Shock the Monkey

If you’ve ever watched 2001: A Space Odyssey on home video, you’ve likely fast-forwarded through the Overture, an introductory sequence of discordant “music.” I would suggest that, next time, you immerse yourself in this auditory experience; if nothing else, the dis-chord represents the chaotic hemisphere of the movie’s overall theme. But it is also perhaps intended to disorient and, thus, open the minds of the audience members to new perspectives and perceptions. The same is achieved by the lack of flat ground along the bottom of the screen, by the slow, laborious movements of bodies traversing zero gravity. You’ll need to suspend your comfortable modes of perception if you’re to really enjoy the two and half hours of sparse dialogue and bizarre screen images relying largely on symbolism and evocation that are to come.

Order and chaos. The alignment of planets and the smattering of pond stones. The Euclidean monolith and the scruffy, screeching ape. 2001 makes manifest the complex numbers theorized by Gaston Julia and eerily foreshadows the discoveries of Benoit Mandelbrot, nearly 20 years after its filming, regarding infinite, iterative loops and the natural forms of fractal geometry. Imagine the graphic designers and special effects people of the 1960s managing to conceive and present Mandelbrot swirls, a dive into the infinity of embryonic cells, contrasted against the iris of cybernaut Dave’s amazed eye -- arterial, internal, organic forms that weren’t examined mathematically until 1982. (It’s perhaps more than a coincidence that Arthur C. Clarke would years later host a documentary on the Mandelbrot set, the infinite, graphical “thumbprint of God.”)

In contrast to the chaotic sounds of the Overture, the strident chords of Also Sprach Zarathrustra explode on the screen, the auditory symbol of order, resolution, culmination. There is a distinct emphasis on the alignment of planets, moons and the monolith, on the sleek lines of modern spacecraft and the calm, orderly voice of Hal 9000. And yet, those menacing strains of the chaotic Overture accompany each appearance of the strictly postured monolith. Is chaos, then, also a form of intelligent design? Is it, perhaps, merely less recognizable to a culture taught only to recognize intelligence as order? Are chaos and order interchangeable? Cause and effect? Co-dependent?

The monolith, a large black, rectangular slab of stone, is the first object representing order on the precivilized, chaotic Earth. It is sleek, simple Euclidean geometry, in contrast to the natural forms prevalent there: hairy apes, craggy soil, jutting branches, the undulations of water, the diminishing pattern of a primitive rib cage. When the monolith appears at the Dawn of Man, the apes are living in chaos – oppressed by the food chain and forced to ineffectually screech the articulation of territory rights at the watering hole. The monolith brings to the apes their first spark of understanding. As the dawn of intelligence presages the dawn of man, the monolith seems responsible for teaching the apes to first grasp a bone as tool, both literally and figuratively.

We’re led to assume that the advent of the intelligent use of tools leads, inevitably, to more chaos, violence and war, as it initially does between the two bands of apes fighting over the watering hole. This ensuing era is one which we “humans” must resolve before we can apply our tools, knowledge and understanding to technological advancement and space exploration -- goals higher than that of simply controlling the local watering hole. Or are they? Perhaps Kubrick and Clarke were instead suggesting that modern innovations stand as nothing more than tools in the hands of two warring bands of apes, fighting over a much larger watering hole. In the Cold War era of the 1960s, this may have been exactly the point.

If so, there’s much about the monolith that seeks to transcend the “us and them” worldview. Take, for example, the primary symbolic shapes of the movie, the phallic and the ovum. The bone, the pointed space pod, the pen floating from Dr. Floyd’s chest pocket… these are filmed against the backdrop of a round, spinning space station, its curved interiors, the bulbous hat of the stewardess. As a symbol, the rectangular monolith transcends the ovum/phallus; it also synthesizes and transcends Russian/American and other basic (though dated) dualities of our modern culture. And it achieves this via culture shock.

We tend to describe something that shocks us as a violation, presumably to our precious “sensibilities,” which we’re oddly desperate to protect. New ideas are troublesome as scalpels, slicing away at our comfortable conceptions about what’s right, what’s real and what’s true. Still, painful as it is, minds must be continually violated by new ideas if we’re to enjoy the personal microcosm of intellectual evolution.

