger at it, blaming it for our woes or hoping to touch ever so briefly that Divinity to which we attribute The Creation of Adam. (Ref- Michelangelo's mural on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel).
And yet, the film does not glorify this instinct or even accept it as necessary. In fact, on the contrary, it points out the futility of the whole thing. At the end, our lives, no matter how hard we've fought for them, are but the blink of an eye, wasted in the pursuit of comfort, luxury, food and wine. At the end, it doesn't matter. For all of creation lies with each of us just as we are but a speck in this unfathomable, vast nothingness. It is but the circle of life. Every instant that one of us dies, many of us are born. Over and over again. For all eternity.
Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the most nihilistic film that I have seen.
I've always felt curiously devoid of the fight for survival. I always thought if I were in a survival horror film I would be the first one to die - I would just kill myself before the Thing got to me. Kubrick makes me rethink if that is true. We live in a time where the very air around us is poison. Our food is killing us, our water is depleting. And yet I strive to live. I worry about my health, I try and prolong the number of healthy days I have in this body. The will to live permeates every breath I take, does it not? I am days away from a birthday and this film has flung me out of orbit, so to speak.
I am in awe. I am in awe of this pulsing, vibrant, utterly futile desire to LIVE. And in awe of the visionary philosopher that was Stanley Kubrick, who ironically never got to see the sun rise in 2001, having died in 1999. I wonder if he thought of the monolith in his final moments. I wonder what I will think of in my final moments.
Yeah, it's just that kind of film...
No comments:
Post a Comment