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Kubrick's 2001: A Triple Allegory
Wheat is a retired economist, who has a doctorate in political economy and government from Harvard. That in itself does not qualify him to review old movies, but it does say he's used to pretty rigorous analysis. His book is an examination of the movie rather than the book. He points out that the movie was based on a Clarke short story, and the book came after the film. This being the case, Wheat is very centered on Kubrick's vision of the story rather than Clarke's. He uses scripts, director's notes, and some interviews to provide evidence for some of his claims.
So what are those claims? Alot of it makes good sense. For instance, Dave Bowman relates to Ulysses (a reknowned bowman in the myths). He goes on a long voyage and loses all his crew. Pretty neat so far, but Wheat tends to go to far in some oif his claims. Here's an example:
"In the next scene, the moon monolith scene, it becomes evident that TMA-1 symbolizes the wooden Trojan Horse: hence, we are looking for hidden meaning that refers or alludes to the Trojan Horse. And that meaning can be found in TMA-1. Spell out the figure '1' and you get TMA-ONE. These letters, like the last nine in Frank Poole, can be rearranged to form an anagram. In this case, the anagram is "No Meat." A wooden horse has no meat on its skeletal framework."
You had me at "Bowman". *sniff* But the whole "No Meat" thing is just a skoach over the top. It stays pretty topsy-turvy. For example, in the discussion of the man-machine symbiosis allegory, Wheat claims that HAL represents a new type of human called homo-machinus. I don't usually quote this much in a review, but you need to hear this from the horse's mouth. In this next passage, he is showing the anthropomorphism of the HAL-Discovery by claiming the six rockets at the back of the ship, encased in three hexagonal casings, have meaning.
"But why the hexagons? Why not circles or squares or nothing? When I was growing up in the 1930's, which is the same time Kubrick was growing up, most reasonably modern houses had white tile bathroom floors. The tile, in vogue from the turn of the century through World War II, were hexagons, one inch across and fitted together in a honeycomb pattern. The rear-end hexagons are bathroom tiles! They symbolize bathrooms. Hal-Discovery has three bathrooms, one for each mouth. And what is the only being that uses bathrooms to answer the call of nature? Homo sapiens. Once more we see that the intelligent spaceship is a humanoid." Yeah, I know.
There's much, much more where that came from. The thing is, these allegorical statements do make sense. I can see 2001 on a level as being a retelling of the Odysseus myth, and on another level being a moralistic story about the dangers of increasingly blurred lines between the mechanical and the biological. Hell, science fiction is littered with similar stories, and Kubrick is not usually without some sort of moral framework. The Zarathustra allegory obviously fits as well. The death of God, the realization that all humans could become god (or Star Children) as well, the whole schmeal. The problem is that one gets so caught up in the loony evidence like that presented above that it becomes easy to lose track on how cool the idea really is.
It reminds us how good human minds, especially smart ones, are at finding patterns in crazy shit. Reading this book you are impressed with two minds: Kubrick's and Wheat's. Wheat has the premise that Kubrick was so wicked smart that these long strings of meaning are not only possible, they are a sure thing. You also come away with the sense that Wheat is a pretty smart man himself. This book goes too far at times, but is worth reading. One thing's for sure, you'll never watch 2001 again in the same way.
Note: There is a very nice Post-It on the book I was sent saying the cover showing the HAL2000 red eye is a cover designer's screw up. I believe that, since after having read the book I doubt Wheat could have ever missed something as simple as Hal's name. Must kill him every time he looks at the cover in fact.
You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.
Not to worry. There are two convenient explanations for this, which you are free to adopt under any open content license of your choice. The first is the simple one alluded to in the subject I chose: if the author tosses out enough crazy ideas, it becomes almost a certainty that some will hit home. And now that I think about it, this blends continuously into the other explanation I'm offering you. At the other end, he started off with one or a few reasonable insights, then fell down the rabbit hole while looking for more. Or somewhere in between. Maybe he's mostly kooky but not so far gone that he doesn't see, in some fashion, that some of his ideas are more sensible than the rest (though that needn't be how he characterizes them), and so he has pushed them harder, making it look like he started out fairly sensibly and got weirder later.
Or maybe the slash-a-dot-a review just makes it sound much stranger than it is... though if the author actually said some of the things that were quoted that seems pretty unlikely.
The most interesting concept that I see here is Homo-Machinus. Long ago, I noticed that James Cameron had tapped a Jungian vein in the robot design in the first Terminator movie. Now whenever see a semi-truck in my rearview on the I-696, I say "Uh, oh. The Terminator's on my butt." This symbolism is very common in sci-fi, with Data and Spock from Star Trek being just two examples. But there are other reasons why Clarke's HAL cration works so well. That's right, HAL is Clarke's. He wrote the screenplay for Kubrik. But I wish the reviewer had written more on the Nitzchean (is that spelled right?) parallel. It sounded like the juiciest of his three connections, and, since I know nothing about Nietzche, I could have gotten some good exposure there, too. But he just blew that part off. Guess he'd better not try for an English PhD, instead. As to he Odysseus parallel, I think that the similarities are superficial. Sure Odysseus went on a long journey and lost all his men, but he also had multple aventures along the way. Where's the cyclops? Where's the island of horny women? Sorry Mike, but it don't wash. Odysseus gets home at the end and wins back his wife. Bowman gets turned into god. No cigar... It turns out that the guy who wrote our freshman Mechanics book, Tipler, went kind of nuts in his bizarro psycho-physical insights, too. He wrote a book called "The Omega Point Theory," in which he said that the universe will end in collapse (ok so far), at which point we will all become one with god and be transformed into a gigantic computer. Riiiiightttt! But this anagram thing makes me think of a movement going on right now to extract hidden secret messages from the Bible. I guess these folks have written a computer pogram that reads every ith letter and assembles them into words. Somwhere in there they found "Hitler," so of course this means that the Bible predicted the WW II. Koff, koff... If you want to read more on these topics, buy a maazine called "Skeptical Inquirer." Martin Gardner is still doing a column for them. I would recommend the movies "Pi" and "X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes" for a litle, non-biblical, allegory on what happens to people who read to much into too many things. I won't tell you what the allegory is, because that might spoil movie, but I'll give you a hint. If you're stumped, look up the profession of Carl Jung. At least when I have a far out fantasy that I can't easily shake off, I have the good common sense to write it down and try to sell it to Marvel Comics. Dont'cha think these these guys have seen one too many episodes of the X-Files?
The original short story is "The Sentinal"
Published in several short story collections, as well as 'The Making of Kubrik's 2001' and 'The Lost Worlds of 2001' [along with portions of early drafts of the scrips and plot ideas]
The book did not come after the movie...it was written during the movie, and was finished before the movie was finally finished, that is why there is a difference between Jupiter and Saturn.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
"Folha Explains... 2001: A Space Odissey", published by the brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo to celebrate the entering in the year 2001, and written by Amir Labaki, this "three-keyed" interpretation is the more common and complementary. It's a very nice, cheap, short, easy-reading (if you can read portuguese ;-) ) book, that describes the relationship between the movie and novel, the reception of the movie when it was launched, how it was understood later, etc.
I have this overwhelming desire to pay you for your post...
There does seem to be an element to this review - when he's talking about how science fiction is littered with stories about "science gone wrong" stuff like that.
About the earliest example of science fiction literature that I can think of is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. If you think of it, that story is THE basis for all science fiction.
In essence, science fiction is about humanity, and it's "progress" from the dark ages to some futuristic point, via technological innovation, and how that technological innovation impacts humanity, and humanity's way of thinking.
Obviously, Frankenstien talks about how this one doctor, way ahead of his time in the field of medicine, devising a method to bring people back to life, but he could not just leave it at that - because if he brought one person back to life, then things would be great and all, but he could not be a "creator" of life. So he built one out of spare parts. It was human pride that screwed Dr. Frankenstein up, because there were aspects to life that he didn't understand, the soul, etc. And as it turned out, the creature had the mind of a deranged madman, murderer, who didn't even know who or what he was, because he was made of parts of many different people. Now, I'm not saying that "it's all about mankind messing with things we do not understand - " it's more along the lines of the tradition of the great Greek tragedy, man falling before his pride.
Pretty much every AI story out there is basically a rip off of Frankenstein. Yes, including the Matrix.
Even when science fiction appears to be about some other topic, like alien invasions, etc. it's still about humanity's advancement. Now that our great thinkers have discovered other stars, and other planets, and have theorized what life on these other planets could be like - and thus, have created new life, have become the creators. And in most cases, this whole alien mythology stems from that concept.
