Understanding Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey

Representation and Interpretation

James Fenwick

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781783208630
• eBook ISBN: 9781783208647
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Scholars have been studying the films of Stanley Kubrick for decades. This book, however, breaks new ground by bringing together recent empirical approaches to Kubrick with earlier formalist approaches to arrive at a broader understanding of the ways in which Kubrick's methods were developed to create the unique aesthetic creation that is 2001: A Space Odyssey. More than 50 years after its release, contributors explore the film's still striking design, vision and philosophical structure, offering new insights and analyses that will give even dedicated Kubrick fans new ways of thinking about the director and his masterpiece.

Part One

Narrative and Adaptation

Chapter One

‘God, it’ll be hard topping the H-bomb’: Kubrick’s search for a new obsession in the path from Dr. Strangelove to 2001: A Space Odyssey

Simone Odino

When Dr. Strangelove was released in the United States on 29 January 1964, Stanley Kubrick was already considered one of the most interesting directors in the film industry. Regarded by the press as author of controversial, unconventional films, his nightmare comedy had garnered considerable attention for its original approach on the topic of nuclear war. In the round of publicity interviews surrounding the release of the film, therefore, many of the questions revolved around his creative process and what his next project would be. On one of these occasions Kubrick answered,

I haven’t found anything I can get so obsessed with. It takes me two years: that’s too big a commitment for something that may suddenly go flat […] there’s no reason to do it my way unless you are, as I said, obsessed. You must be obsessed.

(McGrady 1964: 3c)

Kubrick was referring to his distinctive authorial style, which made him the prototype of the ‘total filmmaker’. As he said, ‘making a film starts with the germ of an idea and continues through script, rehearsing, shooting, cutting music projection, and tax-accountants’ (Southern 1962: 343). The problem to find a so-called obsession was therefore related to the considerable effort needed to put a story on screen. The director often claimed it was never easy for him to find something that would prove to be interesting in the long run, and to better illustrate this crucial point he used to employ a romantic (and fatalistic) comparison: ‘Finding a story which will make a film is a little like finding the right girl. It’s very hard to say how you do it, or when you’re going to do it. Some stories just come from a chance thing’ (Bean 1963: 12).

Kubrick had first hinted at what his new love interest would be in an interview on 3 February 1964 that revealed how he was ‘fascinated by outer space, which he thinks is inhabited, and he is reading and reading and reading about it’ (Anon. 1964a: 80). Tackling a topic by researching it exhaustively was already the method of choice for the director; for Dr. Strangelove, he had immersed himself in years of research into the topic of nuclear warfare, a long-time obsession of his, reading in the process ‘almost every available book on the nuclear situation’ (Southern 1963: 29).

Kubrick’s mention of outer space immediately led to speculation by the trade press, and the April 1964 issue of Show Magazine attached the director’s name to an ‘untitled story of extra-terrestrial life’ (Anon. 1964b). Still, it would take until December 1964 for Kubrick to officially go on the record, in an interview with journalist and friend Alexander Walker:

His next film will have what he admitted (with obvious feat that he was saying too much) is a ‘futuristic plot’. He is co-scripting it with Arthur C. Clarke, the scientist explorer […]. His coal-black eye twinkled, then he said with almost presidential gravity: ‘But God, it’ll be hard topping the H-bomb’.

(Walker 1964)

The caution he used and the solemn tone of the last sentence suggest a sort of performance anxiety not usually associated with Kubrick’s public persona. However, one should be aware that by December 1964 the director had spent the best part of the previous eight months in daily brainstorming sessions with Arthur C. Clarke, struggling to produce a completely original plot,^[1] an effort that he had not undertaken since Killer’s Kiss. Kubrick’s career up to that point had been characterized by a series of rejections from major studios and continual difficulties in having his projects green-lighted, as the director himself recalled years later:

Up until A Clockwork Orange, there wasn’t a single producer who was prepared to produce my films. For example, MGM only took on 2001 at the last minute; no one wanted it. […] The same thing for Dr. Strangelove, it was turned down by all the studios.

