In Space, No One Can Hear You Feel (But They Should)

There was a little pre-title sequence in “You Only Live Twice” with an astronaut out in space that was in a looser, more free style than “2001”—a daring little moment that I think was more fun than all of “2001.” It had an element of the unexpected, of the shock of finding death in space lyrical. Kubrick is carried away by the idea. The secondary title of “Dr. Strangelove,” which we took to be satiric, “How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb,” was not, it now appears, altogether satiric for Kubrick. “2001” celebrates the invention of tools of death, as an evolutionary route to a higher order of non-human life. Kubrick literally learned to stop worrying and love the bomb; he’s become his own butt—the Herman Kahn of extraterrestrial games theory.

-Pauline Kael, “Trash, Art, and the Movies”, Harper’s, February 1969

Peter Hyams’ 2010 is a decidedly different vision than Stanley Kubrick’s.  For all of the latter’s philosophical intonations, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is the progenitor of the modern blockbuster–an expensive action set piece celebrating tools of destruction.  What it supposedly devotes to the human element, and the human transcendence into the cosmos, it doesn’t build toward.

As Matt Zoller Seitz recently pointed out, Roger Ebert’s read contrasted with Kael’s:  2001, he argues, warns us of the path we are carving out, creating the tools of our own destruction.  In one sense, it’s a horror film like THE SHINING, but it’s a rather soulless one featuring a $750,000 centrifuge we see for a couple of minutes.  Yet through Kubrick’s lens, the entire journey from ape to man is all irrelevant.  There’s nothing to be understood…

“2001” is a celebration of cop-out. It says man is just a tiny nothing on the stairway to paradise, something better is coming, and it’s all out of your hands anyway. There’s an intelligence out there in space controlling your destiny from ape to angel, so just follow the slab. Drop up.

Doug Trumbull’s visuals, we’re assured, are the story.  We’re also assured they’re groundbreaking in spite of Jordan Belson’s work preceding them by several decades.  Belson’s slit-scan photography began in the 1940s. He was in fact a visual effects consultant on THE RIGHT STUFF, a film whose defining scene is a juxtaposition of Yeager’s NF-104 Starfighter plummeting 80,000 feet as the aging Sally Rand dances burlesque for the Mercury astronauts.

Using visual effects sparingly, Kaufman’s film grounds its story in relationships between the test pilots and their steely spouses–most poignantly in a dialogue between the wives in which they commiserate on the stresses of Air Force life.  Kubrick, instead, gets carried away with his imagery and completely forgets, or cares not, to make us connect with astronauts Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) or Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood).

Hyams’ sequel, co-written with Arthur C. Clarke who concurrently penned the novel, focuses almost entirely on human relationships to set a context for redemption of HAL-9000 (once again placidly voiced by Douglas Rain), the ship’s computer which killed Poole and left Bowman stranded.

Having resigned from the National Council of Astronautics, Dr. Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider), takes a university faculty position.

“Chancellor of the University. It pays better,” Floyd tells Dimitri Moisevitch (Dana Elcar), a Russian diplomat working on a recovery mission to Jupiter which requires permission from the United States to enter the marooned USS Discovery–the spacecraft piloted by Bowman, Poole and HAL, to explore the second monolith.

“Have you checked Discovery’s orbit lately?” Moisevitch asks.  Dr. Floyd’s analysis of telemetry shows that Discovery is being pulled away from Jupiter toward its much smaller moon, Io–age ten, I learned what a LaGrange point is.  Not by expository dialogue, mind you.  I had to look it up.  Rarely do we find science fiction films like this.  Instead directors take Kubrick’s cue, arguing “It’s not meant to be understood”–ANNIHILATION, for example.  Where’s the profundity in a film that’s both soulless and incomprehensible?

The Alexei Leonov carries Floyd, Discovery’s chief design engineer Walter Curnow (John Lithgow) and HAL’s creator, Dr. Chandra (Bob Balaban), as passengers on a Soviet-crewed mission led by Tanya Kirbuk (Helen Mirren) to resurrect HAL and determine what happened to Dave Bowman, whose last transmission (on which the novel 2001 ends, and this film begins), read, “My god! It’s full of stars!”

In a Q&A with Gary Lockwood (Gary Mitchell of Star Trek) and Keir Dullea, whose work with Otto Preminger caught Kubrick’s eye, the two recalled that the posters for 2001 were changed to show Dullea’s eye splashed in artificial colors from Trumbull’s effects sequence, and the tagline now read, “The Ultimate Trip.”  MGM discovered its core audience were so baked out of their minds, story didn’t matter.  Eighteen years after Kubrick’s film wrapped, Dullea spots a casting call in The Hollywood Reporter for the sequel, and he calls Hyams directly to express interest in revisiting the role of Dave Bowman.  They have lunch and strike a deal.

2010 begins with Bowman’s last transmission, and outgrows its predecessor because it cares to link the large and the small, the cosmic and the personal.  On Earth, Bowman’s and Floyd’s second wives struggle to reconcile their circumstances of separation, as did the wives of the Mercury Seven in Kaufman’s film.  In space, the Soviet and American scientists watch helplessly as tensions erupting in Latin America between their governments near the brink of nuclear war.  In some respects, the melodrama on Earth and in space play like a mid-eighties primetime mini-series.  Move past the production value, however, and you have the prototype for Robert Zemeckis’ CONTACT and Chris Nolan’s INTERSTELLAR.

2010 and INTERSTELLAR are less about their accurate depictions of science than they are about human connection.  Exploring the bond between a test pilot (Matthew McConaughey; also the devout figure in CONTACT) and his daughter (MacKenzie Foy and Jessica Chastain), INTERSTELLAR is often compared to 2001, but it’s clear from many angles that Nolan’s greatest influence was 2010.

Both films emphasize cooperation between machine (the monolith-shaped robots) and human, re-framing technology as an integral part of our lives rather than the postwar fear of it that characterizes so much of post-New Wave science fiction.  There’s even a joke about embracing technology that ends with John Lithgow bemoaning the absence of hot dogs at baseball games—a direct nod to Curnow’s lament aboard the Leonov.

And like that brewing disaster in Latin America and growing uncertainties of our future, we hear constant overtures in the corners of expository dialogues in INTERSTELLAR about ecological devastation, ethically bankrupt military solutions to resulting food shortages, societal abandonment of science-based large scale solutions in favor of short-sighted stopgap measures to global problems.

Today, many of the fears of the Cold War are resurfacing, and we stand at the precipice of decisions that will forever alter our destiny as a species, as a planet.  In the 1970s, a decade that was as welcoming of the grandeur of science as it was fearful of the labor implications of technology, Carl Sagan’s PBS series COSMOS ignited the intellectual curiosity of many in my generation.  2010 is, by extension, a spiritual cousin to that sense of awe that comes from the search for knowledge more than it comes from acquiescence to the perimeter of our ignorance.

“But didn’t he want to believe?” asked an interviewer of Carl Sagan’s widow, Dr. Ann Druyan.

Druyan responded, “No! He wanted to know!”