Star Wars, of course, does not fall under the category of "Science Fiction" when you think about it. It's really not at all about "the impact of technological advancement on humanity". It's a new genre, well, not new, it's Flash Gordon warmed over. Fantasy in a Sci Fi setting.
My point is, after Frankenstein, it's pretty much all been done before.
I, for one, cannot wait, for the well-done movie version of "Ender's Game".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
While I haven't seen any comments from Pink Floyd members about this, according to Alan Parsons, the recording engineer on Dark Side of the Moon, the "Wizard of Oz" thing is utter nonsense--they never talked about it during the recording.
(And, yes, that's Alan Parsons of the Alan Parsons Project.)
Or maybe Kubrick was referring to his frequent soundtrack composer, Walter Carlos, who went to to have a successful new age career as Wendy Carlos...
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
Exactly. I can't understand how anyone can miss the Nietzsche references. Rambling about bathroom tiles is crazy -- noticing obvious references that Kubrick included is not. BTW, besides the music and the general theme of evolution to higher forms, there is also the idea of being "beyond good and evil" -- the newly created ape-men use their intelligence in a way that is not very nice but which increases their power -- they attack the less developed apes.
If Kubrick had made 2010, I bet Bowman wouldn't have beeen standing around saying "Something wonderful is about to happen" -- he would be making himself the leader of Earth or something.
So you think ACC was the main person responsible for 2001? Then why did 2001 so resemble the other films of Kubrick in theme -- i.e. what does it mean to be "human", do we rule technology or does it rule us, etc. Certainly the short story "The Sentinel" was ACC's but that was just a small part of 2001.
Now 2010 was all ACC's -- and guess what -- none of the higher themes were there -- it was just a 1950ish pulp science fiction story more or less ripped off from "The Day the Earth Stood Still".
Using this equation, it's been proven that Abraham Lincoln never existed historically, that in fact he was a mythological construct.
And they are right, if they mean the "Honest Abe" fellow who supposedly fought the South out of righteous anger over slavery, rather than a typical scheming politician who professed whatever beliefs he thought would get him elected. Even "historical" figures tend to become mythological constructs in time.
This isn't off-topic, as an anagram was posted in the original story. Come on moderators - wake up!
Turambar
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Common sense is not so common.
--Voltaire
Turambar
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Common sense is not so common.
--Voltaire
Actually, it was 'mate on', the subliminal message the monolith sent into the brains of the monkeys. When they evolved into humans they eventually recorded it as "go forth and multiply"...
At least, that's what Art told me.
The book and the movie were written concurrently. Try reading The Lost Worlds of 2001.
Doesn't this sort of... meditative for lack of a better word, art ever happen to anyone else?
Yes, of course, I would wager that the best pieces of art usually happen this way. In music especially, for me. It's when I'm not even thinking of the key changes and my fingers seem to take on a life of their own that the best sounding riffs flow forth. Just tapping into the Universal Mind, man. ;-)
I always wondered why she didn't simply do the heel after....
(and can you really die from being shot in the heel?) I guess Achilles was hit in the heel by a large bomb or something..
Oh this is right up there with dissections of Shakespeare (wrote some rip roaring yarns with lots of bawdy lines and the odd car chase/murder to keep the scum interested. OK I lied about the car chases but you get the point - he didn;t sit down and think "hmm time for another classic peice of fine literature" - he just wanted another hit play!) And those archeologists who find a body next to a bronze axe head and off the back of that decide he had 4 kids, his last meal was ground sparrow and he shaved every 3 days...
:)
Stonehenge is a similar story - people ooing and ahing and scratching their heads over why the stones are arrmaged like that - til they realise some guys with big ropes and a lot of time on their hands put them like that in the 19th century.
Kubrick was making a film - not starting a religion - even though the story has western religious overtones. The hexagons were hexagons becuase they tesselate nicley to form a strong structure (and the model designer probably thought it looked nice).
As for all that winamp screensaver stuff at the end - I often wonder if film makers and authors just invent this stuff and let the auidience invent the meaning afterwards. Imagine the script meetings:- "hey lets put in some wierd lights and stuff with some footage of a unborn baby - that'll really throw them"
I wouldn't be suprised if bronze age man didn't randomly distribute axe heads just to confound Time Team.
I'm off to bury 4 elephants and a karaoke machine in my back yard. Let's see the Wheats of the far future figure THAT one out
For some reason you seem to have confused Sri Lanka (formerly known as Ceylon) with Cypress, the large island whose ownership is disputed between Greece and Turkey.
Morn also had the running gag that, while he never said anything on camera, he apparently talked people's ears off off camera. This is something like the running gag on Cheers where Norm's wife was never seen. (Or Maris (sp?) on Frasier is never seen, either.)
DS9 had lots of interesting gags like this, and it wasn't just some tripped out way of keeping Morn's actor for getting paid for talking. ;) For example, watch the real tribble episode, then watch it where DS9 travel back in time. In the real episode, there are two guys in the lineup after the fight, where Kirk talks to them, with a red uniform, and no one in the fight had one. This is a fairly common nitpick. Well...in the new timeline...O'Brien is wearing a red uniform, and in the fight, and in the lineup! Granted, it doesn't fix anything, cause there's still another guy, but I suspect they gave him a red uniform specifically to have fun with that nitpick.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I do not understand this comment. Isn't that like saying 'Watch those Jews grovel once I've cornered the market on pork.'? ;)
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I just prefer to think of 2001 as a joke at IBM's expense myself. The whole trojan horse thing, or the homo-machinus is just something that happens when one over analyzes a piece of work/literature/art. One can draw any number of parralels between 2001 and Greek Myths as long as look hard enough. Why, Arthur C. Clarke lives on top/close to the top of Sri Lanka right? Well obviously he equates himself with some sort of greek god.
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Insert Witty Sig Here
What do you mean he swears it off? He says specifically in a preface or something in one of the books I read where he talked about writing the book, and how hard it was with little money, and that he couldn't think of names for characters, and just happened to be using a Fabercastle (i think that's it) pencil and Montag paper. Ray Bradbury right out said that's where the names came from.
What?
Oh, you're absolutely 100% right that Kubrick filled his movies with symbols. He was very concerned about having non-literal meaning in his work.
:P
What i was trying to say was that while, yes, absolutely, artists use symbols and allegory (both consciously and unconsciously) in their work, its not ridiculously vague and disassociated the way the bathroom tile thing would be. Or the anagrams. Unless it's a pattern with that particular artist, I wouldn't buy an anagram. And there would be far more effective ways to call forth the image of a bathroom than through the shape of tiles in a certain demographics' homes at a certain time. To an artist, such a solution would be inelegant because it wouldn't trigger any subconscious response in the audience -- you can make people think of hell and the devil without being direct, but to think of a bathroom, you need more than the shape of a single tile. A PATTERN of tiles might do it -- and that would be interesting as a device, to make HAL vaguely resemble a bathroom wall. It would be something the audience would never quite put their finger on, but would bring out the idea.
But, as a rule, few artists would be so vague unless it was a private joke (and private jokes are usually the first "hidden" things to ever get found!)
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Hate to say it, but your art teacher was full of crapola. If the creator of a work didn't place a meaning or reference in their creation, then it isn't there, period
That's why i was specifically speaking as an artist, not as a viewer. It's not at all uncommon to look at a piece I did years ago and see things that i put in them without realizing consciously at the time I had done so. I don't know any writers or artists who don't have similar experiences with their own works.
There's just too much going in to be aware of it all -- that;s part of why even the most talented creator needs experience, because you have to be able to do a lot of it without thinking, so you can focus on the things you need to consciously.
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
As an artist, I hate to admit that my high school english teacher was right -- there are often meanings hidden in works that even the creator didn't realize were there.
Its not at all unusual for another artist to look at some work and point out something to me that, once it is said out load, is obvious I put in there subconciously/unconsciously.
Once you've been doing it long enough, every writer and artist is doing half of their work without conscious thought -- its only afterwards that they realize they were subconsciously running a parallel to the Iliad or the Bible (at which point they will usually go through and clean up the references or eliminate them).
That said, its usually easy to tell what is REALLY there vs being coincidental.
For example, Mark twain, despite his protestations to the contrary, clearly wrote with meaning, and had social allegory and commentary, it was never simply "a tale".
I find anagrams HIGHLY unlikely to be meaningful unless the author is in the habit of doing them, as most writers pick names from people they know or from historical/literary sources. If you showed me that EVERY name in a story had an anagram, and that as a group the anagrams were meaningful, I'd buy it. One or two out of many characters? coincidence, especially when it comes up with something dorky like "no meat".