(Heymann 1987: 478)

It is against this complicated background that the director started his path towards 2001, whose starting point is traditionally identified in a chance encounter with Roger Caras on 17 February 1964, a lunch during which Kubrick revealed his intention to follow Dr. Strangelove with ‘something about extraterrestrials’ (McAleer 1992: 190–91), to which Caras suggested the director contact his friend Arthur C. Clarke.

I think that a small step back is needed, though, to better understand the artistic decisions taken in the conception and production of the movie that would, eventually, ‘top the H-bomb’. The period between the post-production of Dr. Strangelove (late 1963) and the director’s commitment with Clarke (the two signed a deal on 20 May 1964 (McAleer 1992: 195–97) has, to date, received scarce scholarly attention. Such neglect is surprising given that in the relatively short space between late 1963 and spring 1964, the director was apparently offered a movie project about overpopulation, was nearly co-opted onto a United Nations-funded TV-series, and optioned the rights of a science-fiction radio drama about an invasion of alien lizards.

Making use of materials from the Stanley Kubrick Archive and from rare interviews, I will argue that these lesser-known entries in the long list of Kubrick’s unrealized projects are not only further examples of his story-seeking difficulties, but they also make good case studies of his overriding interests and concerns of the period, whilst providing an insight into his peculiar attitude towards science-fiction. All in all they suggest a degree of social responsibility usually overlooked when Kubrick’s weltanschauung is discussed, and that seems to have directly informed the creative process that led to 2001.

Sex, bombs and overpopulation

When asked what was the method he used to pick the subjects of his movies, Kubrick said in 1964, ‘I don’t know how you can gauge anything except through your interests. That has to be the yardstick’ (Alpert 1964: 34). Indeed, Kubrick was a man of catholic tastes,^[2] a voracious reader gifted with a remarkable intellectual curiosity, and this open-mindedness might have been one of the reasons behind his undeniable ability at what has been called ‘surfing the zeitgeist’ (Murray and Schuler 2007: 134); that is, to produce movies that captured brilliantly the spirit of the era in which they were produced, a goal that he had stated as early as 1960:

I know I would like to make a film that gave a feeling of the times, psychologically, sexually, politically, personally. I would like to make that more than anything else. And it’s probably going to be the hardest film to make.

(Anon 1960: 21)

Kubrick explicitly expressed his interests in such topics in a letter written to Terry Southern during the post-production of Dr. Strangelove, on 1 August 1963: ‘I haven’t come up with any brilliances yet for a new story […] if you see anything you think might be good, let me know! Atomic warfare, science-fiction, mad sex relationships […] something along those lines – possibly all three might be fun!’ (Tully 2010: 135). He was still of the opinion in February 1964, when asked by McCall’s magazine about his future projects:

One likely subject he would like to tackle, now or soon – woman’s place – and her displacement – in the modern world. (To Kubrick, the ‘gap’ between the sexes now ranks with the bomb, population explosion, and racial problems as a major world crisis).

(Anon. 1964c)

Some of the topics Kubrick was considering had already been, or would be, the subject of one or more of his movies; the director’s interest about the ‘gap between the sexes’ is evident not only in Lolita, a movie he referred to as a ‘comment on the social scene’ (Dundy 1963: 14), but also in several other projects he tried to develop before and after it.^[3] Moreover, even Dr. Strangelove – Kubrick’s take on the major political crisis of the time, the Cold War – notoriously contained many sexual innuendos, and one could argue that the displacement of women in the modern world is suggested in 2001 as well, a film where female characters are less prominent than in any other film of Kubrick’s career.^[4]

