Apeman, Superman; or, by Leon E. Stover
Nobody who can identify the opening and closing bars of music in
2001 need puzzle long over the film's meaning.
At the start the eye of the camera looks down from barren hills,
under the rising sun at dawn, into a still valley below. As the
sun mounts, the eye advances into the valley. Zarathustra is come
forth out of his cave; hailing the sun - "Thou great star!" - he
descends from the hills once more to invest himself in humanity
and go man's progress again. Zarathustra's cosmic mission is
given out in the great blast of trumpets which pronounces the
World Riddle theme (C-G-C) from Thus Spake Zarathustra, by
Richard Strauss.
Richard Strauss write of this music that it was his homage to the
philosophical genius of Nietzsche:
Down there in that awesome valley human destiny is on the
starting line with the apemen, members of the genus
Australopithecus, discovered for anthropology in South and East
Africa. The savannah-land in the opening scenes is authentic East
African landscape, which today is exactly as it was when the
apemen roamed there during Lower Pleistocene times. The apemen
are shown to be peaceful and vegetarian. They spend all day
eating and chewing plant foods.
But one morning a great, black monolith appears in the midst of
their usual feeding palce. The sheer perfection and improbability
of this artifact arouses in the dim chambers of one apeman's
preadamite brain some sense of form, and he reaches out to touch
- fearfully at first, then with great yearning - the smooth
surfaces and smart edges of this magnificently artificial thing.
He is inspired to artifice himself. He discovers the principle of
the lever, an extension of his arm, in a long bone picked out of
a crumbling tapir skeleton. He bashes this club around
experimentally in the pile of old bones from which he lifted it
out, in a slow motion sequence of his great hairy arm lifting up
and crashing down, causing debris to flower outward in floating
arcs, intercut with visions of a falling tapir.
This insightful apeman leads his kind to hunting and meat eating.
Meat eating takes less time than plant eating, and with it comes
the leisure for tool making which in turn leads, eventually, to
science and advanced technology. This first triumph of artifice,
the hunting club, is underlined by the C-G-C World Riddle theme,
climaxing in full orchestra and organ. The weapon is tossed to
the air in a fit of religious exaltation the while the apemen
dance around the monolith, and...
...In a wipe that takes care of 3 million years of evolutionary
history, the bone in its toss is replaced by a spaceship in
flight. The camera comes upon a great wheel-shaped orbital
station that turns slowly and majestically to the tune of The
Blue Danube, which waltzes for man's easy, technological
virtuosity. The audience, accordingly, is treated to a long
appreciation of the docking manoeuvres, in 3/4 time, of a shuttle
craft come up from earth. It single passenger is an American
scientist on a secret mission to the crater Clavius on the moon,
where mystery awaits.
The space platform is fitted out with Hilton, Pan Am and Bell
Telephone services. The audience always ohs and ahs to see these
familiar insignia in the world of the future, which goes to
confirm what anthropologists have learned from disaster studies,
that people really love their culture. It is part of them. People
are thrown into a state of shock when floods, tornadoes or other
destructive events remove large chunks of their familiar material
environment.
The scientist from Earth continues the last leg of his journey in
a low-flying moon bus, the while its occupants eat ham and cheese
sandwiches. The juxtaposition of the eternally banal picnic lunch
with the fantastic lunar landscape zipping by below serves to re-
emphasise the confident virtuosity of space technology. But this
confidence is shattered by the mystery at Clavius: the monolith
again, this time excavated out of lunar soil. While the suited
party examines it, a stinging, ringing beam of shrill sound
penetrates their helmets. The camera looks up from the very base
of the monolith to the sun in a wide angle shot duplicating the
one that brough the apemen sequence to a close with the bone club
soaring high.
The wipe from the screaming monolith to a ship headed for deep
space covers just a decade or so. The energy emitted from the
monolith fled toward Jupiter, the ship's destination. A crew of
five (three in hibernation) and a talking, thinking H.A.L. 9000
series computer, occupy an enormous, sperm-shaped craft: man
seeding the cosmos.