Show me another story by Clark or Kubrick with many meaningful anagrams and I'd be willing to believe they were hiding them here.
As for the hexagonal tile, geez, don't get me started. I don't know how much this Harvard guy has ever done creatively, but there are about a million hexagonal symbols that would be pulled up before bathroom tiles. If Kubrick had a meaningful story in his life with a bathroom tile, maybe I'd buy it, but without that evidence, I'd be much more likely to attribute the shape to a carbon atom (foundation of life!) or a honeycomb (bees) -- a hive mind, nature's workers, collectively peaceful and necessary for life, but with a surprising sting when riled! That's a lot closer to HAL in the story then a third-generation bathroom metaphor.
Geodesic domes are based on hexagons, and are usually the basis of sci-fi colony designs. The shape itself seems very "sci-fi" just because of this history, so maybe that's the only association. Compare that to round shapes (as the head of the Discovery), which are associated with Russian spacecraft. having both shapes might just be a visual way of showing the ship comes from more than one design sensibility, a collaboration between nations.
But I'd want to see something to indicate Kubrick was involved in that production design decision to even worry about meaning behind the arrangement of engines.
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
A better one, as discovered by my friend Sheri and I one drunken Sunday watching World Of Disney, is "The Wizard Of Oz" combined with Alien Sex Fiend's "Another Planet."
There are MANY times the beat of the music intersects with film cuts and/or matches up with the beat of the dancing on-screen. It still MEANS nothing.
Oh, and Devo's "Freedom of Choice" LP goes well with the old Snorks cartoon, too.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
In the X-Files, for instance, they love to have clocks pointing to 10:13 because Chris Carter's production company is named Ten Thirteen. They'll also name minor characters after regular posters on the X-Files newsgroup. That kind of thing is actually comparatively common, a kind of insider's joke.
;-).
The Star Trek series' do this too. For instance, on the TNG Enterprise's bridge, the names of the writers and directors and so forth are on the dedication plaque.
Or in a Deep Space Nine episode, there were two agents from Starfleet who were investigating a time travel incident. Their names were Dulmer and Lucsley. (Anagrams for Mulder and Sculley, of X-Files fame of couse
My journal has hot
I think this author's style of analysis is commonly called "blush lit".
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Which I believe was some kind of hover craft.
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"These letters, like the last nine in Frank Poole, can be rearranged to form an anagram. In this case, the anagram is "No Meat." A wooden horse has no meat on its skeletal framework."
....
/me sighs
Why just the last nine? After all, all of "Frank Poole" could be "Ankle Proof" or "Freon Polka", obviously what Clarke intended, while the last nine merely give us "Pork Alone." Or "Poor Ankle", or "Penal Rook", or "Nap Looker" or
-- John
You're right. This happens regardless of the medium that's been reviewed, analyzed, folded, spindled or mutilated. The only person who will ever know what was meant was the creator of said piece of work. Even then, sometimes he or she may not even know, and it'll just be what it is.
I think sometimes things take on a life of their own, and our input into the work is just a means to the end, where we really had no idea that the end would turn up as it did.
Sometimes when drawing or painting my mind will be a complete blank. I'm not always thinking that "this X needs to be more like N because of Y". Even when writing. The words sometimes flow out without my thinking much about them. I can look back at things I wrote 10 years ago and be uncertain whether that was really me who wrote that or someone else.
Doesn't this sort of... meditative for lack of a better word, art ever happen to anyone else?
An aquaintence of mine wrote a small program that will search the entire text of the bible and will find any phrase you give it hidden as 'bible code', similar to to the book of the same name which pruports to find all kinds of hidden messages. My aquaintence wrote it as a method of debunking such claims.
:)
:)
Is it open source?
But seriously, I collect books by kooks (and thus, Bible Code is one high on the list when I find a 2nd-hand copy), and a tool like this would be a great adjunct to the book. If you know anywhere I can get this, a URL etc. would be muchly appreciated.
deus does not exist but if he does
Leonard F Wheat = Deft anal whore
An on-topic post, yet one addressing a common trollish theme! You, my friend, have won my respect and admiration.
deus does not exist but if he does
WARNING: 3001 SPOILER BELOW.
While I think that the "NO MEAT" anagram probably takes it too far, there is reason to believe that the Monolith might symbolize a Trojan Horse. Anyone who has read 3001: The Final Odyssey might remember that the monolith was ultimately destroyed by introducing a Trojan Horse (the computer program variety) into its system. A lot of people are saying that the author is reading too far into 2001 -- but given the fact that "Odyssey" is included in the title, not to mention the "Bowman" name and the plot parallels, it's perfectly reasonable to draw Odyssean parallels. Writers don't do these things by accident, folks.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Wasn't it Brutus in the original?
dave
Terry Pratchett frequently hides references to other things in his novels.
See http://www.lspace.org/books/apf/index.html
dave
Anyone care to fill me in on the secret?
We picked a movie from his collection at random (Slackers) and a CD from his collection at random (Beastie Boys: Paul's Boutique) and played them at the same time.
Eerily, they meshed exceedingly well. Thus, we must conclude that the Beastie Boys had Slackers in mind when writing that album: surely not too far fetched, if you think on it. ;)
They really did work together. The Pink Floyd thing really is coincidence. Pick a movie and CD at random and watch...
Thanks, Timothy! I might have been intrigued by the title and content of this book. Perhaps enough to actually buy it. Your short review, though, tells me everything I need to know...
For an author as "educated" as he seems to be (on paper), your review shows him pretty much inventing a lot of history, and on the thinest foundation.
So this fellow is an expert in economics and government, eh? If that is truly the case, that explains a lot about the state of our government and economy...
A dingo ate my sig...
Kubrick used them all the time! Just to give a few after a few minutes of Googling:
You might not accept all of these examples. Fair enough. I know many of them aren't anagrams per se, but puns, allusions, and so on. So be it. I hope the pattern is clear enough all the same. Kubrick infused his movies with a lot of word play, and this all contributes to the larger meaning of each film. Did he do it deliberatey? I don't doubt that at least some of it was deliberate, but I also accept that a lot of it was probably done unconsciously -- the meaning may be there but perhaps not deliberately so. That's fine with me. But it's there all the same. That's what makes his films great.
As for the hexagonal exhaust thing, well, I can't really comment much on that one. It's worth noting though that, as the movie's FAQ page notes, food is a big symbol in 2001. The early apes feast on raw meat, while the early space travellers have increasingly bland foods, up through the pastey goo that Discovery's crew gets. It's not unreasonable to take that thread a bit burther & comment on how the 2nd monolith had "no meat", or about Discovery's "anus". Certainly our overreliance on technology is a big theme, and the fact that space travellers need machines even to eat & defecate is a very potent symbol to work into a movie like this.
Cut the guy some slack. I haven't read the critique in question, but this review & these comments are being way too harsh. Kubrick's films in general, and 2001 in particular, are a rich source of allegory. Just because you only wanna dwell on the techno-nerd aspects doesn't mean that the larger themes aren't there. Come out of your cubicle & look at the bigger picture. One of the articles on the Kubrick FAQ draws comparisons between the director and James Joyce, and they seem to be about spot on to me. Among other parallels, it cites a common use of puns (cf. examples above et al), encoded meanings (POE from Strangelove, "NO MEAT" from 2001, etc), portmanteau words (compound or layered meaning), and of course both of them set their masterpieces against the Homerian epics.
Is it too easy to find these kinds of patterns everywhere? I dunno, maybe, but who cares? Patterns are fun! Whether or not they were "deliberately placed", like the lunar monolith (a ha! another one!), they exist and are being found. Deny them if you want to, but it's much more fun to try to figure out what they mean.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Kubrick used them all the time! Just to give a few after a bit of Googling:
You might not accept all of these examples. Fair enough. I know many of them aren't anagrams per se, but puns, allusions, and so on. So be it. I hope the pattern is clear enough all the same. Kubrick infused his movies with a lot of word play, and this all contributes to the larger meaning of each film. Did he do it deliberatey? I don't doubt that at least some of it was deliberate, but I also accept that a lot of it was probably done unconsciously -- the meaning may be there but perhaps not deliberately so. That's fine with me. But it's there all the same. That's what makes his films great.
