Another Odyssey: Design and Meaning in 2001

by Mark Martel

The Myth of the Sixties

"...an epic story of adventure and exploration..."
-- 1965 MGM press release

A mythological interpretation is underplayed in writings on 2001. Kubrick's original press release mentions mythological elements but no one took him literally. This is doubly odd, considering the era. Mythology was a timely focus -- the moon is 2001's first image, and Earth-Moon space its last. Apollo was waiting in the wings as 2001 was premiering. Men would begin orbiting the moon while the film was still in some theatres.

The greek/roman naming of space vehicles was both real and filmic. Classical names derive from both NASA and the International Astronomical Union, which comes up with names for newly discovered craters and comets and spaceships and destinations. All come from longstanding history and highlight both the events of the time and their historic context. Well before 2001 classical names added a cachet to science fiction. This in turn remembers great warships, ocean liners, etc.

Avoidance of names in the film downplays the connection, which a 1960's audience would have become inured to by the frequent media coverage of Mercury, Apollo, Jupiter, Saturn etc. The greco-roman names were used often enough to be decoupled from their mythic origins and become simple, literal terms for a spaceship or planet. A few times Discovery, Clavius, Tycho are named on screen, but much of my remembrance is colored by the novel (which unaccountably gives the pods common female names like Betty).

Argo would have been a more literal spacecraft name for 2001, telegraphing the Homer connection. Kubrick tends instead to more oblique names that provide for multiple interpretations and comparisons across films. Major Kong. Home. Animal Mother.

I'm Not at Liberty to Discuss That

True names: Heywood Floyd, Dave Bowman, Frank Poole. Drs. Hunter, Kimb all and Kaminski. Floyd's name is ridiculous, the tip-off. "Hey, wood flyed." Bowman -- archer. Frank Poole-earnest reflection, honest puddle, true waterhole? Hunter is transparent, Kaminski -- 'come in sky:' sexual, or a door in the sky? The only thing Kimball suggests is a piano and E.E. "Doc" Smith's Grey Lensman, Kimball Kinnison. That's a stretch to cyclopean/odyssean imagery, and the hibernauts are only spear-carriers. AE-35, pronounced Alpha Echo Three Five. 2001 comes approximately 35 years after the film's origin. Alpha echo suggests twins, a copy of the original. From the Greek letter "A."

Judeo-Christian Mythology

Discovery looks like a bone, or a snake's skeleton, and HAL is certainly the serpent in that particular little garden for two. Prominent in the shots of Moonwatcher cracking bones together is a jawbone. Wasn't that the weapon of choice back in Genesis?

David Bowman also relates to the biblical/historical King David, who slays the giant Goliath with a sling. (Clarke loves gravitational slingshots.) An archer connotes both warrior and hunter, tool and weapon user. It suggests pretechnologic/pastoral man, like the blurry Gainsboroughs in the hotel room. Man as he exists in a state of nature, before society molds him. Odysseus was a famed archer. No one could string his bow until his son (Starchild) grew up. The Pan Am shuttle is another arrow, shot at the space station's oblong bullseye.

Poole as sacrifice is offered up to cyclops 'face,' contrasting the biblical story (was it Jacob?) where a father offers to slay his son in worship but God stays his h and. Here the tin god is the slayer. Our technologic worship comes back at us.

All these examples are Old Testament, accessible from both Kubrick and Clarke's backgrounds, as well as most audiences -- the Bible can be viewed as the current dominant mythology.

Odyssey Zero

Odysseus sails from Troy after the war. Sails with his crew, gets lost. He is a famed archer, and one of the first heroes to live by his wits as well as his brawn. Through many adventures, he meets Cyclops, Circe, Sirens, gets tied to the mast, shoots Scylla and Charybdis, all over the unknown, wine- dark Mediterranean, with the greater ocean beyond -- accessible only through a constricted strait. Shipwrecked, he is rescued by Circe, crew lost, and held for 20 years. Circe relents, he goes home to wife and child, 'cleans house' by killing the suitors to his presumed widow.

