This essay is one that I’m especially proud of, since, soon after it appeared in the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound in 1994, Stanley Kubrick’s office called the magazine, and asked to have four copies sent to them; I thought I’d die and gone to Heaven. (Unrelatedly, 1994 was the year that Kubrick started full-time work on Eyes Wide Shut.)

I hope that, if you’ve seen 2001, this piece will move you to watch it again; and if you haven’t seen it, I hope you’ll now be moved to do so. (Please watch it in the largest format possible—not on a laptop, certainly. If you’re lucky enough to have some local theater or museum screen it, by all means watch it there.)

Below this piece are some brief observations on the film’s uncanny prescience vis-a-vis “life” in 2025.

2001: A Cold Descent

by Mark Crispin Miller

Reprinted from “Sight&Sound” (v4, #1) 1994, pp.18-25. All Rights Reserved

“Mr. Kubrick: My pupils are still dilated, and my breathing sounds like your soundtrack. I don’t know if this poor brain will survive another work of the magnitude of 2001, but it will die (perhaps more accurately “go nova”) happily if given the opportunity: Whenever anybody asks me for a description of the movie, I tell them that it is, in sequential order: anthropological, camp, McLuhan, cybernetic, psychedelic, religious. That shakes them up a lot. Jesus, man, where did you get that incredibly good technical advice? Whenever, I see the sun behind a round sign, I start whistling Thus Spake Zarathustra. My kettledrum impression draws the strangest looks.”

“Dear Mr. Kubrick: Although I have my doubts that your eyes will ever see this writing, I still have hopes that some secretary will neglect to dispose of my letter. I have just seen your motion picture and I believe — please, words, don’t fail me now — that I have never been so moved by a film — so impressed — awed — etc. The music was absolutely on a zenith. “The Blue Danube” really belonged in some strange way, and the main theme with its building crescendos was more beautiful than John Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus” and from me that’s a compliment. The story in Life magazine, of course, showed the most routine scenes, as Life has a tendency to eliminate any overwhelming virtue in a motion picture, and the three best scenes were lumped together and were almost unrecognizable. But lest I run off at the mouth, let me conclude by saying that if the of ill-voted Oscars doesn’t give you a multitude of awards in 1969, I will resign from humanity and become a soldier.”

Twenty-five years later. Kubrick’s fan mail has an unintended poignancy — in part (but only in part) because the letters are so obviously dated. Those fierce accolades are pure 60s. To re-read such letters now — and Jerome Agel’s 1970 The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, the ecstatic, crazed homage that includes them — is to look back on a cultural moment that now seems as remote from our own as, say, those hairy screamers of pre-history, erect with murderous purpose at the water hole, might seem from the low-key Doctor Heywood R. Floyd, unconscious on his umpteenth voyage to the moon.

Privilege and Power

The film’s first devotees were knocked out, understandably, by its “incredible and irrevocable splendor” (as another letter-writer phrased it). Others were troubled — also understandably — by the film’s disturbing intimation that, since “the dawn of man” so many, many centuries ago, the human race has got nowhere fast. That subversive notion is legible not only in the famous match cut from the sunlit bone to the nocturnal spacecraft (two tools, same deadly white, both descending) but throughout the first two sections of the narrative: indeed, the negation of the myth of progress may be the film’s basic structural principle. Between the starved and bickering apes and smooth, affable descendants there are all sorts of broad distinctions, but there is finally not much difference — an oblique, uncanny similarity that recurs in every human action represented.

In 2001, for example, the men feed unenthusiastically on ersatz sandwiches and steaming pads of brightly coloured mush — food completely cooled (to say the least) and slowly masticated, as opposed to the raw flesh furtively bolted by the now carnivorous apes: and yet both flesh and mush appear unappetizing, and both are eaten purely out of need. Similarly, in 2001 the men are just as wary and belligerent, and just as quick to square off against tribal enemies, as their tense, shrieking forebears — although, as well-trained professionals and efficient servants of the state, they confront the other not with piercing screams and menacing gestures but by suddenly sitting very still and speaking very quietly and slowly: “… I’m… sorry, Doctor Smyslov, but, uh… I’m really not at liberty to discuss this…” Thus Doctor Floyd, although seated in an attitude of friendly languor (legs limply crossed, hands hidden in his lap), fights off his too inquisitive Soviet counterpart just as unrelentingly as, tens of thousands of years earlier, the armed apes had crushed their rivals at the water hole which recurs here as a small round plastic table bearing drinks, and again the locus of contention. Now, as then, the victor obviously wields a handy instrument of his authority (although this time it’s a briefcase. not a femur) and now, as then, the females merely look on as the males fight it out. (There is no matriarchal element in Kubrick’s myth.) More generally, the scientists and bureaucrats, and the comely corporate personnel who serve them (polite young ladies dressed in pink or white), are all sealed off — necessarily — from the surrounding vastness: and here too the cool world of 2001 seems wholly unlike, yet is profoundly reminiscent of, the arid world where all began.

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