One Small Step For Man

Space has been called the final frontier. For Stanley Kubrick, however, space was not the final frontier – but the beginning of the end of the beginning. Stanley Kubrick’s imaginative work, 2001: A Space Odyssey, has been the movie that has set the stage for science fiction. It was a film that captured the dreams and failures of the human race, from its beginning, to its end, and right back to its beginning, turning them into theatrical reality. Wielding mind-bending camera shots, special effects and style, Kubrick delivered the culmination to themes of evolution and ambiguity in its final scene, an ultimately fitting non-conclusive conclusion.

2001: A Space Odyssey is at times unnerving, and at other times appears to crawl, struggling to get from scene to scene – perhaps, much like the human species does. It is a story about a venture into the depths of space to discover the meaning behind the mystified monolith. It is a film about the journey of humanity to improve ourselves and our knowledge, and of the essential failures ingrained upon the journey. It is a critique of science and technology – captured in all its essence in the final, powerful scene of the film.

In this final scene, millions of miles from Earth on a space mission, having been betrayed by their supercomputer, Hal, the sole surviving astronaut is deep in space with no way out and nowhere to go – the end of one journey and the beginning of another. The monolith returns again, opening up a vortex of colors and dimensions, completely incomprehensible and mysterious - the final odyssey. At the conclusion of the vortex, the eyeball-shaped space pod is left sitting in a pure white, grand looking house. As the astronaut emerges in a red space suit, he stands out like a clump of dirt on a diamond. In this strange place, there is no life except for one man, who, through Kubrick’s directing and camera technique, turns out to be the future form of the astronaut himself. As the astronaut is looking at the man, and as the man begins to stand up and walk towards the camera, the man takes the place of the astronaut as the sole figure in the house. No windows or exits appear to exist, anywhere. No sound can be heard except that generating from the man himself, at times, nothing but his own breathing. As he sits down for a meal, the peaceful isolation is broken suddenly by the shattering of a glass goblet. As he looks down to pick up the shards, he glances to the bed, noticing an old man, laying, it would appear, on his deathbed – and then he is the old man. Dying in bed, alone and one would have to assume, afraid, the monolith makes its final return. Vast and expansive, the monolith centers on the screen, and the old man reaches his hand out to it, a dying call to the faith of religion and the ambiguity of life. As he does so, the old man evolves yet again – into a baby, surrounded by a glowing sphere. With the triumphant return of the familiar Space Odyssey theme music, the shot cuts to a shot of the earth, with the glowing sphere of the baby beside it, equal in size. The conclusion is the rebirth of the dawn of Man, of life and its ambiguity, of the entire circular journey of mankind.

The motion picture techniques Kubrick elected to use in this final, culminating scene offered some of his constant motifs along with fresh, eerie camera shots and special effects. The first sequence takes place from the beginning until the introduction of the vortex, and uses sound, lighting and camera angle to create the prologue to this climatic journey. At the outset of the scene, which begins with the bold-faced caption “Jupiter – and Beyond the Infinite” on a black background front and center, a familiar line-up takes begins to take place. As surreal music, like spiritual opera voices, but hardly understandable or interpretable, permeates the scene, the camera takes a deepfocus shot, with a perspective aligning the sun, the moon, and the earth (or in this case, Jupiter). For the first time in the film, however, the line-up isn’t aligned, at least to begin with. This undoubtedly has some significance in the shakiness of the journey ahead – the stars are no longer aligned, so to speak. As the monolith floats into the screen, surreal and ever-present, the line-up returns with the monolith taking its place directly in the center between the sun and Jupiter: the symbolic center of the Universe.

