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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.
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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...
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".
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
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.
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.
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
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?
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 ;-)
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Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Google solves it again... giving us this link: MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT 2001
There, you can find this text:
The space voyage begins, and Dave Bowman - Zarathustra - becomes the central figure. Dave's colleague, Frank Poole, symbolizes the rope dancer (tightrope walker), a character in an important parable in Zarathustra. One clue to Poole's allegorical identity is that the last nine of the ten letters of [F]rank Poole are an anagrammatical rearrangement of the last nine of the ten letters of "[W]alk on rope"; another clue is that Frank, like the rope dancer, is killed by an entity symbolizing God who sneaks up behind him; a third clue is that Zarathustra (Bowman) picks up the rope dancer's (Poole's) body and later disposes of it. Next, Zarathustra and God clash, and Zarathustra kills God (Bowman shuts down Hal's brain). The words "Beyond the Infinite" flash on to the screen. You undoubtedly gave those words a spatial meaning, but Kubrick gives them a temporal meaning. "Beyond" means after, and "the infinite" is one of theologian Paul Tillich's names for God. "Beyond the infinite" means "after God " - after the death of God (Hal).
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ACid
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ACid
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?
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
"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?"
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.