As for the hexagonal exhaust thing, well, I can't really comment much on that one. It's worth noting though that, as the movie's FAQ page notes, food is a big symbol in 2001. The early apes feast on raw meat, while the early space travellers have increasingly bland foods, up through the pastey goo that Discovery's crew gets. It's not unreasonable to take that thread a bit burther & comment on how the 2nd monolith had "no meat", or about Discovery's "anus". Certainly our overreliance on technology is a big theme, and the fact that space travellers need machines even to eat & defecate is a very potent symbol to work into a movie like this.
Cut the guy some slack. I haven't read the critique in question, but this review & these comments are being way too harsh. Kubrick's films in general, and 2001 in particular, are a rich source of allegory. Just because you only wanna dwell on the techno-nerd aspects doesn't mean that the larger themes aren't there. Come out of your cubicle & look at the bigger picture. One of the articles on the Kubrick FAQ draws comparisons between the director and James Joyce, and they seem to be about spot on to me. Among other parallels, it cites a common use of puns (cf. examples above et al), encoded meanings (POE from Strangelove, "NO MEAT" from 2001, etc), portmanteau words (compound or layered meaning), and of course both of them set their masterpieces against the Homerian epic poem.
Is it too easy to find these kinds of patterns everywhere? I dunno, maybe, but who cares? Patterns are fun! Whether or not they were "deliberately placed", like the lunar monolith (a ha! another one!), they exist and are being found. Deny them if you want to, but it's much more fun to try to figure out what they mean. I'd be willing to give this book a shot, if it could go any deeper than the critical interpretations I've already read on Kubrick & 2001.
Hell, the Slashdot groupthink crowd has dismissed it, so it must be good! ;)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Ah! If "allegory" means "making bizarre comparisons using three different abstractions", then I can do that too!
Ready? The reader's expected response to the author's "NO MEAT" hypothesis would be "GET REAL". The letters in "GET REAL" can be rearranged to spell "LARGE ET". This obviously signifies the subconscious expression that the author is, in fact, an oversized being from outer space.
Maybe I should publish a book called "Leonard F. Wheat's "Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey": A Triple Allegory": A Space Allegory".
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Doesn't he actually say that "Man is a rope, tied between beast and superman"? I don't think that the superman was meant to replace God, since the problem with God was that we looked to Him rather than to ourselves.
As to your interpretation of the end of the film, it seems to overlook the importance of the willing of the eternal recurrence, a concept which calls the whole notion of the superman into doubt; the whole point of the "Soothsayer" (TSZ II.19) is that his truth shatters Zarathustra's great hopes for mankind.
That being said, your interpretation of the end of the film could work if it were split from Nietzsche and expressed in terms of messianism (not necessarily religious; Marx and Hegel's end of history is messianism), which ushering in a new world cannot be described adequately to the old. Of course, Nietzsche would say that messianism in all its forms, Zoarastriansim, Judaism, Christianity, Enlightenment, Hegelianism, Marxism, etc., is a desire for an other world or a behind-the-world (Hinterwelt), and thus a manifestation of the spirit of revenge which will be overcome by willing the eternal recurrence.
As to this whole business about koans, while Nietzsche did respect Buddhism more than Christianity (he thought he was the first European to understand Buddhism), it was not his end-goal, nor was anything like it. The crisis of the West was the decadence of the old slave morality; Buddhism was the decadence of an old master morality, but it was decadence all the same. Buddhism, too, remained something to be overcome for Nietzsche.
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under-paid karma whore
I meant that Nietzsche does not intend for the superman to replace God as the object of our worship, i.e., the superman is not to be some higher power toward which we look for guidance and/or salvation. Man must become the superman, must become God by doing what God has done, but in so doing he abandons his relationship to anything God-like; man must not become to the superman what he formerly was to God, but he must become as God is to Himself. And since the God which Nietzsche attacks is defined by our relation to Him, viz. He is a separate Entity that embodies our desire for a moral, i.e., a just, world, the amoral superman cannot be an ersatz God. I think we are in agreement on this point, but that there was a difficulty in communication.
A quibble for a quibble, superman is the correct translation of Uebermensch; Kaufmann abandoned it in favor of overman because of its association with the comic book hero, not because it more accurately described the intent of the German. Myself assuming a higher degree of literacy in those interested in Nietzsche, I prefer the more accurate rendering of superman and superhero for Uebermensch and Ueberheld.
And here's a superfluous quibble: Zarathutra did not kill God; the Ugliest Man did. Of course, you could say, a la Stanley Rosen, that everyone in Part IV represents some part of Zarathustra, and thus that in a sense it was Zarathustra who killed God, but then you would have to say that Zarathustra also served God until the end and seeks the hermit to serve Him still (for he would also be the last Pope). I myself think that God is already dead by the action of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the death of God representing both the crisis and the greatest opportunity of Modernity: since the death of God allows us to devolve into last men (for they, too, look to nothing beyond themselves), it also holds out the possibility of the superman.
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under-paid karma whore
As to the proper rendering of Uebermensch, this, too, seems a pointless quarrel. Overman has become acceptable in some circles because of the efforts of Walter Kaufmann, with whose translation I have a number of problems (e.g., Stein der Weisheit as philosopher's stone, Es ist der gute Krieg, der heiligt jede Sache as the good war hallows any cause, etc.). Kaufmann's reasons for preferring overman are not based on fidelity to the German, but are in order to avoid the snickering of those readers for whom Nietzsche expressly did not write over the word superman. I would have used Uebermensch in my original post, but that might have been taken as too elitist for our democratic /. community; most people know superman, and there is no linguistic reason not to prefer it over overman.
I find your last point the most interesting. The problem with saying that Zarathustra killed God as the ugliest man killed God is that the ugliest man does so out of a spirit of revenge: Zarathustra has overcome the spirit of revenge, nauseating as such a process may be. The question then remains whether Zarathustra could kill God out of a motive other than the spirit of revenge; the text suggests that this is impossible, for the desire to kill God is a desire to punish that which torments you (as we see in TSZ IV.7). This is where Nietzsche's historicism comes into play: Zarathustra cannot do what he does unless God is dead, but he cannot be the one to kill Him (for the aforementioned reason). Zarathustra, like Nietzsche, is only possible after the death of God, just as it is only now that the Uebermensch is possible. There can be no Nietzsche unless there is first a Schopenhauer.
Lastly, I have two issues of protocol. I would suggest that we continue our correspondence over email (my address is encoded, but not hidden), since I imagine that this story will soon be archived; in any case, we are now in the realm of offtopic moderation. Secondly, I try to follow the rule of always assuming that your interlocutor knows what they're talking about and letting them themselves prove otherwise; I hope my arguments are sufficient to reveal any profound misunderstanding and that they do not require a sentence to that effect. I do not use words, the meaning of which I do not know; speaking both German and English, I feel able to use ersatz intelligently in both (and Uebermensh, for that matter!).
That having been said, I look forward to any further thoughts you may have on Nietzsche.
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under-paid karma whore
I suppose that my reading of Nietzsche also disagrees with Kubrick's; I can accept that you have properly interpreted the relevent scenes from 2001, but I don't think we can take Kubrick's vision as indicative of Nietzsche's thought. It's been at least eight years since I've seen it, so I'll yield to your knowledge of the film.
While your appraisal of the ugliest man is correct, I would say that his motive for killing God is vengeful; the problem of all human society is that it is founded upon the spirit of revenge. The ugliest man does not mind a God who sees his strength and beauty (though the ugliest man, as ugliest man, has neither), but rather is ashamed of his weakness. The spirit of revenge is an outgrowth of weakness: we take revenge on those who hurt us, i.e., who reveal us to be hurtable, to be weak. But as you said, that the ugliest man kills God out of revenge does not prove that Zarathustra does so for the same reason.
God is a conjecture: to kill God means to kill this conjecture. To kill God is to induce disbelief in others, just as to create God is to induce belief in others. When gods die, they die many deaths. The ugliest man killed God, the last pope watched him choke on pity, and Zarathustra inherits a world in which his "ghost" has died. It is only those men lower than Zarathsutra, higher men as they may be, that kill God.
Few people have the strength to kill God as you suggest that both the ugliest man and Zarathustra do. Killing God means acknowledging the result of a slain God: Shopenhauerianism or Zarathustrianism (I don't say Nietzscheanism because I don't think he was strong enough to will the eternal recurrence, as his later works show). Modernity is full of "atheism", but it has yet to come to terms with the death of God; modernity does not believe, but it lacks the strength to actually kill God. Indeed, no one is able to live Zarathustra's life: this is the problem of decadence.
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under-paid karma whore
I believe the point is, was the hidden meaning (if one acknowledges it) intentional, or just chance.