During the outward voyage the two men acting as caretakers on the
ship are shown to display flatter personalities than the spirited
computer, HAL, which is plugged into everything and runs
everything. Man's technology has advanced so far that it is
overwhelming. Technology, basically, is an artificial means of
extending human organs. Clothes are an extension of the skin, a
computer is an extension of the brain, a wheeled vehicle is an
extension of the legs, a atelephone is an extension of the ear
and mouth, and so on. The more such extensions are elaborated by
man, the more they seem toi take on a life of their own and
threaten to take over. A simple example of extensions getting out
of hand is the urban congestion and air pollution created by the
use of the automobile in great numbers. Another is big
organization, made possible by electronic extensions of the
speech functions, which makes for suffocating dehumanization in
the "organization man!" The two men aboard the ship are exactly
that. HAL runs the ship and they act like low grade robots,
passively eating coloured paste for food that comes out of a
machine, passively watching TV broadcasts from Earth, passively
receiving birthday greetings from home.
Hal symbolizes that point of no return in the development of
technology when man's extensions final;ly atke over. They possess
the more life the more man is devitalised by them. It will be
suicide for man to continue in his love for his material culture.
Dependence on an advanced state of technology makes it impossible
to revert to a primitive state of technology. And it is too late
to solve the problem with a "technological fix."
HAL reports an imminent malfunction in the directional antenna of
the ship. One of the men, Astronaut Frank Poole, leaves the ship
in a space pod in order to replace the unit. The old unit is
brought back, tested, and found to be without defect. The two men
worry about HAL's lapse of judgement. HAL insists the unit will
fail on schedule. So Poole replaces the unit by way of testing
HAL. But HAL tested is HAL irritated. When Poole steps out of the
space pod to reinstall the unit, HAL works one of the pod's
mechanical arms - a runaway extension of the human arm - to snip
off his oxygen line. Poole's partner, Mission Commander David
Bowman, goes after the body in another space pod and returns to
the ship. But HAL won't obey the command to open the port. The
only way into the ship now is through the emergency airlock,
providing the entrant is fully suited. Bowman, in his haste to
rescue Poole, forgot to bring his helmet into the pod.
Meanwhile, HAL has turned off the life-support systems for the
three men in hibernation. The blinking lights which register
their deaths say, LIFE PROCESSES TERMINATED, a fitting obituary
for technomorphic man.
But at bottom, Bowman is a real hero. He triumphs over the
technomorphism that turns men into dull machines. He manipulates
the pod's waldo arm to open the airlock on the ship, then aligns
the pod's hatch with it. Bowman calculates that if he blows the
hatch bolts, the air exploding outward from the pod will blast
him into the evacuated airlock; perhaps he can survive half a
minute in hard, cold vacuum. In a realistic sequence of human
daring and bravery, Bowman is exploded into the ship with a
silent frenzy that does not pick up sound until the lock is
closed and air pressure is restored.
Bowman's next move is to lobotomize HAL, who pleads sorry for the
four murders in a parody of a guilty human trying to get off the
hook: "I admit I've made some pretty bad decisions lately." The
humour of this line conceals an affirmation of HAL's autonomy.
Removal of his higher control centres is a significant act
forecasting things to come. It looks forward to the time when
mans hall be able to cut himself loose from his extensions
altogether. The solution to a runaway technology is not mastery
over it but abandonment of it. The liabilities of human
dependence on material means are to be left behind in the
conquest of some higher form of existence.
The monolith appears outside the cabin windows at this juncture
to indicate the direction of that conquest. Bowman follows it in
his space pod, but the monolith vanishes in a purple glow.
Straining his eyes on the spot he suddenly is led down a rushing
corridor of computer-generated effects that represent his
translation through a fourth dimensional experience.
