THE READING RHEUM: 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)

 I'm reasonably sure I never reread Arthur C. Clarke's novelization of the movie he scripted with Stanley Kubrick. I don't even remember noticing the various differences between book and movie, though I imagine that I twigged to the obvious fact that Clarke rendered highly specific explications of all the things that Kubrick left implicit in the cinematic 2001. In fact, I recall that one book reviewer for a SF-magazine back in The Day was so enamored of Clarke's version of the book that he regretted that it hadn't been followed for the movie.                     

I was not so entranced. Frankly, after coming off the high of watching the completed Kubrick film, I was mostly bored out of my skull. Now I say that with the caveat that I've long been a Clarke fan, though I divide his novels into two categories (leaving aside the short stories for separate consideration). One category includes his most ambitious, visionary works, mainly (assuming I haven't forgotten something) CHILDHOOD'S END and THE CITY AND THE STARS. The other group takes in books which are more blandly informational about whatever scientific subject they explore -- the ecology of the sea for THE DEEP RANGE, the lunar surface for A FALL OF MOONDUST. Clarke's ODYSSEY, despite reproducing many of the narrative tropes of the finished movie, proves not visionary in the least. It delivers lots and lots of dry information about the world of ODYSSEY but would have made a very dull movie.                                                                                           

  Divergences between book and movie came about because, even though the book wasn't in circulation until after the finished movie came out, Clarke wrote the novel from a treatment he and Kubrick had completed, as well as from some incomplete rushes from the movie. However, everything I've heard about Kubrick's directorial process indicates that he frequently changed his mind on various elements while still in the process of filming, and there's no way Clarke could have incorporated any of those changes. Yet as a reader I still find Clarke culpable for some of his choices-- for instance, dragging out the cavepeople sequence far beyond its function within the greater whole. The oddest divergence is the ending, after astronaut Dave Bowman has passed through the Stargate and finds himself stuck, for the rest of his life, in a replica of a human hotel room. In one of Kubrick's few commentaries on his enigmatic masterpiece, he admitted that the monolith-making aliens were keeping Bowman in a zoo-like captivity in order to study him. The nature of the replicated room suggests no other feasible purpose, so I tend to reject any idea that some alternate function appeared in the treatment from which Clarke was working. I think it more likely that Clarke simply did not, for whatever reason, like the idea of Bowman passing his whole life in the room until he's transfigured. So in the book, Bowman spends one "evening" in the room, has a meal, goes to bed-- and is immediately transfigured.                                                   

  I hadn't reread the book when I reviewed the movie in January, but I did glance at the book's transfiguration sequence and the subsequent birth of the Star-Child. Clarke doesn't provide any more rationale for the aliens to transform Bowman than the movie did, though in one chapter Clarke asserts that at some point the ETs became fascinated with other life-forms out of an existential loneliness. In that film-review, and in this essay touching on Jack Kirby's comics-adaptation of the story, I raised the question as to whether Kubrick or Kirby reproduced any narrative tropes relating to Nietzsche's concept of "self-mastery," which to him was essential to the formation of the ubermensch. I did find one (possibly accidental) trope in the Kirby work, but I couldn't demonstrate anything definite in Kubrick's movie, and I didn't find (or expect to find) anything of that nature in Clarke. From the smattering of accounts I've read/heard about Kubrick's creative process, I don't think he was all that devoted to Nietzsche's philosophy. I think he intuited some similitudes between that philosophy and the themes of "transhumanism" in certain science-fiction works, though when he first started working with Clarke, it doesn't sound like Kubrick had even read any of the author's works. I don't see the theme of self-mastery in most of the director's other famous movies, so it may be that he only embraced the German thinker for the sake of that one movie, much as Federico Fellini directed a passion for Carl Jung into one film, JULIET OF THE SPIRITS, but did not explore Jungian themes in his later movies.                                                        

CURIOSITIES: KIRBY'S 2001

 In my recent review of the 1968 film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, I wondered about the alleged Nietzschean inspirations of the Kubrick-Clarke script, particularly with respect to the ending, wherein astronaut Bowman is transformed into a sort of superman-- or maybe "super-fetus." Because Kubrick's film utilized so little exposition, though, it's tough to figure out what's going on with Bowman when he transforms. Does he incarnate the Nietzschean idea of "self-overcoming?" I wasn't able to find an online copy of the final 2001 script, which I believe Kubrick changed a lot during the movie's production. The novelization by Kubrick's co-writer Arthur C. Clarke does include a lot of mental exposition by Bowman when he transforms. However, Clarke's description of the process is pretty vague. Novel-Bowman doesn't behold a monolith in his fantasy-bedroom. He goes to sleep and feels like "something invaded his mind," though one can only assume that his alien controllers have triggered this process. He experiences a vision of time flowing backward, and as he re-experiences old memories, he regresses to the super-fetus. Then, as Bowman-Fetus transitions into outer space, he then sees the Jupiter monolith. But Clarke never directly says that the aliens have transformed Bowman, though he may have assumed that all readers would make that assumption.                                                             

  I then gave a quick look to Jack Kirby's 1976 adaptation of 2001. Obviously Kirby had seen the film by then, as he duplicates the scenario of the bedroom-monolith, among many other scenes. Maverick that he was, Kirby diverges from the film in many ways too, sometimes just out of personal preference. According to one online source, Kirby also borrows elements from the Clarke novelization as well, one example being that Kirby has the primeval ape-men hunt Clarke's warthogs, rather than Kubrick's tapirs. But though I doubt Kirby ever read much if any Nietzsche-- it's in the conclusion of the 2001 adaptation that I found the most Nietschean statement about Bowman's transformation. To be sure, the first part of the "explanation" is jumbled, as a Kirby Kaption says, "What is the end or beginning to something that has known neither-- mortally is a condition of man." I can only assume Kirby meant to write "mortality," because the following sentence is, "And he must be taught to surmount it..." That's all the internal monologuing Kirby gives us before the monolith begins its transforming process, but the whole ideal of "surmounting death" bears comparison to Nietzsche's idea of "self-overcoming." Then, in the last few pages, Kirby totally dispenses with the endings of both Kubrick and Clarke, claiming that the Star Child is "the first of many new ones," implying that the monolith is programmed to transform other humans into a race of super-psychics. It's kind of a wacky take on both movie and novelization, but I must admit-- it's Kwintessential Kirby!