Tag Archives: arthur c clarke

Science, Spirituality and “2001: A Space Odyssey”

Image

There’s a new book out titled, “Space Odyssey:  Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke and the Making of a Masterpiece.” I pre-ordered it a couple of months ago and when I opened it I came immediately to this quote:

“Politics and religion are obsolete. The time has come for science and spirituality.”

The story goes that that second sentence was underlined by Kubrick when the quote, from Indian social reformer Vinoba Bhave, was shown to him by Clarke. As a near lifelong (OK, “obsessive”) fan of Kubrick’s work, his emphasis on that line about science enhancing spirituality strikes me as spot on.

It’s been gratifying to see the remarkable outpouring of observance, celebration and reflection on the 50th anniversary of “2001’s” release, April 3, 1968 in Washington D.C. Its gala premiere came amid a historic week. Four days earlier Lyndon Johnson, undone by his prosecution of the war in Vietnam, announced he would not run for reelection. A day later Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.

Very few movies, a generally disposable “art” form, get the attention and respect “2001” is getting these days. Fifty years from now I doubt there’ll be much commotion over the half century anniversary of “The Shape of Water” or even “Black Panther.” That’s because only a handful of large-scale, mass-marketed Hollywood productions qualify as anything close to actual art, with even fewer as willing and determined as “2001” to defy conventional expectations and leave audiences searching their own imagination for resolution.

 

I was 17 when I saw “2001” for the first time, in late June 1968 at the Cooper Cinerama theater in St. Louis Park. I had been following what I could about Kubrick since being riveted by “Paths of Glory” on TV when I was 14 and “Dr. Strangelove” in a theater a few months later. (“Lolita” required parental permission I did not get.) Here was someone making movies unlike anything else I was seeing in far-off rural Minnesota, a resolutely conventional Mayberry RFD existence where “art” for the most part was something hung on dentists’ office walls.

It took me a few years to accept how profound an effect that first viewing of “2001” had on me. I had driven in to the Cities with my high school English teacher and a couple other pals, and like everyone else in the theater was asking “WTF?” by the time Dave Bowman left his glowing bedroom and floated back to earth as a giant fetus. I remember my English teacher, a fan of “Gone With the Wind”, shaking his head as we filed out and saying, “That was just silly.”

 

I didn’t know exactly what to say, but the word “silly” was not among anything ricocheting around my squirrely teenage head. All I could process was that anyone who could put that kind of craft and imagery up on a giant movie screen clearly knew what he was doing and more to the point, what he intended to do.

By the time the homicidal, riotous summer of ’68 was over “2001” had separated into distinct partisan camps. Old guard traditionalists remained bored, harrumphing and snorting about “pretentiousness”, as though the only explanation for a movie that didn’t push the normal buttons of escapist entertainment was that it was pretending it was smarter, and on to something they couldn’t grasp.

On the other side, the new guard was reacting like something had just jolted them out of a stupor. Yeah, a lot of the “mind-blowing” was abetted by significant amounts of pot and acid. I must have seen the movie another half-dozen times before ’68 was over, and you knew the repeat viewers by the way they filled the first couple rows of any theater you went to, with some sprawled out on the carpet in front of the front row. (There was the time a pal re-wired the speakers at a drive-in so a dozen of us could, you know, like, commune with the stars while we watched.)

It goes without saying it was that latter crowd — not all on acid — that drove “2001” to legendary status. In it, without always consciously verbalizing it, they were experiencing art. Not just art-ful camera work, or an art-ful musical score, but the art of the overall concept. That being a step up from mere masterly filmmaking craft work to something that invites and requires viewers to allow their imaginations to fire up, reboot and realign as though solving a puzzle.

A constant of Kubrick’s world view, seen most vividly in “2001”, but in some form in all of his films, is that we are not a particularly evolved set of creatures. We live fitfully and irrationally, in a way that is not all that improved from desperately hungry proto-humans clubbing tapirs for food in Africa a couple million years ago. We are still far, far too easily controlled by basic animal impulses and instincts — fear of the other, greed and an emotional subservience to higher authorities — like the corrupt generals in “Paths of Glory”, the sociopathic fools of “Dr. Strangelove”,  the police, politicians and scientists in “A Clockwork Orange”, the vain, powdered elites of “Barry Lyndon” and so on.

Politics and religion are obsolete as honest vehicles for delivering us to … something better than this … because the success of each relies on exploiting the most basic and worst of our unevolved emotions and impulses. You only have to acknowledge how much both politics and religion rely on a kind of sanctimonious demonizing of others to see Kubrick’s point.

As Bhave’s quote asserts, the reaction then of rational man to the astonishing revelations and still unfolding mysteries of science — or to explorations of human psychology, biology and the incomprehensible vastness of the universe  — is genuinely spiritual. It is a transcendant experience in how it separates us, if only for a few moments, from the chaos and fraudulence of life. Science presents a spirituality qualitatively different from what so many billions still hear from their pulpits, in that it doesn’t rely symbolic fables, highly suspect history and accepting faith as fact. It is transcendence through reality.

As I say, when all that is introduced to your intellectual life stream — via a movie — it is safe to say you’ve been exposed to something truly unique and remarkable.

(Stanley Kubrick, in blue jacket, directing “2001”).

(P.S. Christopher Nolan, director of “Dunkirk”, “Inception” and the Batman trilogy, makes no apologies for his indebtedness to Stanley Kubrick for re-orienting his notion of what film — the craft and sequencing of image and sound — can do. He has called “2001” “pure cinema”. He will introduce an “unrestored” 70mm print of “2001” at the Cannes Film Festival next month, simultaneous with a re-release of “2001” around the country in May.)

