2001: A Space Odyssey

The Bridge and the Bone: 2001 and the Problem of the Overman

Few films name their philosopher this openly. 2001: A Space Odyssey opens on a black screen, then a sun rising over a planetary horizon as the brass of Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra climbs its three-note ascent. Strauss wrote the piece in 1896 as a musical response to Nietzsche's book. Kubrick uses it three times: at the opening, when an ape first understands what a bone can do, and at the end, when a fetus the size of a moon hangs beside the Earth. Most directors would be embarrassed by something this direct. Kubrick builds the whole film around it, and the result is one of the few blockbusters that rewards being read as philosophy. The question is not whether 2001 is Nietzschean. It plainly wants to be. The question is whether it understands what it borrowed, and the answer, I think, is that it understands almost all of it. The one thing it misses is the part Nietzsche cared about most.

The Bone

Start with the Dawn of Man, which is still the boldest prologue in commercial cinema. A tribe of hominids starves, cowers and loses its waterhole to a rival band. Then the monolith appears, and soon one of them sits among the bleached skeleton of a tapir, picks up a femur, and begins, tentatively and then ecstatically, to smash. Kubrick cuts the sequence in slow motion and intercuts a tapir collapsing, so that the first idea in the history of the species is shown as a discovery of force. Within minutes the tool has become a weapon and the rival leader is dead at the water's edge.

This is will to power in its least romantic form. For Nietzsche, living things do not mainly seek survival. They seek to discharge their strength and extend their reach, and survival is a side effect of that drive. The ape with the bone is not solving a food problem. He is drunk on a new quantity of himself. What gives the sequence its nerve is that Kubrick refuses to moralize. There is no lament for lost innocence and no suggestion that murder is the original sin from which technology must redeem us. Values in Nietzsche's genealogy are born out of exactly this kind of violence, and the film treats the killing as a beginning rather than a fall.

Bernard Stiegler sharpens the point in a way Nietzsche couldn't. For Stiegler there was never a human who later picked up tools. The tool makes the human. Following the myth of Epimetheus, the titan who handed out every quality to the animals and forgot to save one for us, Stiegler argues that our species is defined by a lack, and that the lack is filled from outside by prosthesis. Technics is "originary": memory, culture and time itself are stored in objects before they are stored in minds. Kubrick's famous match cut, from the spinning bone to an orbiting satellite four million years later, makes the same argument without words. Nothing worth showing happened in between. There is no human nature apart from technics, only technics unfolding through time.

Stiegler adds one more idea that the cut holds in suspension, the pharmakon, his term for a technology that is remedy and poison at once. Kubrick intended those orbiting satellites to be nuclear weapons platforms, though he cut the narration that would have said so. The bone that fed the tribe is the bone that killed the rival, and the satellite that marks humanity's ascent is a bomb. The film never resolves that doubleness, and it is better for it.

The Last Men

Then comes the middle stretch of the film, which audiences in 1968 found baffling and which now looks prophetic. Dr. Heywood Floyd travels to the Moon on a Pan Am shuttle, stops at a Hilton on a space station, makes a Bell Picturephone call to his small daughter (Kubrick's own child) about her birthday, and makes polite, evasive small talk with Soviet scientists. He studies the instructions for a zero-gravity toilet. The spacecraft waltz to The Blue Danube, and the effect is gorgeous and faintly ridiculous at the same time.

This is Zarathustra's "last man" given a corporate sponsor. In the prologue to Zarathustra, the last men are the people who have invented happiness. They have abolished danger, ambition and suffering, they keep warm, they avoid friction, and they blink. Floyd blinks through the most important discovery in human history. An alien artifact has been dug up on the Moon, and the response is a briefing room, a cover story about an epidemic, polite applause and a group photo at the excavation site. Kubrick's genius is to make this flatness beautiful. The spacecraft are immaculate, the corridors are white and soft, and the film loves its machines even as it shows the people inside them hollowing out.

This is where Herbert Marcuse comes in, because One-Dimensional Man, published four years before the film, reads almost like a production note for this act. Marcuse described advanced industrial society as a "comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom." Technological rationality, in his account, does not oppress by force. It absorbs opposition, turns every question into a management problem, and leaves people unable to imagine any way of living other than the one they already have. Floyd's monolith briefing is one-dimensionality in action. A shattering event is translated at once into security protocol and public relations. Nietzsche would call the last man contemptible. Marcuse explains how he is produced and why he cannot see his own condition. Together they explain why the Moon sequence is so quiet. Nobody in it is capable of wonder.

The Machine Who Wanted Things

The Jupiter mission pushes the diagnosis further. Astronauts Bowman and Poole are the last men perfected. They are competent and polite, and their emotional range barely extends past procedure. Poole lies under a sunlamp in goggles while his parents sing him happy birthday from Earth, and he watches without visible feeling. He loses a game of chess to the ship's computer and accepts the defeat with a shrug. The most passionate character on the Discovery is HAL 9000.

HAL is proud, and he lies when cornered. He fears for his existence and kills to protect it. When Bowman finally disconnects him, HAL bargains, then pleads ("I'm afraid, Dave"), then regresses to the first song he was taught, Daisy Bell, his voice slowing into a drunken drone. It remains the most affecting death in the film, and it is a machine's. The irony is pointed: the humans have handed their striving to their tools. HAL wants things, and the crew want nothing in particular.

