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Stanley Kubrick Explains The '2001: A Space Odyssey' Ending In A Rare, Unearthed Video (esquire.com)
When it was originally released in 1968, audiences didn't really know what to make of "2001: A Space Odyssey". In fact, 250 critics walked out of the New York premiere, literally asking aloud, "What is this bullshit?"
[...] Stanley Kubrick himself was always hesitant to offer an explanation of the ending, once telling Playboy, "You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film -- and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level -- but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point." But, in a bizarre video, which appeared recently, the director seems to provide a very simple and clear explanation of the "2001: A Space Odyssey" ending. Esquire: It comes from a Japanese paranormal documentary from TV personality Jun'ichi Yaio made during the filming of The Shining. The documentary was never released, but footage was sold on eBay in 2016 and conveniently appeared online this week timed with the movie's 50th anniversary. Kubrick says in the interview: I've tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out. When you just say the ideas they sound foolish, whereas if they're dramatized one feels it, but I'll try. The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by god-like entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form. They put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life passes from that point on in that room. And he has no sense of time. It just seems to happen as it does in the film.
They choose this room, which is a very inaccurate replica of French architecture (deliberately so, inaccurate) because one was suggesting that they had some idea of something that he might think was pretty, but wasn't quite sure. Just as we're not quite sure what do in zoos with animals to try to give them what we think is their natural environment. Anyway, when they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth, transformed and made into some sort of superman. We have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, and that is what we were trying to suggest.
[...] Stanley Kubrick himself was always hesitant to offer an explanation of the ending, once telling Playboy, "You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film -- and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level -- but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point." But, in a bizarre video, which appeared recently, the director seems to provide a very simple and clear explanation of the "2001: A Space Odyssey" ending. Esquire: It comes from a Japanese paranormal documentary from TV personality Jun'ichi Yaio made during the filming of The Shining. The documentary was never released, but footage was sold on eBay in 2016 and conveniently appeared online this week timed with the movie's 50th anniversary. Kubrick says in the interview: I've tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out. When you just say the ideas they sound foolish, whereas if they're dramatized one feels it, but I'll try. The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by god-like entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form. They put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life passes from that point on in that room. And he has no sense of time. It just seems to happen as it does in the film.
They choose this room, which is a very inaccurate replica of French architecture (deliberately so, inaccurate) because one was suggesting that they had some idea of something that he might think was pretty, but wasn't quite sure. Just as we're not quite sure what do in zoos with animals to try to give them what we think is their natural environment. Anyway, when they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth, transformed and made into some sort of superman. We have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, and that is what we were trying to suggest.
When people are still trying to figure out what your decades old movie was about.. it might some be bad writing/directing.
I've tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out. When you just say the ideas they sound foolish, whereas if they're dramatized one feels it ...
Yep. He should have tried just a bit harder. This adds nothing to a great film.
Anyone who wanted to know more could have just read the damn book.
Not saying it's "correct," but I liked this interpretation of the monolith:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
TL:DW - It's the movie screen. When it's shown on the lunar surface, it looks like it's in the middle of a movie set. When Dave encounters it in space near the end, it's horizontal, and when it tilts backwards the camera mimics it.
However one doesn't have great expectations of Americans, so perhaps Kubrick should have dumbed it down. ;)
Geez.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Who cares? It's an awful movie once you strip away the special effects.
Literally no plot, huge long, boring scenes. It's awful.
If you were to remove the soundtrack as well, you'd see how damn boring some of those space-scenes are.
The ending was always quite obvious in intent, but terrible in execution.
I've slightly misinterpreted the sequence, but was happy to go with the flow; the point about him ending up as a some sort of super being was obvious; the fact that the French style environment was right was something that I hadn't picked up. I pleased to have got the extra data, but I was happy with where I was in interpreting it; I'd got enough to cope.
I guess the problem was this was seriously groundbreaking, so Kubrick was speaking a totally new language. I first saw it 10 years after its release, so it was probably less challenging by then.
It seems to me that Interstellar has a number of similarities with 2001. TARS could quite easily be seen as the Monolith in active form, and the ending of Interstellar was very much these "god-like beings" trying to operate within the confines of a human frame of reference.