Your post's hidden message was intentional. To be more in line with the story, if every capital letter spelt your message that would be more intriguing.
> You can find hidden meaning in anything, if you spend enough time looking for it.
The book "Godel, Escher, Bach" talks about this: Interpretation lies in the intelligence of the observer. Are there universal meanings, or is it just symantecs.
*shrugs*
Ahem, ahem. I don't want to rekindle the debate
between prescriptive and descriptive lexicography,
but, suffice to say, you shouldn't stop resisting
a solecism just because it has achieved sufficient
market penetration to be noticed by a soi-disant
authority. Parallels to a certain software ven-
dor are left as an exercise for the reader...
Hard to trust a review of a review that has "the public's disinterest in science" adorning the third sentence.
All together now: "uninterested" == a lack of fascination; "disinterested" == a lack of personal motive.
For example: "The public's uninterest in science is caused, not by disinterest -- since science affects it deeply -- but by a lack of understanding..."
OK, so he may have gone a bit far in his Ulysses allegory, but what about the Zarathustra side? There seem to be an awful lot of links between 2001 and Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Nietzsche.
There's the tone poem of the same name by Strauss played at the beginning, the whole Superman theory of those who have 'overcome' humanity to evolve to a higher consciousness.
Surely these analogies were better discussed in the book?
i don't read slashdot anymore.
Reminds me of a website I ran across a few months ago. Read the first few, laughed a little, then realized there were 25 pages of the stuff.
The Numbers of God
www.code-fix.com
"A lot" is two words. I guess Hooked On Phonics didn't work for you?
--
Lord Nimon
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
"More teen bimbo hay time!"
(Or these five: "I emit mere booby anthem.")
(....so very, very bored....)
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
Don't forget 'A MENTO'.
Kubrick's prediction of world domination by one only known as 'The Freshmaker'
Or did he mean that TMA-1 was "fresh and full of life"
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.
what does the L stand for then?
I've been known to get into the occasional mini-flamewar with this friend, one of the biggies: KDE vs. GNOME.
I am of the noble KDE blood.
He is nothing more then a GNOME.
Stemming from this is the enevitable GTK+ vs. Qt...
Anyway, one day, during one of our mini-wars, I studied his nick. His nick in 'kn'.
k, moved up six letters of the alphabet, is q.
n, moved up six letters of the alphabet, is t.
My god! A six letter shift, and my GTKing friend is really a closet Qt fan, and his nick just screams it in secret! Maybe he's a communist too! I better check his house for a copy of the book of Marx next time I'm there!
Well.... he's not really a closet Qt fan... or a communist... but it is fun to take a stab at him with it every once in awhile.
Anyway, the morel of this story is:
"You can twist anything into anything else."
AND
"Eventually, all flamewars stoop to very stupid levels."
(For the record: This story is true. If you want to check, both kn and myself are frequently on client.oz.org, in #megabytes)
It's Dark Side of the Moon not The Wall and it's not a coincidence. Pink Floyd had just lost the job of creating a soundtrack to another movie (I forget which one), and wanted to prove that they could do it. In fact, they wanted to prove they could do a better job than anyone else. And although they've never really acknowledged having done so, they've never denied it, either.
Popeye was definitely vegetarian-oriented. Popeye the sailor - girlfriend's name is Olive Oyl. Eats spinach and gets strong. Popeye, if I'm not mistaken, is a kind of bean as well. Then there's Sweetpea, and ultimately, there was Wimpy, who eats hamburgers (a guy who eats hamburgers is called Wimpy, is fat, and constantly have financial problems, hmmm....)
-- Regardless of individual intelligence, decisions driven by ideology tend to be inherently stupid. - anon
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
Dark Side of the Moon, not The Wall, sucka. I pity the foo who's never watched Wizard of Oz timed to Dark Side. It's nothing at all like these whacky theories discussed in the review. Also, the song Echoes, on Pink Floyd's Meddle, is specifically timed to the Jupiter and Beyond The Inifinite sequence in 2001. No coincidence there.
Jeez, a big long shaft of a ship with a bulbous head, spurts a tiny little pod with human life in it down a hole and a "star child" is born. I bet the support payments would be a bitch. Should have used a condom.
--
--
You nah, me nah. Screw you guys, I'm going home.
One assumes, though, that in Dragonball Z the names are intended to be funny, rather than allegorical. A better example, IMO, is the Wiggin children in Ender's Game. They all have saints' names, and their characters are (IIRC) linked to the saints for whom they were named. Of course in that case, Orson Scott Card deliberately draws the reader's attention to the choice of names. One character specifically mentions that the children were all baptized with valid saints' names, and another points out the possibility of names having connotations. Again, when an author has deliberately put something like that into the work, he'll generally try to point it out, either by having it be glaringly obvious or by including written in suggestions that it's worth looking at.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I'm sorry, but I seem to have been unintentionally misleading above. The show in which these artistic works were inserted was not Twin Peaks (which I don't believe was a Spelling Production) but Melrose Place. The works were presented as part of a larger exhibition entitled "Uncommon Sense" that focused on art as part of the public process, and the specific section was titled "In the Name of the Place". The creators of the work have a nice web site at http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/projects/mpart/. All in all, it was one of the most interesting exhibits I've ever been to.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
But there's a difference between finding something in a work that the author didn't explicitly put in, like finding unintentional allegory and metaphor, and the kind of numerology/anagrams that people are complaining about in this case. It's inherent in the artistic process that works of art reflect their creators, and to the extent that their creators are people of their time, place, social status, etc. the art will thus also reflect that. Thus a talented and well trained artist will almost certainly include unconscious connections to others in his works.
But it's difficult to see how some of the more esoteric connections that analysts dredge up could be inserted unconsciously. Do you really think that authors subconsciously include ellaborate anagrams, numerological calculations, and the like in their writing. I personally can't- not just don't but actually can't- believe that. It's just too far fetched.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I find that a good rule of thumb is that most of the time when the author is thinking about something wacky like making names into anagrams, he tends to do it compulsively rather than just once or twice. If names are significant, for instance, he'll use a group of names that have related significance- all names of saints, or characters from some other work, or the like. If you wind up finding one interesting anagram, one name that's a biblical reference, and one odd similarity to some other work, the chances are that it's just the analyst looking too deep. And, quite honestly, most authors aren't going to bury this stuff too deep in the first place. They put it in there to be, after all, so making it so obscure that it takes ages and ages to notice pretty much defeats the point.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Of course some time these things are most certainly conscious. In the X-Files, for instance, they love to have clocks pointing to 10:13 because Chris Carter's production company is named Ten Thirteen. They'll also name minor characters after regular posters on the X-Files newsgroup. That kind of thing is actually comparatively common, a kind of insider's joke.
What is even more wild is that once in a while a TV show will do something even more radical deliberately. I saw a very, very interesting art exhibit at the LA Museum of Contemporary Art. A group of artists had convinced Aaron Spelling to let them insert various symbolically significant props into the show. There was a pillow that showed up in some bedroom scenes, for instance, that had pictures of condoms all over it. Every container of alcohol that appeared in the season when they were doing this was redone to make it symbollically linked to its role in the plot. When somebody did something stupid after drinking, for instance, their beer cans were of "Be Wiser" rather than "Budweiser". After appearing there, they were moved to the top shelf of the bar that served as a hangout for the characters. More amazingly, the height of stacked glasses and pitchers on the middle shelf of the bar formed a bar graph (and the pun was deliberate) of average per-capital alcohol consumption in the U.S. since the revolution, and the bottles on the bottom shelf were matched with the next shelf up and had labels relevant to public perceptions and attitudes toward drinking at that time. It was pretty amazing, especially considering that the viewers had pretty much no chance of figuring all that stuff out.
The take home lesson, though, is that sometimes people really do hide things in TV shows.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Maybe Kubrick was thinking about a sex-change operation?!
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
There are so many allegories and insights to be gained from watching this film that to undertake writing a book about them is almost a superhuman endeavour.
Similarly, if we find a man named Balthazar in a novel and later on meet his two buddies Melchior and Gaspar, then we're more likely to flag it as a biblical reference; if the Balthazar is isolated it could more likely be that the author pulled it out of a baby book or telephone book. Sometimes the opposite happens: Fahrenheit 451, a novel about a society without books, has two characters named Montag (a paper manufacturer) and Faber (a pencil manufacturer). Bradbury swears it off as a coincidence! But how do we know for sure...?
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
This sounds suspiciously like the people that watch The Wizard of Oz timed to music with Pink Floyd's The Wall.
