Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece

Benson, Michael. Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.[1] 551 pages with page-referenced endnotes and Index. Illustrated with sketches and stills.

Among other things, Benson is a film maker, science writer, innovative creator of images, and student of images, moving and otherwise.[2] Aside from Richard D. Erlich's "Strange Odyssey: From Dart to Ardrey to Kubrick and Clarke,"[3] , whose absence no will notice except Erlich, Benson uses his extensive background and energetic pursuit of a range of sources to produce a definitive narrative of the making of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY as novel and film.

Benson notes that both novel and film "presented a disturbing" (if also exhilarating) "vision of human transformation due to technology, positioning all our strivings within a colossal cosmic framework and evoking the existence of extraterrestrial entities so powerful" and so far beyond matter "as to be godlike" (p. 8 & passim).

Of immediate relevance:

Benson refers to models for "a small multinational squadron of orbiting nuclear bombs" (p. 95) and to "the film's orbiting retinue of nuclear bombs, which at the time seemed a likely outcome of the Cold War. These featured inconspicuous national markings, with the French Air Force roundel, the German iron cross, and the Chinese red star all visible in the final sequence if you knew to look for them. They would be the first twenty-first century technologies visible after Moonwatcher's [sic] ecstatic bone throw into the sky— a weapon-to-weapon match cut" (p. 325). In discussing "The Dawn of Man" sequence Benson casually notes, "Although he'd referred to 'the beautiful transition from man-ape to 2001' in his notes to Clarke a year before, it's not clear if Kubrick already had the idea of matching a shot of Moonwatcher's flung bone with an orbiting nuclear bomb" (p. 313). If Benson mentions the lore that the ante-penultimate cut of SPACE ODYSSEY had Star-Child, as in the novel (VI.47, last page), blowing up an orbiting nuclear weapon, the reference is subtle, and we missed it. As the film stands, Moon-Watcher's weapon morphs into a synecdoche for human — or Man's — technology generally, but in the auteur's initial conception that technology is directly based in The Weapon, whose high point in the civilization of 2001 would be orbiting satellites for nuclear warfare.[4] 

Production notes from the film indicate that "As of mid-1965, approximately the same time that the US Department of Defense was conceiving of the internet's direct predecessor, ARPANET […] Kubrick's […] futurists had seemingly already visualized important aspects of the new technology's implications," most notably, the newspad but flat-screen viewplates generally (pp. 101, 125).[5] Students of Kubrick's films should note continuation of the theme of communication and blocked communication, an important element of Kubrick's preceding film DR. STRANGELOVE: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964). Students of cinematic memes should note here the motif of "Videology" and viewplates. 

One of Clarke's ideas for the ending of the film was to have the final Room of Dave Bowman's trip vanish"and he is alone on the skyrock with the ship of the super-race – and his own Model T space pod. The ship is man's new tool — the equivalent of Moon-watcher's weapons. It symbolizes all the new wisdom of the stars" (p. 116, also 125). Another possible ending before the Star-Child solution had Bowman "flying his pod toward a 'great machine' in orbit of Saturn (or presumably Jupiter after they reverted to that destination)" (144). 

When the computer on Discovery was still tentatively named Athena, Eliot Noyes and others passed along "drawings of astronauts floating within a kind of 'brain room'" with a cover letter that pointed out "that a computer of the complexity required by the Discovery spacecraft would be a computer into which men went, rather than a computer around which men walk" (pp. 123-24). Although rejected by Kubrick at the time, the concept is there in the scene of Bowman's lobotomizing HAL, and in the suggestion throughout the scenes on the Discovery of the crew's being within HAL 9000 and various other life-sustaining containment — including nested-doll images of the hibernauts inside their high-tech sarcophagi inside the centrifuge and Frank Poole and Dave Bowman inside a spacepod, inside the pod bay — all inside the Discovery, which for good and ill is permeated and constantly surveilled by HAL. And we see suggested how HAL himself (sic) deals with "'an autonomous, twenty-four-hour-a-day deluge of data,'" imaged on flatscreens suggesting "a nonstop stream of seemingly authoritative info-graphics, equations, acronyms, and letters [that] gave pulsing, almost capillary life to the computer running Discovery and the scrupulously engineered world in which 2001's story unfolded. No less critically than the design team's creation of a futuristic period equivalent to Georgian or Victorian, it," the set of images on viewscreens, "conjured an entire upcoming chapter of civilization" (p. 134). 