Moonwatcher leaves Africa after the first war, sails his tool/weapon into space and evolves into Floyd, on an episodic trip to the moon. Floyd enters the Cyclop's cave/space station/moon base, does battle with disinformation-blinded Russians around a modern watering hole, sails with crew to the Tycho dig, hears the siren song of the monolith, and presumably finds his way home. Bowman and Poole, his spiritual sons, sails the interplanetary sea, trapped in the cave of the cyclops HAL. Poole lives physically -- he jogs, boxes. Poole lives mentally -- he draws, plays chess. Bowman loses his crewmates to the cyclops and answers the siren song of the monolith, sailing between the wormholes of Scylla and Charybdis, is shipwrecked in the island hotel, grows old, is reborn, and returns home to clean house (that last by the book).

Clarke extends the Homeric plot in 2010. Floyd is recast as Odysseus and Bowman as a minor god. The superpower conflict is Trojan, Floyd's home is oceanside, he gets separated from wife and child on long voyage, Jupiter grows blinding, etc...

From Homer's Odyssey Kubrick seems to have culled the narrative to the main events -- the final/first Trojan battle, sailing for/from home, blinding the Cyclops, surviving alone Scylla & Charybdis, becoming shipwrecked on Circe's island, and coming home.

The Dawn sequence can be read as the Odyssey's beginning, the climactic battle of Troy. Two tribes fight over water rights until the gods give one side the edge. Other comparisons are obvious from the first two paragraphs above.

It's not all sequential; cyclops eyes can be read in the main title shot, hominid cave, space station hangar, phone booth, moon base layout, moon base docking dome, lunar shuttle, planetary orbs in a black sky, HAL's eyes, pods, Discovery's "skull," Jupiter's red spot, the hotel bed's "headboard", starchild oval in space.

Rather than simply recapping Homer's plot, Kubrick runs variations on the main themes, testing man at different stages to similar events, like testing metals to the fatigue point.

The results: cavemen cower before the red-eyed night terror before learning to kill. Modern man builds his own caves, and lives in them as domicile/transport, conforming himself to his machines. Bowman/Poole fight back against cyclops, one wins to blind the beast after he forgets his cycloramic blinders (helmet) and sees with both eyes -- reason and passion -- his controlled fury at HAL.

There are resonances with Plato's cave. Film audiences in the dark watch a distorted shadow play on the wall. The hominids fear what lurks in the shadows -- the original horror movie. Modern man walls out the unknown even as he explores it. No one in the film looks out the window to see where they're going except pilot functionaries. Most vehicles have tiny or nonexistent windows. When Floyd uses the picturephone he completely ignores the rolling earth beyond. Even Discovery's pods are myopically designed, one of the few clearly nonfunctional elements.

Poole and Bowman plot against the cyclops inside a pod which is a cave within a cave. The pods are also like the cyclop's flock of sheep, which Odysseus' crew tied themselves to whle escaping the cave. Contrasting Homeric cyclops behavior, HAL doesn't want to eat them, but spit them out.

Kubrick seems to take the cyclops episode from Odyssey as his main text, advancing it roughly sequentially through the whole film, as well as replayed it in musica l variations. Everyone after the dawn of man inhabit man-made portable caves -- spaceships, waystations, even spacesuits. Bowman's trip is much like that of audiences, ensconced in a dark cave with the light show outside. The hotel room is a timeless home cave, domestic in a larger sense of the word.

The Cyclop's Eye

Sun, moon, leopard, apes, spacecraft, HAL, Bowman's distorted eye during the trip, Starchild's beautific vision at the end. There's a progression from inaminate orbs to bestial eyes to man's vision and beyond.

Prior to 2001 Clarke used the image of a huge cyclopean eye in one of his Jupiter V stories. A cratered "iris" on one of Jupiter's main moons gives the moon the look of an eyeball. The huge monolith is centered in that iris. This evolved into an early version of 2001, and remained in the novel. Kubrick optioned several of Clarke's stories, including I think this one. Although he didn't use the particular situation, the idea of a huge eyeball may have helped shape the film.