One interesting issue that Kubrick rated as a major world crisis was overpopulation, a growing concern in American public opinion, particularly following the publication of The Population Bomb (Ehrlich 1954), a pamphlet distributed in a million copies that sparked a renewed interest in the topic.^[5] Newsweek compared the threat to that of nuclear war, noting that India’s population explosion was ‘of hydrogen-bomb size’ (Bereday and Lauwerys 1965: 388). Many prominent science-fiction authors – among them Robert Heinlein, Frederik Pohl and Isaac Asimov – had already published stories where uncontrolled population growth was depicted as a threat to mankind, and it’s plausible that the director’s interest on the topic could have been aroused by these works,^[6] as we know that by the time of his first meeting with Clarke, Kubrick had already absorbed an ‘immense amount of science fact and science fiction’ (Clarke 1972: 29). Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange (1962), wrote an interesting and provocative novel about overpopulation, The Wanting Seed (1962), which was reportedly suggested to Kubrick by cinematographer Robert Gaffney in 1969 as a possible source for a movie (Lobrutto 1998: 330; Booker 2005: 37–39). Brian Aldiss wrote several stories in which overpopulation was featured within a science-fiction context (see Heise 2003: 74–77, 2008: 71). One in particular, Supertoys Last All Summer Long (Aldiss 1968) was set ‘in an overpopulated future society where pregnancy is allowed only if you win the weekly lottery’ (Watson 2000). According to Ian Watson, though, when he worked with Kubrick in 1990 on the adaptation of Supertoys, overpopulation was neither the focus of the story nor what Kubrick was interested in. By then ‘his primary interest was in creating a “fairy story” for the future, a technological version of Pinocchio […]. Thus the population aspect only served as a pretext for a world where population might be controlled and a substitute robot boy might be plausible’.^[7]

Kubrick publicly expressed interest in the issue in a Newsweek interview from 3 February 1964: ‘I can always do a story about overpopulation. Do you realize that in 2020 there will be no room on earth for all the people to stand? The really sophisticated worriers are worried about that’ (Anon. 1964a: 80). Eight days later, Kubrick was offered a related movie by an unknown company/producer: ‘He is in no rush to tackle the next project, though he has been offered a challenging idea based on the population explosion’ (McGrady 1964: 3c). This project has no further archival sources to support it, but the undeniable fascination Kubrick felt for the topic continued, as demonstrated by a conversation between him and his contemporary, Joseph Heller:

On one hand you’ve got someone saying, if we don’t get ourselves straightened we’re going to blow up the whole world and kill everybody. On the other hand, somebody’s saying that by the year 2000, if we don’t stop the birthrate, there won’t be room to stand on the surface of the Earth. This sense of paradoxes makes it very enjoyable to an audience to take a seemingly serious or important situation and then allow the reality to intrude.

(Heller 1964)

This suggests that, besides being personally concerned by overpopulation as a world crisis, Kubrick was intrigued by the cinematic potential of the inherent paradox of the current state of affairs. The director had already commented on the usefulness of exposing contrasts for dramatic purposes as a narrative device that gave him the opportunity to ‘contrast an individual of our contemporary society with a solid framework of accepted value, which the audience becomes fully aware of, and which can be used as a counterpoint to a human, individual, emotional situation’ (Stang 1958), and had just exploited the paradoxes of nuclear strategy in Dr. Strangelove (Southern 1963; Bernstein 1966a). It’s significant, therefore, to notice that Kubrick would not overlook this dialectical relationship when working on his extraterrestrial project. Rather, the issue was present right from the start of its development.

For example, here’s how the narrator in the initial film treatment for 2001, titled Journey Beyond the Stars (December 1964), illustrates the state of the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century: ‘The two great problems facing the world in the year 2001 had an ominously ironic convergence – overpopulation, and the cancerous spread of nuclear weapons’ (Kubrick and Clarke 1964). This passage comes right after the ‘The Dawn of Man’ section, as a prologue to the part of the movie set in the twenty-first century; Kubrick and Clarke presumably intended to use overpopulation in relation to the threat of extinction that loomed upon the primordial man-apes, extensively depicted as hopelessly starving before the timely intervention of the monolith. The paradox lies in the fact that humans were once starving because they had not yet learned how to hunt and kill; and now that they can (and worryingly so, thanks to the H-bomb), starvation is brought about by overpopulation. The reasons are different, but the bleak human outlook remains the same.

