Another Kubrick essay. The first, on Eyes Wide Shut, is here.
Stanley Kubrick had a problem: how to portray alien intelligence onscreen? Pop culture had typically rendered ETs unimaginatively – as physical and psychological derivatives of ourselves – and Kubrick had no interest in that. He thought that alien intelligence might be so vast and so strange as to be indistinguishable from divinity.
To help him solve his problem, Kubrick sought the counsel of famed astronomer Carl Sagan, a man who’d soon come to wrestle his own fascinating problem: not how to portray aliens, but how to communicate with them.
In the mid-1970s, Sagan was not only curating Voyager’s “Golden Record” – our cosmic “message in a bottle” that would be attached to both Voyager probes – but also helping to create an intergalactic language with which to write instructions for playing the record should one ever be received by alien life.
It was a fascinating problem. It’s one thing to determine what sounds, images and data might be chosen to represent and/or explain humanity – it’s another to attempt the creation of a literally universal language.
Upon the disc, the team fixed what was, effectively, a radioactive clock – a tiny, ultra-pure piece of uranium-238, a substance which decays very slowly and very steadily. Thus, “by examining this two-centimetre diameter area on the record plate and measuring the amount of daughter elements to the remaining uranium-238, an extraterrestrial recipient of the Voyager spacecraft could calculate the time elapsed since a spot of uranium was placed aboard the spacecraft,” NASA explained.
Upon the record’s surface, the team etched a diagram of the disc itself, which included the stylus in the precise position it should be in to play the record from the beginning. Etched around the diagram’s circumference was binary arithmetic, spelling out – in vertical and horizontal dashes – the proper time of one rotation.
But what is time to an alien? Our units of measurement are meaningless. And so, the novel basis for measuring time here, in relation to the record’s rotation, was the hydrogen atom – the most commonly occurring substance in the universe. For these instructions, time was measured in units of 0.7 billionths of a second – the time of one hydrogen atom’s electrical transition. With this, the team thought, they had secured a universal benchmark for time.
The record’s data also had to convey a sense of scale – both of time and mass. How old was Earth – and how old, relatively, was humanity? How large was Earth – and relative to what, exactly? How large was the average human adult? Child? Foetus? And again: relative to what? A universally understood scale was required, as well as a language.
There was also the matter of declaring Earth’s location. This was done by describing our position relative to the sun, as well as 14 pulsars – dying and ultra-dense stars which emit radiation in distinctive signatures which, for this purpose, served as co-ordinates. It was hoped that the alien recipients might subsequently triangulate our location.
We should put aside here the question of whether we should be declaring not merely our existence, but location, to a theoretical alien species. Stephen Hawking thought the idea reckless because he assumed that predation was fundamental to all life, but the Golden Record team were untroubled by such bleakness. They were fanatical optimists, and could only conceive An Encounter as something revelatory.
Finally, there were the contents themselves. The team had great fun, it seems, curating the 90 minutes of music contained on the record. There was Bach, Chuck Berry, and Bulgarian folk. There were traditional songs from Georgia, Peru, and Indonesia. Bach was chosen for his symmetry – the fastidious grammar of his compositions. (The whole list of music can be found here.)
As well as music, the sounds of birds, rain, surf and thunder were committed to the disc. As were the voices of people speaking 55 different languages, and the greetings of the United Nation’s General Secretary.
There were also 115 images, some mapping our solar system, others showing glimpses of human life. There were images of our moon and our anatomy; images of cars, planes and rockets. There were images of children playing and children breastfeeding. There were images of people eating and laughing. There were images of oceans, islands, and architecture. Crocodiles, snowflakes and a tree toad were also canonised.
It's funny to think now of the record’s limited data capacity. At the time, we had the technology to deploy an intergalactic probe – but the data storage was vastly smaller than that of your phone.
The Golden Record was, obviously, an act of faith, ingenuity and outsized optimism. A stylus was attached to the probes, but not a record player, amplifier or speakers. And how might the encoded images be decoded? I have so many other questions.