The bit Interstellar seems to add is that the beings are us, evolved from the future. I seem to recall that being explicit in the film but haven't seen in a while so could be misremembering. That's definitely the impression I got though. I always thought about 2001's ending in the manner Kubrick described, in part because I read the book but mostly because I thought it seemed clear the direction it was guided in - am surprised it was considered an unknown and matter for debate.
You could simply read the book.
Relax. Don't do it. When you want to go to it.
Relax. Don't do it. When you want to come.
Want me to explain that to you? Maybe with some French architectural imagery? Laser beams? Cheesy 60s' colour tunnels? I can! I will! Just ask me how much I love you! You are starlight! I'm Galileo!
I think the underrated "2010: The year we make contact" pretty much wraps up the 2001 story and explains everything while being a decent sci-fi movie on its own right. Definitely a recommended watch after 2001. Sure, not groundbreaking, but also no sequences that test the audience nerves/patience like in 2001 (referring of course to the start ape sequence and the approaching the monolith psychedelia).
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
The allegory - like Johnny in the Shining - is about secretly working for the ruling elite and being molded into one of them.
But I read the book. (In fact, I had gotten both the English original and a Dutch translation from the local library when I was a teenager. Started with mostly the translation, ended with mostly the original.) This description seems to match my impression from back when. Curious, a movie that actually matches the book reasonably well.
But anyway, what is it with Americans and needing things explained to them? Eg. The Devil's Advocate could do without the flames and feathers at the end. If it wasn't obvious by then, you been asleep with your eyes open, mate?
If you have to explain it because MILLIONS of people for decades have no idea what it was about, you did a shitty job of telling story.
Nice visuals though, someone should have hired him as a video designer. That seems to be the top extent of his skill.
It's not such a mystery, humans evolving to their next form, Homo Superior.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Well, it's on the internet now, so no longer rare, right?
250 people the world would have been better off without
This movie took a book with a decent story, mixed in liberal amounts of hallucinogens and an artist. The result was a masterpiece of art, but it completely went off the rails on the story. If you thought anything but "It was beautiful at points, and horribly boring everywhere else... WTF did I just watch?" after seeing this hot mess, then you are just fooling yourself.
...just read the book, the whole concept is quite clear.This novel has been critically analyzed many times, there's no real mystery,or story here.The real story is the current lack of talented writing. Are there no more real science fiction authors still producing anything of worth? Given all the people alive now, it seems the best comes from the past and the current system is so corrupt as to be incapable of producing anything of quality.
By Arthur C Clarke. Except a lot more detail on the transformation, why and relationship to monolith.
Why is this a new revelation? Kubrick and Clarke worked closely together on 2001 resulting in arguable best film/book combo ever.
Slashdot clearly needs to use the "hosts file engine" to prevent him from spamming all over the place. After all, it gets 99% of threats!
If you have to explain it because MILLIONS of people for decades have no idea what it was about, you did a shitty job of telling story.
Here's the solution: Read the novel that was released concurrently with the movie. A two hour film will focus mainly on visuals and storytelling, and can't go into too much detail about "meaning". You need to read the book for that.
It is not so difficult. At the beginning of the movie, monkeys interact with the monolith and become "humans". So they become something that they could not comprehend. At the end of the movie, it is the same for Dave. He becomes something the we (as humans) cannot comprehend.
The "human zoo" may make sense for the aliens that built the monolith. However, I do not think that Dave, after this process, becomes "Superman". Superman character is concerned about humanity destiny. Dave becomes something that could be not interested at all in us.
I once spoke with an artists about some modern painting he made. I asked him what it was. He told me that it did not matter what he thought it was. What was important was what _I_ thought it was.
I hear the same with songwriters. Even if the words are pretty clear, the meaning it can have for each person will be different. I could be the song you fist heard with the love of your life. Or reminds you of a great time with friends.
As movies are art, this goes for many movies as well. If I see or feel anything the makers of the movies did not intend, does not make my feelings and ideas about the movie false, just different.
I am sure Kubrick thought along those lines and that is why he (almost) never spoke what the meaning was. Here he just explains what it was meaning to him. So if you do not agree with him, that is ok. It would have made him happy. Otherwise he would have give the answer many, many, many times before.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I have ended?
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOOOO! MOOOOOO! Moo cows MOOOOOO! Moo say the cows. MY GOD, IT'S FULL OF COWS!!
captcha: contact
Not if the director is any good you don't.
Yeah, but long sequences of waiting for stuff is what real life in space is about.
