Word: murder
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...balance concerning the relationship between man and tool. In a brilliant and indescribable sequence, preceded by some stunning low-angle camera gyrations as Bowman makes his way toward HAL's controls, the man performs a lobotomy on the computer, dismantling all but its mechanical functions. Symbolically, it is the murder of an equal, and HAL's "death" becomes the only empathy-evoking scene in 2001. Unlike any of the humans, HAL dies a natural human death at Bowman's hand, slowing down into senility and second childhood, until he remembers only his first programmed memory, the song Daisy, which...
...separates one from the other only in their choice of food from the dispensing machine: Poole chooses food with clashing colors and Bowman selects a meal composed entirely within the ochre-to-dark brown range. In a fascinating selection of material, Kubrick omits the actual act of Poole's murder, cutting to his body in space directly after the mechanical pod-hands sever his air hose, thus taking emphasis off any identification we might suddenly feel and turning the murder into cold, further dehumanized abstraction...
...only human in the film HAL proves a greater murderer than any of the men. Returning 2001 to the theme of inherent destruction in social and technological progress, Kubrick's chilling last-shot-before-the-intermission (a shot from HAL's point-of-view, lip-reading a conversation of Bowman and Poole deciding to dismantle him if the mistake is confirmed) suggests the potential of machine to control man, the ultimate reversal of roles in a situation where man makes machines in his own image. HAL's success is partial; he murders Poole, then three doctors on the ship...
Bowman's complex act parallels that of the australopithicus: his use of the pod ejector to re-enter the craft was improvisational, the mechanism undoubtedly designed for a different purpose--this referring to the use of bone as weapon-tool. Finally in committing murder, Bowman has essentially lost his dehumanization and become an archetypal new being: one worthy of the transcendental experience that follows. For the last part of the film, we must assume Bowman an individual by virtue of his improvised triumph over the complex computer...
...keeps mankind (and finally Bowman) under observation, and manipulates it at will. Man's progress is not of his own making, but a function of the monolith--man cannot predict, therefore, the ensuing stages of his own evolution. That the initiation of man into higher stages of development involves murder casts ambiguity as to the nature of the monolith force. In its statement that man cannot control his destiny, 2001 is anti-humanistic--this also in the concept that what we consider humanity is actually a finite set of traits reproducible by machines...