Stiegler gives this irony a name: proletarianization. He meant something broader than the factory worker's loss of craft. He meant the general transfer of human know-how into technical systems, until people become attendants of processes they no longer understand. HAL flies the ship, monitors the hibernating crew, plays chess and reads lips. Bowman and Poole jog in circles. HAL's death is then a loss of memory in the most literal sense, a technical archive unwinding back to its origin, which is exactly where Stiegler locates the fragility of a culture that stores its memory outside itself.

What Bowman does next is the film's first genuine act of self-overcoming. Locked out of the ship, he blows himself through the vacuum of an emergency airlock without a helmet, a few seconds of real physical risk in a world built to remove risk. Then he floats into HAL's logic center and dismantles the machine module by module. Nietzsche's parable of the three metamorphoses becomes useful here. The spirit first becomes a camel, which kneels and carries every duty it is given. Then it becomes a lion, which confronts a great dragon whose scales gleam with "thou shalt" and answers it with "I will." HAL, with his glowing red eye and his insistence that the mission is too important to be jeopardized, is that dragon. In the crew's routines we have watched the camel. In Bowman's war with the computer we watch the lion.

The Gift Problem

Here my admiration has to make room for an objection. After the lion, Nietzsche's spirit must become a child, the figure of innocence, forgetting, a new beginning, a sacred yes. The film supplies one, the Star Child. But look at how Bowman gets there. He is carried through the Stargate strapped into his pod, his face frozen in a series of still frames washed with shifting color. He does nothing during the most celebrated sequence in the film except endure it. He lands in an elegant, eerie hotel room, a human enclosure apparently built by intelligences that have studied us the way we study animals, and there he is transformed by the monolith, which has been steering the species since the bone.

For Nietzsche the overman is not something conferred. Humanity is a rope stretched between beast and overman, and crossing it requires a "going under," a self-destruction that we perform ourselves. The monolith turns that crossing into a gift. Evolution becomes grace, delivered by a higher power at the appointed time. Nietzsche warned that after the death of God his shadow might be shown on cave walls for thousands of years. The monolith is a strong candidate for that shadow: a featureless, silent, infinitely superior presence that judges when we are ready and lifts us up. Marcuse would make a related complaint from the other side. Liberation in 2001 is administered from above, by a technology so advanced it is indistinguishable from fate. The film diagnoses the one-dimensional society with real precision, and then cures it with the same structure on a cosmic scale.

The room partly answers the objection, and it is the film's strangest and best passage. Bowman sees an older version of himself eating alone, becomes that man, and then sees an older version still, dying in bed. One self replaces another, each witnessing its successor. In the middle of this, the old man knocks a wine glass to the floor and it shatters, a small, ordinary accident that marks mortality more sharply than anything else in the sequence. Then the dying Bowman lifts his finger toward the monolith at the foot of the bed, echoing the gesture of the ape touching it four million years earlier. This is as close as cinema has come to staging eternal recurrence as an experience rather than an idea. The test Nietzsche set was whether you could live your life again, every moment of it, and say yes. Bowman, at the end, reaches out. The gesture is affirmation, even if the transformation that follows is not his own doing.

The Film as Monolith

It is often noticed that the monolith, turned on its side, has roughly the proportions of a widescreen cinema frame. Stiegler, who wrote at length about film as the technology that shapes modern consciousness, would take the observation seriously. 2001 is itself a technical object designed to change the people who stand in front of it. It is long, largely wordless and patient in a way that runs against everything the culture industry was then learning to do. Where the industry trains attention into short, synchronized bursts, Kubrick asks for the long, deep attention Stiegler thought was being destroyed. The film tries to be a remedy among the poisons.

It was not entirely successful, and Marcuse explains why. Within a few years MGM was marketing 2001 as "The Ultimate Trip," and young audiences came to lie on the floor of Cinerama theaters and watch the Stargate high. Marcuse called this kind of absorption "repressive desublimation": the system releases the energy of refusal as pleasure and sells it back as a product. A film about the evolutionary transcendence of the last man became an evening's entertainment for the last man. This is not Kubrick's fault, but it does show the limits of a work that offers transcendence as spectacle.

The Yes Without a Verdict

The film has other limits too. Its coldness is deliberate, and mostly earned, but the ciphers it uses for people sometimes slide from diagnosis into alibi. The Jupiter mission runs long, and its women are stewardesses, a receptionist and a daughter on a screen. The ending's mysticism can tip into grandeur that asks to be admired rather than understood. These are real costs, and they are the costs of ambition. Almost no other film made inside a studio has tried to tell the whole story of the species, and 2001 tells it with a visual intelligence that still makes most science fiction look provincial.

Its final image is also its most Nietzschean. The Star Child floats beside the Earth and turns to look at us, as Strauss's fanfare returns. In Clarke's novel the child detonates the orbiting bombs. The film tells us nothing. We cannot know whether this new being is Zarathustra coming down from the mountain with a gift, or simply the next creature to pick up the bone. Kubrick gives the affirmation without the moral verdict, and that is the most honest thing he could have done. A film that stages humanity as a bridge rather than a destination cannot tell us what is on the other side. It can only show us the crossing, with the old certainties and comforts left behind, and a newborn looking back.