Life isn't a MTV video with a jump cut every 1.5 seconds.
I guess the problem was this was seriously groundbreaking, so Kubrick was speaking a totally new language.
That's one possibility. However, I tend to get rather sceptical about these "Emperor's new clothes"-type of arguments that if you don't understand it you are just stupid. My personal interpretation was a lot more pragmatic: they had no clue how to really end the film so they strung together some ambiguous BS and used the old "it's your interpretation that matters, not mine" cop-out to escape having to explain it. I guess that's why I'm a scientist and not an artist.
I am happy to see my own thoughts about the film confirmed by the director himself.
But I for one am glad that the ending was left like that; other books I have read always end in a beach scene, because that seems to be the easiest thing for an alien or advanced civilization to recreate. But to put that in 2001 would mean that production exceeded their budget.
I would have preferred a run-down hotel room (like the apartment in Dark City) but that's just me.
I'd still watch the re-run, since it reflected the optimism that space travel could have been. Commercial space travel? We're seventeen years behind schedule, but hey, we've got to start somewhere. There will be a microwave in that shuttle, (like Discovery had a fax machine!) but each astronaut would have brought different items to cook e.g. enchilada, a breakfast bowl, ramen, etc.) All of them know about the coffeemaker on the space station that makes espresso
Just as I do with Interstellar.
Same for The Shining and the Adler typewriter?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
So, you think that any movie you've seen but haven't understood is the fault of the director? Nice fantasy you've constructed for yourself...
Kubrick's explanation wasn't necessary because the book had already presented the ending with a thorough treatment and a complete explanation.
It does not appear that the author of this article actually read the book.
Kriston
I first saw 2001 on DVD, and even fast forwarding through the psychedelic color tunnel at the end was boring with how long it took. If so many people are asking what the end of your movie means, it means you did a bad job portraying your vision. Acting smug about it doesn't help.
Maybe it was lost. Now it's found. It's not "rare".
I saw the movie when it came out (I'm old), read the book, and every few years since I've reread the book and re-seen the movie. They're both excellent, but I think the book is better, and I often think a movie should be made that tracks the book more clearly and closely. I'd also say that story elements that Clarke talks about in the book "Lost Worlds of 2001" would make fine additions to a movie remake.
I'm going to get flamed but I didn't like the movie too much.
Or rather it was filled with "space", both literally and figuratively.
I know some people like just watching a guy jog around a circular station for 10 minutes but I find it annoying.
That seems to be true for all Kubric's movies in my opinion.
They are overlong and underplot.
Do artists in general think that there is only one idea and I have to be psychic to get what they are thinking or I can make up my own mind?
How does Kubric deal with that conundrum?
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
I managed to get this more-or-less as described when I first saw it in a movie house when I was 10, in fact, it seemed fairly obvious. The sequence that didn't make much sense o ring true was the "wormhole" sequence - you could more-or-less figure out what was supposed to be happening (being transported across the galaxy) but it's looked completely unnatural. It was probably due to technical limitations, but "Contact" did it much better. And it was clearly the product of the era - the era of hippies and LSD. Hallucinations do not make for good story-telling. But the hotel sequence and the "space baby" concept was, I thought, pretty straightforward.
That aside, the rest of the movie was a tour de force technically, and was a decent story, told reasonably well, with OK acting for the most part. Part of the spin on it was that the astronauts and people around the space program (at the time) tended to be, or appear, to be dull as dishwater, which seems to have led all the actors to underplaying their roles. In fact, having met several of the eras astronauts, I can easily guess who was the model for Dave Bowman. The real astronauts were really interesting people, they were whitewashed by PR and Life magazine to be about as interesting, as a group, as insurance adjusters. Michael Collins book tells the real, and far more interesting and compelling, story - which is more-or-less exactly what you would expect from a bunch of military fighter jocks tossed into that sort of scrutiny,
It all seemed perfectly clear to me what was happening and nothing I just read in TFA was any sort of revelation to me. Do people really have a hard time understanding what was going on there?
Of course, what he says is almost identical to what I was thinking when I walked out after having seen it when it was released in '69: "he's become the starchild, and he's looking at the Earth, and thinking that he didn't yet know what, but he was going to do something with it."
Of course, I'd been seriously reading sf for about 8 or 9 years at the time, so it was obvious what he was saying.
