GROSS/59 1968, part two - Stanley Kubrick - brilliant, fastidious, ridiculous
Cinema and Kubrick, too big to fail.
GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
2001: A SPACE ODDYSSEY; KEIR DULLEA, GARY LOCKWOOD; directed by STANLEY KUBRICK. 139 minutes. Wikipedia, IMDB, Letterboxd.
Part one of this two-part essay: 2001: A Space Odyssey - working in orbit.
Cinema is ridiculous. The whole enterprise: the crazy levels of capital, effort, material. The vast, overstated creative ambition; the demented monomania that’s needed in bringing a movie into being. We all know this, we recognise it and it sometimes makes us uncomfortable but, in showing up to the cinema as we continue to do, we allow it, we revel in it even. The spiralling absurdity of it all.
2001: A Space Odyssey is especially ridiculous. Ridiculous in its own special way, from end to end. Ridiculous in almost every respect. It’s hard to define exactly how this movie can be more ridiculous even than the norm for a big Hollywood production but it definitely is.
It’s Kubrick, of course. He’s the monomaniac: the bringer of ridiculousness, the Michelangelo to this ridiculous Sistine Chapel. I don’t know if I can easily explain this, though. How can the epic investment of an unarguably brilliant creative person like Kubrick in a single project be so ridiculous? How can Kubrick’s vast, multi-year involvement in every aspect of this movie have resulted in something so ridiculous.
I’m going to start with the apes. This might seem like a cheap shot. I mean this is years before realistic animation was possible. Without adding painted cells like Disney did for Song of the South (reviewed here) or Mary Poppins the only way to achieve this particular practical effect was for Kubrick to hire some apes: in this case various off-Broadway mimes and dancers in costumes.
The apes are an index to the absurdity of it all: Kubrick and his lead primate Dan Richter invested months in getting them right (at a time when PG Tips had been getting convincing performances from a bunch of chimps for more than a decade). Richter and his dancers became regulars in the primate house at London Zoo - he and Guy the Gorilla “became friends.” We are never for one second convinced. These apes lollop around on a gravelly soundstage in Borehamwood and what we honour, if anything, is the effort.
But it’s not just the silliness, it’s the flat, intellectual emptiness of the thing. You’ll remember that at the climax of this sequence an ape, called in the script Moonwatcher, puts his head on one side and - under the instruction of the monolith - enacts some kind of evolutionary breakthrough: in that moment human conflict is born. We snort. Ridiculous.
The movie is packed, end-to-end with this kind of hyper-fastidious nonsense. And the more detail, the more trainspotter perfection that Kubrick and his apparently hypnotised crew put in, the more ridiculous it all is. They all devoted years of their lives to this and I don’t want to deride them for it: these are artists from the top tier, all somehow convinced by the sheer surface perfection of Kubrick and Clarke’s confection that it has something to say, that its reflection on human frailty or the evolution of mind or the inevitability of violence or whatever it is makes it worthwhile.
The ridiculous climax to all this ridiculousness is, of course, the gorgeous acid-trip sequence that opens the final scene: the psychedelic tunnels and fans and nets of light and colour - a long sequence that apparently required Doug Trumbull to invent half a dozen completely novel VFX techniques (and for which Kubrick essentially stole the credit when he collected the movie’s only Oscar, for special effects). Ligeti’s contribution here is enormous too, of course, although unknowing (Kubrick lifted the music from an LP. No sync fees were paid. The composer sued and won).
By the time the huge, stupid baby is rotating stupidly against the infinite blackness of space - set against the rotation of earth in another of Kubrick’s sophomoric visual analogies - we are essentially anaesthetised. We’ve given up attempting to locate this movie’s humanity. It has none. The ideas have all drained away and what we’re left with is a kind of pedantic collage of perfectly crafted images.
And, throughout, it’s dry, cold, unforgiving stuff. The cast is permitted at no point to do more than the bureaucratic minimum. In one of the DVD extras, a doc about the production made in the year 2001, cast and crew strikingly - and loyally - justify Kubrick’s blank creative manner, the emotionless direction. Poor Keir Dullea (Dave) is reduced to claiming credit for a tiny detail of his portrayal of the astronaut in his psychedelic crisis - and it’s kind of sad.
I’ve lost patience with Kubrick. It took me a while to come around to this but it’s a relief (you know the feeling - when you set aside a rigid idea you’ve been clinging to forever). This might be connected to the fact that I’m catching up with him: my age puts me between Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut, close enough to the end for some discomfort.
It might be that Trumbull’s psychedelic sequence is what saved the movie from obscurity. After a few very poor weeks in cinemas after release, exhibitors started to notice a steady flow of stoned teens and students showing up specifically for this sequence.
In the doc I mentioned above, various intelligent people gush about this big, dumb, phoney movie. James Cameron says “…it’s about abstract scientific ideas, the origin and the future of the human species, life in the cosmos, the evolution of our machines and artificial intelligence. Even to this day Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey remains the all-time great science fiction film.” Camille Paglia, a brilliant critic I’ve quoted here a few times, says “…it takes in all of creation, the great themes of nature and art, talks about the limits of the human mind. I think that it has such a visionary vastness that, to this day, I am in awe of it.”
Movies became huge, industrial-scale projects very early on, when the entrepreneurs realised that what they had on their hands in this new form was essentially the appeal of a vaudeville show or a theatre performance but with the economics of the infinitely repeatable, manufactured good - smashing the ancient economic limits of the theatrical entertainment. A movie could produce the kind of return on investment that essentially no other art form had ever been able to promise - and the logic of bigger budgets; more lavish sets; larger, more expensive casts became obvious. The ridiculous fact that almost thirty of the films on this list cost more than a quarter of a billion dollars to make can only leave us open-mouthed - and there’s no end to this, no logical upper limit. More and more ridiculous.
The music has been a big topic of conversation over the years. Was it bold to do without a specially-composed score, using only commercial recordings? Elmer Bernstein, quoted in this excellent oral history of Hollywood, couldn’t tolerate it: “I hated it so much. In the case of 2001 I had to walk out of the theater for a few minutes at one point because I got so infuriated by the ridiculousness of it. Now, maybe that’s what Kubrick wanted. I once discussed it with Kubrick, and I still don’t know what he had in mind. But the use of the “Blue Danube Waltz” made me very sorry that I wasn’t stoned when I was in the picture. Maybe it would have been fine. But just sitting there, normal-like, it was positively infuriating, it was so ludicrous, asinine, totally unrelated, and unless it was designed to be, to me it was like writing “Fuck” on the bathroom wall or something in the girls’ dormitory, or something like that. It was just stupid. It was unrelated and smart-assed and dumb. Kubrick is a literate man. There’s no problem about that with Kubrick. He’s a literate man and he knows composers, and I think he should have gotten a composer and he should have let him score the picture. It’s my feeling about it. In the case of Kubrick, there are certain men whose attitudes are bigger than life. These fantastic men who sometimes border on being mountebanks. The mountebanks are Renaissance men, and Kubrick is somewhere in that area.”
These reviews are on Letterboxd.