When asked by the
Mason’s to write about a symbol and it’s meaning, I chose one of the most enigmatic
in cinematic history. The film 2001: A Space Odyssey begins with a
group of australopithecines in an African desert struggling to survive in finding
food and battling with rival clans of their species. Seemingly
from out of nowhere a rectangular black monolith appears. The australopithecines are confused by what
they see. Regardless of what they did
see, after encountering the monolith they gained the capacity to use tools. This made them better hunters and better able
to fight off rivals. This first part of
the film is called The Dawn of Man as the australopithecines were the first
primates to walk upright and are thought to be a link between chimpanzees and
humans.
The film then
leaves the earth as a US spaceship is flying towards the moon to investigate a
strange sighting there at the US moon colony.
A cover story about an epidemic in the colony was created to keep the
Soviets away. When the people on the
spaceship arrive at the strange sight we see that it is the same monolith that
the australopithecines saw. They
discover that the monolith is sending radio signals to Jupiter. In this segment, human’s use of tools has
advanced greatly but groups of humans (represented by the US and the Soviets)
are still in conflict with each other.
After encountering
the monolith on the moon, the US sends a top secret mission to Jupiter to
investigate what it is sending radio signals to. The spaceship is controlled by the ultimate human
tool, the supercomputer HAL. As the ship
nears Jupiter, HAL malfunctions and kills all but one of the astronauts on
board and lets the air out of the ship.
The lone survivor on the ship, played by Kier Dullea, has no choice but
to investigate the monolith alone after disconnecting HAL.
As Dullea
approaches another monolith in orbit around Jupiter he has a psychedelic
experience while being transported to a strange room where he ages
rapidly. As he approaches the end of his
life he encounters the monolith and is then transformed into the star child
floating above the Earth. The ending is
ambiguous and has had people debating it ever since. When asked about the ending, the director
Stanley Kubrick said “If you understood the ending, I failed.”
At every moment in
the film where the monolith appears, the next step in human evolution is
complete. This seemingly inanimate
object has the power to direct evolution.
The film 2010: The Year We Made
Contact (without Kubrick as the director) addresses some of the ambiguities
about what happened to Dullea’s character and why the computer HAL turned
homicidal. This time a joint US-Soviet
mission returns to Jupiter and encounters HAL, Dullea and the monolith. Exactly what the monolith is is not addressed
to leave something to the imagination, and a possible sequel. It could represent a supreme being, it could
simply be a tool of a more advanced alien society to achieve some positive aim,
or it could mean nothing at all. This
ambiguity is what makes the monolith so fascinating.
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