A year before the United States first landed a man on the moon, director Stanley Kubrick released one of the most celebrated space films in history—2001: A Space Odyssey. The film won a host of awards in different categories. The visual power of the film is arresting, and the soundtrack became a trope in American culture. Yet beyond all of the spectacle, critics regarded Kubrick’s masterpiece so highly because, like the best art, it wrestles with important questions about the nature of man in the world.
Though I had friends in high school who spoke highly of this film, I did not watch it until I was a young adult. I had just finished the book, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was written by well-known science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who simultaneously worked with Kubrick on writing the screenplay.[1] I was excited about the science fiction elements of space adventure that I had enjoyed since my youth. Upon seeing the film, I found that it would not leave my mind, unlike more popular space movies. I kept mulling over different scenes and the ideas they sparked.
In this essay, I offer a short review of the film before examining Kubrick’s investigation of the cultural nature of technology. While many aspects of Kubrick’s thinking contradict Scripture (and I would not recommend most of his other films), we have much in common in the area of technology. I would also clarify that technology is not limited to computers and digital devices. As philosopher Jay Newman has argued, we define technology, or techne, as the Greeks referred to it, as any human craftwork, art, or applied science.[2]
Review
Perhaps the first thing to note about 2001 is the sparse dialogue, which does not begin until about thirty minutes into the film. Kubrick is a deeply visual director, who relies on the power of the camera, physical acting, and soundtrack to convey his messages to the audience. For this reason, the film opens with an instrumental prelude of white noise and a choir of senseless voices that slowly rise in dynamics but never form a cohesive thought or chord.
Suddenly, the screen fills with a shot of the dark side of the moon while Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra begins with a lone trumpet playing a melody that rises in pitch as the length of the notes become shorter, communicating triumph. Kubrick has already laid out his main argument that he will explore for the rest of the film: Man’s evolution from inchoate nature to reasoning creature requires artificial assistance from alien beings.
The first act of the film shows a tribe of ape-men in Africa who struggle to find enough food and water to survive as they battle rival tribes and avoid the clutches of a gimlet-eyed cheetah. They awake one morning to find an obsidian obelisk in the middle of their camp. As they investigate it with hand and tooth, the monolith issues a high-pitched electronic screech.
Interaction with the alien techne transforms the ape-men so that they now discover and embrace new technology of their own. Having learned to use the skeletal remains of a deceased animal as a club to hunt for food, the apes begin eating better and learn to fend off the cheetah.
However, the inter-tribal warfare of the ape-men remains, and their recent technological breakthrough serves only to make their conflicts more deadly. As the tribe beats their enemy’s leader to death with bones, sticks, and other makeshift clubs, the camera shows the victorious ape-man leader cast his murderous techne into the sky in triumph as the soundtrack rises—brass instruments joining an organ in triumphal celebration over the wild beating of the timpani.
As the camera zooms in on the bleached bone revolving and spinning in the air, the image switches abruptly to a cylindrical spaceship roughly the same size as the bone on the screen, thus introducing the second act. Kubrick wants to emphasize that even the space age is really no different than the bone club. And if the club served to empower the worst urges in the ape-men, what might this new techne do?
Kubrick’s cynicism about the Cold War reveals itself in the second act, which is dominated by the themes of secrecy and security. Each spacecraft is filled with security checkpoints as Dr. Heywood Floyd makes his way from earth to the mysteriously quarantined Clavius moon-base. Once he arrives, we learn that moon exploration has led to the discovery of another obelisk that emits an identical electronic shriek as the one encountered by the ape-men. Another leap in the evolutionary narrative is thus in the offing.
The next scene opens with a shot of empty space bearing a caption that explains the protagonists are on the Jupiter mission eighteen months after the obelisk discovery at Clavius. Then the shot shifts to show a massive elongated space ship. Its white exterior, bulbous main capsule, and long thin body give the ship the look of a cold, metallic, and menacing spermatozoa.
As this symbol of artificial humanity and life makes its way slowly through space, the camera cuts to the spacecraft’s interior where Captain David Bowman is exercising by running along a circular track and shadowboxing. Bowman’s Christian name, and its association with the flawed Israelite king, signals to the audience that man, even at his best, is filled with error.
Bowman and his four crewmembers, three of which are in cryogenic sleep, are making their journey with the assistance of radically new technology. The ship’s computer, known as the HAL 9000, is a self-aware artificial intelligence that watches over the ship through its myriad red camera lenses and verbally interacts with the crew in a realistic but stiff manner. HAL, as he is addressed, mimics the human brain but at higher speeds. In an interview with the BBC, HAL explains that no 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information, claiming that they are foolproof and incapable of error.