The moon base landing dome opens in pie slices like eye muscles, or the jagged mouth of a cyclops. Pods are not designed strictly for function but thematic meaning: who would fly one without side ports? Tunnel vision. The dark port in the white pod body is very eye-ballish. Similar also is the deep socket of Discovery's bridge. It's lit red early on when Bowman inhabits this superskull, later it's dark/blind when HAL takes charge, signalling his dismissal of the astronauts, prefiguring his death. The space station shuttle bay was read as a vaginal slit by Freudian reviewers; the clipper ship entering can also read as a symbolic prestatement of the blinding of the Cyclops, an archer's arrow aimed at the widescreen audience. Similar blind slits are in the Orion moon shuttle and lunar surface flyer.

It should be noted that eye-like spheres will abound in space as natural and artificial orbs. Space habitats will often resemble cyclopean caves, for pressurization, shielding, economics. Necessity becomes thematic by usage.

Odysseus blinds the cyclops. Bowman loses his helmet to see the real dangers and wonders of his world. The angular space helmets depart from more functional designs with their wraparound visors. They echo the Panavision screen the film was projected on.

Continual revisiting of the eye metaphor in sf and other films suggests some influence has been felt from 2001. Solar Crisis, Bladerunner, 12 Monkeys all use it; Solar Crisis qualifies more from the partial success of concept artist Syd Mead than any unified direction. 2001 of course was not original to this 'vision'; we go back to Melies' rocket in a moon man's eye, and on back to Homer.

Everything in the film is seen through the cyclops eye of a movie camera. The extensive minifilms within 2001 extend this, and show different 'one-eyed' visions. In the country of the blind... Kubrick worked on One-Eyed Jacks before Brando took over. The title again referred to its visual qualities, as do titles to many of his films: Paths of Glory, The Shining, the upcoming Eyes Wide Shut. HAL's eye is 'a clockwork orange' shifted to the red.

Many scenes look through HAL's red eye, a cyclopean vision as subtext about film. HAL's eye is a camera lens; victory over the camera leads to true vision.

His vision is distorted by an extreme wide-angle lens, colored red for the most subjective viewpoint -- in fact the only one in the film. Well -- there is some subjective hand held camera work when the moon monolith shrieks, and when Bowman advanced on HAL's brain room, both times of intense distress. Red distortion is indicative of rage, paranoia, "seeing red." Red rum. hmm. Even while HAL's view appears distorted to us there is a strange familiarity, as through a glass darkly. Our own eyes cover a very wide angle compared to those used in most films. HAL's lenses even make sense technically by allowing him a wide field of surveillance.

HAL's eye is always locked down, immobile except on pods (and then not shown from his POV); it has no apparent choice of looking away or blinking, like a film audience, like the Ludovico Treatment. Visual reality for him is an endless cablecast of multiple channels. The camera has its limitations.

HAL's vision is also self-reflective. Close-ups on his eye look like they were filmed in front of a mirror: we see through his lens at his lens. Wonderfully economical: we are most self-conscious before mirrors and lenses, thus we sense his own self awareness by projecting our own. Plato's cave again.

The traditional omniscient god's-eye view of most films is undercut. We are told HAL cannot err, yet we see how distorted is his view of reality. Framing his lens at the main console, eight displays constantly monitor shipboard functions via diagrams and readouts that are nearly impenetrable to us. His cybernetic reality is very alien to ours yet carries a highly analytic authority.

Kubrick succeeds in transforming his camera into what is fully the most memorable character in the film. Yet an other of 2001's core images must be the close-up on HAL's lens. Kubrick turns the camera against itself in a movie about film experience, and shows us how this camera can lie, and kill.

Mythic Archetypes

"It's the Jungian thing, sir. Sort of a comment on the duality of man, I guess, sir." That's at least a close quote from Full Metal Jacket. Unfortunately I'm not well read on Jungian archetypes, which is probably where this essay should end up. Mythology is the storehouse for archetypes. For example, the mismatched twins -- Poole (animalistic) and Bowman (childlike/artistic) -- probably cast as much by physiognomy as talent. HAL simultaneously can read as a cyclops, biblical Goliath, edenic snake (the chess conversation with Bowman) and generalized deus ex machina (literally, God in a box). The monolith is a blank slate upon which we project our own interpretations, a blank rorschach test. Maybe Private Joker sums it up pretty well.

Problems for the Student

Items I couldn't fit elsewhere but like too much to toss: