Although I’ve been known to inveigh against fiction from time to time, I’d be the last person to deny that fictional works exist that break out of the confines of mere storytelling and playacting.
I watched Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey again, for about the hundredth time or so, last night on video. These days with Blu-Ray discs, stereo sound, and hi-def flat-panel TVs, a great deal of the movie’s original Cinerama-enhanced impact is available to home viewers. And I still remember that impact, courtesy of the Cooper Cinerama on S. Colorado Blvd., Denver 1968. It was a mesmerizing experience then and it remains so now.
But this time around I was taken by a thematic detail I had never observed before. In 2001 the human race is depicted as making a series of transformational leaps into a more advanced level of intelligence. I noticed that each of those steps is accompanied by an act of ritual murder — cleaning house, as it were, clearing the way for the new order.
Ritual murder is common to many species. A potential alpha male of a herd, for example, must vanquish the current alpha before he can take over as the prime genetic source of his group. Thus the dominant male faces incessant challenges from the younger members; eventually one of those youngsters triumphs and the cycle begins all over again. Human society has paralleled that same alpha-male dominance strategy, either identically or with the whole affair sublimated.
The deposing of a monarch in favor of a fresher, younger figure makes a good case in point. A king can grow tired, or old, or incompetent and thus it’s time for a newcomer to unseat him. A classic example concerns the replacement of one entire dynasty with another, as the Plantagenets, enfeebled by generations of infighting and intrigue, are replaced by the Tudors as the future Henry VII kills Richard III at the battle of Bosworth Field. Or just take a look at the upper echelons of any modern corporation, as ambitious younger admins jockey for a shot at the CEO position.
2001 is structured in three acts with one transitional passage. Each act culminates in a ritual murder. The first act takes place in human prehistory. The hominids are scraggly, defenseless, and starving. Even the tapirs that share their feeding grounds seem to be doing better than they are. "Our" group of hominids can’t even hold out against a rival group that bullies them away from the area’s only water hole. Extinction — either of the group or the species as a whole — seems to be the next step in their process. But then the black monolith appears in their midst, becomes the object of a hands-on veneration, and everything changes. The group’s leader ("Moonwatcher" in Arthur C. Clarke’s novelization, written simultaneously with the screenplay) realizes that those parched bones littering his world can be used as weapons to kill those pesky tapirs. And those tapirs, once killed, can be eaten.
The critical final scene in the act takes place at the water hole where the rival herd mounts its daily challenge. But this time Moonwatcher & Co. are armed with bone clubs, which they proceed to use with brutal savagery on the leader of the rival gang. It’s the first of the movie’s ritual murders, the unmistakable sign that the old order has ended and a new one begun. Not only has ‘our’ tribe become dominant over its rivals, but it will survive and evolve into humanity. The scene ends in one of modern cinema’s signature edits, as an exultant Moonwatcher throws his bone club into the sky and the club becomes an orbiting satellite.
Ritual Murder No. 1: Moonwatcher kills rival
Act Two will not begin until after a transitional passage on the moon, where humanity has established a few scientific stations. A routine geographic (well, selenographic) survey reveals a powerful magnetic field emanating from a point underground; they excavate and find a big rectangular monolith that they can date as having been deliberately buried four million years ago. Of course they don’t know what it is, but we the viewers saw one just like it fifteen minutes ago teaching the hominids how to make tools. So we make the connection that the movie scientists cannot. Sunlight strikes the newly-excavated monolith for the first time since its burial, and the monolith emits a blast of radio energy. End of transition.
[Note: the entire half-hour-long transition could be replaced by a short, simple "briefing" scene as scientists relay the discovery of the monolith and its radio blast to some military or political types, who then impose a gag order on all and sundry. But I’m deeply grateful that Kubrick gave us instead the loving detail of a routine flight to the moon via the space station, complete with the Blue Danube waltz and that haunting Ligeti choral music during the moon sequences.]
Act Two takes us to the Discovery as it wends its way to Jupiter. The ship is staffed by five astronauts, only two of whom are actually up and about; the remaining three are in cold-storage hiberation. Just as Kubrick opens Act One with scenes of primate tedium, he opens Act Two by detailing the boring, pointless activities of the astronauts. They’re not scraping around in the dirt for berries or roots, but they might as well be. They play chess, they eat, they watch TV, they talk to their folks back home, they sleep, they jog, they sketch, they go through checklists. They also masturbate with high-tech sex toys, a detail you will find only in Clarke’s novelization.
But, like the hominids, they have a rival, another intelligent species sharing their environment. That’s the HAL 9000 computer, the only character in the movie with a distinct personality. HAL is also just a teeny bit insane, made that way unwittingly by his designers. They filled him with a sense of purpose, gave him a compelling mandate to process information perfectly and reliably. Then they ordered him to withhold vital information from the crew: the mission wasn’t actually a scientific survey but was in fact in response to the monolith’s radio blast, which was directed towards Jupiter. The astronauts know nothing about the monolith’s discovery or the real reason for their voyage, but HAL knows it all.
HAL solves his unbearable dilemma by attempting to kill off the entire crew, and he very nearly succeeds. In this, he’s acting very much like that rival hominid herd at the waterhole. But HAL fails to assassinate the mission’s commander David Bowman who, in an unforgettably tender yet horrifying scene, carries out the necessary ritual murder that is required when a challenger fails to vanquish the alpha male. As Bowman lobotomizes HAL, the computer regresses to his digital infancy, ending by singing the children’s song "Daisy", that being the first thing he had ever learned how to do.
Ritual Murder No. 2: Bowman kills HAL
Thus Act Two ends with the ritual murder of a dangerous rival, leaving David Bowman free to continue the mission. Act Three: the Discovery arrives at the Jovian system and encounters a gigantic version of the monolith in orbit around Jupiter. Bowman goes out to investigate and is swept into a cosmos-spanning voyage to some unimaginably distant place.
With that it’s time for ritual murder No. 3, which will be performed by those unseen alien intelligences who started humanity’s ball rolling all those millions of years ago. David Bowman ages and dies in their care, and in his place comes — what? Is the "star child" of the film’s finale actually representational, or is it a stylized image of humanity’s next level of evolution when physical substance has been transcended? (I favor the latter idea, myself.) But no matter. The point at hand is the ritual murder of David Bowman in favor of the star child.
Ritual Murder No. 3: The aliens kill David Bowman
The final seconds of the movie hint at the possibility of ritual murder No. 4 — this time the star child performing ritual murder on the entire human species. At least that’s what I envision as taking place in the "next scene" following the end of the movie. Yes, I know that Arthur C. Clarke wrote a sequel to 2001, made into a movie with Roy Scheider and Helen Mirren, that doesn’t work that way. But my ending is better, even if it messes up Sir Arthur’s various sequels.
Ritual Murder No. 4 (Potential): Star Child kills humanity