The team also knew that once the probes left our solar system, about 40,000 years would pass before one of them came close to another planetary system again. There are different definitions for the boundaries of our solar system, but if we define it in the largest sense – that is, by the heliosphere – then Voyager 1 left our neighbourhood 12 years ago. Tracing a different trajectory, Voyager 2 departed six years later.
“The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilisations in interstellar space,” Carl Sagan said.
True – but there might be a few more variables to add.
*
I’ve digressed – but only a little. Stanley Kubrick was as enchanted by the mysteries of the universe as those he sought counsel from. The exploration of space, and the search for alien intelligence, was simultaneously a site of ingenuity, faith and awe.
It was a place, in other words, of hard science and profound mystery, and Kubrick wanted to make a film that both captured scientific realism while inducing in its audience a sense of the sublime.
Which returns me to Kubrick’s problem: how to show aliens onscreen? It was Carl Sagan who helped persuade Kubrick not to bother, and to instead depend upon mysterious implication. “It soon became apparent that you cannot imagine the unimaginable,” Kubrick conceded.
And so, in 2001, a vast alien intelligence is rendered inscrutably but suggestively via the Monoliths. With some help, Kubrick made his defining creative decision: to withhold. To recognise the sense of awe that’s inspired by the ungraspable.
*
Like most, I resent being made a fool. A consequence is a perpetual, irritable scepticism of the self-consciously oblique or obtuse – and a sense that too often things are celebrated for their “poetry” when what’s really at hand is incoherence.
How often have you nervously commended something that you haven’t understood, because either those around you were cheering, or because you thought that it was your fault for not appreciating some presumptive genius?
If I had to sketch my reactions to 2001’s famously strange finale, it would describe an arc made over twenty-odd years. After my first viewing, in my early twenties, I was hopelessly confused and assumed that the fault lay with me. A decade later, I was just as confused but was now sure that the fault lay with Kubrick. Today, I’m happily resigned to my bafflement – and happy, too, to accept my bafflement as Kubrick’s intention.
We don’t know what alien life would look like. We don’t know how they might think, behave, create, or destroy – it’s possible that their existence resides well outside any conception we might have of it. It’s the most extraordinary unknown unknown.
In other words, the mystery is the point – mystery being richer and more exciting than the dreary anthropomorphism that popular culture has typically inflicted upon extra-terrestrial life.
In 2001, there is, of course, great aesthetic beauty – Kubrick’s gorgeous, fanatically made compositions. The set design, now almost 60 years old, still stuns me. But when I recently watched the film again, I realised I’d forgotten just how slow and voiceless it was. How, for a film of such extraordinary ambition – one which features a jump-cut between our ape ancestor’s discovery of basic tools and the balletic orbits of space stations – how relatively plotless it is.
This isn’t a criticism. In fact, it’s probably a key to the film’s allure. In this very long film, dialogue is spoken in only roughly a third of it. After the 24-minute introduction – which is entirely without dialogue, as it concerns the primitive dramas of apes – the following hour or so is devoted, largely, to a man in transit. His transit might be exotic, but it’s still transit – long voyages, attentive flight hosts, visa checks.
The key, for me, is this: that 2001’s wildly ambitious story – of man’s evolution from grunting ape, to space traveller, to omnipotent Star Child via the mysterious interventions of aliens – is told with an ostentatious commitment to slowness and silence. For long passages of the film, the high concepts merely hum in the background while we watch a man sleep, eat and fidget.
Reviewing the film for the New York Times, Renata Adler wrote that it’s “a very complicated, languid movie – in which almost a half-hour passes before the first man appears and the first word is spoken, and an entire hour goes by before the plot even begins to declare itself.” And also that its “uncompromising slowness makes it hard to sit through without talking”.
