Psychedelia and enlightenment

Rating: Null/10 (2 May 2009)

Beauty is indeed part of why Kubrick does what he does. But let's not forget that he and Arthur Clarke collaborated daily in the making of the movie and the novel; the story was co-conceived by both, and so rather than see the motion picture as a Kubrickization of the literature, see it as an expression of the story itself, of what it's about: evolution.
I haven't yet read the third novel, so I apologize if this accidentally spoils anything, but it's clear from having been raised on these two movies that the intent of the conceptualizers is to demonstrate what entheogenic practitioners have always known: that contact with higher planes of existence, even if only within ourselves, is an intensely psychedelic experience.
I've made a study of Kubrick's movie-making approach (and don't worry, I won't inflict it here, other than to point out that he's very capable of blending abstraction and conceptualization in such a way as to convey how, for instance, David Bowman is perceiving the process of enlightenment that is consuming his brain. The pretty colored lights are an abstraction of what his body experiences as his central nervous system melts under the onslaught of information, but they're also just ordered enough to suggest actual streams of data being forced into his consciousness. At intervals he's shown elements that resemble both cosmic events and organic interactions, and we're given to understand that he's grasping some fundamental association between the two.
The whole "cosmic tunnel" scene, far from being filler, is a litany of the evolutionary experience in Dave's microcosm. Just as with the Hunting Hypothesis demonstration at the Dawn of Man, Dave's evolutionary response (to the presence of a higher intelligence) propels him to a higher degree of functionality. He is being consumed by the process--losing much of his Bowmanship--but he is taking on as much more experience and perspective as to make it worth it. I think what some people might find tedious about that scene is the fact that it demands rigorous, unfaltering attention for an extended time, which I feel perfectly expresses the discipline that would be demanded, even if for only such a short time, by someone actually experiencing forcible Enlightenment.
There's a lot of abstraction in the scene, but there's also a lot of representation, and Kubrick overlays them in order to achieve the effect: an onrush of sensoria-destroying information, a glimpse of Creation, the arisal of solid worlds, the inevitable slow attacks on those worlds by their first life forms. As life spreads conceptually, so do the abstractions become green. You recognize a forest superimposing itself over what had been barren rock.
Chaos to order, and then back to chaos...the start of evolution, whence all diversity comes. Seven Sentinels standing by, in mechanical yet possibly organic form, commanding him to pay attention, to internalize the lesson. Your intelligence is not a factor in how we will treat you, they seem to be saying; it has only served you this far, to deliver you to us; now we'll show you what REAL intelligence is.
When his perceptions have settled back down enough for him to move around, he sees himself in two places...and in two stages of life...at the same time. He is now not only timeless, but multicorporeal. This is precisely how we lower 3-D beings might experience a multidimensional entity, and apparently precisely how the ex-Bowman still experiences himself: in discrete parts. He never clues in to his bilocation until it's too late to do anything really cool with it. But aside from representing, physically, the ages of Man in various stages of potential and decrepitude, we can tell that the experience has aged Bowman materially. Something about his body was consumed in his reorganization.
He is both less and more than we was before. Sorry, than he was before.