Kubrick thus portrays the utopian hopes of modern techies. Like the philosopher Jay Newman, these implausibly optimistic devotees of technology sweep aside arguments that suggest technological innovation may carry with it negative ramifications for society and culture.[3] But as we have already seen, Kubrick has a more nuanced understanding of the power of technology.
Historian of technology Janet Abbate explains in her analysis of the birth of the internet: “The design of any technology reflects the priorities of its builders.”[4] Kubrick could not agree more. As the third act of the film unfolds, the HAL 9000 begins to behave erratically because its designers have implanted a secret file within its “brain” that reveals the true nature of the space mission which has been hidden from the two active crew members. HAL’s act of deception eventually drives it mad, ending in murder. Man’s flawed nature is imprinted in his technological creation. The ensuing battle of wits between Bowman and his mutinous techne is filled with wonderfully rich suspense.
After reaching Jupiter, Bowman comes into contact with another black monolith in orbit around the red planet. Kubrick shifts the tone of the film by turning to abstraction. Using slit-screen photography and film negatives, Kubrick shows a terrifying stargate and alien landscape as György Ligeti’s atonal Requiem bulges from the speakers. While this sequence grates on the nerves, Kubrick effectively conveys the sense of confusion, fear, and awe that Bowman feels as he is being transformed by the alien technology. I am not going to reveal the final scene, but these benevolent and unseen alien forces have once again pushed human evolution forward and the film closes with the ringing notes of victory as the soundtrack’s most famous piece plays.
Reflections
Although I disagree strongly with certain elements of 2001, it is a masterpiece. Kubrick, for all of his faults, is not willing to settle for easy and trite explanations of the world. Even though he presents an evolutionary narrative, he recognizes that materialist evolution fails to explain how human consciousness developed without influence from beyond. The solution of alien technology to this problem clearly departs from the Scriptural narrative of creation in grand fashion, but at least Kubrick was willing to see the flaws in his own position.
However, I am most affected by his understanding of technology as filled with paradoxes and complex reciprocity. Kubrick’s human beings evolve through interaction with alien technology but cannot help implanting their fallen nature within their own technological creations. Technology is shaped by the culture of the people who create it, but they, in turn, are transformed by engaging their technological creation.
Scripture explains that, when He made man, God issued to us a mandate to govern over creation (Genesis 1:26–28). As we carry this instruction out by, among other things, marrying and producing children, caring for plants and animals, building up brothers and sisters in Christ, caring for the least in society, crafting governments, and developing technology, we are creating culture that bears the imprint of our nature, theology, and philosophy. Or as historian of technology David E. Nye has persuasively argued in multiple books, “each technology is an extension of human lives.”[5] Kubrick saw this truth and sought to warn his audience to avoid technological arrogance. Our greatest technological successes are attended with oft-unforeseen dangers latent within our designs. Our creations bear our image as sub-creators.
Lastly, technology shapes us as we engage it. The descendants of Noah decided to settle in Shinar and build a tower to Heaven because their technological prowess offered a means to fulfill their fallen desire to band together and make a name for themselves (Gen. 11:1–4). Had they not had the technological skill to make bricks and construct a tower, they still would have had these fallen desires, but their capacity to pursue that temptation would have been constrained. Their technological powers led them to set aside God’s command to Noah to spread out through the earth. We may also note that when God splintered their language, they abandoned their technological masterpiece and unintentionally began to obey God’s directive to Noah.
Conclusion
In our modern discussions about how Christians should engage technology, we could benefit from Kubrick’s nuanced cautionary tale. Technology has the ability to extend our powers far beyond our physical strength. However, all technology also carries with it embedded assumptions about the nature of man and his place in reality. Further, and more unsettling, our fallen natures also inscribe our flaws into our technological creations.
This reality should encourage us to be intentional in our interaction with technology. We should wrestle with whether or not to embrace one technology or another rather than blindly accept them. And only with caution should we allow our techne to shape our lives by what we welcome into our homes, take into or place on our bodies, embed in our church architecture and practices, or slip into our pockets.
[1]This unique approach to writing and filmmaking is worth further attention, but the constraints of space have forced me to avoid delving deeper. Let me simply recommend reading the book as well as watching the film.
[2]Jay Newman, Religion and Technology: A Study in the Philosophy of Culture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 48–49.
[3]While Newman offers good arguments about some aspects of technology, he flirts with technological utopianism while brusquely dismissing the well-reasoned critiques of French philosopher Jacques Ellul.
[4]Janet Abbate, “Government, Business, and the Making of the Internet,” The Business History Review 75, no. 1 (Spring, 2001): 150.
[5]David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), ix.
Recent Comments