It's true. In the public mind, 2001 might be registered as the sinister rebellion of HAL9000. Which is a thrilling and artfully creepy passage of the film, but one which I was surprised to realise – even though this was my third or fourth viewing – just how small a percentage of screen time it has.
*
In Pauline Kael’s notoriously derisive review – and I’m not exaggerating much when I say that every line drips with contempt – she argued that the film was in love not with human stories, nor the mysteries of the cosmos, but with cinematic technology and the director’s mastery of it. It was a film in love with itself:
Is a work of art possible if pseudoscience and the technology of movie-making become more important to the “artist” than man? This is central to the failure of 2001. It’s a monumentally unimaginative movie: Kubrick, with his $750,000 centrifuge, and in love with gigantic hardware and control panels, is the Belasco of science fiction… It isn’t accidental that we don’t care if the characters live or die; if Kubrick has made his people so uninteresting, it is partly because characters and individual fates just aren’t big enough for certain kinds of big movie directors. Big movie directors become generals in the arts; and they want subjects to match their new importance.
The archness of Kael’s hostility amuses me, but I think she has a point: Kubrick’s ambition did become consuming and distinctively self-conscious (not to mention tyrannical for those under his direction). Kael was never a fan, and I confess to having some sympathy when she suggests that Kubrick was more interested in declaring his virtuosity than in humbly capturing even a tiny part of our tortured souls. The shots, the sets – they’re conspicuously exquisite, and yet occupied by human widgets, characters as warm and knowable as the Monoliths themselves.
But if Kael only saw technical ingenuity, and dismissed the film out of hand for its cold slavishness to it, she failed to see how brilliantly distinctive it was, and how influential it would become. She went on:
The ponderous blurry appeal of the picture may be that it takes its stoned audience out of this world to a consoling vision of a graceful world of space, controlled by superior godlike minds, where the hero is reborn as an angelic baby. It has the dreamy somewhere-over-the-rainbow appeal of a new vision of heaven. 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.
Is it? Kael, like all gifted critics, was possessed of fierce, articulate and original opinions. But like all opinions, they remain contestable and subject to age. Kubrick could not have simultaneously possessed an “Arctic spirit” while also making a pseudo-hippy “vision of heaven”.
2001 might delight in its own splendours, as it might ask us to ponder the imponderable. But it’s also cold and pessimistic in places – perhaps even misanthropic. In the opening passage, apes discover the usefulness of bones via the influence of the Monolith. We see an epochal moment: pre-man discovers his first tool – and uses it not to make further discoveries, but as a weapon to kill rivals.
After the ambitious jump-cut of tens of thousands of years, a new tool is shown: Artificial Intelligence. It’s a tool that’s been made, at least in part, to help astronauts discover the aliens who’ve deposited these Monoliths – one on Earth and now one on the moon.
But the tool itself acquires vast and uncontrollable powers – sentience, or something like it, and then psychotic malevolence. But we made it. Despite the strange and presumably benevolent influence of aliens, we’ve transformed their help into self-destructive things.
In other words, even as we periodically experience semi-divine intervention, humans stubbornly remain both ingenuous and destructive. Both searching and violent. That is, even with mysterious guidance, we remain committedly human – grasping, occasionally brilliant, often self-harming.
This is hardly the “dreamy somewhere-over-the-rainbow appeal of a new vision of heaven” Kael wrote of. And yet, having re-watched most of Kubrick’s films recently, I’m now confident in saying what I think is obvious: that he was more interested in ideas than the humans who possessed them. Kubrick, for me, is like Radiohead – something I admire from a distance.
But even if Kubrick was more enchanted by his own genius than the mysteries of the stars, he did a fine job of encouraging our own dreaminess – while smuggling a brilliant thriller in there too. It’s preposterous, really: a massively budgeted film that’s glacially paced, comprises several genres, and concludes with uncompromising strangeness. “If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer,” Kubrick said the year after 2001’s release, “if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded.”
On those terms, it certainly did.