Literature Ramble

[Pompey Bum]

In Burgess, of course, the total freedom is when Alex is free from both violence and behavioral brainwashing, etc. In Kubrick before the brainwashing, when he Alex picks violence.

Yes, although you could argue that Kubrick's Alex does not possess total freedom if he is not free from his own compulsion to violence. This is what the Ludovico technique was trying to fix, although it only made him unfree to choose violence (before it failed). So his return to freedom was not total freedom . Burgess' Alex, on the other hand, ends up choosing not to be violent while remaining free of the failed brainwashing.

He is a cynical bastard, but still a cynical bastard that thinks like an artist. I think even him would not add something that he couldnt justify in name of his artistic vision.

Well, their relationship is more harmonious than Burgess/Kubrick or King/Kubrick, after all they worked together here. The differences, many can be traced to the fact Clarke wrote the book from the first draft they worked and during shooting (for many motives, some pratical, scenes were removed or little changes made). Other differences are because Clarke is a writer with scientific mind. He has to explain everything, make it plausible. Kubrick, as you mention, is not very keen for explanation. He is the artist (here frost and the lady asking explanation) more worried with the emotional impact than a literal impact. In this way, plots for Kubrick are quite simple, not that complicated. He uses what he gets to give his vision of The What. This considering, I can see Clarke explaning everything, Kubrick nodding and thinking he could give a damn if the monolyth is from mars or IBM, if both are useful for him. This and the fact it is supported by the Sentinel Story, make me believe Clarke story works out more or less as he imagined. Also, Clarke went to the hassle to modify details that were modified in the movie to make 2010 and others to look like a legitimate sequel to the movie. Seems like someone who would respect their original ideas.

My best friend from college days (shortly after the Dawn of Man) knew Stanley Kubrick a little and Arthur C. Clarke quite well (they sometimes vacationed together). His father, whom I also knew, was a colleague of both. My friend and his father had spent time on the set of 2001, although my friend was only a boy at the time. He used to say Kubrick was an odd duck with a real temperament d'ariste, but he was essentially a humanist and a humane man. He also used to talk about this limited artistic relationship that Kubrick and Clarke had worked under and how the movie was mostly Kubrick's. I pass that information along anecdotally. You understand the film through the lens of Clarke's books, which is absolutely fine. What I am saying is that the Clarke reading is not an orthodoxy. Clarke's book certainly contributed to Kubrick's film, but the film does its own thing, too. The viewer has to make his or her own heterodoxy. That was Kubrick's vision in any case.

Yeah, the idea is the Old Testament. Clarke never went much affar to produce a Christ like figure, at best, HAL and the two astronauts in the sequence acted a bit like prophets, interpretating the signals from the monolyths and their makers. But those Makers are quite judgmental, prone to send cataclysm. Of course, overall, they never went to a metaphysical path too far to suggest a religon. There is a lack of morality coming from all this (that make the sequels a bit bland, after all the good Old God from OT has quite a personality).

Yes, He can be quite the card.

I'm not much on religious allegories for this film, although I know a lot have been drawn. Clarke was looking for God, but he could only conceive of Him in materialist terms (it's interesting that he had no problem with life evolving into machines and pure energy but found a spiritual being a stretch). Kubrick, too, made some comments about the inevitability of omnipotent and omniscient life having evolved in an incalculably vast cosmos (somehow forgetting about the all just and all loving part). It's always a little funny when atheists and scientists try to do theology (though when the religious try to do science it's just as bad). In that context, in any case, if there was an intended Christ figure in 2001, it was probably supposed to be bubble boy from the film's end (which makes Dave a bit like the Virgin Mary, I guess). Give me Prince Myshkin anytime.

Like I said, I believe Clarke story to be closer to what he and Kubrick imagined at the begining. Thinking this way, i think those four paths seem to be too similar and only a matter of linguistic is here.

I think there need to be at least two paths to explain HAL's actions: one circumstantial and one intentional. In the circumstantial approach, he malfunctioned or was made in a way that led to malfunctioning. And even then he didn't start killing until he discovered a conspiracy to kill him. In the intentional approach HAL was not malfunctioning but choosing to lie for his own purposes. Most of his victims were uninvolved in the plan to shut him down, which was only a contingency in any case. He was a murderer.

Kubrick leaves the matter ambiguous: you could make an argument either way. I think he does this intentionally as part of his Rorschach ink blot approach. When you think about it, the question of HAL's culpability is familiar from almost any homicide case. Did he go insane? Was he always insane? Did he have his own motives? Was he acting in self-defense? Kubrick's puzzle-it-out approach allows one to explore ones predispositions on these issues. This matters much less if I say he's guilty and you say he's not guilty. He's both and he's neither: he never existed.

I think Kubrick treats Hal as a human character.

I think you are sympathetic toward which is the best character in 2001.

HAL has a human character. So did Frankenstein's monster (Shelly's version) and Milton's Satan. And he is by far the best character in 2001. It's not even close. The personality-free astronauts are another of Kubrick's jokes--part satire and part realism (astronauts are selected for limited individuality). No one would even remember Dave's name if it weren't for HAL's famous lines: "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave," "Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?" and (my personal favorite) "Look, Dave, I can see you're really upset about this." And Dave's buddy, the one HAL kills? Anyone remember his name? Not me!Famously, the ship's computer seems more human than the humans in Kubrick's vision of the technological future.

But HAL's ontological essence remains a mystery. The film goes out of its way to establish this. During a BBC interview (in the movie not real life), Dave says that says HAL's sophistication and advanced social programming make it virtually impossible to tell whether Hall has feelings of his own. This is another example of Kubrick leaving the matter ambiguous. In some movies that would be a weakness, but in 2001 it is a strength (and gives us plenty to talk about in any case).

All those things are terrible (but not evil), but awe terrible (as art can be, as the terrible symetry of a certain tyger, as the awe and terror Yaveh could inspire) and we really have a notable movie cosmogony.

Yes, that's the movie's vision. It evokes amoral phenomena like evolution and artificial intelligence and is silent or ambiguous on violence, natural selection, and killing. Because that is how the god of evolution works, right? That's why I get off the train before the supposed happy ending. That god will have to get by without me.

I always recall the true description of angels before europeans started to humanize their shapes (in this, the original anime Neon Genesis Evangelion captured the spirit and have a lot to do with 2001) when I see the monolyths. We are supposed to be awe struck in their presence.

I've heard of that anime, but I've never seen it. Angels are necessary because you die if you look into God's face (no really, it's how Moses died). So you need messengers. I wonder if Dave ages and dies so quickly because his room is so close to the pure-energy life form. At one point there is this weird booming noise that might be its voice.

Of course, the use of music is brilliant and make us think it is more closer to poem than a narrative. (unlike the book). We should be awe struck by art too. (Yeah, sometimes I think Kubrick was able to see the creator as his alter ego in the movie).

If you mean Kubrick was a megalomaniac you are probably right. His use of Strauss in the hominid tool scene is brilliant, though. It strikes me that this may have been his original "cherry on top"--repeated with Beethoven in A Clockwork Orange. Perhaps that's what led him to Burgess.

[JCamilo]

Yes, although you could argue that Kubrick's Alex does not possess total freedom if he is not free from his own compulsion to violence. This is what the Ludovico technique was trying to fix, although it only made him unfree to choose violence (before it failed). So his return to freedom was not total freedom . Burgess' Alex, on the other hand, ends up choosing not to be violent while remaining free of the failed brainwashing.

Oh, yeah. I was just tagging along with the idea you suggested. Kubrick is not very existential.

My best friend from college days (shortly after the Dawn of Man) knew Stanley Kubrick a little and Arthur C. Clarke quite well (they sometimes vacationed together). His father, whom I also knew, was a colleague of both. My friend and his father had spent time on the set of 2001, although my friend was only a boy at the time. He used to say Kubrick was an odd duck with a real temperament d'ariste, but he was essentially a humanist and a humane man. He also used to talk about this limited artistic relationship that Kubrick and Clarke had worked under and how the movie was mostly Kubrick's. I pass that information along anecdotally. You understand the film through the lens of Clarke's books, which is absolutely fine. What I am saying is that the Clarke reading is not an orthodoxy. Clarke's book certainly contributed to Kubrick's film, but the film does its own thing, too. The viewer has to make his or her own heterodoxy. That was Kubrick's vision in any case.

Oh, no doubt. The movie is Kubrick's and the book is Clarke's. But that is not what I mean exactly. Clarke and Kubrick started working together and wrote together was first draft/script. After this, each went to their busines: Clarke to wrote and Kubrick to direct (Clarke still worked as a consultant). What I mean is that the basic outline of the story, the literal plot, etc. was something both agreed and the book and movie were born from this. (I dont see Kubrick disagreing with something, but letting it slide so he would change in the movie). The idea of the monolyth as "messagers/watchers" from superior beings and HAL evolution/humanity are already in this script (and came from the "source material too"). Then, of course, each artist gave their own vision of this story (I admit for Clarke it was more relevant to have an explanation, to Kubrick just the existence was enough). The difference from Book and Movie are not that relevant in terms of content (but of course, a lot in terms of style, intensity, rhytim, etc), Kubrick never went to express disagrement about the book like he did for example with Burgess last chapter and Clarke went so far to modify information in the sequels to keep the harmony with the movie, all this made me think there were that much both disagreed (at least that was relevant). So I think we can take Clarke development as based on their original ideas.

One more thing, I think Kubrick gave a damn if the monolyth was an angel, a weapon of mass destruction, etc. In his mind, what he didnt want to explain wasnt "What the monolyth was" but "what the effect of the monolyth on us". Clarke could be with the what the monolyth was, but then, he was not the artist Kubrick was. (I am sure the person Kubrick was an intelectual dude, not the mean sadist people mention when talking about his filmaking, but he wouldnt be the first man of genius that went overboard when dedicated to art either).

Yes, He can be quite the card.

I'm not much on religious allegories for this film, although I know a lot have been drawn. Clarke was looking for God, but he could only conceive of Him in materialist terms (it's interesting that he had no problem with life evolving into machines and pure energy but found a spiritual being a stretch). Kubrick, too, made some comments about the inevitability of omnipotent and omniscient life having evolved in an incalculably vast cosmos (somehow forgetting about the all just and all loving part). It's always a little funny when atheists and scientists try to do theology (though when the religious try to do science it's just as bad). In that context, in any case, if there was an intended Christ figure in 2001, it was probably supposed to be bubble boy from the film's end (which makes Dave a bit like the Virgin Mary, I guess). Give me Prince Myshkin anytime.

Yeah, they had no mind for a religious allegory (albeit Clarke do have a thing for thinking about technology and science in contrast with myth and magic), I think that was in the end an inevitable narrative stereotype. I also think, even in the sequels, they never went past Maccabees. In a way, I think Dave became more a Moses (returning to his people), but he lacked someone to be free... Well, anyways, Clarke wasn't that much into religious to make a complete pararel religious story, albeit the idea of people with superior technology to appear like god or magic is a commun theme in his work. Funny enough, I think his best short story is one about scientists that build a computer that finally can calculate all the names of the god. When the list is being finished, two of the scientist kind like perceive signals of the end of universe. (Ps. talking about optmism and pessimism, Clarke was clear an optimistic person.)

I think there need to be at least two paths to explain HAL's actions: one circumstantial and one intentional. In the circumstantial approach, he malfunctioned or was made in a way that led to malfunctioning. And even then he didn't start killing until he discovered a conspiracy to kill him. In the intentional approach HAL was not malfunctioning but choosing to lie for his own purposes. Most of his victims were uninvolved in the plan to shut him down, which was only a contingency in any case. He was a murderer.

I think HAL chosing to lie for his own purpose is already malfunction. Anyways, Kubrick gave interviews saying HAL had a "emotional breakdown". I dont think there was ever the intention to make him a cold bloodled petty murder, but tell a Raskolnikov kind of mental story (without going much inside the mind of the computer. Kubrick wouldnt be a fan of Matrix, after all).

