Words, words, words.

Rating: 10/10 (11 April 2018)

Over most of my life, I've studied this film and the conception of its story in both Arthur Clarke's scientific mind and in Kubrick's artistic mind, and I've learned about a great many subliminal themes and subconscious effects Kubrick wove into it. But I think that probably the most profound and unique effect of the film is this:

It begins in a place before language, where a profound but inexpressible truth is communicated nonverbally, - to the Australopithecines and to the audience. It then jumps ahead to a time where language is universal and compulsory, but where it is also consistently platitudinous, shallow, (Heywood Floyd and others) deceptive, cryptic, (Hal) or purely technical in nature. Nothing of any deep truth or impact is presented in the film verbally, and most of the dialogue is distinctly mundane and, the deeper one looks into the film, duplicitous. Hal is deceiving his two astronauts, and later they are presenting a false veneer of cooperation to him. Dr. Floyd has a conversation with Russian collaborators in which all are extremely polite and friendly even as Floyd refuses to actually answer any of his companions' questions (and in which he is slyly given a middle finger by Dr. Smyslov as Smyslov moves a drink on the table).
Floyd later gives a speech on the Lunar base in which he gives absolutely no actual information about the monolith, and in which are several quietly sinister references to the 'proper preparation and conditioning' of the public, the 'formal oaths' that need to be obtained and 'sacrifices' made by those privileged to be present at the meeting (Kubrick was greatly fixated on the secretive, Freemason-like enclaves of the rich and powerful). Floyd's small daughter (whose mother is currently away shopping) wants a telephone for her birthday, but he reminds her they've already got lots of telephones - so many ways to talk, but the girl still seems to desire real communication (communication and its failure is another recurring theme in Stanley's work). On and on it goes.
But when we finally arrive at Jupiter and its orbiting monolith, speech drops away completely for the last twenty-three minutes of the film (about the same length as the pre-verbal prologue). Bowman passes beyond speech into the most stupefying experience in the cinema - an experience of incomprehensible images and music, (and an experience whose connection with the audience is strengthened by the fact that Bowman isn't a Specific Character, with his own personal and emotional history the movie's supplied him with, but a blank, prototypical human we can read anything onto) and even more bewilderingly, he encounters himself at the end of this journey; and the movie itself seems to pass beyond its own logic.
The subconscious feeling one's left with from a full, uninterrupted viewing is of a film largely about the treachery and emptiness of speech in which we finally escape the verbal universe entirely and arrive at a place of profound but inexpressible truth; that nearly all the film before this has had a distinct falseness and superficiality about it, and we have finally found a great Secret far beyond any word. I've never seen another film that's achieved this feeling.

I've studied Kubrick's other films for some time now, and 'The Shining' and 'Eyes Wide Shut' may exceed '2001' in the richness of their subliminal thematic and aesthetic tapestries (and days before he died, Stanley himself said the latter would be his greatest contribution). But none of his other movies go nearly as far down the rabbit-hole of raw experience and mystery as the Odyssey does. Emily Dickinson wrote that 'Nature is a haunted house--but Art--is a house that tries to be haunted.' Of the artists who've worked with film, Kubrick is the most skilled I've seen at haunting his houses.
Einstein -
'The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead - his eyes are closed.'