2001: A Spacey Odyssey - about nationality?

MakeEmLaugh

I recently watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, having not seen it for years. Something occurred to me; how much the film is about nationality.

In the film's famous prologue, The Dawn of Man, man's ancestors learn to fight and kill using bones as weapons, changing from herbivores to carnivores. However, they also begin killing not only for the purpose of food, but over territory (a watering hole). Two tribes of ape-like creatures fight over this small peace of land in Africa, shortly before the film moves forward millions of years to the year 2001. This tribal scuffle may have been intended as a precursor to the modern conflicts over national territory which are visible all over the world.

Take, for instance, the first named human character he are introduced to, Dr. Heywood Floyd (played by William Sylvester). Floyd is on his way to Clavius, an area of the moon which has been colonised by man, to investigate the discovery of a recent obelisk or monolith found buried in the sand from four million years prior.

While in what can only be described as an airport, waiting for his 'stopover' flight, Floyd gains access to the terminal via a voice activated video message from the “United States Immigration Department”. Floyd is required to state his full name (including 'Christian name' – though that's a term worth investigating another time) and nationality. For nationality, he states “American”.

Moments later, however, Floyd is speaking to his daughter on what seems like a precursor to Skype, a video phone booth. His daughter has a very strong English accent (and was played by Kubrick's own daughter, raised in England, Vivian). Floyd even asks his daughter to pass on a message to “Mummy”, a term not common in the US.

So Floyd is an American national with an English daughter and probably an English wife – an expatriate. How this affects his loyalty to his mission or to his country, we do not know. Perhaps it does not affect this loyalty at all. Perhaps he is some kind of Ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Soon after concluding his video phone message, Floyd meets some other doctors, who are clearly a different nationality (probably Russian – their surnames are Smyslov, Kalinan, Stretyneva). Floyd is superficially friendly, but soon becomes evasive and suspicious of the Russian doctors when they ask about his motives for travelling to Clavius. A false story has been circulated about an epidemic there, in order to cover up the fact that the monolith has been found. Even in 2001 (when the film is set) Floyd is suspicious of the motives of the Russian doctors.

HAL 9000, the computer on board, does not have a nationality, and is therefore an even greater threat to the astronauts on board than a human of a different nationality would be. HAL betrays the two astronauts – a precursor to this is HAL's playing of a chess game against Dr. Frank Poole, in which the computer triumphs. HAL eventually kills Poole and tries to kill Dr. David Bowman by denying him access to their ship, though Bowman enters through an emergency hatch, and deactivates HAL.

What Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, with whom Kubrick wrote the film, may have been saying was that there are future threats to the human race beyond nationality, and that nationality must be left behind.

If one looks at Kubrick's subsequent films, such as A Clockwork Orange, one sees similar concerns over nationality and identity. Although it's been a while since I watched it, A Clockwork Orange is the story of a group of violent youths who speak in a pseduo-Russian patois. As A Clockwork Orange was filmed in the early 1970s, the most visible tension between nationalities was that of the Soviet Union and the Western Bloc (countries like the United States and the United Kingdom). Therefore the use of this cod-Russian slang may have been intended to seem a surreptitious threat to the values of the West.

Look at the way historians like Prof. David Starkey described the rioters in London in 2011.

“A particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion, and black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England, and that is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.”

Again, language is used to signal threat, except in this case being a Caribbean influenced language, as opposed to a Soviet influenced one.

Kubrick, of course, was an American who lived for a majority of his live in Great Britain, and married a German. It was his daughter, Vivian, with her English accent, who appeared in 2001: A Spacey Odyssey. This, of course, may well render the English accented daughter of Dr. Floyd to be merely incidental, and have no bearing on his nationality. But Kubrick's own footloose nationality is something which must have had a bearing on his work (he refused to work outside the United Kingdom, and even filmed his Vietnam War drama Full Metal Jacket in England, flying specially chosen trees over to make it look more authentic).