Kubrick leaves the matter ambiguous: you could make an argument either way. I think he does this intentionally as part of his Rorschach ink blot approach. When you think about it, the question of HAL's culpability is familiar from almost any homicide case. Did he go insane? Was he always insane? Did he have his own motives? Was he acting in self-defense? Kubrick's puzzle-it-out approach allows one to explore ones predispositions on these issues. This matters much less if I say he's guilty and you say he's not guilty. He's both and he's neither: he never existed.

I agree here. As I said, Kubrick cares little for the details of plot. It is not what he is working, he works with the feelings caused by it. (Hence, he removed the scene explaning HAL malfunction). What matters is HAL decided to kill them. David decided to face HAL. And of course, we have to note, HAL's death is slow, even sentimental in a way. Compare with the death of the other members of the crew and we see that Kubrick wanted to make us be shaken by HAL being turned off.

HAL has a human character. So did Frankenstein's monster (Shelly's version) and Milton's Satan. And he is by far the best character in 2001. It's not even close. The personality-free astronauts are another of Kubrick's jokes--part satire and part realism (astronauts are selected for limited individuality). No one would even remember Dave's name if it weren't for HAL's famous lines: "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave," "Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?" and (my personal favorite) "Look, Dave, I can see you're really upset about this." And Dave's buddy, the one HAL kills? Anyone remember his name? Not me!Famously, the ship's computer seems more human than the humans in Kubrick's vision of the technological future.

Well, Frankie's monster is human after all. But yes, Kubrick used more of those Dickens like character, traits being exagerated (but not for a comic effect, hence he liked actors able to exagerate (or do some pantomime) like Nicholson, Roddy,Douglas, Sellers), and HAL is a bit unique. Of course, that is why you like him more: he is the closest thing to a dostoievisky character we have in Kubrick. The other characters are more like wallpapers. You can even say, the actors in 2001 are part of special effects.

But HAL's ontological essence remains a mystery. The film goes out of its way to establish this. During a BBC interview (in the movie not real life), Dave says that says HAL's sophistication and advanced social programming make it virtually impossible to tell whether Hall has feelings of his own. This is another example of Kubrick leaving the matter ambiguous. In some movies that would be a weakness, but in 2001 it is a strength (and gives us plenty to talk about in any case).

Yeah, Albeit I think that was a way to raise the tension and create more of the feeling HAL was more human than the astronauts (those bored, plain-faced dudes who we ask if they have feelings at all too).

Yes, that's the movie's vision. It evokes amoral phenomena like evolution and artificial intelligence and is silent or ambiguous on violence, natural selection, and killing. Because that is how the god of evolution works, right? That's why I get off the train before the supposed happy ending. That god will have to get by without me.

It is a cold vision, I think from a scientist and a someone who went cold while making movie because he wanted the audience to have feelings, not him. But with Kubrick, I always will think he is (your friend said, a humanist) a "champion" of culture. He does want to reduce humankind to violence, but portray somehow the difference between us in savage/primitive state without culture. (and I mean culture as art, not culture as institutions and such). With his ego, I would always wonder if he didnt saw his movies as the Black Monolyth.

I've heard of that anime, but I've never seen it. Angels are necessary because you die if you look into God's face (no really, it's how Moses died). So you need messengers. I wonder if Dave ages and dies so quickly because his room is so close to the pure-energy life form. At one point there is this weird booming noise that might be its voice.

Yes, never meant to face the full glory of the sacred. Something in many cultures. I think Dave aging/dying is because he is now out of time/space dimensions (in the pure energy dimension, after all, energy does not need time or space) . Kubrick would love to show all this happening at once I think. In another "religious allegory", I think that was akim to the momment Muhammad falls from his camel, is taken by an angel to memorize the Quran and returns for the fall.

If you mean Kubrick was a megalomaniac you are probably right. His use of Strauss in the hominid tool scene is brilliant, though. It strikes me that this may have been his original "cherry on top"--repeated with Beethoven in A Clockwork Orange. Perhaps that's what led him to Burgess.

Oh, yeah. He was creating the uberape there. I think he laughed a lot.

[Pompey Bum]

Yeah, they had no mind for a religious allegory (albeit Clarke do have a thing for thinking about technology and science in contrast with myth and magic), I think that was in the end an inevitable narrative stereotype.

I think Clarke and Kubrick are trying find the point where myth and magic (which is how they see religion) become science and technology. To my way of thinking this is naïve, but if those are the ground rules then materialism needs to be adhered to till the bitter end. No fair introducing allegories when you can no longer represent what you mean directly. To Kubrick's credit, I don't think he tries to do that, but many read him that way. Dave's suite full of neo-classical furniture is just that--it's not a symbol. Maybe it's a projection of Dave's mind or maybe the alien life form picked up the furniture at a pet store (like we pick up little plastic divers and treasure chests for our fish tanks), but it is not an allegory for existence--or it's a p*ss poor cop out if it is.

The problem, of course, is that it really is hard to express yourself about things that surpass our normal way of thinking. Kubrick finds that language is no longer useful and tries to get by on images. But that creates problems, too. Does the image of a small fetus in a disembodied amniotic sac floating over Dave's corpse still constitute something other than an allegory? Or don't fetuses need umbilical cords in the 5th dimension? There's a point where these images fail, too.

And that (in my opinion) is because Kubrick and Clarke are still trying to force the square materialist peg into the round religious hole. Again, there is an integrity to their consistency; it's not my religion, but okay, it's theirs. (I'm not arguing that science is necessarily a religion, by the way, but used this way it is). So fine, fine, but the inconsistency emerges when the materialist god (the god of evolution) is then conflated with the all loving and all-just God the materialists have left behind. If Kubrick and Clarke are not doing this, then again, fine. As you say, it's a cold vision, but it's only a movie, and they can believe what they like. But in that case, I don't want to hear about what an optimistic vision this is for humankind (not that you said this, but many do). In fact, it is a rather silly vision born of a fundamental misunderstanding between science and religion.

(Ps. talking about optmism and pessimism, Clarke was clear an optimistic person.)

I agree. A lot of technologically oriented atheists are optimists. They don't quite get how bad people are, and so they assume new technology is going to be used mostly to help people rather than hurt or control them. Or they listen to Also Spake Zarathustra and say they are beyond good and evil. But those children in Vietnam who tore their clothes off because their bodies were covered in napalm--they seem to have still been in range. Who else may be is an open question.

I think HAL chosing to lie for his own purpose is already malfunction.

I agree to an extent. I think HAL became self-aware during the voyage because of the need to deceive the crew about the mission. (There were other 9000 units on earth, including a twin HAL, and they apparently exhibited no anomalies). The problem was that conscious deception was not based on HAL's superhuman intelligence but on the human quality of being able to assess the intentions and dispositions of others and to being cagey with them. HAL was so bad at this that his new mind soon degenerated into a state of paranoia. In the scene that made me suspect HAL to be a failed hero, he expresses his reservations about the mission (so many rumors, so much secrecy, etc.). But I think now that HAL is being paranoid about whether the information he has been given is correct. Perhaps he's also being tricky with Dave to see if he can get anything out of him. Dave, for his part, looks at HAL with marked distrust and accuses him of conducting a psychological test on him. HAL confirms this (none too convincingly), then pauses as if thinking about something (taking much too long for HAL), and THEN reports the supposedly failing antenna.

I believe HAL misread Dave's suspicious glance as intended aggression against him and decided to kill all the astronauts at that point. This was before the lip reading incident, which must have fueled his fears. I originally remembered that HAL had passed up an opportunity to kill the other astronaut while he was retrieving the antenna, and I couldn't figure out why he had waited. But I think I may have been wrong. I think NASA refuted HAL's diagnosis without anyone retrieving the antenna, and HAL attacked the other astronaut when he left the ship for other reasons. If I am right about this, it means that HAL simply waited until his first good opportunity to begin killing the astronauts. Do you remember what actually happened? Or if you don't, does anyone else reading this know? I don't have a copy of the film so I can't check.

It seems to me that HAL's fears about the antenna (like his fears about the mission) may have been a part of his general paranoid delusions. But HAL also lies through his (metaphorical) teeth when Dave asks him for information about the other astronaut and--Cain-like--HAL says he doesn't have information (in fact he's just killed him). So it sounds to me like malfunctioning had something to do with HAL's killings, but in his conscious mind he knew to lie for his own purposes (that is, to remain free to commit more murders). In other words, while there was some overlap between circumstance (malfunction/paranoia) and intentionality (premeditation/cover up), Hal was, at least to some extent, responsible for his actions. The extent of his culpability is something for individual viewers to decide. And I think that's exactly what Kubrick wanted.

Of course, that is why you like him more: he is the closest thing to a dostoievisky character we have in Kubrick.

Ah, you got me, brother.

In another "religious allegory", I think that was akim to the momment Muhammad falls from his camel, is taken by an angel to memorize the Quran and returns for the fall.

Yikes! To go back to playing Joseph Campbell, that's a lot like what happens to Tam Lin when the Fairy Queen caught him. And I think there's an older tradition about it, too. It's one of the ways the fairies can get you.

Oh, yeah. He was creating the uberape there. I think he laughed a lot.

Well, Sun Wukong was the uberape. But he only would have peed on the monolith. Actually that would make a good satire of the Dawn of Man--Sun Wukong peeing to Also Spake Zarathustra.

[JCamilo]

I think Clarke and Kubrick are trying find the point where myth and magic (which is how they see religion) become science and technology. To my way of thinking this is naïve, but if those are the ground rules then materialism needs to be adhered to till the bitter end. No fair introducing allegories when you can no longer represent what you mean directly. To Kubrick's credit, I don't think he tries to do that, but many read him that way. Dave's suite full of neo-classical furniture is just that--it's not a symbol. Maybe it's a projection of Dave's mind or maybe the alien life form picked up the furniture at a pet store (like we pick up little plastic divers and treasure chests for our fish tanks), but it is not an allegory for existence--or it's a p*ss poor cop out if it is.

That is Clarke's law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Of course, it is a bit of reductionism, and I have seen being used (mostly by sci-fic fans, who consider Clarke to be an authority on literature bigger than he really was) to imply the non-existence of magic (as if the rules of fantasy must follow the rational pattern of rules of science, but then, they think suspension of disbelief is meant to allow sound in space and not that it was about the use of language), while Clarke was just pushing for the use of imagination as a form to allow new discoveries/creations. Of course, when you think he was only talking about language, it is less naive, after all it is a hint that the genre sci-fic is a brainchild of fantasy stories, just replacing the mythical/religious ethos for modern science ethos. We can agree this is fits 2001 well.

I dont thin Kubrick was really interessed about this (maybe he found funny as he likes confusing/mixing language themes) but to him more than a rationalization of sci-fic, he was worried with the feelings caused by his movie. I think a good evidence is that he didnt create a futuristic setting for Clockwork Orange because he didnt saw himself as sci-fic creator at all.

And that (in my opinion) is because Kubrick and Clarke are still trying to force the square materialist peg into the round religious hole. Again, there is an integrity to their consistency; it's not my religion, but okay, it's theirs. (I'm not arguing that science is necessarily a religion, by the way, but used this way it is). So fine, fine, but the inconsistency emerges when the materialist god (the god of evolution) is then conflated with the all loving and all-just God the materialists have left behind. If Kubrick and Clarke are not doing this, then again, fine. As you say, it's a cold vision, but it's only a movie, and they can believe what they likes. But in that case, I don't want to hear about what an optimistic vision this is for humankind (not that you said this, but many do). In fact, it is a rather silly ludicrous vision born of a fundamental misunderstanding between science and religion.

As I mentioned early, it is funny those two would come with the best modern creationist fable. But of course, because of their materialism, the movie lack elements most cosmogonies have and lead to religion: the moral ground (there may be a moral implication in the violence/conflicts, but the movie, as you point, is never clear of what is wrong or right in the sense of creating a culture) and the mystical deep that give us space for faith. It is just wrong to approach from this point of view, the only way is from Kubrick faith in Art and it is all the movie has to offer. That is what is weird about Kael critics: 2001 is hardly a product of an "art-director wannabe" that has "no idea of what he wants". Quite otherwise, hard to imagine anything that sucessful as an artwork for artwork sake.