Coincidence? Probably. You can find hidden meaning in anything, if you spend enough time looking for it. This post is no exception.
Not everything is a conspiracy.
NO CARRIER
If you try hard enough, you can find connections between just about anything.
I took a couple of English courses throughout University for interest sake and I found that this is what English people do. I think the purpose is to maybe find subconscience links from one thing to another. Many connections, like the one between the bathroom tiles and the space stations, aren't necessarily on the conscience level, but the author is looking for a reason the docking stations are hexagonal shaped instead of circular.
Anyway - I had the same problem that you're having, but I think you have to be in the same mindset that the author is. I think this book would be an interesting read and I'd like to check it out sometime.
Like sex? Read and write about it! Indecent Blogging
Let's all keep in mind that kubrick can't be attributed for the creation of the name "Frank Poole" or the label "TMA-1". Sure, perhaps he came up with the hexagonal shape for part of the ship, but the author here is making half-assed 'connections' about a man who only made the filmed version itself, not the darn book. So not only are his connections half-assed, they're being pointed at the genius behind a man who didn't even come up with them.
C++ programmers do it with class.
Perl hackers do it quick and dirty.
C++ programmers do it with class.
Perl hackers do it quick and dirty.
I've gotta learn perl.
Nietzsche once said that the human was a bridge between God and animal. That would explain our schizoid reality to a T. In "Also Sprach Zarathustra", Nietzsche created the myth of the "superman", but never really described him in detail. Somehow we humans would slave away at life until we reached some threshold, then magically, some border would be crossed by some individual to The Next Great Thing. This is what I read into the film after reading Kubrick interviews. Dave Bowman was that superman who finally crossed into the next state of being, the first human to get off that damned bridge to the other side. The confusing ending was symbolic of this Unknown. Rock Hudson supposedly left the film disgusted saying, "will somebody please tell me what that film is about!? Rock, just like you showing your dog your wedding pictures, Kubrick is "showing" us this Great Beyond. IMHO, Clarke screws everything up with his absolutist/literalist overcooking and overexplaining. The hotel scene at the end of the film is ruined by Clarke in his book version. To me the scene is a genial symbolistic dreamscape. The human mind, when given information beyond its comprehension does exactly what a computer does when it mis-calculates some math problem: vaguely recognizable, but totally unreliable stuff comes out. Koans, baby, do your koans! The Nietzsche-man asked Big Questions, probably the biggest ever asked. Seeing a film based on some of the N-man's biggest issues has made me a better person....
--- WWSD? What Would Strider Do?
You're mad. You know that, don't you...
In a similar vein, the British UFO Society recently closed its doors due to the lack of interest.
Gosh. Wonder why. Could be we're basically less mad...
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
And then there's the Douglas Adams thing about the guy who proved that God ddin't exist . . . .
Yeah. But he went on to prove that black = white, and got run over on the next zebra crossing...!
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
The group of artists who created all those works were the GALA committee, which was made up primarily of students and faculty from the University of Georgia and CalArts (hence GA=Georgia LA=Los Angeles). Pictures and video clips of the pieces that made it into the show can be found at the GALA committee website, which has most of them:
http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/projects/mpart/
Another interesting fact- in order to bring attention to the art while Melrose Place was running, the committee created a fictional Melrose fan named "Eliza" who began to notice strange things happening on the sets. "Eliza" documented these anomolies on her website, and was essentially a mole for GALA in order to arouse speculation among the show's fans.
An archive of the mole's website is at:
http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/projects/mpart/eliza/
Experts agree: everything is fine.
A few other things in the movie about this.
1. The child travelling down the road to hell (the long hallway sceens on the tricycle)
2. Multiple murders in differnt time frames.
3. Pictures on the walls: Both having images of previous caretakers and in the end with the picture of Jack.
4. Many of the cut scenes in the end. Particularly the man in a yellow dog suit giving a blowjob. According to kubrick the dog was very symbolic but I think it coulda been cut and I never woulda known.
Just a little evidence that Krubrick was a crazy enough guy to do something like what the book is saying. After typeing all this out I still gotta agree that the bathroom tile thing is a little bit off.
Pithy, yet ultimately meaningless, phrase expressed with gusto!
Every container of alcohol that appeared in the season when they were doing this was redone to make it symbollically linked to its role in the plot.
$ ln -s alcohol plot ;-)
--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
An interesting thing about Kubrick is that he almost always adapted books. IIRC, "Paths of Glory" was his last work not based on a book. And it was based on a historical incident.
Kubrick was good at getting his usual themes out of whatever books he chose to adapt. That is part of why his "Lolita" and "Shining" are so different from the books.
Two is not equal to three, not even for very large values of two.
The creator only knows what the piece of art means to them, it means somthing different to everybody and just because the creator is the *creator* doesn't mean their view is 'right':)
I know alot of people bitch(*) about how much other people read into works which, when you think about it, really were not 'meant' to have that much read into them. But after alot of this sort of protracted analysis in my literature course I have come to think of the intense analysing and abstracting of countless layers of allegory and metaphore to be a kind of mental excersise. It's not that we are doing these things because we think the author actually meant us to see such relations with their work, but because we can use that piece of art as a base upon which to superimpose countless other things and to through it see those other things in a different light or simply to mess about with our ideas a bit.
(*) I'm not saying the post that I am replying to was, just incase you read that.
// It had been Fat's delusion for years that he could help people. --Philip K. Dick, Valis
1. The book is not based on the film. It was released later, but both projects were developed at the same time, with lots of cooperation between the two.
2. Kubrick was reading a lot of Jung at the time, so a lot of the shapes did matter... just not the ones that this reviewer seems to be focused on. The Pod looks like an egg because Bowen is soon to be "born" as the Star Child. (Hence, the stargate scene, which is essentially passage into the "womb".)
3. HAL was, by far, the most human personality on board the ship. This was to show that man had become more machine-like as machines began to seem more human.
4. Yes, the voyage was based somewhat on Homer's Oddessey. All I can say to that observation is, "duh!"
5. No Trojan Horses were anywhere to be found in the story. The astronauts were not Greeks trying to invate the Trojan moon... They were primates, mirroring the experience of the monkeys during the first chapter of the film: discovering the monolith (during a period of isolation and exile, brought about by conflict with another tribe... the monkeys were kicked out of the watering hole; the astronauts were quarentined in order to keep their project a secret from the Russians), not knowing what to make of it, and finally, deriving inspiration from it to move on to their next phase of evolution.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
All good art, i.e., art that stands the test of time, has a large degree of ambiguity in it to allow for various forms of interpretation and meaning. That is part of what gives it value.
I think the book says more about the author than the subject. Boy is he deep and intelligent. I can't wait for his brainy analysis of Brittany Spears lyrics and how they are derived from Greek Philosophy AND quantum physics. You can PROVE this by rearranging the letters in the words to Baby Hit Me One More Time. It's soo obvious.....
On the other hand, I wonder what "Bluto" means. Why not "Brutus"?
Happens when you analyze any book/movie/creative work. Where do you draw the line between what the author might have been thinking and your own twisted imagination? -Rahul
Genebrew
Leonard F Wheat = Deft anal whore
Linux advocates are in a no Win situation
Not liek Stan is around to comment, agree or refute the ideas suggested in this book. Maybe this author should have published a little sooner. I am sure that If Kubrick were around today this book would not be in print - as the editor would have sent it to Kubrick and heard nothing bu chuckles on the other end. A little too convenient not to have him around. IMHO
An aquaintence of mine wrote a small program that will search the entire text of the bible and will find any phrase you give it hidden as 'bible code', similar to to the book of the same name which pruports to find all kinds of hidden messages. My aquaintence wrote it as a method of debunking such claims.
The problem with debunking absolutely everything is that there are probably some very genuine mathematical puzzles out there left to us by older civilizations, that may well be 'pooh poohed' and grouped with the rest of the nonsense, and we will have missed learning some interesting information about that civilization or religious context.
Precious truth may have been dilluted with an ocean of gibberish. Finding those gems and getting people to believe you is not going to be easy.
Mike Massee
This may seem like nit picking. Does anybody know the name of the original short story by Clarke? I have seen the movie far greater then 'n' times and read the book a few times too. Unfortunately I have not seen the reference to the original story. Any ideas. I would love to read it to determine how many of the naming ideas were Clarke's and just what Kubrick conjoured up!
I like the clever "send me money" gimick. But what do you mean about "this post?" One of the main points in the post is that the author of the 2001 book often grasps at straws. But I don't see where the post does so.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Why does 2001 resemble a few other Kubrick films? Duh! Because, as I pointed out, it was a CO-DEVELOPMENT.