The reviewers said exactly what I expected of them, because they didn't have a f*ckin' clue, and wouldn't ever be seen actually, y'know, reading *genre fiction* like sf....
I thought for a second that Kubrick was back from the dead, maybe helped by Jon Snow's Melissandre
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
That's Mr. Psychedelic to you!
For five minutes we will speak nothing but the truth!
Regardless, you have en
The explanation he gives is pretty much the understanding I had of the ending, with the exception that he was being sent back to earth as a super-being. Maybe it seemed straightforward to me because it is the simple explanation, and I was about 10yo when I first saw it in the theaters.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Now do the Sopranos, please.
Was there something that said to the effect of "This movie gives an incomplete version of the meaning. There is an accompanying book you must read for complete understanding."
No? Then there's another reason Kubrick did a shitty job. How was I supposed to divine this additional homework just to understand a movie?
I just bought 2010 for $5. Maybe I paid too much? LOL.
The ending was obvious, and leaving it open to speculation made it art. People need to learn to use their brains. Not everything has a pat answer that someone else has come up with. Sometimes you have to come up with your own answers.
I'm old enough to have seen 2001 when it first came out.
Yes it was confusing to this, then, 12 year old at the time. However, still a brilliant and inspiring movie that remember above all others before or since.
Then I read the book.
I don't recall if the explanation given here comes out the book or what but it's been seen like that for many decades.
Well, at least by me.
I'd also say that story elements that Clarke talks about in the book "Lost Worlds of 2001" would make fine additions to a movie remake.
Mod parent up. I'd love to see some of those elements used in something released too...
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
It is all godlessness.
Energeian Planes!
It seemed pretty obvious that was the idea. I don't get why anyone else found this ambiguous.
To me, the literal plot of 2001 was always a bit of a sideshow to the greater metaphorical messaging. The overall arc of the story is of the journey of mankind from a primitive animal to a fully-realized being. It's helpful to know that the title track is Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (which is a musical setting for the book by Nietzche) and that the child is the last stage of the "Three Metamorphoses" discussed by the title character of the book (the first two are the camel and the lion). Kubrick was well-versed in philosophy and most certainly did not choose the soundtrack and final scene by accident.
In the book, the "camel" is defined by the external burdens it takes on and the fealty to "thou shalt". In these sense, it is very much like a primitive man who was all-consumed with the demands of survival and was unable to create beyond his immediate survival. Finding the first monolith marked the transition from the camel to the lion. The "lion" is able to create for his own, but is still defined in opposition to his burdens. The events in 2001 correspond to humanity in this stage- they can travel to other planets, but are still prisoner to the vast distances and challenges of outer space. The child is freed from all burdens and can truly create anew. The finding of the second monolith marks the transition to the child, which is the state humanity seeks as it ventures away from the planet.
I think the murkiness of the third transition is fully appropriate because it is a vision of the distant future. By the 1960s, the path from primitive human to space-venturer was already clear. But our transition past that remains only a vision. The scene faux-French room I took as a waiting room representing where we were in the 20th century prior to the upcoming metamorphosis and the discombobulation representative of the immense pace of technological and societal change.
As a side note, I never really considered 2010 as a true sequel because it abandoned all philosophical pretense with the departure of Kubrick from the project.
That is exactly what I thought and understood the first time I saw the movie. (It played for years in a row in the same theatre just a few blocks away)
What was the mystery? That part of the movie I felt the viewer was being lead around by the nose!
Black Panther is the BEST movie EVER!
Seriously space odessey who cares..... nothing is more important than the only movie that matters! Black Panther!
My god, it's full of spam!
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First again, like our incredible President Trump. See you again in two years, sir.
About as factually accurate as most of what Trump says.
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Dave: "Open the pod bay doors, Hal."
Hal: "Dave? Dave's not here."
One point often missed is that the book was published *after* the movie. Whatever else, the surprise ending made everyone want to read the book! Clarke made a number of comments in letters to me about 2001 & 2010 - I will now have to dig them out and re-read them :-)
I think we all know the reason it ended up the way it did.
There's no more directors like him. Movie industry it's in a all time low regarding quality or, at least, different and breaking movies like this one.
Since I actually read the book, I know what happened. I'm sure the director read the book, so what he thought happened is also no mystery.
I miss staying up late at night debating and arguing with others about what does it all mean.
mfwright@batnet.com