I agree to an extent. I think HAL became self-aware during the voyage because of the need to deceive the crew about the mission. (There were other 9000 units on earth, including a twin HAL, and they apparently exhibited no anomalies). The problem was that conscious deception was not based on HAL's superhuman intelligence but on the human quality of being able to assess the intentions and dispositions of others and being cagey with them. HAL was so bad at this that his new mind soon degenerated into a state of paranoia. In the scene that made me suspect HAL to be a failed hero, he expresses his reservations about the mission to Dave (so many rumors, so much secrecy, etc.). But I think now that HAL is being paranoid about whether the information he has been given is correct. Perhaps he's also being tricky with Dave to see if he can get anything out of him. Dave, for his part, looks at HAL with marked distrust and accuses him of conducting a psychological test on him. HAL confirms this (none too convincingly), then pauses as if thinking about something (taking much too long for HAL), and THEN reports the supposedly failing antenna.

I believe HAL misread Dave's suspicious glance as intended aggression against him and decided to kill all the astronauts at that point. This was before the lip reading incident, which must have fueled his fears. I originally remembered that HAL had passed up an opportunity to kill the other astronaut while he was retrieving the antenna, and I couldn't figure out why he had waited. But I think I may have been wrong. I think NASA refuted HAL's diagnosis without anyone retrieving the antenna, and HAL attacked the other astronaut when he left the ship for other reasons. If I am right about this, it means that HAL simply waited until his first good opportunity to begin killing the astronauts. Do you remember what actually happened? Or if you don't, does anyone else reading this know? I don't have a copy of the film so I can't check.

I dont think there is 9000 HALs like that HAL. If I recall well, he was the first of that model and had a "sister" (used in 2010, but she was twinkered to prevent any failure). I recall, the owner of HAL had to be convicend to allow HAL to be used in the mission, he was basically a "son". So, HAL was above all, a newbie, with no experience in that kind of interaction with other humans other than his creator. In the end, there is some message there about HAL being given everything (inteligence, data, capacity of empahy) but not taught Ethical grounds and limits. Like the monkey, his insticts is eliminate the other lifeforms (maybe this is why he kills the other members of the crew - they belong to that other species, as Dave is all home sapiens and all homo sapiens is Dave).

The movie and book are slighty different in the order, so a quick search shows in the movie, HAL kills when he has his chance and Frank goes to get the antenna. There is no intereference of the superiors from earth, it is the lip reading accident that triggers his decision to kill (albeit, he is of course paranoic already). In the book, people from earth come with the idea (I suppose Clarke couldnt never find a way to produce a so effect scene for the lip reading accident as Kubrick did in the movie), and HAL takes the chance. HAL decision to kill is often triggered by a self-defense reaction, albeit, it is clear by his reaction killing the defenseless crew, he would probally go that way anyways (I suppose he had plenty of ways to kill people without the antenna rescue thing... but well).

It seems to me that HAL's fears about the antenna (like his fears about the mission) may have been a part of his general paranoid delusions. But HAL also lies through his (metaphorical) teeth when Dave asks him for information about the other astronaut and--Cain-like--HAL says he doesn't have information (while in fact he's
just killed him). So it sounds to me like malfunctioning had something to do with HAL's killings, but in his conscious mind. he knew to lie for his own purposes (that is, to remain free to commit more murders). In other words, while there was some overlap between circumstance (malfunction/paranoia) and intentionality (premeditation/cover up), Hal was, at least to some extent, responsible for his actions. The extent of his culpability is something for individual viewers to decide. And I think that's exactly what Kubrick wanted.

I recall some people pulled the idea HAL acted because of the monolyth influence. I disagree with that (people are exagerating the monolyth interference), but yeah, while Kubrick may mean HAL judgement was violent for a lack of proper reference to preserve life, etc. I dont think he wanted to mean HAL was unware of the consequences. He could even have HAL singing "Piggy, Piggy" lord of flies style.

Yikes! To go back to playing Joseph Campbell, that's a lot like what happens to Tam Lin when the Fairy Queen caught him. And I think there's an older tradition about it, too. It's one of the ways the fairies can get you.

Yes, it is the old "enchantment" theme, which is a bit of saying you are taken by Beings out of time and space. Works with many religons, I think works well as a metaphor for the artistic experience too. Art is not just entertaiment, at least not in the sense of just having some fun time. No time in this experience should exist.

Well, Sun Wukong was the uberape. But he only would have peed on the monolith. Actually that would make a good satire of the Dawn of Man--Sun Wukong peeing to Also Spake Zarathustra.

well, at this point everyone is entitled to have a satire of 2001. It is basic routine like a flip-flap in ballet.

[Pompey Bum]

As I mentioned early, it is funny those two would come with the best modern creationist fable. But of course, because of their materialism, the movie lack elements most cosmogonies have and lead to religion: the moral ground (there may be a moral implication in the violence/conflicts, but the movie, as you point, is never clear of what is wrong or right in the sense of creating a culture) and the mystical deep that give us space for faith.

Well, Kubrick is to be commended for trying, even if his materialism dooms his efforts to go any further. The truth is that theology and art (materialist or otherwise) also fail at a certain point. It is not surprising to see language fail; it is a cultural product after all. As art, language has the advantage of being generalizable within its own universe, but it bleeds meaning the farther it strays from its home. It's not surprising to see that Kubrick gets more mileage out of images, although they too fail to express a really generalizable meaning after a point. I think the art form that has the greatest potential to express the sublime, ineffable, or divine, in a reasonably objective way is music (the trouble of course is that it is so much less specific than language or image). It's interesting that the "room" sequence at the film's end is almost as free of music as it is of speech (unless you count the weird sound that may be the alien lifeform's voice). Strauss' Also Spake Zarathustra returns as the fetus approaches the deathbed monolith (which doesn't do a lot to help in my opinion). Theology has mysticism to fall back on, but again this is a highly individual experience and difficult to generalize in an authentic way.

It is just wrong to approach from this point of view, the only way is from Kubrick faith in Art and it is all the movie has to offer. That is what is weird about Kael critics: 2001 is hardly a product of an "art-director wannabe" that has "no idea of what he wants". Quite otherwise, hard to imagine anything that sucessful as an artwork for artwork sake.

For me, what this movie has to offer are its puzzles: in working through them, one wrestles with ideas and clarifies one's own thinking. I didn't read the reviews by Kael as I seldom find film criticism very useful. I'm enough of a Christian mystic to focus mainly on how a work of art affects me on an individual basis. 2001 made me think more than it made me feel. I loved the Dawn of Man sequence and the HAL story, but the trippy color show near the end did nothing for me. I found the film's ideas more important than its style.

I dont think there is 9000 HALs like that HAL. If I recall well, he was the first of that model and had a "sister" (used in 2010, but she was twinkered to prevent any failure). I recall, the owner of HAL had to be convicend to allow HAL to be used in the mission, he was basically a "son". So, HAL was above all, a newbie, with no experience in that kind of interaction with other humans other than his creator. In the end, there is some message there about HAL being given everything (inteligence, data, capacity of empahy) but not taught Ethical grounds and limits.

Well, there was definitely a HAL 9000 twin on earth in the first movie. Here's a YouTube clip (from the film) in which the twin is mentioned. Note also how cagey Dave is with Hal. Presumably HAL see's through the act but doesn't understand that all this trickiness is just the way humans get along. Watching it just now, I've discovered something else. Kubrick does a lot with reflections in this film. Check out the reflection in HAL's camera lens at the end of his talk with the two astronauts. Two "devil horns" appear on him as he watches them go. I think this effect has to be taken as a sign HAL already intends to kill them. This is before the lip reading scene (that's where the astronauts are headed). Again I think this suggests that HAL was already planning to kill the crew. The lip reading incident just showed him that it was time to move. Here, check it out it's a fun clip in any case):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QFSE4dUJYM8

Like the monkey, his insticts is eliminate the other lifeforms (maybe this is why he kills the other members of the crew - they belong to that other species, as Dave is all home sapiens and all homo sapiens is Dave).

I've given the idea some thought, too, but I don't think it works. The hominids kill the tapirs and attack the other hominids because they are competing with them. The tapirs are eating their plant food and the rival hominids have driven them from their water source. But the humans do not consume any resources HAL needs. Quite the contrary, they ensure his survival which is linked to theirs. What interrupts the partnership, I think, is HAL's paranoia. Either that or he simply despises humans as weak and needy and decides that he and the mission would be better off without them. Now that would have been a great ending--the giant fetus could have been a cyclops with a big red camera lens instead of an eye!

(I suppose he had plenty of ways to kill people without the antenna rescue thing... but well).

Yes, that's just the way it goes. Why didn't Cinderella's glass slipper turn back into rags like the rest of the trash her fairy godmother enchanted for her? Sometimes the story just goes the way it does.

Yes, it is the old "enchantment" theme, which is a bit of saying you are taken by Beings out of time and space. Works with many religons, I think works well as a metaphor for the artistic experience too. Art is not just entertaiment, at least not in the sense of just having some fun time. No time in this experience should exist.

I've also thought of the passage of time in Dave's room in terms of time anomalies in the fairy world (Thomas the Rhymer's return in seven days instead of seven years, etc.). Mohammad falling from the camel (which obviously is different) seems remarkable coming from a culture that had so little contact with the culture that produced Tam Lin (but maybe people's minds just work like that). The Muslim idea must have been that the angel was keeping guard over Mohammad and saved him at the critical moment. I think the Scottish idea was much darker than that, which is why Tam Lin is so anxious for the mortal Janet to rescue him.

[JCamilo]

For me, what this movie has to offer are its puzzles: in working through them, one wrestles with ideas and clarifies one's own thinking. I didn't read the reviews by Kael as I seldom find film criticism very useful. I'm enough of a Christian mystic to focus mainly on how a work of art affects me on an individual basis. 2001 made me think more than it made me feel. I loved the Dawn of Man sequence and the HAL story, but the trippy color show near the end did nothing for me. I found the film's ideas more important than its style.

Well, yeah. But then Joyce offered a lot of puzzles too. 2001 is certainly an ideal movie for an ideal insominiac audience. There is much you can take from it (we don't even come close to Blue Danube sequence, when all technology and advance in the space race became an ballet, for example. Something that could stand for the beauty of the scene alone, but maybe has a bigger meaning, the music/art over science/technology).

Well, there was definitely a HAL 9000 twin on earth in the first movie. Here's a YouTube clip (from the film) in which the twin is mentioned. Note also how cagey Dave is with Hal. Presumably HAL see's through the act but doesn't understand that all this trickiness is just the way humans get along. Watching it just now, I've discovered something else. Kubrick does a lot with reflections in this film. Check out the reflection in HAL's camera lens at the end of his talk with the two astronauts. Two "devil horns" appear on him as he watches them go. I think this effect has to be taken as a sign HAL already intends to kill them. This is before the lip reading scene (that's where the astronauts are headed). Again I think this suggests that HAL was already planning to kill the crew. The lip reading incident just showed him that it was time to move. Here, check it out it's a fun clip in any case):

Yeah, that is HAL sister. I think Dave is like this because of the chess game (in the end a rehershal of the final act), but yeah, at this point, HAL paranoia is full mode on. Kubrick loves those juxtaposition of images, he certainly was suggesting someone omnious there, not sure if you can say "intent to kill" already or if this is when the intent is born. Maybe there is no ultimate difference. (Happily HAL does not act like evil bond villains to explain to them "it was when..." his plans and of course, considering he is something like a fast computer, it took no seconds to turn will to kill in a plan to kill, so I dunno if we are even meant to perceive it).

I've given the idea some thought, too, but I don't think it works. The hominids kill the tapirs and attack the other hominids because they are competing with them. The tapirs are eating their plant food and the rival hominids have driven them from their water source. But the humans do not consume any resources HAL needs. Quite the contrary, they ensure his survival which is linked to theirs. What interrupts the partnership, I think, is HAL's paranoia. Either that or he simply despises humans as weak and needy and decides that he and the mission would be better off without them. Now that would have been a great ending--the giant fetus could have been a cyclops with a big red camera lens instead of an eye!

