Does it make any sense for these ape-like human ancestors in the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey to “suddenly” be imbued with an understanding of tools by “divine fiat” via the alien artifact?

This is a story element that rubs me the wrong way, but given the film’s success and reputation – not to mention the popularity of the scene itself – I had to ask myself why. What is it about this scene, and for that matter the transcendental experience at the end, that bothers me?

On the face of it, it seems a not unreasonable premise for a science fiction story – and in its favor it resonates with the questions that were surrounding human evolution at the time both the book and the movie came out.

The core of 2001 is of course Arthur C. Clarke’s short story The Sentinel which he apparently wrote in 1948 as his entry in a BBC competition.[1]  But this story only contains the seed of the idea, and forms the basis for the scenes on the surface of the Moon where the first Monolith is discovered in the film.  The rest of the film, and the book that was developed along with it[2]  were grown from this seed, and are very much a product of the late 60s in many respects.

At the time the film was made, we knew much less about human evolution than we do now.[3]   The evidence we had at the time showed what appeared to be a sharp division between clear human ancestors (Homo lineage) who were using tools and fire and clear extinct great ape lineages who we thought were not[4] – ideas proposed to fill this gap ranged from special creation by supernatural agency through to a chance mutation that just happened to have “the right stuff.”  In between, some exotic evolutionary histories were “floated”[5] including Zecharia Sitchin’s ideas on alien intervention.

On top of this, the late 60s saw deep interest in altered consciousness[6] and a growth in interest in alternative ideas.  In this context, it’s hardly surprising to find that evolutionary gap being plugged by what we now see as a slightly silly idea[7] and accompanied by what amounts to a glorious on-screen pseudo-religious experience.

Given this context and the fact that we accept even sillier ideas without blinking in other SF works, why should this seemingly innocent conceit be troubling, especially in a film that was received very well and raved about ever since?[8]

I think the issue is that “science fiction” is a rather large tent and although 2001, Star Wars, ERB’s Mars stories and War of the Worlds are all stamped SF they actually operate under different rules.

The Force is acceptable in Star Wars because, despite being dressed up in space ships, blasters and robots, it’s actually a fantasy so it operates under rules that demand resonance with mythic archetypes.  So long as it’s internally consistent, a lot of the tech etc. can be black-boxed without issue.

ERB’s Mars stories are similar in that the world to which John Carter travels doesn’t have to be Mars – it just happens to have that sign hung on it.  Beginning to end, it operates on mythic levels, so much can be accepted so long as it’s internally consistent.

War of the Worlds again doesn’t need Mars – that’s just a convenient label that forestalls questions as to the origin of the aliens.  The point is the vastly superior tech of the alien invaders, the bumbling, over-confident early response of industrialized humanity, and the irony that the aliens are defeated by the fact we’re too backward to have conquered microbes.  The tech presented is a reasonable extrapolation from things in use or being discussed at the time, in most cases, and the main thrust is the social reaction anyway so we can call this sciencey science fiction.

Here’s where the problem lies:

Most of 2001 appears to be presented as a science/engineering hard SF story.  There’s solid extrapolation, the tech itself and scientific advances are integral, and it appears to be a science mystery.  The scene with the “space flight attendant” delivering a meal, the meeting on the space station, the Moon excavation site with the Lunar Monolith, the suspended animation and other tech of the Discovery One en route to Jupiter/Saturn.[9]

With the “discovery” of the orbital monolith[10] it becomes a first contact story, and to be honest the presentation of the aliens being so far advanced that we can’t even grok them outside a psychedelic experience works, especially in historical context.

However, the premise of “uplift” as the moment of transition from ape to human is jarring in the context of the majority of the film. It’s not an entirely unreasonable riff on the more out-there ideas of the day, but it’s out of step with the majority in the middle – because it breaks the rules:

It invokes mythic themes and deus ex machina in the context of what’s written as a solid engineering SF story.  To my mind, this essentially puts the film (and the co-developed book) in the position of being two quite different stories which have been stitched together, which I think is what causes the sense of “wrongness” in the early ape scene and the transition to psychedelia at the end.[11]

The thing about the film as it is that rubs me in a funny way is that it appears as though Kubrick and Clarke were trying to have their cake and eat it too.