Likewise, I could ask you why does 2001 resemble a few other ACC books.
As for 2010, PLEASE make sure you know which one you are talking about there - the BOOK (the original) is pretty good.
The FILM, however, (filmed after the book was written and NOT a co-development like 2001, but a mere "adaptation") is utter shite by comparison.
If you read the book then watch the film, you'll notice they make a lot of changes which completely alter the background ideas.
e.g. that final message which HAL forwards to Earth.
In the book, the message is "All these worlds are yours save Europa: attempt no landing there.".
Pretty obvious. The Monoliths are up to something with Europa and don't want us interfering, but we can do what we like with the rest and they pretyt much don't care what we get up to (reasons for that become apparant in 3001).
However, in the FILM, they spoil it completely by having the message read
"All these worlds are yours except Europa. Use them together, use them in peace".
I mean, come ON! The Monoliths care not one jot about Man, let alone whether we play nicely with each other or wipe each other out.
Part of me hopes for a film of 3001, but having seen how Hollywood ruined 2010, part of me hopes it never happens!
(And both parts of me hope there is never a film of 2061 as that was rather a letdown compared ot the other 3).
--
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
2001 is NOT a "Kubrick" story.
2001 was mainly written by Arthur C Clarke, in conjunction with Kubrick when they decided to make "the proverbial good Sci Fi film".
The book was written at the same time as the screenplay (although as the film was developed, certain limitations meant some changes to the script which were not reflected in the book. For example, in the book, they visit Saturn not Jupiter, purely because Kubrick didn't feel his special effects team could make a convincing Saturn backdrop. As ACC hilself says later, he was glad that turned out to be the case because of Europa).
I wish people would get their facts straight and not go round claiming 2001 was Kubrick's story! It was a collaboration (sp?), with the main story coming from ACC.
--
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
Of course, Eco's profession is semiotics, so it is his job to find signs. Kubrick did have very deep films, but some of the connections this reviewer is drawing seem to be a bit of a reach.
Ceci n'est pas un post
Are TMA. I am the first born in my family and I was born in 1969. TMA-ONE. PH3ar my sk!11z.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Fair enough (particularly with respect to elaborate constructed interpretations like this one). But it can still be interesting to consider what other people have concluded, especially other people who have been able to devote substantial time, effort, and insight to the study of a particular piece. Reading a review is never a substitute for interpreting a work of art ourselves, but an thoughtful review can add dimension to our own vantage point, by highlighting details or similes that we might have missed, and raising questions we might have overlooked. And of course, in some cases there are contextual clues that a specialist can reveal -- for example, deliberate Biblical or Shakespearean allusions are often lost on today's audience, which is less familiar with these works than the audiences of yesteryear.
I've found works of criticism useful on various occasions. I agree it's no substitute for our primary experience, and I think many people use the criticism of others as a substitute for their own aesthetic; but I wouldn't dismiss all (most, perhaps, but not all!) criticism as wasted breath.
That being said, I find this particular type of criticism -- which tries to explain a work of art through elaborately contrived allegories, anagrams, metaphors, etc. as if a series of coincidences represent the author's intention -- generally to be uninteresting. As Freud reportedly said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." As another comment pointed out here, if you look hard enough for patterns, you can always find them, and you can make them support any conclusion you like. This is true in art and in life.
JMHO -- Trevor
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
HAL isn't IBM moved down one letter each. It's Hueristic ALgorithm. -- jokrswild
But HAL *is* IBM moved down one letter each, regardless of the author's intent. Just because an author doesn't consciously intend something as an allusion doesn't make the connection invalid. Literature is full of accidental allusions and metaphors that add to the richness of the enclosing works.
Remember that the creative process is mysterious and complex, and we use many subconscious elements when writing, composing, painting, etc. Only a soulless, mechanical author would write by deliberately and systematically selecting images and themes to underlie a work. Good authors are often surprised to find parallels and echoes in their works, pointed out by their serious readers, which on reflection they realize must have been part of how those works evolved in their minds, and why those particular images struck the author as powerful and evocative.
Which is not to say that every coincidental detail has meaning. Obviously, you can easily read too much into something. But it is pointless (IMO) to say "the author didn't mean *this*, he meant *that*, because that's what he said in the introduction." There are plenty of good authors who admit they have no clue about how and why they construct their images they way they do; and plenty of others (T S Eliot comes to mind) who have deliberately misled the public about their sources and intent, chuckling long afterward about the lies they've told.
Is it significant that HAL is so similar to IBM? I dunno. But if you were a writer, who spent ten hours a day whacking away typing prose, who's to say what connections your fingers and brain might subconsciously make about a three-letter acronym? And besides, regardless of the author's intent, this image is part of the audience's consciousness, and affects how we react to the work. A work of art stands on its own, regardless of the author's intent (this is part of what makes it art). Of course, there's a valid discussion to have about whether 2001 can stand up to comparison with great works of art; perhaps it's simply not as internally rich. But that is beside the point.
JMHO -- Trevor
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
Pardon my bad manners in replying to my own post, but let me hasten to add that nothing in my above comment should be taken as support of the critic's extravagent conclusions, e.g. the Frank Poole anagram. I find that kind of coincidence-mapping totally boring -- like numerology or phrenology. As another poster observed, you can find a coincidence to support any ridiculous claim. What's the difference between a silly coicidence and a profound allegory? It's obviously in the eye of the beholder, with a smattering of common sense. So: images of Odysseus? Yeah, I can see that, it's part of our Zeitgeist. Frank Poole? I don't think so.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
Yes, the bathroom-tile man-machine argument sounds pretty 'out there'; however, there is a long tradition of books attempting to connect-up seemingly dispirate myths, legends, stories and poems. Taken in abstract, Robert Graves's claim that the stories of Jesus and Hercules are different versions of the same myth, sounds mad. Perhaps it is, but Graves's justification takes a few hundred pages and is pretty convincing. By the time he goes into how theories of accretion can pollute oral narratives and the effect of the written-word in making particular versions of stories more canonical than others, he's made a point.
Fact is, Wheat wasn't the first nor will he be the last. Sir James Frazer's 'The Golden Bough', Joseph Campbell's 'The Hero With a Thousand Faces', etc, etc, etc, are all equally mad. But each of them is attempting to do something very human and touching: they are attempting to detect some order, sanity, ration and reason in an otherwise pretty random and chaotic world -- just as Kubrick was doing, just as Homer was doing...
The problem is that anything where you've got a long voyage with people being killed looks like the the Odessey. Greg Egan's The Plank Dive has an offhand comment about these sort of myths being strange attractors for pre-literate stories.
"So what are those claims? Alot of it makes good sense. For instance, Dave Bowman relates to Ulysses ... He goes on a long voyage and loses all his crew. Pretty neat so far, but Wheat tends to go to far in some of his claims." That's just about it for the claims discussion that doesn't have to do with proving to us how wacked Mr Wheat is. Pretty disappointing for a review intro'd by Timothy that ends with a statement that A Triple Allegory is one of the "most unusual books about a science-fiction movie that you are likely to encounter. Ever."
More reality, less promotion, pls. Readers don't have infinite time.
"Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design
This dude missed a few TMA-ONE interpretations:
NATO ME - the monolith is discovered in the Cold War posturing between the West and the Iron Curtain, and this is Kubrick's way of downing Communism
A MONTE - referring to a popular game show at the time, and that the monolith was at various times in the movie under a curtain marked number two, and behind a door marked number three
OAT MEN - Quaker paid Kubrick for subliminal advertizing
Check all the others here
Anybody want a peanut?
A few things. HAL isn't IBM moved down one letter each. It's Hueristic ALgorithim. (yeah, I probably spelled it wrong). Clarke even states that in one of his books. Also, even though the book came out AFTER the movie, doesn't mean the book is based on the movie. Clarke and Kubric worked together on alot of it. The reason that Kubric used Jupiter instead of Clarke's Saturn is because the Special Effects department couldn't come up with a convicing Saturn in Kubric's mind. So there. TMA-ONE = NO MEAT? um. yeah, sure. Tycho Magnetic Anomoly. The first one, actually. There's a TMA-0 in his later books, on earth! hah! Read the books. Good books.
I used to be really into Twin Peaks and spent lotsa time on USEnet (or was it FIDOnet?) to discuss meanings of the episodes. Well, it got pretty far out, to say the least. For example, someone noticed that all the 3 digit hotel room numbers which were ever shown, added up to 12. Since David Lynch is a ment, it made perfect sense that he did this on purpose. Then there were all the anagrams, like 'Agent Cooper' == 'One Great Cop'.