I agree HAL is paranoic, but his paranoia creates this competition. It may not be for resources, but it is for dominance (He proposes himself as superior, remember, "all is human error", we have the suggestion of competition with the chess game). You are forgetting it is the 60's. Xenophobia in the air, Space race too. The Apes fight against the tapir leads to against themselves, and the side with higher technology won. That is more about resources (albeit one can argue, the race they had was for resources of some sort), but political dominance. It is a clear allegory (Clarke and Kubrick being too pacifist and 2001 did had a anti-nuclear undertone). The mission fails because both sides cannt work together. (a theme Clarke would work again in 2010).

I've also thought of the passage of time in Dave's room in terms of time anomalies in the fairy world (Thomas the Rhymer's return in seven days instead of seven years, etc.). Mohammad falling from the camel (which obviously is different) seems remarkable coming from a culture that had so little contact with the culture that produced Tam Lin (but maybe people's minds just work like that). The Muslim idea must have been that the angel was keeping guard over Mohammad and saved him at the critical moment. I think the Scottish idea was much darker than that, which is why Tam Lin is so anxious for the mortal Janet to rescue him.

Well, yeah, but of course, Tam Lin faeries are now distant from their religious origem, so they are "scary" in a way and not providing religious rapture and revelation like happened to Muhammad. But in the end the idea is similar: the contact with supernatural happens outside time/space normal flow (if any flow). We have of course, Borges's Alleph, a similar idea (the dot where all universe is in, and all experience happens in that second or His Funes that can remember everything, so past is always happening at sametime as present). You know, time and space are probally mother and father of all metaphysics, so i guess you can say human mind works this way.

[Pompey Bum]

There is much you can take from it (we don't even come close to Blue Danube sequence, when all technology and advance in the space race became an ballet, for example. Something that could stand for the beauty of the scene alone, but maybe has a bigger meaning, the music/art over science/technology).

Here is my take on the Blue Danube scene: I think it's largely ironic. We have just seen primal humanity master its fate by mastering the tool (to the strains of Also Spake Zarathustra, no less). But the technological age inverts that. The tool--the wheel-shaped space station--now encloses the human who is rendered puny by comparison. The descendent of the killer ape still throws punches as he runs his treadmill, but he is only a rodent running on a wheel in a giant cage. And Kubrick's joke is the change of Strauss: his switch from Richard Strauss' primal dawn to Johann Strauss' ultra-civilized 19th century European waltz.

Of course, there are other things going, too. As you pointed out (I think), 2001 originally had the Cold War nuclear stalemate as a theme. This was eventually muted, but the idea of humanity imprisoning itself by its very technology is well suited to the theme. I have also heard it said that using the slow torturously slow music was Kubrick's way of showing the tedium of life in space. I'm not sure (I like the music), but that could have been part of the "Is man really fit for space?" theme. (Note the sarcophagus-like cases of humans in suspended animation that the astronaut jogs through). Humans seem too small and weak to survive in the cosmic vastness of time and space. In the coming HAL sequence humans also seem too stupid compared to their machines. But they are not, and perhaps that's the reason the HAL story is given such prominence. Dave uses his reason to survive HAL's attack and, like the ape in the Dawn of Man sequence, he destroys his adversary by using a tool (in this case, a screwdriver). Humankind uses technology to survive technology, and the voyage goes on.

(Happily HAL does not act like evil bond villains to explain to them "it was when..."

"You see, Mr Bond, it was while we were playing chess..."

Actually, HAL sort of does that at one point. Dave is trying to get HAL to let him back into the ship by playing dumb, but HAL lets him know about the lip reading. But HAL doesn't say that was when he decided to kill them, just (by implication) that Dave wasn't fooling him.

I agree HAL is paranoic, but his paranoia creates this competition. It may not be for resources, but it is for dominance (He proposes himself as superior, remember, "all is human error", we have the suggestion of competition with the chess game). You are forgetting it is the 60's. Xenophobia in the air, Space race too. The Apes fight against the tapir leads to against themselves, and the side with higher technology won. That is more about resources (albeit one can argue, the race they had was for resources of some sort), but political dominance. It is a clear allegory (Clarke and Kubrick being too pacifist and 2001 did had a anti-nuclear undertone). The mission fails because both sides cannt work together. (a theme Clarke would work again in 2010).

The chess game does suggest something, but I don't think it's competition. HAL is just too smart and sees himself as too superior to the astronauts to worry about them (especially since they do not compete for resources). On reflection, I think that the chess game was just the first clue that HAL wasn't able to understand unwritten social rules and would respond by going on the offensive. Chess has rules. Any computer can play chess, it may even use a tricky strategy, but as since its playing by rules, it's not going to cheat you. But once HAL learns human duplicity, he can no longer tell the difference between playing and cheating. So he cheats because, um, isn't that what you're supposed to do? Win by being tricky? Hal's a little like a genius with Asperger syndrome. He's smarter than anyone in the room, but he can't get the social rules down to save his (metaphorical) soul.

I think we agree, though, that HAL's aggression is caused by a mixture of paranoia and a need for (or expectation of) dominance. This is fueled by confidence in his intellectual superiority and blindness to his weakness in social interactions (that is, blindness to his own paranoia). In the end, if duplicity is the name of the game, why not kill the lot of these dopes and run the mission without the possibility of error? I think that notion (and fear that the astronauts will try to get him first) is what sets HAL to killing.

Well, yeah, but of course, Tam Lin faeries are now distant from their religious origem, so they are "scary" in a way and not providing religious rapture and revelation like happened to Muhammad. But in the end the idea is similar: the contact with supernatural happens outside time/space normal flow (if any flow). We have of course, Borges's Alleph, a similar idea (the dot where all universe is in, and all experience happens in that second or His Funes that can remember everything, so past is always happening at sametime as present). You know, time and space are probally mother and father of all metaphysics, so i guess you can say human mind works this way.

Yes, they a removed from religious context in a way, but in a way they are not. The British fairies are pre-Christian woodland spirits with a leftover god or goddess here or there. But taking mortal lovers (as is the fairy queen's habit) is well within in a pagan goddess' job description, and since Ishtar's time, they haven't been all that nice to their boy toys. So in a way they were always a little scary--the Queen of Elfame is just the latest version. The fairies themselves are liminal creatures--not angelic but not exactly demonic either. I think Yeats says they were rebel angels who were not bad enough to sink to hell so they ended up on earth. But they did pay a tax to hell, a human sacrifice every seven years, so they were scary enough. And their liminal quality is probably related to the time anomalies in their realm.

The business about falling from a horse in interesting because the fairies carry you off in that in between-ish time/space between slipping from a horse and landing on the earth. Tam Lin had to be rescued by repeating the process. His mortal lover (whom he had taken up with behind the fairy queen's back) had to pull him off of his fairy mount, in effect allowing him to finish his original fall to earth. So even though we are dealing with a fallen goddess, there is still the sense that the sacred (or at least the uncanny) occurs outside of the normal laws of time and space. Kubrick and Clarke were no doubt trying to show something similar at the end of 2001. The problem for me (not to belabor the point) is that equating the physically extra-dimensional with the sacred/uncanny is an unwarranted leap of--um, science.

[JCamilo]

Here is my take on the Blue Danube scene: I think it's largely ironic. We have just seen primal humanity master its fate by mastering the tool (to the strains of Also Spake Zarathustra, no less). But the technological age inverts that. The tool--the wheel-shaped space station--now encloses the human who is rendered puny by comparison. The descendent of the killer ape still throws punches as he runs his treadmill, but he is only a rodent running on a wheel in a giant cage. And Kubrick's joke is the change of Strauss: his switch from Richard Strauss' primal dawn to Johann Strauss' ultra-civilized 19th century European waltz.

Yeah, I think Kubrick want us to feel small before technology progress. But I also think he wants to make us perceive the universe, us, all in harmony in light of an artistic representation. Funny again, that orderly vision of the universe seems to imply Voltaire's watchmaker and not a universe that just obey natural laws and need a bit of chaos to exists.

Of course, there are other things going, too. As you pointed out (I think), 2001 originally had the Cold War nuclear stalemate as a theme. This was eventually muted, but the idea of humanity imprisoning itself by its very technology is well suited to the theme. I have also heard it said that using the slow torturously slow music was Kubrick's way of showing the tedium of life in space. I'm not sure (I like the music), but that could have been part of the "Is man really fit for space?" theme. (Note the sarcophagus-like cases of humans in suspended animation that the astronaut jogs through). Humans seem too small and weak to survive in the cosmic vastness of time and space. In the coming HAL sequence humans also seem too stupid compared to their machines. But they are not, and perhaps that's the reason the HAL story is given such prominence. Dave uses his reason to survive HAL's attack and, like the ape in the Dawn of Man sequence, he destroys his adversary by using a tool (in this case, a screwdriver). Humankind uses technology to survive technology, and the voyage goes on.

If a slow pace was a way for Kubrick show us boredom, then we can say he considered a all life, all experiences to be boring as he was a master of slow pacing on his movies
Perhaps boredom was not the word, after all Dawn of Men is also slow.
As the sarcophagus, I think the reference for this kind of stuff in previous movies and books was similar. I guess Kubrick feel suited and no need to change, after all he was aware that the mission arc is a horror story (in a way, it is the lost chapter of Dracula, showing his travel to england, or perhaps we can say Alien - the first movie - was a bit like this too) and it was quite suited for the mood of the moment. It is creep, indeed.
Now, something I am not sure if it has any meaning, because i do not see how the plot would happens otherwise (Kubrick would never allow a momment Monolyth Ex Machina rescuing the astrounauts), but it is that he defeats HAL using a tool of inferior technology (of course, closer to a bone, so another juxtaposition). But if HAL is the most advance tech in the movie, and in real life, the Nuclear weapons are the most advanced tech, so, maybe it was a way to say : we went to far, lets go more primitive. He had to give up HAL to survive, we have to give up the bombs to survive.

"You see, Mr Bond, it was while we were playing chess..."

Actually, HAL sort of does that at one point. Dave is trying to get HAL to let him back into the ship by playing dumb, but HAL lets him know about the lip reading. But HAL doesn't say that was when he decided to kill them, just (by implication) that Dave wasn't fooling him.

I was more HAL boasting "Puny human"... I mean, remember the apes grunting to intimidate the other apes?

The chess game does suggest something, but I don't think it's competition. HAL is just too smart and sees himself as too superior to the astronauts to worry about them (especially since they do not compete for resources). On reflection, I think that the chess game was just the first clue that HAL wasn't able to understand unwritten social rules and would respond by going on the offensive. Chess has rules. Any computer can play chess, it may even use a tricky strategy, but as since its playing by rules, it's not going to cheat you. But once HAL learns human duplicity, he can no longer tell the difference between playing and cheating. So he cheats because, um, isn't that what you're supposed to do? Win by being tricky? Hal's a little like a genius with Asperger syndrome. He's smarter than anyone in the room, but he can't get the social rules down to save his (metaphorical) soul.

Yeah, you are right the chess is the momment Dave notices HAL can play outside the rulebook (or create his rules). But chess does not need to suggest a competition, it is one. Of course, in this one, a friendly competition. For HAL this conception may be lost, hence he feels need to be tricky. Since HAL is a genius kid (with aspenger), he reacts like a kid when playing with their parents. Kids take plays more seriously that adults, they also do not have also the moral education to play always by the rules. If Dave had said "Bad Hal, you are grounded, one week without tv", he probally could have saved the mission.

But look how the chess game foreshadows Dave and HAL final showdown. Their movements are slow, deliberated, mechanical. HAL eats some pawns, Dave sacrifices his rook to finally cover hall in a corner. I am not saying Kubrick did a Lewis Carroll, maybe it was even the other way around (the final showdown pace suggesting the chess game to be the place where the conflicts starts), but I think it is another example of Kubrick using juxtaposition of scenes/events in the movie.

I think we agree, though, that HAL's aggression is caused by a mixture of paranoia and a need for (or expectation of) dominance. This is fueled by confidence in his intellectual superiority and blindness to his weakness in social interactions (that is, blindness to his own paranoia). In the end, if duplicity is the name of the game, why not kill the lot of these dopes and run the mission without the possibility of error? I think that notion (and fear that the astronauts will try to get him first) is what sets HAL to killing.