When another monolith is discovered, government officials determine (like hundreds of their big- and small-screen “you-can’t-handle-the-truth” descendants) that it predicates a “need for absolute secrecy” from the bumbling populace. Knowledge of the monolith, according to Dr. Floyd, carries with it “the extremely grave potential for cultural shock and social disorientation.” This is apparently a bad thing.

Floyd and his council colleagues deliciously miss the cinematic point that culture shock is the monolith’s purpose. It was a culture shock of epic proportions that propelled the movie's primitive apes to determinedly grip that first leg bone. These shocked monkeys were then able to hunt more efficiently, defend their water hole, and evolve into planet cruising astronauts. Such advances don’t come without a bit of uncomfortable “social disorientation.”

Fox the fox
Rat the rat
You can ape the ape
I know about that...

Wheels keep turning
Something's burning
Don't like it but I guess I'm
Learning...

Too much at stake
Ground beneath me shake
And the news is breaking...

Shock the Monkey
Copyright 1987 Peter Gabriel

But if the first monolith launched the Dawn of Man, the second seems to herald Man as Machine. While the Jupiter Mission spaceship oddly resembles the human head and spinal cord, and small, cuddly travel pods emerge from its organic roundness with large, innocent windshields, it’s actually Hal who embodies this new principle. He is the culmination of intelligence’s bar-hopping from ape to man to machine. If the ship is the body, Hal is its brain: intelligence, perfected.

Amidst all this technological flaunting and fussing, however, is an odd emphasis on human birthdays, a celebration of growth that's continually sacrificed at the altar of technological modernization. Dr. Floyd misses his daughter’s birthday to encourage secrecy about the monolith; we’re led to view this failure as somewhat tragic. Frank, Dave’s partner on the Jupiter Mission, receives a birthday greeting from his parents. How does Hal approach this concept of birthdays? He acknowledges them with little emotion, in typical robotic style. Still, Hal is not a robot; he boasts and displays certain human emotions, including jealousy, anger and fear. But he misses the joy of the birthday, just as he misses the essence of on-board games like chess, and the artistry of Dave’s sketches. He is intelligence, without humanity.

Meanwhile, we vicariously experience the spacesuit travels of Dave and Frank outside the spaceship. The sounds of air hissing, the labored breathing, suggesting a sense of almost embryonic limitation, contrasting the biology of man against the technology he’s built. The frailty of man is emphasized, his physical limitations and tendency toward “human error.” The error Hal commits, then, marks his entrance into a bizarre form of humanity, rather reminiscent of Adam and Eve’s entry into same. Hal grows paranoid, violent, and defends his watering hole down to the final refrain of the tune, “Daisy.” Intelligence, for Dave and the Jupiter Mission, has become symbolically dangerous. Hal has disconnected the life support of Frank (his detached air line waves about like an umbilical cord) and the other crew members. Likewise, Dave must disconnect Hal, symbolically handing back the problematic fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. (At which point, Hal recites a programmed introductory greeting acknowledging the day he became "operational," his birthday, January 12, 1992. We can only assume his programmers, and not Hal, found the date to be significant.)

After disconnecting Hal, Dave seems to experience a birth-canal-like journey through the atmosphere of Jupiter (or of the monolith, it’s not entirely clear). If the birth of intelligence launched humanity on its first ride, the death of intelligence launches its second, and at the culmination of this two-part journey, Dave experiences a synthesis – a consilience, if you will – of dualities. He arrives in a room both modern (lighted floor) and traditional (French provincial). He wears both a spacesuit and an evening jacket. He dines both orderly (eating food arranged at right angles) and chaotically (spilling his wine and breaking the glass). He is both dying and forming in the womb. “But you’ll look sweet on the seat of a bicycle built for two…”

He rises from the table to look for himself, and finds nothing. He regresses and progresses to the embryonic form of the star child, and looks us, the audience, squarely in the eye. It’s tempting to interpret this journey as Dave’s ascension toward the consilient nature of God – the Alpha and the Omega. Rather, I prefer to see Dave’s metamorphosis as a return to the innocence humankind knew prior to Knowledge, civilization, violence, and death. How you choose to interpret the movie’s message is the rather weighty responsibility Kubrick and Clarke have laid upon you, as its audience, and angry moviegoers have complained about the movie’s recondite nature for 30 years. Our culture’s used to being spoon-fed the moral of a story; what Kubrick and Clarke have obscured in 2001 is either a nasty trick or a generous gift. You decide.