2001 can not be spoiled in words

Rating: 10/10 (13 September 1999)

Spoiler Warning?, but 2001 can not be spoiled in words!

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
2001: A Space Odyssey causes one to reflect on the primary questions of the ontology of human existence. The key word is questions. The film is about unanswerable mysteries. It embraces the unanswerable and frames the unknowable in its rightful state of awe.
In 2001 the Questions are Monolithic (!). They are the Questions that have hounded the human soul since the Dawn of Man and persist just as forcefully today.
What is the Monolith? It is black. It is impenetrable. It is always there. It comes from who knows where. It never responds to our inquiries. It is void, and it is absolutely terrifying. It is . . . the Unknowable. It represents everything that we are not sufficiently equipped to know.
Since humanity's first appearance in the universe, since that first miraculous acquisition of the quality that makes us human, self-awareness, we have thereafter been engaged in confrontation with this Monolith. In the Dawn of Man, Kubrick shows the time from the first acquisition of self-awareness until confrontation with the Unknown to be quite short. One sleepless night of fear and darkness, eyes searching, then at dawn, suddenly, immediately, full force unmediated confrontation with the Unknowables of Existence. The unexpected and sudden `I am' that precedes this confrontation is, smartly, only implied by Kubrick. He skips it and moves directly to the What, Where, How, and Why Monolith. What, Where, How and Why are the objects that human logic and grammar immediately demand from the profound and simple `I am.'
`I am' is an a priori argument. It is antecedently necessary to the subsequent Monolithic Questions that have no answer. 2001 is mostly commentary on the fear and psychic destabilization which the human mind has endured since its first `I am.' Fear and psychic trauma are humanity's characteristic reactions to the Questions that can not be answered and from which the mind demands answers in order to complete the argument `I am.' In 2001 these are the reactions we see the first time and every time the monolith is encountered.
The first time is, of course, at The Dawn of Man. The monolith did not appear quietly without being noticed one day. No, clearly it was not there, and then it was there. The trigger was self-awareness. The trigger was `I am.' Before this, the apes were quite content sharing puddle water with Tapirs. These same Tapirs and other animals, we later notice, do not seem the least bit impressed when the Monolith does show up. In fact, they don't even see it. And they certainly don't here that scary music. They just continue wandering around as always.
Man, alone, is burdened with the Monolith. This burden, this 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, irrationally, because we do not know.
We still have not found any way to fundamentally alter our relationship with the unknowable. It was possible to skip all of human history since the Dawn of Man until the year 2001, transitioning as Kubrick did in only a few seconds with the camera panning and following the bone/weapon, flung out by man's arm in one fluid movement, propelled by a very perceptible and fertile combination of exaltation, fear, terror, power, primal angst. The bone is hurled skyward in this way, as has all of human technology since. But more importantly, what is said by compressing all of history like this into just about 5 seconds of film, is that nothing at all worth mentioning has changed apparently since the Dawn of Man regarding our own self awareness and its concomitant relationship to the unknown. The relationship was, at the beginning, and still is, a relationship of terror. Even the artificial intelligence of HAL is shown to encounter self-awareness in exactly the same manner. He becomes self-aware. Therefore he is inextricably engaged with the Monolith. And his reaction is the same: fear-inspired violence and murder. `I'm afraid, . . .Dave. . ., I'm. . . afraid,' he says as he is about to die as Dave removes his `higher' logic circuits.
The psychedelic journey into the living room shows again the persistence of this shock on our psyche. Bowman finds himself engaged in rather immediate and intimate, Eyes Wide "Open" encounter with the Monolith. This plummets him directly into a domestic Victorian apartment where all of his physical needs are satisfied, without effort, for his entire lifetime (a simple symbol of civilized life which is surely designed to some extent to act as a buffer against our primal fears of the unknown). Yet, at the core of his soul, he is shown to be quite alone, in a world with still no answers to the questions. He has his life-long monologue with the silent monolith, which hounds him always and offers him still nothing even on his death bed. Even as his last act is a finger pointed at the monolith, as if to say `Can I ever know?'
Finally, the embryo. the awe of creation and of `being,' and perhaps, Kubrick offers a suggestion that one day humanity may alter its manner of being, that perhaps we may find a way of perceiving the unknowable not solely with fear and violence, but instead with a more positive posture.