Yes, paranoia, like nuclear paranoia. In the end, I do not thin the cold war was so away from the movie. Kubrick was showing us that paranoia would end to one side killing another (not both side killing each other, so we call kubrick optimistic now?).

But competition notherless. Just it is a more sophisticated competition. HAL and Dave fight for political control. Of course, just like time passed from the bone to high tech space stations, time also changed to competition from individual bone swingers to social disputes. But in the end, political dispute is anything but a fight for the control of resources.

Yes, they a removed from religious context in a way, but in a way they are not. The British fairies are pre-Christian woodland spirits with a leftover god or goddess here or there. But taking mortal lovers (as is the fairy queen's habit) is well within in a pagan goddess' job description, and since Ishtar's time, they haven't been all that nice to their boy toys. So in a way they were always a little scary--the Queen of Elfame is just the latest version. The fairies themselves are liminal creatures--not angelic but not exactly demonic either. I think Yeats says they were rebel angels who were not bad enough to sink to hell so they ended up on earth. But they did pay a tax to hell, a human sacrifice every seven years, so they were scary enough. And their liminal quality is probably related to the time anomalies in their realm.

Yeah,. I know before Pascal wager, there was Old Bertha Wager that went more or less like this "Yeah, I know I am christian and all, but the church is a bit far away and when i cough, the tea my granny made works too well and my little greatson Billy is lost in the woods, they say wolves did it, but if I made the garland with flowers for the next spring festival, she will protect him like did in the past and if she does, god wont be angry, it is just a boy". Since that was done in oral medium, nobody fixed the stories for academics, until someone said "lets call faery tales" so people understand I do not believe on them, which is said with a wink to God, so he is aware he is being tricked.

The faeries were just, of course, in another moral tradition, hence they could be evil as good, but I am not sure about the demonic part (Yeats called them, but he is a modern man winking to God), since when they believed it, they probally didnt imagine demons, but overlods of sort (and in the end, all gods demand virgin sacrifices, which may mean many things, as we saw in the minotaur case).

The business about falling from a horse in interesting because the fairies carry you off in that in between-ish time/space between slipping from a horse and landing on the earth. Tam Lin had to be rescued by repeating the process. His mortal lover (whom he had taken up with behind the fairy queen's back) had to pull him off of his fairy mount, in effect allowing him to finish his original fall to earth. So even though we are dealing with a fallen goddess, there is still the sense that the sacred (or at least the uncanny) occurs outside of the normal laws of time and space. Kubrick and Clarke were no doubt trying to show something similar at the end of 2001. The problem for me (not to belabor the point) is that equating the physically extra-dimensional with the sacred/uncanny is an unwarranted leap of--um, science.

Also happens in Ossia story (but not sure if fall come from that Fall, maybe it was a form of abandoning the cerimony or ritual, but I think you are being unfair with science.They werent scientist, it was all science fiction, which loves the time theme. I even recall, Merlyn from THWhite mentions the idea all time happened at same time when he tried to explain (mentioning Einstein) to Arthur why he couldn't stop his past (Arthur future) to happen.

[Pompey Bum]

Yeah, I think Kubrick want us to feel small before technology progress. But I also think he wants to make us perceive the universe, us, all in harmony in light of an artistic representation. Funny again, that orderly vision of the universe seems to imply Voltaire's watchmaker and not a universe that just obey natural laws and need a bit of chaos to exists.

Yes, he represents the universe as a forbidding but ultimately harmonious place. Is this a deism on Kubrick's part intruding on Clarke's atheism? I don't know.

If a slow pace was a way for Kubrick show us boredom, then we can say he considered a all life, all experiences to be boring as he was a master of slow pacing on his movies
Perhaps boredom was not the word, after all Dawn of Men is also slow.

Well, he sometimes uses slow pacing to make a point. I mentioned to ecurb the amusing, deliberately slow, robbery scene near the beginning of Barry Lyndon. The idea of past centuries moving at a slower pace turns up again and again in that movie. Even when things do pick up, it has to be under the controlled rhythm of a fife and drum march. And that's in combat under French fire. The same thing is going on in the duel scenes, especially the later one. Barry's stepson can barely control how much he wants to murder him, but the violence has to be slowed to a crawl to accommodate the rules of the day. I think Kubrick's one of Kubrick's points in 2001's Blue Danube is the infinitely slower pace of space. It is exquisitely graceful (no space junk or cosmic debris), but the tiny human seems genuinely dwarfed to insignificance by its vastness (I think the "rat in a cage" imagery is quite deliberate). It wouldn't be hard to argue that the characters in Barry Lyndon are also prisoners of slow time (however graceful it appears).

But--the Dawn of Man slow? There is a leopard attack, a hominid war, and an alien monolith, not to mention the ape-on-tapir violence. What do you want, a zombie attack?

As the sarcophagus, I think the reference for this kind of stuff in previous movies and books was similar. I guess Kubrick feel suited and no need to change, after all he was aware that the mission arc is a horror story (in a way, it is the lost chapter of Dracula, showing his travel to england, or perhaps we can say Alien - the first movie - was a bit like this too) and it was quite suited for the mood of the moment. It is creep, indeed.

No 2001, no Alien. There was even a (sort of) HAL.

Now, something I am not sure if it has any meaning, because i do not see how the plot would happens otherwise (Kubrick would never allow a momment Monolyth Ex Machina rescuing the astrounauts), but it is that he defeats HAL using a tool of inferior technology (of course, closer to a bone, so another juxtaposition).

I think it worked because Dave was using more than the screwdriver. He had to use reason (arguably the gift of the monolith to the hominid) to reenter the ship. And while it is true that HAL outgunned him in intelligence, Dave exceeded HAL in evolved qualities like scrappiness, resourcefulness, and survival instinct (all HAL could do in the end was whine that he was scared). So the tool remained the servant (the screwdriver) and not that master (the supercomputer), as HAL would have had it.

But if HAL is the most advance tech in the movie, and in real life, the Nuclear weapons are the most advanced tech, so, maybe it was a way to say : we went to far, lets go more primitive. He had to give up HAL to survive, we have to give up the bombs to survive.

I wouldn't exclude that as an aspect of HAL's story. HAL is certainly part of the theme of humans becoming prisoners of their own technology.

Yes, paranoia, like nuclear paranoia. In the end, I do not thin the cold war was so away from the movie. Kubrick was showing us that paranoia would end to one side killing another (not both side killing each other, so we call kubrick optimistic now?).

I don't think HAL's story was an allegory, just a variation on the theme of humans being victims of their own technology. Nuclear weapons were originally an explicit part of that message, but Kubrick toned it down--apparently at the last minute. Everyone remembers the shot of the hominid's airborne bone turning into a spacecraft. People usually assume it was bound for the moon, since a lunar scene follows. But according to my friend and his father (and others who were on the set) the original idea was that the spacecraft was an orbiting delivery system for a nuclear missile--so that the hominid's weapon eventually became a nuclear weapon. Other satellites appearing in the film were also part of this concept and there is supposed to have been an opening voiceover describing a space-based nuclear stalemate as the context for the story. My friend did not tell me this, but the giant fetus at the end is supposed to have resolved the crisis by exploding the missiles in space. GO JESUS!

So yes, I suppose that would have been a more optimistic ending despite an alien life form violently attacking the earth's defenses. It would have been a more symmetrical ending in any case. The alien life form helped the hominids get through their competition crisis long before, but that had resulted in millions of years of violence and warfare. Now that the humans have helped to get the life form through its evolutionary/reproductive crisis, the giant fetus very gallantly gets humankind out of its nuclear stalemate (except of course for land and sea based missiles). Sorry for the billions of violent deaths since the Dawn of Man! Our bad!

Kubrick supposedly decided not to go with these scenes because his previous movie, Dr Strangelove, had ended with multiple nuclear explosions and he didn't want to become stereotyped as a director (seriously). Also the US and USSR had just signed a treaty banning nuclear weapons in space, which which might have detracted from the premise as realistic science fiction. But meanwhile, back on earth, Mutual Assured Destruction was a genuine nuclear stalemate. So (happily, I think), 2001 lost its less subtle approach to nuclear weapons and became a more a movie about humans becoming trapped by their own lethal technology. HAL's story is a part of that, but I don't think it's an analogy for nuclear weapons per se. The message is there, though.

Yeah, you are right the chess is the momment Dave notices HAL can play outside the rulebook (or create his rules). But chess does not need to suggest a competition, it is one. Of course, in this one, a friendly competition. For HAL this conception may be lost, hence he feels need to be tricky. Since HAL is a genius kid (with aspenger), he reacts like a kid when playing with their parents. Kids take plays more seriously that adults, they also do not have also the moral education to play always by the rules. If Dave had said "Bad Hal, you are grounded, one week without tv", he probally could have saved the mission.

And no computer games, either!

But look how the chess game foreshadows Dave and HAL final showdown. Their movements are slow, deliberated, mechanical. HAL eats some pawns, Dave sacrifices his rook to finally cover hall in a corner. I am not saying Kubrick did a Lewis Carroll, maybe it was even the other way around (the final showdown pace suggesting the chess game to be the place where the conflicts starts), but I think it is another example of Kubrick using juxtaposition of scenes/events in the movie.

First of all, as a point of trivia, I was wrong before: HAL does not play chess with Dave but with the other astronaut (the one he later killed), whose name, as a point of super trivia, was Mike. This does not affect your argument, and I fully agree that a human playing chess with a computer (which would have been novel in 1968) foreshadows both Dave's final conflict with HAL and the entire human-machine interaction from the chess sequence on. Foreshadowing, dramatic irony, whatever you want to call it, that's what's going on.

But competition notherless. Just it is a more sophisticated competition. HAL and Dave fight for political control. Of course, just like time passed from the bone to high tech space stations, time also changed to competition from individual bone swingers to social disputes.

I think we are using the term competition differently. What I mean probably has a more precise biological term-- evolutionary pressure or something like that. You seem to mean a merely adversarial relationship (whether in play or in earnest). Your definition could be political in certain cases; but. mine, I think, is a categorically different. Politics is what happened to Alex when his droogs temporarily overthrew him and put one of themselves in charge (Pete? Georgie? I forget which one). If one of the hominids had grabbed the bone the other one threw in the air, whacked him with it, and with the support of other similarly minded hominids, had made himself Fearless Leader, it would have been politics. Using weapons to drive a rival band from a water source at best constitutes the rudiments of warfare --and at worst is merely a lethal form of grunting. Kubrick may have seen aggression as the ultimate origin of politics (it seems like the kind of thing he'd think), but I don't see him making a case for it in this movie.

But in the end, political dispute is anything but a fight for the control of resources.

Right, which is why (in my opinion) evolutionary pressure and adversarial politics are not the same thing.

Yeah,. I know before Pascal wager, there was Old Bertha Wager that went more or less like this "Yeah, I know I am christian and all, but the church is a bit far away and when i cough, the tea my granny made works too well and my little greatson Billy is lost in the woods, they say wolves did it, but if I made the garland with flowers for the next spring festival, she will protect him like did in the past and if she does, god wont be angry, it is just a boy". Since that was done in oral medium, nobody fixed the stories for academics, until someone said "lets call faery tales" so people understand I do not believe on them, which is said with a wink to God, so he is aware he is being tricked.

Academics/elites used a similar sort of winking with the persistence of Greco-Roman mythology in western art and culture. Most men have put their trust in Priapus in one way or another, and Venus has lost none of her power to fell the mighty--just look at the news! Moral of the story: think before you wink.

The faeries were just, of course, in another moral tradition, hence they could be evil as good, but I am not sure about the demonic part (Yeats called them, but he is a modern man winking to God), since when they believed it, they probally didnt imagine demons, but overlods of sort (and in the end, all gods demand virgin sacrifices, which may mean many things, as we saw in the minotaur case).

The fairies definitely got a sinister add-on once the Christians came to (official) power. The fair folk were supposed to be beautiful, but that was just because of their glamor. If you were to see them in their true form you would find them hideous hags (Kubrick plays with this idea in one of the scarier scenes in The Shining). On the other hand, there had always been a degree of risk with the woodland spirits. The fairies would pluck your eyes out if you watched them without their consent, which is not so very different from what happened to Actaeon when he found Diana bathing with her nymphs. The fairies aren't just scary because of Jesus. Like all pagan deities, you have to treat them just right (or else). The Christians found other ways to make them scary.

