Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 22, August 2003
Richard I. Pope
In Kubrick's Crypt, a Derrida/Deleuze Monster;
or, An-Other Return to _2001_
A rosebud by any other
name! Here's what the artifact's
been called: Artifact Metal prism Pentalogue Mies van der Rohe version
of one-half the Tablets of the
Law Black basalt
column Black steel
door Long cement
board Pillar The block Monolith That
damn-two-by-four Teaching
machine Candy bar Calling card Transistor
radio Handball court
wall Cracker Jacks
box Vibrating Metallic
bar God [1] It's like something out of
Borges, something foreign to 'our' traditional ways of
thinking. The monolith. The movie. And the experience of
trying to verbalize either. In a common sense, each stands
in for the other -- and cinema itself. People had never seen
anything like it. During the Los Angeles world premiere,
Rock Hudson is said to have ran out of the theatre
screaming: 'Can someone tell what the hell this movie is
about?'. People, unaccustomed to so many long silences -- as
has been well noted, there are only 40 minutes of dialogue
in a movie 160 minutes long -- chattered throughout. Yet
during the intermission, they were speechless. Packing some
serious affective punch, _2001: A Space Odyssey_ (Stanley
Kubrick, 1968) bode badly for New York critics with a
deadline to meet. They called it 'somewhere between
incredibly hypnotic and immensely boring', arguing that it
left too many unresolved plot lines. [2] 'What the
devil was the monolith about?', the chorus rang. They called
it pompous, childish. And yet it would be a
child who had the most interesting speculations -- at least
in Kubrick's eyes. At the age of fifteen, Margaret
Stackhouse suggested that the monolith was *supposed* to be
incomprehensible, that it is perhaps always invisibly
present, that it is always out of reach (except at death),
and yet that nothing is meaningful without its spirit.
Kubrick called her speculations 'the most intelligent that
I've read anywhere, and I am, of course, including all the
reviews and articles that have appeared'. [3] This
is as close as we are going to get to Kubrick's own thought
on the 'meanings' of the film, given that he refuses to
discuss his own interpretation (unlike co-writer Arthur C.
Clarke, who insists on a limitative, and even
techno-utopist, reading). Not that we would care to unearth
Kubrick's intentions behind the film, of course; far more
interesting, in fact, are how, in the inevitable desire to
unearth these intentions, one falls upon a kind of void or
abyss into which intentionality disappears, or at least
mostly so. In its place we have style, cryptic in its
operations. On the origin of the
cinematic odyssey Kubrick remarks: 'I do not remember when I
got the idea to do the film. I became interested in
extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe, and was
convinced that the universe was *full* of intelligent life,
and so it seemed time to make a film'. [4] But as to
the confusion surrounding the film upon its release, and in
particular many thinking Floyd had gone to the 'planet'
Clavius he said: 'Why they think there's a planet Clavius
I'll never know. But they hear him [Floyd] asked,
'Where are you going?', and he says, 'I'm going to Clavius'.
With many people -- *boom* -- that one word registers in
their heads and they don't look at fifteen shots of the
moon; they don't see he's going to the Moon'. [5] At
the same time he rhetorically asked: 'How could we possibly
appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the
bottom of the canvas: 'The lady is smiling because she is
hiding a secret from her lover'. This would shackle the
viewer to reality, and I don't want this to happen to
_2001_'. [6] Leonardo doesn't need to
write it: we already know Mona is hiding a secret; we are
seduced, taken in by it. Just as Kubrick is by his
extraterrestrials, his secret, his (or is it 'our'?)
