Stanley Kubrick
2001: Odissea Nello Spazio

Stanley Kubrick - "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968)

What is the message of this film? I've always wondered since I first saw it at a second-run theater when I was just a little more than a kid. The cinema was called Aniene, before it became an art house, then an adult film venue, and finally a multi-use nightclub - the Horus - before closing forever: but at least it was saved from the disgrace of becoming a multiplex.

Connecting these faded magnesium flashbacks, I reached back to 2001 thanks to a television clone, a commercial for Michelin tires, titled Beyond Space, Beyond Time - directed by Paolo Casalini - a clip extraordinarily beautiful and haunting for those times, starring an astronaut and clearly inspired by Kubrick's 2001. Randomizing with another film of the genre, the eco-sci-fi 2002: The Second Odyssey, I found the right film the following year.

Random memory, or cache, the strength of this film lies in its ellipticity, in its polysomic reference to multiple layers of interpretation; it is deeply, after all, a religious film, almost cosmogonic, opening a mythological window on human destiny: the thesis of the film and of the science fiction story The Sentinel by A. Clarke from which it is derived, is that humans follow the evolutionary path of an unknown cosmic plan, marked almost zodiacally by astral deadlines and extraterrestrial observers - the sentinels, precisely - that have in the black monolith their mysterious Stone Guest. From primordial chaos, a divine fiat lux generates the suns and star systems: the film opens precisely with the syzygy of the astral deities, the Sun and the Moon, the cosmic union of energies that create life on earth.

In its infancy, the dawn, Man from his brutish, collective, and tribal origins, arrives at creating a technological civilization through a millennia-long struggle for survival, first against Mother Nature that relegates him to primus inter pares with animals, then against his peers, with violence and then war. It will be the Moon-gazing Ape that creates the first technological gap from which there is no turning back: the first weapon, a bone, the first of media, what philosopher Malcom McLuhan defined as extensions of man, physical extensions: the foot is extended through the wheel, the wheel is further extended through the train, then becomes an automobile and, through these forms of physical extension, it reaches the Eye of Shiva of the camera capturing with a cosmic flight the dance of spacecraft: millions of years have passed in a second.

The monolith, the alien intelligence, makes its first appearance, at the most propitious cosmic moment, and attracts into a sort of magnetic intellectual fire the beastly tribe, of which it will be the occult responsible for the mutation about to make the primate a man. The price will be the violence of the struggle, for evolution. The same price in blood that astronaut Bowman will pay to become the superman who defeats the perfect machine, after his crew is exterminated by the onboard computer, Hal 9000. In the sky beyond Jupiter, Bowman leaves the last phallic-technological prosthesis, the spaceship, to embark on an astral journey and land in a 18th-century style room - the century of enlightenment and the director's obsession - where he ages and dies in a few seconds, only to return as the Star Child, closed in upon himself like a primordial, spherical, Platonic androgynous: the circle of human history thus closes, man comes from the stars, he has within him a fragment of divine mind shared with other technological alien races of the Universe; the infinitesimal sperm seed surpasses and retraces all animal possibilities, head down fertilizes the female egg, and retraces the waters of Creation, becomes an anthropoid, then something intervenes to finally make him man, then warrior, legislator, technocrat, finally cosmonaut, and even chrononaut; he returns to his contemplative origins as a space fetus: he can now begin to fertilize other worlds, just as the fathers of the fathers who came from other worlds did before him.

A million monkeys working twenty-four/seven on a million typewriters might not write Shakespeare, but at least they can formulate a few sensible sentences... but to make the technological leap, buried in the human brain there is a spark of the immortal fire of the Gods.