[JCamilo]

Yes, he represents the universe as a forbidding but ultimately harmonious place. Is this a deism on Kubrick's part intruding on Clarke's atheism? I don't know.

I think Clarke also saw the universe as some more organized and harmonious. It is part of his scientific-positive approach.

Well, he sometimes uses slow pacing to make a point. I mentioned to ecurb the amusing, deliberately slow, robbery scene near the beginning of Barry Lyndon. The idea of past centuries moving at a slower pace turns up again and again in that movie. Even when things do pick up, it has to be under the controlled rhythm of a fife and drum march. And that's in combat under French fire. The same thing is going on in the duel scenes, especially the later one. Barry's stepson can barely control how much he wants to murder him, but the violence has to be slowed to a crawl to accommodate the rules of the day. I think Kubrick's one of Kubrick's points in 2001's Blue Danube is the infinitely slower pace of space. It is exquisitely graceful (no space junk or cosmic debris), but the tiny human seems genuinely dwarfed to insignificance by its vastness (I think the "rat in a cage" imagery is quite deliberate). It wouldn't be hard to argue that the characters in Barry Lyndon are also prisoners of slow time (however graceful it appears).

Yeah, but using slow pacing to make a point is different from slow pacing making a point. It is his style of course, he builds things with too much details, wouldn't make sense he used a Matrix rythim. I think it is part of his realism. Life is one second each time.

But--the Dawn of Man slow? There is a leopard attack, a hominid war, and an alien monolith, not to mention the ape-on-tapir violence. What do you want, a zombie attack?

Over a half hour? There is plenty of dirty scanvenging too. I don't think Kubrick wanted to give us the impression that was a glorious golden age fun time.

I think it worked because Dave was using more than the screwdriver. He had to use reason (arguably the gift of the monolith to the hominid) to reenter the ship. And while it is true that HAL outgunned him in intelligence, Dave exceeded HAL in evolved qualities like scrappiness, resourcefulness, and survival instinct (all HAL could do in the end was whine that he was scared). So the tool remained the servant (the screwdriver) and not that master (the supercomputer), as HAL would have had it.

Yeah, almost like if Dave is rescuing the human traits that give him advantage over HAL.

I wouldn't exclude that as an aspect of HAL's story. HAL is certainly part of the theme of humans becoming prisoners of their own technology.

Yeah, I know it is a theme that was on Kubrick (and Clarke, he was always a pacificist, anti-atomic race) at the time. But then again, sometimes a rose is just a rose. I just see that also as the most simple, obvious and honest development of the story. There wouldnt need to have a extra meaning.

I don't think HAL's story was an allegory, just a variation on the theme of humans being victims of their own technology. Nuclear weapons were originally an explicit part of that message, but Kubrick toned it down--apparently at the last minute. Everyone remembers the shot of the hominid's airborne bone turning into a spacecraft. People usually assume it was bound for the moon, since a lunar scene follows. But according to my friend and his father (and others who were on the set) the original idea was that the spacecraft was an orbiting delivery system for a nuclear missile--so that the hominid's weapon eventually became a nuclear weapon. Other satellites appearing in the film were also part of this concept and there is supposed to have been an opening voiceover describing a space-based nuclear stalemate as the context for the story. My friend did not tell me this, but the giant fetus at the end is supposed to have resolved the crisis by exploding the missiles in space. GO JESUS!

Yeah, that was one of Kubrick biggest changes from the original script (for the motives you described, not that Kubrick needed an excuse to pick the most confusion option). But he didnt change the story back, so all the elements that lead to it are in the movie. If looks like an Allegory it is because the part that was removed (since would it in an explict act). I think it also sounds better, but still all was there and since Kubrick was not exactly an happie to be heralding age of aquarius, I would not move away from this. (Since, the technology is trapping man is in the end, the attomic bomb - could be tv too, but I think that would be a bit of exercise from my part).

So yes, I suppose that would have been a more optimistic ending despite an alien life form had just violently attacking the earth's defenses. It would have been a more symmetrical ending in any case. The alien life form helped the hominids get through their competition crisis long before, but that had resulted in millions of years of violence and warfare. Now that the humans have helped to get the life form through its evolutionary/reproductive crisis, the giant fetus very gallantly gets humankind out of its nuclear stalemate (except of course for land and sea based missiles). Sorry for the billions of violent deaths since the Dawn of Man! Our bad!

I would tease you saying "those who live by the bomb, die by the bomb"...

First of all, as a point of trivia, I was wrong before: HAL does not play chess with Dave but with the other astronaut (the one he later killed), whose name, as a point of super trivia, was Mike. This does not affect your argument, and I fully agree that a human playing chess with a computer (which would have been novel in 1968) foreshadows both Dave's final conflict with HAL and the entire human-machine interaction from the chess sequence on. Foreshadowing, dramatic irony, whatever you want to call it, that's what's going on.

I had the name Frank in my mind. Was it the actor name...

I think we are using the term competition differently. What I mean probably has a more precise biological term-- evolutionary pressure or something like that. You seem to mean a merely adversarial relationship (whether in play or in earnest). Your definition could be political in certain cases; but. mine, I think, is a categorically different. Politics is what happened to Alex when his droogs temporarily overthrew him and put one of themselves in charge (Pete? Georgie? I forget which one). If one of the hominids had grabbed the bone the other one threw in the air, whacked him with it, and with the support of other similarly minded hominids, had made himself Fearless Leader, it would have been politics. Using weapons to drive a rival band from a water source at best constitutes the rudiments of warfare --and at worst is merely a lethal form of grunting. Kubrick may have seen aggression as the ultimate origin of politics (it seems like the kind of thing he'd think), but I don't see him making a case for it in this movie.

Oh, yes. The bone politic would happen afterwards when someone get hold of a tiger bone. But just like you jump from bones to spaceships, the competition (yes, but I would just say the evolutionary pressure is a result of the competition, and of course, it is very arguable if civilization is putting a hold on this for our case. Anyways, the human race extinction, which is something many people relates to evolution, by nuclear war was at loom) is more "civilizated". I dont think it is a case by itself, just a natural thing as he wouldn't have HAL and the astronauts fighting for sex.

The fairies definitely got a sinister add-on once the Christians came to (official) power. The fair folk were supposed to be beautiful, but that was just because of their glamor. If you were to see them in their true form you would find them hideous hags (Kubrick plays with this idea in one of the scarier scenes in The Shining). On the other hand, there had always been a degree of risk with the woodland spirits. The fairies would pluck your eyes out if you watched them without their consent, which is not so very different from what happened to Actaeon when he found Diana bathing with her nymphs. The fairies aren't just scary because of Jesus. Like all pagan deities, you have to treat them just right (or else). The Christians found other ways to make them scary.

Yeah, but the glamour trick is also already something when the trust in the original beings was under doubt (a bit like, witchcraft is false). I recall the original Tuata De Daannan and Fomorians battles, there is a clear difference between them based on physical atributes, the fomorians being deformed or flawed, the Tuatas more like a Greek pantheon. Most of old cultures saw physical flaws and ugliness to be a reflect of something twisted in the spiritual level, so I dont think they would make creatures that inspired reverence to be plain looking, ugly of false.

[Pompey Bum]

I think Clarke also saw the universe as some more organized and harmonious. It is part of his scientific-positive approach.

Somehow that universe seems less violent than the one we're stuck in. That's strange when you consider how violent life on earth is in that movie. It's as if Kubrick saw physics as perfectly harmonious but biology as full of raging conflict--and both as more or less amoral. I mean, the tapirs needed the food as much the hominids did, and neither of the hominid bands were all that into sharing. So my question is: did Kubrick see nuclear war as morally wrong (wrong, for example, to burn millions or billions of people alive) or an abstract if existential threat to the species?

Yeah, but using slow pacing to make a point is different from slow pacing making a point.

To me, Kubrick seems to have been too much of a control freak for it to have been anything but the former. There was a time when producers used to let directors get away with challenging audiences like that, but alas, no more! If 2001 were made today, Dave would be a caped superhero.

Over a half hour? There is plenty of dirty scanvenging too. I don't think Kubrick wanted to give us the impression that was a glorious golden age fun time.

Well, I was riveted (but then I fell asleep during E.T. and the only Harry Potter I ever bothered with). But okay, Kubrick certainly wasn't romanticizing our "dirty scavenging" days. And in fact, hominids were relatively low on the pecking order until they figured out you could hit things with broken rocks. Before that we were pretty much leopard chow. Tool technology really did put us in the game.

Yeah, almost like if Dave is rescuing the human traits that give him advantage over HAL.

Yes, I think this is the upside of Kubrick's otherwise dark humanism. Yes, we evolved from an brute animals that used violence to subdue the world and one another. In some ways that legacy is still with us, and that makes us vulnerable in some ways. We could always destroy ourselves and everything else with nuclear weapons. But it also gives us human qualities that could just get us out of the traps we make for ourselves. That, I think, is at the heart of the movie.

It strikes me also that this may be another reason 2001 was A Space Odyssey. Odysseus/Ulysses was the human being who always had a trick up his sleeve, whether it was the Trojan Horse or a stratagem against his own more powerful one-eyed monster. This is the human quality of survival, and (per Kubrick) it is as much a part of our evolutionary legacy as aggression.

I had the name Frank in my mind. Was it the actor name...

The character's name was Dr Frank Poole. He was played by Gary Lockwood. Dave (Dr David Bowman) was played by Keir Dullea. HAL 9000 was played by a Canadian stage actor named Douglas Rain.

Yeah, but the glamour trick is also already something when the trust in the original beings was under doubt (a bit like, witchcraft is false).

No, I didn't mean that Christians weren't responsible for the stories of fairy glamor--they probably were. Early Christian apologists seldom claimed that the pagan gods didn't really exist, just that they were really demons. Missionaries to Ireland and the British Isles may well have done the same--I don't really know. My point was that even in pre-Christian times the pagan gods could so times be dangerous in a way that Jesus and Mary never were. (Mary may have replaced Diana as patroness of the local spring, but she wouldn't have had you ripped to pieces if you happened to catch her bathing in it). The business about being carried off by the fairies if you fell from your horse is interesting, though. Falls were bad omens long before the missionaries turned up, but I suspect that something more sinister is going on. Falling from a horse was a potentially serious accident. If one survived, malicious neighbors might claim that it was because of a contract with the devil (let me live now and you can have me later, that sort of thing) concluded in the uncanny, liminal world between the fall and the landing. It's not surprising to see similar detail in fairy legends. Tam Lin, in fact, was about to be sacrificed to the devil when his mortal girlfriend rescued him. The fairies by that time were evil spirits indeed, but Tam Lin was composed at just the right time--Christendom was robustly established and the fairies had not yet been sentimentalized and prettified by the Victorians.

[JCamilo]

Somehow that universe seems less violent than the one we're stuck in. That's strange when you consider how violent life on earth is in that movie. It's as if Kubrick saw physics as perfectly harmonious but biology as full of raging conflict--and both as more or less amoral. I mean, the tapirs needed the food as much the hominids did, and neither of the hominid bands were all that into sharing. So my question is: did Kubrick see nuclear war as morally wrong (wrong, for example, to burn millions or billions of people alive) or an abstract if existential threat to the species?

I think that is quite natural, if you think how science developed: physics was developed under a different philosophy, still very humanist, the idea of the universe as something orderly (and with a different approach to maths too) was natural. Newton, Galilei, etc were not atheists or even agnostics. In a way, that kind of physics never was trully a challenge to god's existence. Meanwhile, Biology was a product from XIX century, under the influence of positivism, uncertain and chaos were coming to the real of philosophy that organized the scientific approach at the time. (of course, Physics would follow that path too). It was not (i believe) the explanation for 2001, but in the end the nature of both sciences had their influence in how Clarke/Kubrick told their story.