I’ll be in the front row.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where Do I Get a Ticket to Kepler 452-b?

Posted on by

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterThere’s nothing like an American political campaign, especially one dominated by the rolling freak show of our “new conservative movement” to make you wonder if intelligent life exists anywhere in the universe, including here.

Thank God then for Stephen Hawking and the NASA teams responsible for the Pluto fly-by and the discovery of “Earth’s twin”, Kepler 452-b. They didn’t quite drown out the buffoonery and cynicism of Donald Trump-Scott Walker last week. But if you were so inclined it was quite pleasurable to ignore the clamor of their toxic grifting and let the mind wander, imagining truly advanced civilizations and what they might think of us.

Among the most interesting people I’ve ever and had the chance to talk with is Arthur C. Clarke, the famous science-fiction writer, best known for co-authoring the screenplay for “2001: A Space Odyssey”, which was drawn from his short story “The Sentinel”. in 1984 Clarke flew halfway around the planet from his home in Sri Lanka to do publicity for “2010: The Year We Make Contact”, an instantly-forgotten sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic. By no means a typical Hollywood type, Clarke arrived for interviews at some Beverly Hills hotel looking like an Iowa mortician. Black suit, white shirt, black tie, horn-rimmed glasses and the demeanor of the guy who makes certain the deceased is returned to the earth with due gravity.

One of Clarke’s many classic quotes is his response to being asked if we are alone in the universe? “Two possibilities exist,” he said, “either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” He also said when asked what we might expect from contact with an extraterrestrial society, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

I had only 30 minutes or so with Clarke, and there didn’t seem to be much point in wasting it getting his reaction to the noisy, formulaic sequel to a truly audacious film that left no intelligent viewer with an option other than to contemplate our modest accomplishments — standing upright, conquering to survive and traveling beyond the pull of our own planet.

I doubt the news about our “twin”, Kepler 452-b, 1400-light years away, would have surprised Clarke much. Terrified or not, he found it it difficult to believe, based on the astonishing immensity of the universe that we were all that unique in terms of complex organisms or all that advanced, given the relative youth, 4.5 billion years, of Earth and the Milky Way. Organisms in other parts of the 14 billion year old universe could have hundreds of millions of years head start on us.

I do think Clarke, who died in 2008, would have been delighted to hear of Hawking’s collaboration with a Russian billionaire to re-start a long-term radar search for signals from another civilization, likely a “mega-civilization”, a culture likely generations, millennia or more advanced than ours. He was generally appalled at the priorities of so-called social leaders. (The fact that a single football stadium in one obscure Midwestern city cost more than we invested in the Pluto mission would have been to Clarke a prime example of barely post-amoebic thinking.)

One part of my conversation with Clarke centered on why any truly advanced culture would have an interest in us? And if they did how they would go about looking us over? This of course was the gist of “The Sentinel”, in which millions of years in our past a probing civilization, perhaps assessing Earth’s position in the so-called “Goldilocks” zone in relation to our sun, drops down a kind of cosmic tele-prompter, sparking the decisive leap one species makes toward sentient thought … and then a fire alarm (on the moon) to alert the civilization that one of the species it has incubated is one the move.

I was pleased that Clarke agreed with me that it made no sense at all that a “mega-civilization” (he didn’t use that term), would visit this planet in any kind of mortal form. No little grey men like in bad Hollywood or Japanese sci-fi. No bizarre, multi-tentacled deep space octopi like out of a comic book. Robotic probes alone, and most-likely the size of molecules rather than city-wide flying saucers could tell culturedeep space s capable of spanning  everything they needed to know about life on this rock. That is if at hundreds of thousands or millions of years of development beyond us they had any interest.

Clarke’s argument, in various books, in the script for “2001” and in conversation in Los Angeles is that immortality is probably a primary initiative for any self-aware species, and that following the logic we saw in HAL the computer and see today in any number of the artificial intelligence advances made since his death, the process of separating consciousness out of and away from the frail, mortal carbon container we evolved in would be Job One.

In the “acid trip” sequence of “2001” there’s a shot of seven shimmering crystalline objects, generally regarded as Kubrick and Clarke’s depiction of “mega civilization” life forms. When I asked him if that was in fact the point of that shot, he smiled and said, “I don’t want to say. It’s more fun to imagine.”

So what then? Having transferred consciousness from flesh and blood (or whatever chemical stew might work on other “goldilocks” planets) to a form immune to the ravages of wind, fire, war, radiation and time, what interest would such a form of being have in us? Why would we be of any particular interest at all? We’re probably flattering ourselves that we’re exceptional. Most likely we would be no more interesting than plankton in a tidal pool. Ours would be an existence to be acknowledged, at best. But nothing more.

More likely, Clarke thought (and wrote in several novels, although maybe most provocatively in “Childhood’s End”), such a culture would practice a form of dispassionate benevolence, offering cues to lower life forms (us) for sustaining evolution, but taking no active role. (They’re a bit more involved in “Childhood’s End”.)

One commentator writing about Hawking’s endeavor reminded readers to do the math on Moore’s Law, which says computing power, in terms of transistors on a CPU, doubles every two years. You can find people who say we’ve reached a limit and that that isn’t going to happen. But since the number of transistors in a CPU has increased from 37.5 million in 2000 to 904 million in 2009, we’re kind of in range. Point being, by 2050, at this rate, our own technology will seem like magic to us today.

And that’s 35 years. For the sake of this discussion, add six zeroes. 35,000,000 years. Then try and imagine what “life” looks like. Most likely we wouldn’t recognize if it was standing next to us.

Now back to the plankton we know as Trump, Walker and the others vying to lead our civilization.