The relationship between these two themes appeared in later scripts as well, like the following from October–December 1965 – again mentioned by the narrator at the beginning of the part of the movie set in space: ‘By the year 2001, overpopulation had replaced the problem of starvation, but this was ominously offset by the absolute and utter perfection of the weapon’ (Kubrick and Clarke 1965a). In this version there’s apparently a shift in focus in favour of overpopulation, but famine will come back to haunt the unfortunate citizens of the twenty-first century in the eventual novel by Clarke:

Since the 1970s, the world had been dominated by two problems which, ironically, tended to cancel each other out […] the population of the world was now six billion […]. As a result, food was short in every country; even the United States had meatless days, and widespread famine was predicted within fifteen years, despite heroic efforts to farm the sea and to develop synthetic foods.

(Clarke 2012: 424)

Such references, and others that clarified how the nuclear threat would loom heavily on the twenty-first century, were ultimately discarded; Kubrick commented that he wanted a ‘non-specific result’ (Krämer 2010: 47) for the film and removed the narrator altogether in the late stages of the editing. It would be up to Clarke to make clear in his book that after the famous match cut of Moon-Watcher’s bone turning into a satellite, what we are presented with is a series of nuclear bombs put in orbit by some of the 38 existing nuclear powers,^[8] and that the spaceship Discovery One is propelled by a series of explosions of atomic bombs behind the spacecraft in a way that echoes the US Air Force’s Project Orion from the 1960s.^[9] Despite the ambiguity of the movie, Kubrick did admit that there was a ‘contrast in the story between giant orbiting bombs, which you might say is the negative use of nuclear energy and this particular spaceship, which leads to great, fantastic accomplishments, which is also another, the good use of nuclear energy’ (Bernstein 1966a).

All in all, the director’s interest in the relationship between overpopulation, starvation and nuclear weapons appears to provide an interesting insight into the extent and the artistic relevance of Kubrick’s socially related concerns and their influence on the thematic richness that underpins 2001. It also hints towards a rather pessimistic view of the early twenty-first century that is often overlooked when referring to 2001, commonly presented as the most optimistic film of Kubrick’s oeuvre, and offers a significant connection to the dystopian future later seen in A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 1971). Yet, the director did not find a true ‘love interest’ in overpopulation, and as the mysterious movie offer about it faded, other intriguing suggestions seemed to be on the horizon.

‘Nothing has clicked yet’: Kubrick and the United Nations

On 6 April 1964 Kubrick sent a telegram to movie executive Harold Mirisch, turning down the proposal to helm the project of adapting an unnamed book: ‘I have to decline for the most subjective of reasons, namely that I am presently at work on two ideas that have more fascination to me’ (Kubrick 1964a). As it is most likely that the first of such ideas was his extraterrestrial project, about which he had first written to Arthur C. Clarke on 31 March (Kubrick 1964b), the second idea could refer either to the previously mentioned overpopulation movie or to the second project Kubrick was involved with by early 1964: a TV-movie project with the United Nations.

Three days after Kubrick’s telegram to Mirisch, the American press announced that on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the United Nations, the Xerox Corporation would produce a series of television dramas that would revolve around the activities of the intergovernmental organization (Adams 1964a). Kubrick was mentioned as one of the high profile filmmakers involved, along other directors like Joseph Mankiewicz and Otto Preminger, as well as actors Marlon Brando and Paul Newman; basically the most respectable names in Hollywood seemed to have gathered to ‘waive fees’ in order to gain the prestige associated in working with the United Nations (Patureau 1964). The directors involved would have had the chance to choose a script or a story to their liking; it was explicitly mentioned that Kubrick would write the script for his film.

Kubrick’s involvement with the United Nations seems to have been originated by Peter Hollander, an old New York acquaintance of Kubrick, who by then was at the executive level in the film department ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Text
• Introduction: Forging new perspectives
• James Fenwick
• Part One: Narrative and Adaptation
• Part Two: Performance
• Part Three: Technology
• Part Four: Masculinity and the Astronaut
• Part Five: Visual Spectacle
• Part Six: Production
• Appendix One: Stanley Kubrick filmography
• Appendix Two: 2001: A Space Odyssey film credits
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index