During this sensational ride, Bowman is given a god-like vision
of whole galaxies in full form, turning wheels of hot gasses and
their embedded star clusters. Through this cosmic whirlpool
shoots a symbolic representation of the parent ship: a fiery,
sperm-shaped comet thing that drives across the screen and into a
pulsing, luminous gas cloud. A delicate point of theology is
raised here. In that famous novel of theological science-fiction,
Perelandra (1944), C.S. Lewis argues that man is evil; space
travel will only spread the blight. He is out to rebut the idea
that
The viewpoint of 2001, however, is that man's seeding of the
cosmos is a positive good. For the men who will go out to quicken
the universe with the human presence will be supermen, lifted
beyond the evil they did on earth as captives of their
technology. Man's extensions always carried a built in margin of
wickedness, beginning with the apeman's weapon of the hunt that
could also be used as a weapon of war. But the supermen will be
fully emancipated from material extensions as from the material
body that is extended by technology. The universe will be made
full with the essential goodness of a disembodied humanity.
The transition for Bowman takes place in a hotel suite, mocked up
beyond Jupiter by the kind of super beings he and the rest of
mankind are destined to join. There Bowman ages rapidly and takes
to bed, living out the childhood of man to the end. When the end
comes, the great monolith stands before his bed, that recurrent
symbol of the great yearning that prompted the apemen millions of
years ago to reach for tool making and that now prompts Bowman to
reach out for something beyond artifice. He struggles upward from
his sheets, unrecognizable in his stupendous oldness, yet
reaching painfully for that ineluctable goal waiting beyond the
mysterious form standing before him. He reaches forward to touch
it, reaching for rebirth...
Cut to a view of planet Earth as seen from outer space. The
camera moves aside from the great green disc in the sky to
include another luminous body nearby. It is an enormous
transparent globe that contains an alert, watchful embryo of
cosmic proportions, looking down on Earth with the eyes of
Bowman, as he prepares to liberate all humanity from the
disabilities of material existence and promote it to the status
he has attained to. This giant embryonic figure is a symbolic
show, for the sake of something to visualise on the screen, of
Bowman's leadership in attaining to a state of pure, incorporeal
intellect.
Such a destiny is predicted not alone by science fiction writers.
It is to be found also in The Phenomenon of Man (1959) by the
late Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Catholic father and
anthropologist, who explains that the gathering force of mind
that has come to envelope the surface of the planet Earth out of
prehuman beginnings must eventuate in a projection into space as
a purelys spiritual component that will converge ultimately at
the Omega point in one single intellectual entity, the evry stuff
of God. But once all the consciousness of the universe has
accumulated and merged in the Omega point, God will get lonely in
his completeness, and the process of creation must begin again by
way of arousing conscious creatures to reach out once more for
closure in one collective identity.
2001 comes to an end on a great trumpeting blast of the World
Riddle theme, C-G-C, the shimmering globe of Bowman's pure mind
stuff staring the audience in the face. Soon the whole population
of Earth will join him. But the story of man is not complete with
the evolution from apeman to superman. When the curtain closes,
the superman is still one step away from evolving into God.
But even then the story is not finished. For the universe is
cyclical. God will come down from the hills again. Thus spake
Zarathustra:
Now that the theologians tell us that God is dead, it appears
that the burden of theology is upon Science Fiction.
2001's Answer to the World Riddle
Copyright ©1968, reprinted in 'The Year's Best
Science Fiction No. 2' edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss, by
permission of the author.
I meant to convey by means of music an idea of the human race
from its origins, through the various phases of its development,
religious and scientific, up to Nietzsche'sidea of the Superman.
"...humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet
where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself
over a larger area: that the vast astronomic distances
which are God's quarantine regulations, must somehow be
overcome."
"Lo! I am weary of my wisdom. I need hands reaching out for
it. For that end I must descend to the depth, as thou dost
at even, when sinking behind the sea thou givest light to
the lower regions, thou resplendent star! Zarathustra will
once more become a man."