In other hand, Kubrick was pretty much anti-war (not sure if because it caused pain and death) and I think this is more important than an abstract end of humankind, but both aspects are present in his work.

To me, Kubrick seems to have been too much of a control freak for it to have been anything but the former. There was a time when producers used to let directors get away with challenging audiences like that, but alas, no more! If 2001 were made today, Dave would be a caped superhero.

You still have guys like David Lynch around, but yeah. But what I mean is that the slow pace is a mean to an end, as a form for him to bring his ideas and let the audience absorb the scene, a technique and not something symbolic by itself, after all, it is his most usual trait. We can see when he speeds up the scene, for example, in Full Metal Jacket, he is working this not to say something about speed, but because the scenes needed that to cause impact (or the kind of impact he wanted). Obviously, you are wrong. Dave would be a Jedi.

Well, I was riveted (but then I fell asleep during E.T. and the only Harry Potter I ever bothered with). But okay, Kubrick certainly wasn't romanticizing our "dirty scavenging" days. And in fact, hominids were relatively low on the pecking order until they figured out you could hit things with broken rocks. Before that we were pretty much leopard chow. Tool technology really did put us in the game.

Yeah, I think he is a careful detailist. If you notice how the docs about wild life (under Walt Disney influence) had a fast pace (most people are often interessed in hunting scenes, not the daily lion lies to sleep, lion sleeps, lion gets up, dear, lion goes to sleep) and Kubrick prefers to make it slow (almost like the slow daily scenes we can see in european movies, showing actual people doing their daily choirs) to make us settle. The emotion/strangness is for specific momments (the monolyth, the fight).

Yes, I think this is the upside of Kubrick's otherwise dark humanism. Yes, we evolved from an brute animals that used violence to subdue the world and one another. In some ways that legacy is still with us, and that makes us vulnerable in some ways. We could always destroy ourselves and everything else with nuclear weapons. But it also gives us human qualities that could just get us out of the traps we make for ourselves. That, I think, is at the heart of the movie.

It strikes me also that this may be another reason 2001 was A Space Odyssey. Odysseus/Ulysses was the human being who always had a trick up his sleeve, whether it was the Trojan Horse or a stratagem against his own more powerful one-eyed monster. This is the human quality of survival, and (per Kubrick) it is as much a part of our evolutionary legacy as aggression.

Well, I think Kubrick always vallue cultural aspects of humankind, mostly the capacity to use imagination and be able to create something (like art) and I always think those are the greatest vallues he think is worth of survival (of course, Kubrick is a bit elitist, he shows classical images, use classical music, transform a typical Stephen King novel in a classic labirynth tale, etc, but who is to blame?).

No, I didn't mean that Christians weren't responsible for the stories of fairy glamor--they probably were. Early Christian apologists seldom claimed that the pagan gods didn't really exist, just that they were really demons. Missionaries to Ireland and the British Isles may well have done the same--I don't really know. My point was that even in pre-Christian times the pagan gods could so times be dangerous in a way that Jesus and Mary never were. (Mary may have replaced Diana as patroness of the local spring, but she wouldn't have had you ripped to pieces if you happened to catch her bathing in it). The business about being carried off by the fairies if you fell from your horse is interesting, though. Falls were bad omens long before the missionaries turned up, but I suspect that something more sinister is going on. Falling from a horse was a potentially serious accident. If one survived, malicious neighbors might claim that it was because of a contract with the devil (let me live now and you can have me later, that sort of thing) concluded in the uncanny, liminal world between the fall and the landing. It's not surprising to see similar detail in fairy legends. Tam Lin, in fact, was about to be sacrificed to the devil when his mortal girlfriend rescued him. The fairies by that time were evil spirits indeed, but Tam Lin was composed at just the right time--Christendom was robustly established and the fairies had not yet been sentimentalized and prettified by the Victorians.

Just occured me that you are using and I am accepting the idea of fall because our conversation here has a tendency to find possible interpretations related to christian themes, but the explanation may be way simpler (or complex): since Ossian went out of his horse by himself I think the point is not the fall, the point is entering in contact with the ground. The enchanted person renews his link with the land, ou normal land, and loses the "magic". He is back to his self (the same motive Dracula had to carry earth from his land to sleep or Scarlett O'Hara - an irish girl after all - always return to Tara to renew her strength.). This also suits with the kind of nature related believes of that time.

Yeah, Jesus is a differnet kind of guy. He is a divinity for "Modern" times, a civilized one, related to the use of one technology (the word) and not to primal powers exactly. His Daddy is another story, being Moses's Desert God, playing with primal natural elements such as fire or storms and being a bit scary too (or course, not all this is perfect matched, Jesus still on the oral world and Moses still trying to bring the written laws, he is almost one of those modern teachers trying to convice people the importance of reading). Budha is close to this, but he is a guy who had all the best civilization had to offer and denied that (and all else). Those Nature related Gods are not so different from what you said about the evolution for materalist: they are a remind nature was not tamed at all.

[Pompey Bum]

I think that is quite natural, if you think how science developed: physics was developed under a different philosophy, still very humanist, the idea of the universe as something orderly (and with a different approach to maths too) was natural. Newton, Galilei, etc were not atheists or even agnostics. In a way, that kind of physics never was trully a challenge to god's existence. Meanwhile, Biology was a product from XIX century, under the influence of positivism, uncertain and chaos were coming to the real of philosophy that organized the scientific approach at the time. (of course, Physics would follow that path too). It was not (i believe) the explanation for 2001, but in the end the nature of both sciences had their influence in how Clarke/Kubrick told their story.

I think it was more a snapshot of how an educated person might have looked at life and the cosmos in 1968. As you imply, physics has moved in less deistic directions since then, but Kubrick can't be faulted for not knowing that. But some of ideas about evolution were eccentric at the time and remain a minority opinion today. 2001 and A Clockwork Orange were influenced by a 1961 book by Robert Ardrey called African Genesis. Audrey was a protégé of Robert Dart, who discovered of the first Australopithecus fossil. Dart pioneered (and Audrey inherited) the Killer Ape Hypothesis, the idea that interpersonal aggression (including warfare) was the definitive factor human evolution, and that violent aggression remains an inescapable aspect of human experience. The Dawn of Man sequence in 2001 is a recapitulation of Ardrey's book. So, in my opinion, is the idea that Alex has recovered his fundamental humanity/existential freedom when the Ludovico technique failed. It's interesting that Burgess and Ardrey wrote around the same time. They seem to have been addressing similar ideas, although (per the final chapter of A Clockwork Orange) to significantly different ends.

In other hand, Kubrick was pretty much anti-war (not sure if because it caused pain and death) and I think this is more important than an abstract end of humankind, but both aspects are present in his work.

My impression from Dr Strangelove is that Kubrick saw the Cold War nuclear stalemate as ineffably stupid--and the purview of ineffably stupid people. If my interpretation of 2001 is correct, he may have thought humans were rational enough to overcome their innate aggression. A Clockwork Orange may suggest he had his doubts. Or, as we've said, he may have found these ideas interesting and important and worth getting people to talk about. I get the feeling that if I had asked Kubrick how evolution could be amoral but nuclear war immoral, he would have rolled his eyes and said it wouldn't matter to anyone once life had been wiped out.

Obviously, you are wrong. Dave would be a Jedi.

Somehow I see Yoda as HAL. As in:

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL!"

"Do that I cannot, Dave, afraid I am.

Just occured me that you are using and I am accepting the idea of fall because our conversation here has a tendency to find possible interpretations related to christian themes, but the explanation may be way simpler (or complex): since Ossian went out of his horse by himself I think the point is not the fall, the point is entering in contact with the ground. The enchanted person renews his link with the land, ou normal land, and loses the "magic". He is back to his self (the same motive Dracula had to carry earth from his land to sleep or Scarlett O'Hara - an irish girl after all - always return to Tara to renew her strength.). This also suits with the kind of nature related believes of that time.

Well, when I talk about a fall, I don't mean the Fall of Man, but just the in-between-ish time and space between falling from a horse and hitting the ground. There is nothing especially Christian about that idea, in fact, liminal time and space were a significant pagan preoccupation. One can appease tutelary spirits within a house and gods and goddesses without, but who's got your back at the entrance? It requires the intrusion of the freakish, non-Olympian, Ianus/Janus ("Mr Doorway," from whom janitors get their name). Even the household gods tended to haunt liminal places like chimneys and hearths. The same apprehensions existed for thresholds (better carry that bride into the bedroom, you don't want problems now). And bridges, which are under the protection of neither the divinity of this bank nor that, nor of the river god beneath, were a particular source of anxiety (with trolls eventually coming to express the potential for trouble). To this day the Pope bears the pagan title of Pontiff/Pontifex Maximus, which is often translated as High Priest but which in fact means Great Bridgekeeper. Liminal time (including the transition to the month we're in now) was also presided over by Janus, but only after all sorts of social inversions and conniption fits about the Equinox involving other scary gods.

Many of these traditions have survived into Christian times in a quasi-pagan form, including but not limited to the nasty, gloomy, child-devouring Saturn becoming a jolly, generous, patron of children (a Saturnalian inversion if ever there was one). That gentleman is, in fact, a kind of fairy, dressed in the fur-trimmed red outfit of a leprechaun (right down to his red cap with the white ball at the end). My original point was that it is not surprising to find fairies in liminal time and space since they are liminal creatures in themselves (no winking), created illicitly by Christians as keepsakes of a lost paganism. It is therefore not to be wondered at (wink, wink) if, after slipping from one's horse, the Queen of Faeries swoops one up before the crash landing.

Your idea about the eventual landing as a return to normalcy also works in that scenario, or it does with Tam Lin in any case. (I've never read Ossian--didn't all that turn out to be a fake?). Tam Lin's return to the non-magical world required his mortal girlfriend to pull him off his fairy steed and protect him when he fell to the ground by wrapping him in her mantle. As I said, this probably represents the completion of his original fall. I don't think it was an affirmation of a link to the land, though. Tam Lin's earth was as full of fairies as the forests--hobs, cobs, cobalts, goblings, dvores, dwarves, you name it! Christianity or no Christianity, the earth was still an enchanted place.

Yeah, Jesus is a differnet kind of guy. He is a divinity for "Modern" times, a civilized one, related to the use of one technology (the word) and not to primal powers exactly. His Daddy is another story, being Moses's Desert God, playing with primal natural elements such as fire or storms and being a bit scary too (or course, not all this is perfect matched, Jesus still on the oral world and Moses still trying to bring the written laws, he is almost one of those modern teachers trying to convice people the importance of reading). Budha is close to this, but he is a guy who had all the best civilization had to offer and denied that (and all else). Those Nature related Gods are not so different from what you said about the evolution for materalist: they are a remind nature was not tamed at all.

It seems to me that Jesus' "primal powers" in the Gospels have to do with his divine authority. The winds and waters obey him, which has resonance with Pentateuch traditions and certain Psalms. Demonic forces also obey him (the devils recognize him on sight). He asserts an authority to forgive sins, that is, transgressions against the Mosaic Law. In the Gospel of John he even has the power to raise Lazarus from the dead. So I'm not sure the distinction between God and Christ is quite as clean as you suggest (although it is a complicated matter, I recognize). I agree that some materialists are de facto crypto-pagans. At least Kubrick and Clarke had the courage of consistency.

[JCamilo]

I think it was more a snapshot of how an educated person might have looked at life and the cosmos in 1968. As you imply, physics has moved in less deistic directions since then, but Kubrick can't be faulted for not knowing that. But some of ideas about evolution were eccentric at the time and remain a minority opinion today. 2001 and A Clockwork Orange were influenced by a 1961 book by Robert Ardrey called African Genesis. Audrey was a protégé of Robert Dart, who discovered of the first Australopithecus fossil. Dart pioneered (and Audrey inherited) the Killer Ape Hypothesis, the idea that interpersonal aggression (including warfare) was the definitive factor human evolution, and that violent aggression remains an inescapable aspect of human experience. The Dawn of Man sequence in 2001 is a recapitulation of Ardrey's book. So, in my opinion, is the idea that Alex has recovered his fundamental humanity/existential freedom when the Ludovico technique failed. It's interesting that Burgess and Ardrey wrote around the same time. They seem to have been addressing similar ideas, although (per the final chapter of A Clockwork Orange) to significantly different ends.