Anyway, these were just some thoughts that occurred to me.

Harry Palmr

MakeEmLaugh wrote: »

HAL 9000, the computer on board, does not have a nationality, and is therefore an even greater threat to the astronauts on board than a human of a different nationality would be. HAL betrays the two astronauts – a precursor to this is HAL's playing of a chess game against Dr. Frank Poole, in which the computer triumphs. HAL eventually kills Poole and tries to kill Dr. David Bowman by denying him access to their ship, though Bowman enters through an emergency hatch, and deactivates HAL.

HAL Speaks with an American accent though

What Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, with whom Kubrick wrote the film, may have been saying was that there are future threats to the human race beyond nationality, and that nationality must be left behind.

Clarke revisited cold war nationalism of early 80s through the lens of 2010 of course. The summary of the ending as war breaks out on earth is "be nice to one another"

If one looks at Kubrick's subsequent films, such as A Clockwork Orange, one sees similar concerns over nationality and identity. Although it's been a while since I watched it, A Clockwork Orange is the story of a group of violent youths who speak in a pseduo-Russian patois. As A Clockwork Orange was filmed in the early 1970s, the most visible tension between nationalities was that of the Soviet Union and the Western Bloc (countries like the United States and the United Kingdom). Therefore the use of this cod-Russian slang may have been intended to seem a surreptitious threat to the values of the West.

The invention of Nadsat by Anthony Burgess was just a handy way of creating something that was familiar but distinct so would not sound like youth talk of the era (be it 1962 or 1971) or indeed any era and so wouldn't date.

MakeEmLaugh

Harry Palmr wrote: »

HAL Speaks with an American accent though

Maybe, but HAL is still hostile to the American crew members on board the ship. He cloaks it through the veil of pride in his own infallibility, but really he views his two co-pilots with contempt. He reports that a satellite onboard the ship must be replaced, but when it is brought in and investigated, no fault can be found.

The pilots ask him why he said there was a fault when none could be found. His response is

“I don't think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.”

bnt

Remember also that the designer of HAL 9000 was Indian: Dr. Sivasubramanian Chandrasegarampillai, better known as Dr. Chandra. (Specifically Tamil, from Madras (Chennai) on the east coast near Clarke's adopted Ceylon (Sri Lanka)). I think his nationality is a reflection of how Clarke's boundaries had been expanded by living in that part of the world, compared to his early life in England. He'd been something of an internationalist for years already:

It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.
-- The Exploration of Space (1951), p. 187

DavidRamsay99

2001: A Space Odyssey is about a master intelligence or aliens or God intervening in human affairs. The ape scene is obviously Genesis in another form. After touching the monolite early man learns to hunt and make war and by using a bone to do it represents the beginning of his mastery of technology. Man won the war over nature and after the monolith is found on the moon Dave's battle with HAL is when man defeats technology and ascends to a new godlike condition when he encounters a third monolith orbiting Jupiter.
In the philosophy of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx and other philosophers of the 18th and 19th century mankind was destined to ascend to a new reality going through stages where forces met their contradiction and a new reality emerged which in turn met its contradiction.
Hegel believed the future was coming to be in and through history with humans becoming vehicles for the Spirit coming to be.
This idea has been taken up by many modern sci-fi movies in humanity is in danger of creating a Satanic super intelligence.
This idea of mankind's creation trying to destroy him goes all the way back to the Bible with the visions of the beast enslaving mankind with 666 on his forehead.

Aj Furlong

I think it's about how intelligence and life is measured, and evolution. HAL is arguably the most human character in the movie and shows the the most emotion out of everybody. and goes crazy cause he will be terminated.

The ape in the beginning were also given a help evolving when the monolith appeared, then helped them evolve to the levels of current humans.

Then at the end, when they discover the last monolith, he evolves again into the next advancement in evolution. when he's that weird baby thing overlooking earth. Even the ship looks like a big sperm. I think it's about progress and what kind of life is deemed worthy of being called intelligent.