HARLAN ELLISON'S HANDY GUIDE TO 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

Open to a portrait of the reviewer as a name-dropper:

So I'm sitting in Canter's at three in the morning, with Sal Mineo, and we're having matzoh ball soup and some conversation, when over walks Rob Reiner, and the first thing out of Rob's mouth is, "Did you see 2001, and wasn't it a groove?" I sit quietly, spooning in bits of kreplach and hoping he won't ask again.

Mineo chimes in, "FanTASTic flick!"

I chew my matzoh ball.

They then launch into a highly colorful conversation about the psychic energy of the film, how it obviously applies to the ethical structure of the universe as expressed in the philosophy of the Vedantist movement, and the incredibly brilliant tour de force of Nietzsche-esque subplotting Kubrick pulled off. My gorge becomes buoyant. I can no longer deal with the realities of good Yiddish cooking in the presence of such rampant hypocritical hyperbole.

"Listen, you two loons," I begin politely, "you haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about. 2001 is a visually exciting self-indulgent directorial exercise by a man who has spent anywhere from ten to twenty-five million dollars—depending on whom you're talking to—pulling ciphers out of a cocked hat because he lost his rabbits somewhere."

They stare at me.

It is maybe because in the telling, I have confounded my syntax to the point where even I don't know what I just said. "Well, uh, what did it, uh, mean . . . to . . . you . . . ?" Rob Reiner asks, a bit timorously.

So I explain the picture to them.

And then I realize it is the nineteenth time I've explained it to people in the week and a half since I saw the damned film, and once again I'm explaining it to people who came on like gangbusters with their total understanding and involvement with what Kubrick was "saying." I realize I am sick to tears of having to point out to phony and pretentious avant-garde types that all the significance they've dumped on this film simply ain't nohow, nowhichway, in no manner, present.

Now I will tell you. So you can tell your friends; and I can eat my matzoh ball soup in peace.

For openers, there is no plot. That simple. No story. I know this because I got it on the best authority—from one of the men listed in the credits as having devised the bloody story. He has said that after Kubrick had that staggeringly boring paean to the monkey wrench in the can (that first half that sent people stumbling from the theater half-asleep on the pre-premiere night I saw the film), he and some of the head honchos at Metro screened it, went ashen, and said to one another, "We ain't got a picture here." So they went out to the Kalahari Desert and shot the apes, and then they shot that Antonioni white-on-white bedroom, and they taped the second-thought sections on either side of the Man Against Space nonsense, and they called it the birth of the blues. So with that knowledge cemented into the forefront of your cerebrum, you can now see that any spiderweb superstructure of superimposed story you devised after you left the theater confused and didn't want to look like a schmuck to your friends, is just rationalization.

But let's pretend Kubrick didn't do that. Let's just say the story runs sequentially from the Dawn of Man and the apes through the discovery of that black formica tabletop on the Moon, and Keir Dullea chasing Gary Lockwood around 'n' around the centrifuge, to the surrealism of the ending and Thus Spake Zarathustra running as Muzak for the journey back to Earth by that homunculus in the bubble. Let's pretend such was the case. (For those of you who haven't yet seen the film, naturally this will make very little sense, but don't let it bother you; if you are one-half of the crowd-followers I think you are, you will be dashing to queue up for the film soon anyhow, and you can clip this guide, put it in your wallet, and read it during the half-time intermission so when you emerge, your girlfriend or husband will think you are the most intellectual item since Nabokov, a rare combination of beauty and brains.)

Now. Had you read the short story, "The Sentinel," written by Arthur C. Clarke (well-known science fact/science fiction writer and co-author of the screenplay of 2001), upon which the film was loosely based, you would know that the black formica tabletop was a kind of radio signal left on Earth by aliens; left behind on their passage through our galaxy to somewhere else.

So. The first monolith, the one the apes find, is the one that gives the slope-brows the gift of reason (we know this because when one of them touches it, we hear Thus Spake Zarathustra and we are uplifted). And if you still had any doubts, the scene that follows shows the ape discovering the first utensil. The linkage is inescapable. Res ipsa loquitur.

So now we go from the ape hurling the bone-weapon into the air, to the space-shuttle spinning down through the void to dock (at unbearable length) at the space station.

Now we mulch on forward. They take half the two hours and x-minutes (it was forty when I saw it, but I understand they've cut seventeen minutes of boredom since then) of the film to let you in on the big deal surprise of another monolith being discovered on the Lunar surface . . . or strictly speaking, just below the surface, which is where the plot lies, as well. In Clarke's original story, the aliens had left the signal device—the monolith in the film, a pyramid in the story—on the Moon, because they wanted to get in touch with whatever life form developed on Earth only at a point when it was advanced enough to get to the Moon. (You knew, of course, that the ape-stuff took place on Earth, didn't you? Rob Reiner didn't.)