crypt. It is well known to what
extent Kubrick kept his project secret. Most of his actors
performed their lines and left the set never having read the
full script. One reason for such secrecy was the freedom it
allowed Kubrick; without media reports of what he was up to,
he could change the plot as he wanted. After all, he could
never see the whole project clearly; he was too obsessed. He
read and watched every science-fiction film or book his
assistants came across, kept Clarke up late, and chattered
everyone's ear off in coming up with ideas. One humorous
anecdote involves him and Clarke, who, while collaborating
one night, saw a UFO in the sky. Paranoid, Kubrick thought
it to be the end of their project. If real aliens made
themselves known, who would want to see _2001_? Luckily for
him -- and us -- it turned out to be a weather
balloon. His obsession with the
specter of alien life was total. Possessing just about as
complete a knowledge of the fiction and the technology
behind science and extraterrestrial life as anyone could,
perhaps it in turn possessed him. Perhaps he did not make a
film about aliens; maybe they made a film about him. In a
not so friendly note, Norman Kagan suggests, 'many of
[his] movies turn out to be secretly autobio
portraits of a monarchical ego struggling for control of its
universe'. [7] Yet perhaps the joy of such films are
his losing his ego along the way -- nowhere more 'clearly',
I think, than in _2001_. As an aside, it is interesting that
after _2001_ Kubrick tried to make a film about ego-maniac
Napoleon -- which he failed to even begin. So: the secret is
that _2001_ was an autobiographical portrait. But what was
the secret of this secrecy? What on earth, or in space, was
he hiding? *It's in Mona's eyes; it's in the monolith's
(in)difference.* Crypt and Cut In Jody Castricano's
_Cryptomimesis_, a masterly exposition of the functioning of
the crypt in the writings of Jacques Derrida, the abject is
shown to be locked up, and kept safe, in the (non)place of
the crypt: an internal exclusion. It is our secret, and one
best kept if it is kept from ourselves, thereby *remaining*
at work, with each of us unaware. Mourning requires a space
that can be opened in the self wherein the dead other can be
introjected -- yet this very spacing, if total, would
annihilate the self. So the conditions of possibility of
mourning are at the same time its impossibility, and as a
result the dead are lodged, at least partly, in the
non-space and non-place of the crypt, as secret. 'I' can
only -- continually -- come to be if 'my' 'other' is locked
away, incorporated into 'my' crypt. Everyone, even while
chasing the ghosts of others, writes (with) her or his own
ghosts. Like _2001_, writing becomes hieroglyphic,
rebus-like; perhaps Kubrick, searching the galaxy for
alien-ghosts, was filming his own (and our) ghosts. The
secret of (t)his secrecy? (T)his secret did not belong to
him. It came -- it comes -- from the other. Now the act of
crypt-analysis is not restorative, seeking to uncover ghosts
and make amends. It is rather productive. It dwells in the
aporia, yet in this dwelling it is necessarily pushed
forward. It hopes for a congregation of ghosts, an orgy of
spirit. But before the orgy, let's see if we can wed
crypt-analysis to film theory. Let's introduce
Castricano/Derrida to Deleuze. For Deleuze, as for
Kubrick (and many others), what makes the cinema different
from other art forms is the cut, the edit. In _Cinema 2: The
Time-Image_, Deleuze argues that what makes the time-image
different from the earlier movement-image is the 'irrational
cut'. [8] By this he means that whereas in classical
cinema the sound-image and the visual-image are linked or
folded over each other, in modern cinema the disjunct
between the two is highlighted. In classical cinema speech
hides the cut, covering the event with words which serve as
totalizing clues for the viewer to follow the narrative. In
the time-image speech's supremacy over the image is reduced,
so that the cut, when it comes, seems all the more novel,
indeed irrational. The viewer is not told how it will
develop; the factor of plot prediction is minimized. Since
neither the sound-image nor the visual-image seek to extend
themselves continuously through the film, both are allowed
to enter a specific relation with each other. Both are
framed in themselves, and the interstice between them
replaces classical cinema's out-of-field. This interstice,
this incommensurable relation that is nevertheless a
perpetual relinkage -- again, an aporia -- is the irrational
cut. To be more clear where Deleuze seems murky, there are
*two* irrational cuts. One between the sound-image and
visual-image, and one between shots. When both types of
image change at the *same time* as a cut between shots, one
reaches the most powerful form of time-image, and cinema.
