2001 - A Space Odyssey 1968 Starring Keir Dullea Gary Lockwood

2001: A Space Idiocy.

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2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Back in my junior-year literary theory text (almost twenty years ago now), I remember someone-- can't remember who it was, though-- going on about how the deconstructionists went "running around turning sacred cows into shishkebab." I've always loved that image, not least because when I run across a sacred cow, it's always been the case that my mouth starts watering and I get out the skewers. In this case, I had no idea that Ligeti's Requiem was used so extensively in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I love Ligeti, and find the Requiem very enjoyable, and hearing it that much was quite a pleasure. Which is the last positive thing I'm going to say about this interminable piece of pretentious silliness.

I was never a Kubrick fan (thanks to his desecration of The Shining) until I saw Lolita a few years ago, which clued me in to the fact that Kubrick did, once, deserve all the acclaim. A friend of mine soon after forced me to watch The Killing, which I was also inordinately fond of given that it's a pretty standard noir (blame my background as a horseplayer). I gradually loosened my mind's hold on the idea that Kubrick was entirely (save the first forty-five minutes of Full Metal Jacket; too bad the rest of it's so terrible) unwatchable and sat down to watch some of the movies universally lauded as classics. This, of course, is one of them; Kubrick fans can sit and argue for hours about whether 2001 or A Clockwork Orange is the better movie. (Interestingly, I've found critics tend to acknowledge both, but then go on to argue for hours over whether his best work is Spartacus or Paths of Glory.) I've now seen both, over the course of a few days, and will unequivocally cast my lot at the feet of A Clockwork Orange (while reserving the right to claim that, of those I've seen, Lolita is by far his strongest work). Not because I fell head over heels in love with A Clockwork Orange, which was decent but not special, but because I loathed 2001 with every fiber of my being. About three quarters of the way through the film, I came to the conclusion that the reason everyone praises HAL 9000 as the quintessential film villain is because he doesn't have much to compete against where this movie is concerned; the acting in John Carpenter's basement-budget spoof Dark Star is orders of magnitude better than any actor comes up with in this movie. Not that there's a terribly large amount of acting to be done; huge swaths of the movie are devoid of acting (or, for that matter, characters). We don't actually find the main plot arc until almost an hour into the movie, and it disappears half an hour before movie's end. The rest is theme, theme, theme, and my god, does it get tiresome. Kubrick's ham-handed treatment of sociopolitical topics is nothing new to me-- he showed all the subtlety of a hammerblow to the face in Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut-- but he never had as large a canvas to do it with as he did here, and he made sure to scrawl in every corner.

I'm relatively sure that had I first seen this movie in my idealistic teen years-- or, perhaps even more so, had I seen it for the first time in a chemically altered state that I haven't experienced since those same teen years-- I probably would have enjoyed it a great deal more. For that's what the movie reminds me of, an acid trip. The problem being, of course, that (a) as anyone who hangs out with druggies can tell you, acid trips are a lot more fun when you're having them than watching them, and (b) Kubrick is on a very, very bad trip; this is the most nihilist portrayal of the human condition I've seen outside a Hideshi Hino film.

While I've watched a lot of movies recently that have been anywhere from horrible to horrendous in their mediocrity, incompetence, or silliness-- and I've enjoyed any number of those despite it-- I can't remember the last time I out-and-out hated a movie. Movies have made me apathetic, they've annoyed me, they've caused me to wonder if the guy who greenlighted certain projects still has a job, but I seriously can't put my finger on the last movie I watched and desperately wanted to turn off halfway through because they were so very, very awful. I have only, in fact, done so with three films in the course of over thirty years of movie watching (and twenty-two in movie reviewing). 2001: A Space Odyssey came close to being number four at least six times during the two and a half hours of my life I wasted watching it. A thoroughly execrable experience. (zero)