So they discover the monolith is sending out signals, and the receiver is somewhere out near Jupiter.

So they send out the astronauts to dig what is shaking out there. The computer that runs the ship—aside from being faintly high-camp gay in its mannerisms—does a bang-up job keeping them on course, until one day, for no apparent reason it goes completely out of its gourd and kills everyone on board with the exception of Keir Dullea, who is just too smart to be put down by a mass of printed circuits and mumbly memory banks. But, the question asks itself, unbidden, why did the computer run amuck? The only answer that works within the framework of the film and logic, is that the aliens have somehow, by long distance, telekinesis or somesuchthing, sabotaged the thing. Reason: to capture the finest specimen of Terran life, the astronaut they know will be sent out to check that monolith near Jupiter. And they do. When he gets just abaft Jupiter, the formica tabletop comes for him, and then begins the section that will make this film a success . . . the astounding visual interpretation of a trip through hyperspace as the aliens cart Dullea back to wherever it is they actually live.

(This section, by the way, has already gotten a deserved reputation in the underground, and when they can scrounge-up the hard-ticket prices to see it, the waiting lines at 2001 are mini-deep in heads waiting to get their minds blown a tot more than usual. It will be this underground rep that will spread out into the Establishment, and thereby assure the film of big box-office.)

Now we come to the confusion.

Oh really? Where've we been already? But . . . onward!

Dullea wakes up (comes to? regains his senses? something.) in a Louis XVI bedroom, segues into a shot of himself a little older, segues again and he's wizened, segues again and he's lying in bed dying of old age. What is happening? Well, I see it this way (and being a science fiction writer naturally I am privy to all the secrets of the Universe, not to mention the mind of a director and the subtleties of a befuddled script):

The aliens are trying to decide whether to go and join Man in his march through space to fulfill his destiny, or to let him destroy himself. They are pumping Dullea's mind.

The periods of clarity for Dullea are those moments when the brain-draining ceases for a moment or two. Knowing that their environment is so alien to the mind of a human that he would crack, and be worthless for their purposes, the aliens have created a self-contained continuum for him to exist in, a dream if you will. It takes the familiar form of a white-on-white bedroom. It probably isn't really that. He may be in stasis in a gelatin tank, or hooked into a dream machine, or just floating free-ego in a never-never land of the aliens' design, depending on how alien and impossible-to-understand you care to make them.

Finally, they get all they want out of Dullea, make up their minds to help Man on his way to Destiny, and utilizing the Time-Is-Circular theory, they send another formica tabletop to him, which changes him—devolves him? retrogresses him?—back to a baby with tarsier-huge eyes, and they send him back to Earth, ostensibly to make that second touch in the brain of Man that will give him an equivalent leap in intelligence that the first ape got from the monolith. Homo superior, the next evolutionary step, aided and abetted in the von Däniken idiom.

That's one way to look at it.

But then, is that really Dullea as a baby? It looked like an alien baby to me. It might even be an adult alien. Who says they all have to look like Raymond Massey with a fright-wig and a long beard? But even so, the story line holds.

Unfortunately, this is not necessarily the story Kubrick and Clarke wrote. It may be a better one, who knows?

In any case, there are still innumerable unanswered questions in the film, such as:

If they found the monolith on the Moon, why didn't they find the one on Earth?

Is it the same monolith, and it moves around?

Why didn't the computer know Dullea would use the emergency exit to gain reentry into the ship?

Why did Kubrick take endless time for the discovery of the monolith on the Moon, a sequence that would have been handled better in the teaser of the worst TV space opera?

I could go on indefinitely.

Which is not to say I didn't like the film. As I said to Norman Spinrad, the science fiction writer who was seated next to me at the screening, "the first half is boring . . . but not uninteresting." He stared at me. How can anything be boring and engrossing at one and the same time? Well, visit Kubrick's Folly and find out.

The psychedelic segments are visually some of the most exciting stuff ever put on celluloid; in a way it's what cinema is all about, really. The ape sequences are brilliant, the special effects staggering, and my review brilliant. But I am compelled, once and finally, to say that this is a seriously flawed film. It fails in the first order of storytelling: to tell a story.

So go get stoned on acid, pack your pockets with hash, go sit in the Cinerama cocoon, and let Kubrick fly you to the Moon. It ain't gossamer wings, but what the hell do you expect for $X.XX per ticket?

Trumpet #9/1969