On complaints that "Lockwood's presence within the film was curiously anodyne," and similarly with Dullea's flat performance: "This was intentional. Kubrick and Clarke had conceived of the spacemen as […] so unflappable as to be almost android. Like Charlie Chaplin's bolt-tightening factory worker in Modern Times" (1936) […] they were ghosts in the machinery, component parts of their chilly, refrigerator-white mother ship" (p. 184). 

HAL's "cyclopean red eye" — Benson's word-choice reminds us he takes seriously 2001 as a Space Odyssey — was not "a prop but was actually a Nikon Nikkor 8-millimeter wide-angle lens lit from behind," reportedly used by Kubrick for some actual filming, but not for shots from HAL's point of view" (p. 171 n.).
 
Cites a heading by Kubrick in his notes for "Killing the Computer," indicating that early in the production process Kubrick saw what became HAL 9000 as a character in the cast — whom (sic) many critics have seen as the most sympathetic character — and in some sense alive (p. 129). Quotes Christiane Kubrick (SK's widow): "'I want this to be a murder,' Stanley had said to Christiane, who clearly remembers the origins […] of the scene. It was Arthur's idea,' she said. 'Stanley wrote it. But he, Arthur, planted the concept of an intelligence as something that's alive'" (p. 209). Similarly, Benson uses as a headnote to ch. 9, "End Game" a significant quotation from Kubrick to Michel Ciment for "A Propos de Orange Méchanique" (i.e., On A Clockwork Orange) in 'Positif, June 1972, "contained in original manuscript, Agel, ed. Making of Kubrick's 2001 (p. 471 n.): "Man, in a very technical age, must attain more discipline and control of himself, and thus become more like a machine. Inversely, the machine, in order to communicate with man and enlarge his horizon, must become more human. So it goes" (p. 319, italics for a headnote removed). The "So it goes" could be read at the time of the Ciment interview as a nod to similar ideas in Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 work, Slaughterhouse-Five. On the other hand, in "the Brain Room scene […] Bowman's arrhythmic breathing is the only response HAL hears for most of his final minutes of consciousness, something accentuating the stark difference between living and synthetic forms of life" (p. 379; sic with usefully odd formulation "living … life"). 

For the final Star-Child shot, the only action Kubrick wanted from the figure "was for its eyes to move." Brian Johnson arranged this by "Connecting the eyes to small rods" which he "motorized […] by attaching them to selsyn motor-controlled bearings […]. 'If you look at automatons that were made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it's the same sort of principle,' he observed" (p. 381).

Quotes Clarke note to the film critic Joseph Glamis on Glamis's comparison of the initial critical reception of SPACE ODYSSEY to a review of the newly-published Moby-Dick: "I was quite consciously aware of another Moby-Dick parallel — i.e., the use of 'hard' technology to set a background for metaphysical and philosophical speculations" (p. 426). ). Also quotes Clarke in a radio interview: "Asked if he felt the pervasive speed of technology was beginning to dehumanize us, Clarke replied, 'No, I think it's superhumanizing us'" (p. 432).

See The 2001 File: Harry Lange and the Design of the Landmark Science Fiction Film.

NOTE: On p. 307 and the note on p. 470, Benson assigns to Kubrick lines on how "Man emerged from the anthropoid background […] because he was a killer" (etc.); these are from Robert Ardrey's African Genesis, p. 29.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 6July18, 10July18