Word: progressing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...executed in brilliant slow motion montage of the pre-ape destroying the skeleton with the bone, establishing Kubrick and Clarke's subjective anthropological notion that the discovery of the tool was identical to that of the weapon. The "dawn of man," then, is represented by a coupling of progress and destruction; a theme of murder runs through 2001 simultaneously with that of progress. Ultimately, Kubrick shows an ambiguous spiritual growth through physical death...
...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...
...monolith has previously guided man to major evolutionary and technological progression, it leads Bowman now into a realm of perception man cannot conceive, an experience unbearable for him to endure while simultaneously marking a new level in his progress. The frozen shots intercut with the light sequences show, debatably, Bowman's horror in terms of perception and physical ordeal, and his physical death: the last of many multi-colored solarized close-ups of his eye appears entirely flesh-colored and, if we are justified in creating a color metaphor, the eye is totally wasted, almost subsumed into a pallid flesh...
...solar system, watching Earth. He has plainly become an integral part of the cosmos, perhaps as Life suggests, as a "star-child" or, as Penelope Gilliatt suggests, as the first of a species of mutant that will inhabit the Earth and begin to grow. What seemed a linear progression may ultimately be cyclical, in that the final effect of the monolith on man can be interpreted as a progress ending in the beginning of a new revolutionary cycle on a vastly higher plane. But the intrinsic suggestiveness of the final image is such that any consistent theory about the nature...
SEVERAL less-than-affirmative ideas can be advanced. The monolith is a representation of an extraterrestrial force which 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...