One classic example in _2001_, of course, is the tapir bone
cutting to space. Neither the sound nor the
image tries to fold over the other; neither seeks to
colonize the other or determine its meaning. Instead each is
allowed to dance in its own space until it reaches its
limit, the limit of each being the same 'common limit': they
relate in their incommensurability. I'll follow Deleuze in
calling this 'touch'. [9] When this common limit is
the cut itself, you find the time-image which gives rise to
a thought which lodges itself in the interstice, in the play
of resemblances that comes before, during, and after
language. Thought as becoming. In the classic example,
humanity becomes: a leap of four million years, a leap of
technology, the similitude of both. The crypt is a non-place.
The irrational cut is a non-place. And so is the monolith.
Most importantly, one cannot move in the direction of either
of the three without undergoing qualitative change as a
result. Movement, traditionally understood as extensivity,
as moving unchanged from one place to another, is here
intensively transformed: movement opens onto, or is always
already a part of, duration, and thus undergoes qualitative
change. As mentioned, classical cinema seeks to pave over
the cuts between the sound and visual images, and between
shots; thus it avoids the crypt, the place of the other
within. The time-image, on the other hand, makes the viewer
anticipate the cuts, makes them find the incommensurable
relations, makes them touch in touching them, through
thought. Makes them -- *invites* them -- to accept, or at
least engage, the other within: an ethical
invitation. Cut by Cut To begin with, _2001_
calls attention to its form. For instance, the film divides
itself into 3 sections via the titles 'Dawn of Man',
'Jupiter Mission', and 'Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite'.
Yet there are really four segments, with one between the
'Dawn of Man' and 'Jupiter Mission', during the
bone-to-space cut mentioned above. As Michel Chion has
noted, the very omission of a title here serves to highlight
the cut itself, its irrationality, and the thought on our
part required to imaginatively link them. There are many
other possible segmentations of the film -- the other most
obvious being the Intermission, halfway into the film and
halfway into the Jupiter Mission -- with all such 'schemes
underscore[ing] what they cannot contain and name.
All the precise details supplied in _2001_ create
imprecision; all its plenitude creates voids, stimulating
the play of rhymes, repetitions, parallels, echoes'.
[10] Thinking it through, the viewer becomes
immersed in duration and memory work, imaginatively piecing
together humanity's development. For some it was and is too
much -- think Rock Hudson. For others, feeling oppressed by
the rigid segmentarities of classical narrative cinema, it
is something like freedom in its showing the inability of
language to contain its visuals. Certainly 'Dawn of Man' and
'Beyond the Infinite' are pompous titles (and in the latter
case, pompously absurd). But what Kubrick is doing is
explicating the pomposity *of language*, its relentless
desire to fold the world into its little pocket. In
Kubrick's world, there are many holes in the
pocket. Much has also been made of
the banality of language in the film, language which seems
incapable of adequately reacting to the beauty of the world
around it. When Floyd gets to the space station, an employee
asks: 'Did you have a pleasant flight?' Like a mantra, this
sentence has become the quintessential example of such
banality. Well what should she have asked? 'Isn't it great
that we can fly through space, and isn't it beautiful? Makes
you wonder how they made it through 1968, eh?' On the other
hand, there is some truth to the 'banality' claim. But its
truth lies elsewhere (at least in significant part) than the
language of _2001_ itself. For instance, much has been made
of Kubrick's anti-humanism, his coldness, his distance from
his characters. There is some truth to this, at least from
the classical Hollywood view point. That is, he is
anti-humanistic relative to classical Hollywood: in _2001_
the only point-of-view shots are from HAL (and, to a certain
extent, in the 'Beyond the Infinite' room shots with Bowman,
which we will discuss shortly); nearly all the
shot-reverse-shots are between HAL and Bowman (only once,
without speech, between Poole and Bowman); and there are
very few close-ups, again, besides those of HAL. The
banality, then, lies less in the language itself than in the
relationship between the language and the visuals: the fact
that the former fails to convincingly fold over the latter.
Banal because language doesn't control within the shot, and
banal becasue it certainly doesn't pave over the whole of
the film (it is only present for 40 minutes of 160 minutes).
