Kubrick, true star of 2001
Space Odyssey a robust examination of his cinematic masterpiece
Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke and the Making of a Masterpiece Michael Benson Simon & Schuster
Fifty years ago, moviegoers had their minds blown by director Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. To this day, some of them still aren’t quite sure what it all means.
Was an alien intelligence behind the monolith? What went wrong with the computer known as HAL? Does the way station in the afterlife really look like a Louis XIV hotel suite? Did Dr. Floyd’s daughter get her bush baby?
Seriously, part of Kubrick’s genius — and that of his co-screenwriter, Arthur C. Clarke — was not to spell out everything, thus challenging people to ponder the futuristic mythology unspooling before them. “If anyone understands it on the first viewing,” Clarke said at the time, “we’ve failed in our intention.”
Failure? Not when many consider 2001 the greatest science-fiction movie ever made and one of the landmarks of cinema, period.
Whether you’ve not seen 2001 recently or not seen it at all, do so before tackling Michael Benson’s exhaustive account of its creation. Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece is a movie wonk’s dream, launching its rich narrative with the invitation from Kubrick to Clarke in 1964 to create what Kubrick hoped would be the first “really good” science-fiction film.
Scores of books and videos about 2001 and its director have appeared since its premiere, yet it would be difficult to envision anything offering the abundance of telling anecdotes, technical detail and keen insight that fills this book.
Kubrick was riding a critical and popular wave with the nuclear nightmare satire Dr. Strangelove, when Clarke, a renowned writer and futurist, responded favourably to his entreaty. This unlikely pair of intellectuals — Kubrick was living in his native New York City with his wife and daughters while the British-born Clarke led an expat’s life in Sri Lanka with his male partner — bonded over the challenge of writing a filmable story about aliens and mankind that centred on ideas instead of monsters and ray guns.
Both the writer and the filmmaker scoured scientific books and journals and discussed all kinds of subjects with experts as they fine-tuned their story of human contact with an alien intelligence.
Benson explains in great detail the narrative hurdles Kubrick and Clarke faced as they tried to stay true to what might be possible in space exploration three-plus decades in the future. For example, they didn’t settle on astronaut Dave Bowman’s helmetless jump from spacecraft to spacecraft without assurances that a human being could actually survive several seconds in a deep-space vacuum.
There were all kinds of technical issues for Kubrick and company to surmount, too, such as how to shoot the interior of a ship supposedly travelling in zero gravity, and how to present the organic, yet otherworldly, shapes that Bowman encounterswhiletravelling“beyond the infinite” (they filmed drops of paint in various liquids and turned Scottish and U.S. landscapes shot by
helicopter into psychedelic images).
Benson’s chapter-long description of the Dawn of Man sequence offers a microcosm of Kubrickian moviemaking: studying paleo history, creating specialized makeup, utilizing a unique front-screen photographic process, employing a mime to study and replicate simian movement and demanding that a leopard and other live animals mix with the early humans.
While Benson gives Clarke, the movie’s cast and various members of the production team their welldeserved places in the creation of
2001, the maddeningly brilliant, obsessed Kubrick remains its star. He is presented as a flawed genius, at least in the eyes of his collaborators, a man at times cold and cruel and at other moments empathetic and generous. Kubrick cultivated creative people, encouraged them and gave them room to come up with ideas, yet he was stingy when it came to sharing credit.
Kubrick, who died in 1999, remains as enigmatic as his movie, a cinematic touchstone for future generations of filmmakers.