And this never ended. The more people looked into it, the more strange shit came out. Some (me included) started speculating wether this all happened subconsciously for David Lynch. That maybe he didn't even know, but somehow he couldn't help adding twistedness to the script. And just like Mr. Lampe says here, I really got caught up in the looney evindence and lost perspective completely.
I guess that paterns and similarities are all over the place, you just gotta look hard enough. Just like adding the ASCII values of the letters in Bill Gates name and it equals 666. It just doesn't prove anything.
-Kraft
-Kraft
Live and let live
Melchior? Belthasar? Gaspar?
>Chrono Trigger
Reminds me of an anecdote from one of my critical theory classes: A prominent Folklorist designed a mathematical equation to determine whether folk-stories represented actual events or reflected mythological archetypes. A character in a folk story would "score points" for things like military prowess, greater than human stature, etc. It was a very complex equation, subtley and pains-takingly crafted.
Using this equation, it's been proven that Abraham Lincoln never existed historically, that in fact he was a mythological construct.
And then there's the Douglas Adams thing about the guy who proved that God ddin't exist . . . .
Your facts on the Illiad are right. Also, "ankle poor" reminds one of Oedipus, whose name after all translates as "swollen foot." (Although my greek isn't flawless.) "Frank Poole" yields many potentially meaningful anagrams:
Flop one ark: clearly refers to the potential danger to the ship in the movie
Freak'n' Polo!: Odysseus was noted for hating water-polo.
Porno Flake: Obviously refering to HAL's voyeuristic tendencies.
Lo! Fake porn!: Foreshadowing Kubrick's final movie.
OK elf apron: It was rumoured widely at the time that Santa Claus' elves were hired to work as gaffers and key grips for 2001.
No rape folk: The real reason all the scientists were locked up and frozen, to keep Dave from going buggy on their booties.
Lake of porn: the real reason the the obelisks were protecting Jupiters moon -- their grrrly magazines were hidden under its frozen surface.
I could keep going indefinately, but I've probably already made my point and made everybody who's read this permanantly dumber already. Might as well quit while we're ahead . . . .
nt
This reminds me quite a lot of Erich von Daniken. He did things like take the different measurements of pyramids, multiply them together, take square and cube roots wildly until he got a number that could be construed as similar to some astronomical measurement, and then claim that as proof that the "ancients" had an incredibly advanced knowledge of astronomy. No, it's just proof that one set of numbers can be transformed into something similar to another (arbitrary) set by using lots of mathematical operations.
Same thing here. If you try hard enough, you can find connections between just about anything. That proves nothing, however, beyond the creativity of the person coming up with the "connections".
--
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
There's a real history among academics of finding meaning in grains of sand, etc., going back to Medieval scholasticism. Sounds like your guy fits right in. If you really want to lose your mind, read Robert (I, Claudius) Graves "The White Goddess." Then read his "King Jesus." Talk about endless connnections.
wags
I would say that the article in Cinefex pretty well debunks most of the symbolism that is being attributed to the movie. The special effects crew involved in the film recount how many of the "symbols" planted in the movie were accidents or experimentation. That Kubrick would not be involved in the creation of most of the effects elements except in a "I like it" or "I hate it" final approval.
For those interested in movie special effects this article is a goldmine. They invented techniques never before seen on the big screen for this movie. Computer displays and wireframe models before you could just whip it out in a few hours on a graphical workstation. Thousands of hours spend using a photographic animation stand to create the classic computer monitors on the Discovery. A technical description of how they created the stargate light show at the end of the film using a variation of time lapse photography.
Obviously 2001 has alagorical elements built into it, but lets not go overboard. Sometime a cigar is just a cigar people.
*****
Just think of it as evolution in action.
... that the author sat on this book for six years, waiting until a bit after Kubrik's death so Stan couldn't tell him how full of it he is?
"So what are those claims? Alot of it makes good sense. For instance, Dave Bowman relates to Ulysses (a reknowned bowman in the myths)."
While I agree that there is a lot in common between A Space Odyssey and Homer's original (just look at the title!), I think this is taking it a little too far. If Clarke really wanted to do what this author is suggesting, why not call him "Dave Archer?"
"These letters, like the last nine in Frank Poole, can be rearranged to form an anagram. In this case, the anagram is "No Meat." A wooden horse has no meat on its skeletal framework."
Yeah, so? It also spells "toe man" and "no team" and "M... neato." Besides, the Trojan Horse had a lot of meat (in the form of the Greeks inside of it).
"But why the hexagons? Why not circles or squares or nothing?"
Because curved surfaces aren't justified, while using a cube would result in something that looks a little too much like a Tinker Toy.
"The rear-end hexagons are bathroom tiles! They symbolize bathrooms."
Exactly how far up his own ass did he have to reach to pull this one out? This makes those goat sex pics look tame in comparison!
"Hal-Discovery has three bathrooms, one for each mouth"
Um... how do you figure three? Is this "the new math?" And HAL is no more Discovery than Windows is my computer.
"It reminds us how good human minds, especially smart ones, are at finding patterns in crazy shit."
So, what you're saying is that this book is an example of how far computing needs to go before it catches up with human pattern-recognition skills?
"Wheat has the premise that Kubrick was so wicked smart that these long strings of meaning are not only possible, they are a sure thing."
Then perhaps he should sit down and write his next few books on "Dr. Strangelove," "Full Metal Jacket," and "Eyes Wide Shut." If Kubrik was half as smart as the author suggests, then he might be able to find the meaning of life in these movies.
"You also come away with the sense that Wheat is a pretty smart man himself."
Using big words makes you smart. Right. Or should I say "Utilizing unwieldy verbage demonstrates one's superior intellect?"
author has it dead wrong. This is one of those times. No thinking required in this case.
Spell out the figure '1' and you get TMA-ONE. These letters, like the last nine in Frank Poole, can be rearranged to form an anagram. In this case, the anagram is "No Meat." A wooden horse has no meat on its skeletal framework."
There's as much truth to that as your average psycic reading. One can make hundreds of true, but random statements about an object, such as a horse, and surely find that some of them are anagrams toward some related idea.
Firstly, there is no justification for spelling 1 as "One". 1 means 1, and if if Mr. Kubrik really meant "one", he should have spelled it out himself.
Secondly, the Trojan Horse was NOT a skeletal framework. I suppose its wooden walls could be viewed as "meat", in fact, but this is all just nonsense... The guy's a Quack.
Unfortunately, too many people start to believe what they read just because it's in black and white. That is why Kubrick stopped filming in black and white after Dr. Strangelove. Never again did he film in anything but Technicolor, which adds layers and layers of complexity to his films.
UFOs are real, and Kubrick knew it. They are slip-streaming from exactly 1521 years in the future (1521 being the biblical number of the Oracle Beast) to both aid and destroy us. Kubrick discovered this in his research and was nearly killed by Clarke, who helped mastermind the conspiracy.
Don't believe me? Check out these facts. Haven't you ever used a spork? When you come to your senses, join the truth-seekers at MUFON.
Slashdot: power trips for hypocrites
This reminds me of decoding Paul is dead messages on Beatles covers in college. None of the general thrust of 2001 is less than 31 years old, although the anagrams and hexagons may be new. It's like Homer's Odessey, and it says so in the title. (But let's not forget Leopold Bloom! Maybe Kubrick was a Joyce nut too). Zarathustra? Gee, ya think? Also Sprach Zarathustra is only the overpowering theme music, played over and over again. Man/machine symbiosis, is again, as plain as the nose on Jimmy Durante's face. It's Frankenstein, Prometheus etc. all over again. All of this is so plainly obvious that it can't possibly be news to nerds. Everyone who paid the slightest attention knew all this three decades ago. 2001 is one of the top movies ever made not because of these out front allegories, but because it uses these allegories to draw a picture that is a contemplation of consciousness, and it means just what you can get out of it, and unquestionably it means different things to different people. HAL is the murdering child/frankenstein. The sequels kinda cheapen the impact of HAL by explaining why he went nuts. Wasn't it a lot better as a Rorasch test to speculate why HAL went bad. (Star Trek TNG did a cute send up of this with Data/Lor) What does the aging of Bowman as he watches himself Buddah-like, evoke?
I think it's important that the reader find his/her own meaning in any work of art. Stop trying to find the, Absoulte/True/God/No one can mess with meaning, ..and interpret it for yourself.