Word: monoliths
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...progress is evolutionary. A series of brief scenes establishes the life cycle of the australopithicine before its division into what became both ape and man--they eat grass, are victimized by carnivores, huddle together defensively. One morning they awake to find in their midst a tall, thin, black rectangular monolith, its base embedded in the ground, towering monumentally above them, plainly not a natural formation. They touch it and we note at that moment that the moon and sun are in orbital conjunction...
...moon, American scientists discover an identical black monolith, apparently buried over four million years before, completely inert save for the constant emission of a powerful radio signal directed toward Jupiter. The scientists examine it (touching it tentatively as the apes did) at a moment when the earth and sun are in conjunctive orbit. They conclude that some form of life on Jupiter may have placed the monolith there and, fourteen months later, an expedition is sent to Jupiter to investigate...
...major progressions have been made: an evolutionary progression in the discovery of the tool, and a technological progression inherent in the trip to Jupiter. The discovery of the monolith has preceded each advance, and with it the conjunction of the sun and moons of a given planet, as well as the presence of ape or human at a stage of development where they are ready to make the significant progression. The monolith, then, begins to represent something of a deity; for our own purposes, we will assume that, given the three conditions, the inert monolith actually teaches or inspires...
...Kubrick, this dehumanization is more than the result of the undefined force exerted by the monolith and proves a direct consequence of advanced technology. Kubrick is no stranger to the subject: The Killing and Lolita both involve man's self-expression through the automobile; Spartacus's defeat comes because he is not adequately prepared to meet the advanced military technology of the Roman army; Dr. Strangelove, of course, contains a running motif of machines assuming human characteristics (the machine sexuality of its opening titles) while humans become machinelike, a theme carried further in 2001. The central portion...
LEFT alone in the space ship, Bowman sees the monolith slab floating in space in Jupiter's atmosphere and takes off in a pod to follow it; knowing by now the properties of the pod, we can conjure images of the mechanical arms controlled by Bowman reaching to touch the monolith as did the australopithicines and the humans. The nine moons of Jupiter are in orbital conjunction (a near-impossible astronomical occurrance) and the monolith floats into that orbit and disappears. Bowman follows it and enters what Clarke calls the time-space warp, a zone "beyond the infinite" conceived cinematically...