Maybe Kubrick is saying that our *current* everyday usage of
language is pretty boring; we just don't see it as such
because we're too busy using it. In _2001_, he is just --
(im)possibly -- *showing* us this. I find Kubrick's
disruption of the shot-reverse-shot system in the final
scenes of the film particularly haunting. The first
two-thirds of the film were objectively presented; the only
point-of-view shots coming from HAL. It bordered on the
documentary. By contrast, the latter third of the film are
subjectively based on Bowman, the viewer practically merging
with the character. For instance, at the end of Bowman's
wild ride through the infinite -- where we see precisely
what he sees -- the universe merges with his blinking eye,
almost taking on the colour of flesh. Do the universe and
his eye touch, in us touching him? Whatever the case,
Kubrick does seem to be making explicit our subjectification
with Bowman, our eyes merging with the extreme close-up of
his eye. This scene cuts to him
looking out of his pod into a Louis XVI room. After a few
shots of the room, and then another of his face, we look out
of the pod from his point-of-view directly facing an older
version of himself. Led as we are by classical cinema, we
expect a shot from the point-of-view of the older version
back to the pod and the original Bowman. But when it comes,
the pod, and the original Bowman, are gone. In a way, we
feel cheated. This process repeats twice more, until Bowman,
now a death-bed ridden old man, looks as if he's looking to
his previous self, and we (foolishly now) expect to see his
younger version. Instead we get the monolith, which the old
man feebly points to as if desiring to touch. After a few
more establishing shots, we cut back to the bed where the
old man was lying; he has become a glowing fetus. The camera
moves into the black of the monolith until it takes up the
whole screen, which then 'cuts' -- the term loses meaning
here -- to space and the Star Child. Given the fact that during
the majority of the film we were excluded from identifying
with any of the characters (one of the reasons for the
'banality of language', to recall above), and that the only
identification came within the last twenty minutes, the
effect of this repeated displacement is profoundly jarring.
The character we just traveled through the infinite with,
literally -- or rather, visually -- disappears. The one he
becomes we then identify with, who in turn disappears. And
on it goes, until 'we' -- the dying/dead old man -- become
the Star fetus/Child and go through the monolith out into
space. During those moments, when we look through the eyes
of the younger version at the older version, are we in fact
both? Is the older version looking at the younger version,
or us, the spectators? That is, the sound of strange 'alien'
voices is audible, though no aliens are shown. Is the older
Floyd reacting to the voices of the aliens, that perhaps
emanate from us, the spectators/younger Floyd? Whatever is
going on here, it is certainly cryptic. Mario Falsetto calls it a
splitting of self. That if we went from the super-objective
to the super-subjective, we are now in the realm of the
subjective, if not individual. Singular, yet universal. All
the places can and are exchanged, to infinity -- and beyond.
Moreover, as Bowman wanders the room, contemplating his
aging, the film is contemplating itself -- and all of
cinema. What will happen next -- what will the next cut do
to 'me', to 'us'? What will we become? In the end, a Star Child.
That is, we are -- first -- the Star fetus. Together we go
through the monolith, the crypt, and (be)come out the other
side. Here again is a meditation on cinema. Here, the crypt
becomes the cut, 'literally'. Non-place meets non-place,
black meets black. We, the Star fetus/Child, move together,
while qualitatively changing, through the crypt (or are we
already in it?), becoming the Star Child. Becoming pure
energy, looking at the Earth, then looking directly at the
viewers. We were the Star fetus, but not the Star Child --
or is one the other? Things have gotten cryptic again. Is
this metaphysical transcendence, as is usually thought? Or
is just a re-birth, akin to the experience of watching a
film? Thou will flirt with the abject, the cut as crypt,
and, if you're lucky, move right 'through' it, but if you do
you'll never be the Same. You'll either: pick up a tapir
bone and start bashing it against your water-hole rivals;
take off to Jupiter; or go beyond the infinite. It is certainly
significant that no aliens are shown. Kubrick and his team
poured over a multitude of designs, yet they could not find
one convincing enough. Their stated intention was to find
one. Money was not an issue. And yet they failed. Perhaps it
was meant to be so; perhaps the aliens weren't meant to be
represented. How to represent a crypt? Kubrick's crypt
becomes the (meditation of the) film. One might say that the
explosion of alien-sightings in
that-thing-called-postmodernity is a result of abjection
raised to the surface of everyday life, in that we have
become outwardly obsessed by our secrets, the secrets of the
others within. Kubrick's _2001_, like
most science fiction, problematizes humanity's relation with
technology. And, like most science fiction, it is not so
much about *the* future, whatever that could mean, as the
future as seen from the present of the filmmaker's eyes and
thoughts. The banality of the film's language is the
banality of ours; the cold calculating nature of the
characters is our coldness; their lack of surprise at their
surroundings is our lack of surprise at ours. Like us, the
film's characters are lost and have all but disappeared,
surrendered to their crypts in an all-pervasive melancholy.
