I am a self-proclaimed knower of what this film means.

Rating: 10/10 (22 July 1999)

Years ago a hippie girlfriend said to me, in reply to my assertion that Jack Nicholson's character in Easy Rider is a "Christ figure," that this was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard: Jack Nicholson, a Christ figure!
I must be an idiot, her tone indicated. This same person also found it unfathomable that Peter Fonda and his American flag-painted motorcycle might be taken to represent, in some ways, America itself. What, I say, does a flag of the USA represent? The USA, surely. And that is not being simple-headed. Nor is the idea that Hopper and his flame-painted chopper might represent the devil. But of course none of that goes very far to support the common reading of the film as a sad story of the evil rednecks that ignorantly kill the nice dope-head easy riders for no reason.
But Easy Rider is not the subject here. This is about Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This is for all those who are so fond of claiming that 2001 was intended to be obscure to the point that each viewer is free and invited to think that it all means just whatever one might happen to think that it means.
While it is certainly open to interpretation, the film was created with meticulous attention to providing, with tremendous clarity and poetry all of the elements, in abundance, that are necessary for a complete understanding of the film.
Here are a few that I have noticed.
2001: A Space Odyssey concerns itself with primary questions of the ontology of human existence. The key word here, though, is "questions." The film is about unanswerable mysteries. It embraces the unanswerable and frames the unknowable in its rightful state of awe.
The sequel to this, 2010, obliterated this feeling of awe in the face of the unknowable by presuming, via the conventional Hollywood formula, to provide all the answers, while in fact it ignored all of the great questions, and therefore trivialized the mystery of human thought. The same, of course, was glorified in 2001.
In 2001 the Questions are monumental, and Monolithic (!). They are the Questions that have hounded the human soul since the Dawn of Man and persist just as forcefully today. The human mind has sought answers and still seeks answers, and always the Question(s) demand answers that struggle to match the scope of the question.
What is the Monolith? Kubrick's monolith is the very definition of poetic beauty and clarity. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to fail to interpret the monolith for what it so clearly is. The modern American suburb-dwelling shopping mall consumer whose brain has atrophied due to lack of usage may have some difficulty, but otherwise we should have no trouble reading what Kubrick has provided. It is black. It is impenetrable. It is of unknown origin. It says nothing, answers no questions. It is a constant presence, yet it responds in no way to our normal probings and inquiries. It is void. And it is absolutely terrifying. It is what we all try to hide from most of the time. It is the Unknowable. It is what we can not know, what we are not sufficiently equipped to understand. It is what has tortured humanity since humanity's first appearance in the universe. At the very same moment of our triumphant miraculous acquisition of that primal quality that made us human, that is self-awareness, we are simultaneously shocked to find that although we now suddenly know that "we" ARE, we (or I) exist, we are self-aware, now we have a tremendous problem: We have no way of knowing WHAT, WHERE, HOW, or most importantly, WHY we are. We encounter the monolith.
The Monolith appears at the Dawn of Man. On this dawn the pre-humans find suddenly that their perception of reality is radically altered. They are on this day, for the first time, self-aware. The monolith did not appear the day before without notice. Clearly until they became self-aware they were quite content with their status of sharing puddle water with Tapirs. The result of this new awareness is shown to have a rather disturbing effect on the psyche, however. Because the awareness is inseparable from a simultaneous awareness of the Questions (the Monolith), because the questions represented by the monolith can have no verifiable answers, because the origins and destiny of human consciousness are unanswerable, the result is shown to be traumatic and terrifying. The monolith can not, by definition, appear before self-awareness. And self-awareness can not appear without, at the same time, the Monolith, the unknowable.
The shock of being, but not knowing, is linked in the film immediately to a propensity to commit violence. The deep rooted fear, constantly present in our consciousness, of that which we can not know, has not yet been sufficiently tempered by any framework that we have yet been able to construct in this world to prevent us from lashing out irrationally and violently at the world. We kill, because we fear, because we do not know.
We still have not found any way to fundamentally alter our relationship with the unknowable. The relationship was, at the beginning, and still is, a relationship of terror. The artificial intelligence of HAL is shown to encounter self-awareness in precisely the same manner. At the moment he becomes self-aware he is inextricably engaged with the Monolith, the unknowable. His reaction is the same: fear-inspired violence and murder.
The psychedelic journey into the living room shows again the persistence of this shock on our psyche. Bowman finds himself engaged in a rather immediate and intimate, Eyes Wide "Open" encounter with the Monolith. This plummets him directly into a domestic (civilized) Victorian apartment where all of his physical needs are satisfied, without effort, for his entire lifetime. Yet, at the core of his soul, he is shown to be quite alone, except for his constant monologue with the monolith, which hounds him always and offers him still nothing on his death bed.
Finally, the embryo. Once again the awe of creation and being, and perhaps, Kubrick offers a suggestion that one day humanity may alter its manner of perceiving the unknowable, and may encounter it not solely with fear and violence, but instead with a more positive posture.