They wanted to make a grand, glorious hard SF masterpiece, a monument to what they saw as the ultimate conclusion of the enormous technical strides that were being made in the 60s. They wanted to paint a future beyond the nerve-wracking nuclear worries of the day, where a (more or less) united humanity stretched out its hand to touch the stars…and learns just how small we are.  This is long before Sagan’s famous “pale blue dot” commentary of course, and even before the comments of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins after they first looked back at the Earth from the Moon, but we had already heard the wonder in the voices of astronauts who had been in orbit and we were starting to get a true sense of the enormity of it all.  I think this is what they were trying to capture through most of the film.

But they also seem to have wanted to create a transcendent SF work, a “religious” experience embedded in the sterile human world of technology.

It’s perhaps important to note here that Clarke’s work frequently has religious themes, and in fact he had a long courtship with the paranormal that seems to have ended in the 80s or early 90s.  Clarke described himself variously as a pantheist (what he insisted be printed on his dog tags when he was in the RAF), an atheist, and a crypto-Buddhist (though he always maintained that Buddhism is not a religion) but his work actually explores all sorts of religious ideas, and this in combination with his fascination with the paranormal I personally think reflects a deep interest in the nature of self and identity, and actually was probably born out of his rational, scientific outlook on life and an openness to exploring whether mystical or paranormal ideas might have some foundation in fact.

Likewise, Kubrick himself has said that he didn’t intend the film to imply “God” but rather that it’s an exploration of the possibility that there might be intelligences in the universe so far removed from us that for all intents and purposes they might appear to be gods.  In fact, he has been quoted in an interview with American Cinematographer as going so far as to claim that the entire film is a refutation of the idea that there might be a god, saying:

“This film is a rejection of the notion that there is a god; isn’t that obvious?”[12]

Given this knowledge of the attitudes and ideas of the two creators of the film, it seems unlikely that when we say “religious experience” they would have made a version of this film that literally required the experience to be religious, so reinterpreting elements of religion as being echoes of some kind of species-level memory, or even deliberate messages from our “sponsors” would seem to fit with the sort of thing they might consider using to generate a mythic version of the story.

Honestly? This is a very complex film.  It famously has far more non-dialogue scenes than dialogue scenes, and so is almost entirely a visual work – it’s incredible how such complex ideas can be communicated via nothing but (admittedly incredible) screen craft.

I enjoy this firm very much every time I see it[13] but I’d be lying if I said I completely understood what Kubrick and Clarke were aiming for.  This really is a great film in my opinion (though of course I am biased[14]), and I certainly wouldn’t demand it be “remade” to “fix” the dissonance that bothers me.[15]

But the fact is that two very different stories are being attempted here, and to me they don’t seem to go together – the “rules” for each clash, and realising this can, I think, help to improve our own efforts.  The take-away, basically comes down to this:

1.       Stories can be divided into clear types (this is quite separate from genre)

2.       These types have their own unique “rules of engagement” that follow from their foundations and the expected internal logic.

3.       It might be possible to mix types (and therefore rules) but it will be a tricky process, and you will risk jarring the reader/viewer.

If we look back, I think we can see a number of films and (less often) books that famously suffer from criticism that can be traced to just this jarring effect – for just two very obvious examples:

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier – takes the “black box sciencey” core elements of the Star Trek universe and tries to graft on quasi-religious themes, including a rather ridiculous interaction with “god”.  While Star Trek had explored the nature of gods and beings far beyond mere humans in the past, the way in which the matter was engaged in this film was more mythic than materialist, and it rubs many viewers the wrong way.[16]

Star Wars prequels –  I won’t get into the weeds here, as there are many things to critique if the Internet is to be believed, but one element that gets routinely mocked is midi-chlorians. You might think that anyone who freely accepted the concept of the Force in the original trilogy shouldn’t get so worked up about these microorganisms that apparently are the conduit between intelligent beings and the Force – but the issue here is again a mismatch between the sort of story Star Wars is (fantastic SF with strong mythic elements) and the nature of the midi-chlorian speculation – by trying to explain the Force “scientifically” in something approaching real-world terms, the films clash with the mythic elements and the result is an almost visceral reaction in some people.

As 2001 shows, even when blended by masters like Kubrick and Clarke, the combination of different story types can cause issues.  2001 works but the clash causes a roughness that wasn’t necessary.

The type of story you’re trying to tell is important – not because some types are superior to others, but because it takes a very, very careful hand to blend types successfully.  You must be aware of what you’re doing and think through the implications very carefully, or you will be courting disaster.