This is the liberal condition of viewing technology as
simple means, as tool, as detached from us so that we can be
in full control. As seemingly exterior to us, however, the
final truth is that our tools must be *out* of our control
-- here is the ground from which narratives of transcendence
and/or Apocalypse spring. HAL, the tool, goes mad. Is
Kubrick suggesting we regain control of our tools, as a
liberal might, or that we renegotiate our relation with
technology, accepting our contamination by it, our
co-dependence with it? Given the nature of the ending, there
can be no conclusions here, though it should be noted that
even after Bowman kills HAL, he still employs the technology
of the pod -- goes for a ride with it -- beyond the
infinite. There is no garden here, no Adam and Eve. Only a
bunch of apes and a cryptic monolith (of technology) . .
. . . . Which Bowman,
despite his overtaking of HAL, can never possess. On the
contrary he is constantly displaced by the crypt and through
it -- just as one could not possess the cut, which by its
nature eludes understanding. One does not see the cut, any
more than one sees the crypt. Yet everything is structured
by and through it. The cut makes cinema cinema. The crypt
makes humans human. They touch in the . . . Artifact Metal prism Pentalogue Mies van der Rohe version
of one-half the tablets of
Law Black basalt
column Black steel
door Long cement
board Pillar The block Monolith That
damn-two-by-four Teaching
machine Candy bar Calling card Transistor
radio Handball court
wall Cracker Jacks
box Vibrating Metallic
bar God . . . or whatever else you
want to call it. I chose 'monolith', it being in the middle
of the list; but I like 'candy bar', and even 'God', too. As
for whether the final image is transcendence or becoming I
leave open, as indeed I must. Who would dare to draw a box
around such a film, such a monster? To simply immerse
oneself in the questions is good enough. One never emerges
unchanged, one becoming other, orgy of wonder. Like a child,
thought through resemblance, in the interstice . .
. McGill University,
Montreal, Canada Footnotes 1. Agel, _The Making of
Kubrick's 2001_, p. 289. 2. Adler, in Agel, _The
Making of Kubrick's 2001_, p. 208. 3. Kubrick, in Agel. _The
Making of Kubrick's 2001_, p. 201 4. Ibid., p.
111 5. Ibid., p.
102 6. Ibid., p. 93 7. Kagen, _The Cinema of
Stanley Kubrick_, p. 248 8. Deleuze, _Cinema 2_, p.
213. 9. Ibid., p.
278. 10. Chion, _Kubrick's
Cinema Odyssey_, pp. 68-9 Bibliography: Agel, Jerome, ed., _The
Making of Kubrick's 2001_ (New York: Agel Publishing,
1970). Castricano, Jody,
_Cryptomimesis_ (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's
Press, 2001). Chion, Michel, _Kubrick's
Cinema Odyssey_, trans. Claudia Gorbman. (London: British
Film Institute, 2001). Deleuze, Gilles, _Cinema
2: The Time-Image_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1989). Falsetto, Mario, _Stanley
Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis_ (London:
Praeger, 2001). Kagan, Norman, _The Cinema
of Stanley Kubrick_ (New York: Continuum, 2000). Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Richard I. Pope, 'In
Kubrick's Crypt, a Derrida/Deleuze Monster; or, An-Other
Return to _2001_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 22, August
2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n22pope>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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