![]() This future man, whom scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. First, this passage from Hannah Arendt’s 1958 Human Condition, which my father bought in the early sixties : But despite all of that, when you see the movie today you see how 1968 wasn’t just about social and political reform people thought they were about to evolve, to become something wholly new, a revolution at the deepest level of a person’s essence.Īllow me to quote two books taken from my father’s library. From heavy capital to form-fitting turtlenecks-thank goodness, not the mass fashion phenomenon the film anticipated-it all looks like it was made yesterday. More important, everything in 2001 looks new. Based on the rate of inflation, a video-payphone call to a space station should, in theory, cost far more than $1.70, but that wouldn’t apply when the payphone is a thing of the past. Pan Am does not offer commercial flights into high-Earth orbit, not least because Pan-Am is no more. We have no moon colonies, and our supercomputers are not nearly as super as the murderous HAL. is not waging the Cold War in outer space. ![]() It’s especially ironic because anyone who sees the film today will be taken aback by how unrealistic it is. Curious about extraterrestrial life, Kubrick consulted Carl Sagan (evidently an expert) and made changes to the script accordingly. They were so successful that a report written in 2005 from NASA’s Scientific and Technical Information Program Office argues that 2001 is today still “perhaps the most thoroughly and accurately researched film in screen history with respect to aerospace engineering.” Kubrick shows the audience exactly how artificial gravity could be maintained in the endless free-fall of outer space how long a message would take to reach Jupiter how people would eat pureed carrots through a straw how people would poop in zero G. The film was supposed to describe events that were really about to happen-that’s why Kubrick and Clarke went to such lengths to make it realistic, dedicating months to researching the ins and outs of manned spaceflight. In large part this fact has been lost on more recent generations of viewers who regard the movie as almost entirely metaphorical. Clarke, who intended the film as a vision of things that seemed destined to come. It wasn’t until much later that I started to understand the movie-and, maybe, to understand my father.Ģ001 is the brainchild of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Ah, my father told me, that’s because evolution is slow, evolution is bizarre. Of course, when I finally saw the movie, well after the actual year 2001, it bored me out of my mind. He told me often of HAL, of the monolith of evolution, of how glorious the future would be. For as long as I can remember, my father had talked about 2001. It became something of a talisman for him, a semisacred object invested with all the crazy hopefulness of his youth. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that the movie summed up everything my father was in April 1968. When 2001 premiered, he was working at Columbia University’s Computer Center, in the academic computing branch. He’d worked for IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York, a corporate labyrinth of beige cubicles and epochal breakthroughs a world of punch cards and reel-to-reel magnetic tape, where at least some of the employees were deadly serious about making sure to wear the company tie clip and then, once they were off duty, to switch to their own personal tie clips. My father was twenty-four then, and perhaps at his most world-historical: he was becoming an expert in computers. In the film’s iconic final shot, the space baby looks down at the planet to which it is no longer bound. When it ended, he got up and walked out into Times Square, with its peep-show glitz and sleazy, flashing advertisements he found the uptown subway beneath the yellow marquees for dirty movies like The Filthy 5 and through all of it, he thought that when humanity hurls itself into the depths of the cosmos, this is how we will do it. It was April 1968 and my father was sitting in a theater in Times Square watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, certain that what he was seeing wasn’t just a movie but the future. Watching the sixties and seventies through 2001 and Alien.
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