With a pan-up, the vortex begins – a swirl of colors zooming in to the camera, producing a lost, spiraling effect to the viewer: the metaphorical journey of the human race into the unknown. Here begins the en masse onslaught of visual stimuli, in every shape and design – separated only be abrupt cuts to extreme close-ups of the astronaut’s eyeball, wide open. Throughout the movie, there appeared to be a motif of eyeballs, or at least eyeball-shaped things, such as the space pods, Hal’s eye, the space ships. It would seem to suggest the blindness of humanity, and perhaps, these abrupt cuts to the astronaut’s eyeball represents eyes that are really seeing for the first time. At the concluding frames of the lengthy vortex, each shot appears to be dominated by two contrasting colors – at the very last frames, the eyeball returns, and with each blink is shaded by the contrasting colors. Throughout the film, color appears to have taken on definitive meaning, especially red. The color here, though, and more importantly the contrast in them, seems to represent both ambiguity and a struggle – or maybe even the struggle of ambiguity, combining both possibilities.

The closing sequence of the scene begins with a confusing jolt, and most effectively makes use of mise en scene and camera work to deliver the culmination of the film’s themes. As the scene is suddenly taken over by the inexplicable house, the mise en scene and camera work take control of the technique. At the instant the house comes into play, the dominating surreal music transforms into an eerie monotone, slowly dropping in volume until it fades completely away, leaving a silence where even a pin drop would reverberate through. The house is most noticeably almost completely white, and furnished extensively with expensive paintings, chairs set in a way that appear to never have been used, and spotless cleanliness. It has a very elaborate museum feel to it – until the red suit of the astronaut arrives, blaring its disturbance. Red has also been a motif in the movie, signifying perhaps mortality or the struggle of mankind, and here, in this peaceful place where mortality seems as distant as a dream, it is completely out of place. And then Kubrick turns the camera’s viewpoint into a tool to capture the evolutionary themes throughout the movie; at each new person the camera focuses on, that person appears to be the future version of the astronaut, and the camera then immediately takes their view, traversing time in an unusual but startingly cool fashion. Three such transformations take place: astronaut to old man, old man to dying man, dying man to baby. During this stage of the scene, the surreal spiritual music returns, along with the monolith, absolutely engulfing the frame to depict its control and importance before the transformation into a baby. The closing shot, accompanied by the grand theme song of the film, is of an earth-sized sphere containing the baby, side by side with the earth itself. Such a comparison is both unexpected and extraordinary – it is the final representation of the themes of the movie.

And the universal themes represented by the techniques, like the techniques, were nutshelled in the microcosm of the movie that was the closing scene. The most obvious is the role of ambiguity in life and evolution through the movie; in the Dawn of Man, the primates embraced ambiguity (the monolith), and evolved; in the future, the scientists rejected ambiguity, and were betrayed by their own technology; in death, the astronaut returned to embrace ambiguity again, and was reborn, the size of the earth, to show the universality of his condition. Besides ambiguity, the monolith could also reflect faith and religion, the possibility of the power of a greater being. It certainly was irrational and quite inexplicable. Also apparent in the scene is the struggle of the human condition, and coming to terms with the mortality of life and the isolation of death (the red suit in the white house), in a world where neither can be completely explained nor understood. Also, the failure of technology to be the end-all be-all answer is stressed with the circular theme of rebirth; in one way, it signifies a return to the original Dawn of Man, a step backwards because of the failures of our own devices, while in another, it signifies a new stage of Man because of the limitlessness of our ambition and the depths of our journey. The pervading, overriding theme is by and large the inexplicability of the universe, and our failure to see that not everything can be seen. Ambiguity may be the only thing we are left with in a world that has no sympathy for the tragedy that is the human condition.

There is no dialogue in the last twenty some-odd minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, nor is there any in the first twenty some-odd minutes. Stanley Kubrick, it turns out, needed none to show the true odyssey that mankind faces on a day-to-day basis – indeed, the lack of dialogue in itself is part of that odyssey. There are no words to explain the unexplainable. With groundbreaking special effects for its time, and using everything from camera technique to mise en scene, Kubrick created a microcosm of the universal struggle of humanity in the final scene of the movie. Especially considering that for a 1968 film, the seemingly inexhaustive imagination divulged in the movie may be its most unremarkable part, it truly is a remarkable film. Like the thundering soundtrack that accompanies it, there is no rest to the seemingly blurred reality of the journey; reality itself, in many ways, is a very surreal thing.