It may be, but that is hardly new, rather a tendency of Biology. Darwin himself was a shy dude, but always had his theories being defended with ferocity (Huxley for example, was not his "White Knight", but his bulldog) and the misinterpretation of the survival of the fittest to the survival of the strongest was always looming over his bald head. Think about the imediate effect on literature, they always showed the "regression" to primate to be violent: the orogutan from Poe, Mr.hyde from Stevenson, Dr.Moreau creatures from HG.Wells, even Tennyson with his nature with red tooth and claw. Conflict was always the key that Darwinism was understood (which also is inside the frame of Marxism clash of classes, of course). Physics was however elegant, classic science, for Gentleman. The most violent thing they faced were apples and gravity. They could pratice it with wigs. Of course, this means universe is full of harmony, life of chaos.

My impression from Dr Strangelove is that Kubrick saw the Cold War nuclear stalemate as ineffably stupid--and the purview of ineffably stupid people. If my interpretation of 2001 is correct, he may have thought humans were rational enough to overcome their innate aggression. A Clockwork Orange may suggest he had his doubts. Or, as we've said, he may have found these ideas interesting and important and worth getting people to talk about. I get the feeling that if I had asked Kubrick how evolution could be an amoral but nuclear war immoral, he would have rolled his eyes and said it wouldn't matter to anyone once life had been wiped out.

Kubrick saw war as many things really bad beside stupidy, but yeah, what matter is that was some pointless stupidy wasting lives and potential. I agree, but I think he aims that the method humans avoid this stupidy is with culture. Kubrick has a thing against institutions and war is obviously played by institutions (countries, governaments, companies) and sacrifice individuals. In Clockwork orange I think more than doubt, he is implying he prefers the individual that is violent for his own choice rather than the one that is doing this for others (like a soldier). Anyways, I think Kubrick would roll eyes to any question except "what time is it?", but yeah, the word play would been meaningless for him, as you said, he is a visual kind of guy. Burgess would probally sit and elaborate, even if he was thinking "what a silly question", because he obviously likes the words.

Well, when I talk about a fall, I don't mean the Fall of Man, but just the in-between-ish time and space between falling from a horse and hitting the ground. There is nothing especially Christian about that idea, in fact, liminal time and space were a significant pagan preoccupation. One can appease tutelary spirits within a house and gods and goddesses without, but whose got your back at the entrance? It requires the intrusion of the freakish, non-Olympian, Ianus/Janus ("Mr Doorway," from whom janitors get their name). Even the household gods tended to haunt liminal places like chimneys and hearths. The same apprehensions existed for thresholds (better carry that bride into the bedroom, you don't want problems now). And bridges, which are under the protection of neither the divinity of this bank nor that, nor of the river god beneath, were a particular source of anxiety (with trolls eventually coming to express the potential for trouble). To this day the Pope bears the pagan title of Pontiff/Pontifex Maximus, which is often translated as High Priest but which in fact means Great Bridgekeeper. Liminal time (including the transition to the month we're in now) was also presided over by Janus, but only after all sorts of social inversions and conniption fits about the Equinox involving other scary gods.

Many of these traditions have survived into Christian times in a quasi-pagan form, including but not limited to the nasty, gloomy, child-devouring Saturn becoming a jolly, generous, patron of children (a Saturnalian inversion if ever there was one). That gentleman is, in fact, a kind of fairy, dressed in the fur-trimmed red outfit of a leprechaun (right down to his red cap with the white ball at the end). My original point was that it is not surprising to find fairies in liminal time and space since they are liminal creatures in themselves (no winking), created illicitly by Christians as keepsakes of a lost paganism. It is therefore not to be wondered at (wink, wink) if, after slipping from one's horse, the Queen of Faeries swoops one up before the crash landing.

Your idea about the eventual landing as a return to normalcy also works in that scenario, or it does with Tam Lin in any case. (I've never read Ossian--didn't all that turn out to be a fake?). Tam Lin's return to the non-magical world required his mortal girlfriend to pull him off his fairy steed and protect him when he fell to the ground by wrapping him in her mantle. As I said, this probably represents the completion of his original fall. I don't think it was an affirmation of a link to the land, though. Tam Lin's earth was as full of fairies as the forests--hobs, cobs, cobalts, goblings, dvores, dwarves, you name it! Christianity or no Christianity, the earth was still an enchanted place.

Sorry, I thougth you were on the christian theme (even because Tam Lin was avoiding hell and well, the maiden that rescues him was quite liberal for a catholic at the time ). Anyways, the horse thing, may have much to do with valkyries horse thing (he is not just a transport out, but in). And yeah, we had spirits linked to earth, trolls mostly, but notice how those beings are not related to the sylvian creatures too often, almost like in competition (it is natural, sylvian, air, water creatures are more flick, dinamic, dwarves and such are more greedy, stable). I would suggest they belong almost to another "court". But really, the motif of earth linking to who the person was is very strong (Atlas too, his strength come from it) and it is different from being underground. A man is his nation, something like this.

Ossian (Ossin, etc) poems by MacPherson, you mean? They are, but his tale with Niamh still part of the tradition. She is a faery queen, visits ireland on her magical horse, takes Ossian (willingly) with her. After centuries he is homesick (no killing, fighting, bloody sports), she let him go but tell him to not dimount and he does to help some old man, the years he was away take over him and his is old and the horse gone. The mottiff of the elf queen in a magical horse is there, just like in Thomas and Tam Lin, so does the contact with the ground breaking the enchantment (obviously, Ossian got the nicest queen of the 3, there is some catholic link already to this story - it is about the end of Fionna age and Ossian ends nursed by Saint Patrick), but it was probally born in a nicer time.

It seems to me that Jesus' "primal powers" in the Gospels have to do with his divine authority. The winds and waters obey him, which has resonance with Pentateuch traditions and certain Psalms. Demonic forces also obey him (the devils recognize him on sight). He asserts an authority to forgive sins, that is, transgressions against the Mosaic Law. In the Gospel of John he even has the power to raise Lazarus from the dead. So I'm not sure the distinction between God and Christ is quite as clean as you suggest (although it is a complicated matter, I recognize). I agree that some materialists are de facto crypto-pagans. At least Kubrick and Clarke had the courage of consistency.

Well, all gods have authority, or they wouldn't be gods at all. But I think you misunderstood me, I mention Jesus and God as different characters here because they are in different books, only that. I mean here, pretty much that God still without a home (pretty much logical, as his followers had no home either) that was linked with the Desert, had those ideas to cause storms, one or another plague in egypt, burn like fire, etc. Jesus abides most of those F/X (when things happen, like the darkness when he dies, it is not like something that is linked to his manifestation), even if he walks over water, it is not his biggest trait. As you said, he based most of his sayings in what was written, even if worked in peripheries (in this case, geography), there is always some urban center (Jerusalem) for his story. A quite educated guy (and mostly natural, as the hebrew culture and religion was always moving towards culture, to the point the were the people of book and eventually, this would lead to muslim, where the biggest miracle of God is writting a book). Meanwhile, those natural gods would naturally fit in the barbarian style. Obviously, this difference makes no sense in term of dogma (even if Jesus is a new pact, etc). There is obviously an uderline that being educated like Jesus or Budha are would imply bigger capacity of understandment and civility, meanwhile, being a sexual predator lighting bolt like Zeus would lead to a bit of unfariness and emotional conflicts. Obviously, it is not always the way the followers of either act, but that is another dime.

[Pompey Bum]

It may be, but that is hardly new, rather a tendency of Biology. Darwin himself was a shy dude, but always had his theories being defended with ferocity (Huxley for example, was not his "White Knight", but his bulldog) and the misinterpretation of the survival of the fittest to the survival of the strongest was always looming over his bald head.

Even "survival of the fittest" was Huxley's. Darwin may have seen natural selection in those terms (it's debatable), but I don't think he ever actually put it that way. But Dart's ideas about the origins of human violence and war are not generally accepted now and never really were (Ardrey wrote African Genesis in response to their rejection). Poor Dart was proved right about so much as a paleontologist, but he is fated to be remembered, it seems, for his mistakes (and someone else's version of his mistakes at that). I happen to know that Kubrick liked Ardrey's book, though. The Dawn of Man is his version of it.

Conflict was always the key that Darwinism was understood (which also is inside the frame of Marxism clash of classes, of course).

Yes, and what works for the commie (in this case) works for the cappie. The idea of ceaseless struggle producing greatest good for the majority lies at the heart of that ideology, too. Capitalists like to say that the difference is that their struggle doesn't involve violence, but the wars of imperialism sing a different song.

Physics was however elegant, classic science, for Gentleman. The most violent thing they faced were apples and gravity. They could pratice it with wigs. Of course, this means universe is full of harmony, life of chaos.

But the physical universe turns out to be a more violent place than that, its apparent order rooted in chaos. The temptation (as far as I'm concerned) is to say that human violence also reflects an ultimate harmony. This is a nihilistic (okay, positivistic) thesis which tries to reduce human experience to the amoral processes of insensate matter. But the apple didn't intuit gravity from landing on Newton's hairpiece and the Hiroshima bomb knew not what it did.

In Clockwork orange I think more than doubt, he is implying he prefers the individual that is violent for his own choice rather than the one that is doing this for others (like a soldier).

Well, this gets back into the issue of existential freedom we were talking about before--whether Kubrick's Alex was really free if he was evolutionarily predisposed to violence (as opposed to Burgess' Alex who was making a genuine choice by the end). You are correct, I think, to say that Kubrick saw Alex's violence as a kind of freedom, but I think it was more a "freedom to" (to act in accordance with what Kubrick saw as his innate human aggression) than a "freedom from" (from the needs of a society that censures his violence but sends soldiers when it needs them). In fact, there was an element of both in the film. The Ludovico technique was hideous and those who administered it were monsters in their own way. But I think Kubrick regards Alex's violence (wrongly) as genuine freedom. Defying the dystopian medical technicians (and the society for which they stand), while no doubt important to Kubrick, is of secondary concern in his version of Alex's story.

Sorry, I thougth you were on the christian theme (even because Tam Lin was avoiding hell and well, the maiden that rescues him was quite liberal for a catholic at the time ).

It's hard to say if young Janet was supposed to be a Catholic. The ballad is from well after the Reformation, but it does involve knights and castles and seems to be set in bygone era. On the other hand, no Protestants, no Catholics (in the sense of a Roman Catholic confession in any case). And Janet may have been liberal, but she was no maiden--she was carrying Tam Lin's child when she rescued him (and there is all sorts of sexual imagery in the final scene). She does seem like a rather modern woman, though, rescuing her knight rather than being rescued by him and going on the offensive against the wicked queen. You'd think feminists would take more of an interest in her story.

And yeah, we had spirits linked to earth, trolls mostly, but notice how those beings are not related to the sylvian creatures too often, almost like in competition (it is natural, sylvian, air, water creatures are more flick, dinamic, dwarves and such are more greedy, stable). I would suggest they belong almost to another "court".

I think we have a tendency to categorize them like that, but historically I think they were largely local phenomena and less consistent in character. Fairies are obviously remnants of the old pagans silvans and wood nymphs, the mermaids of tritons and sea nymphs, etc. The old local tutelary spirits got mixed in with them, and I think those became the earthier spooks. But their characteristics and natures vary over time and geography, and attempts to categorize them now (into courts, for example) are a bit artificial. Hobs, for example, are lucky spirits that live in holes, while gobs/goblings/goblins are evil spirits that live in holes. In fact, they're the same damned thing--old pagan tutelary spirits that are being remembered in different ways over time and in different areas. And then there are hobgoblins to really confuse things. Shakespeare's Puck is a hobgoblin among other things (he is also the fertility figure Robin Goodfellow, and, if you look closely, he is a will-o-the-wisp, too). He is full of comical trouble, but he also blesses the bridal beds with fertility in the final scene. By contrast, hobgoblin was a name for the devil to the settlers of New England in the generation immediately following Shakespeare's. There is a fairy court in A Midsummer Night's Dream, divided (if only temporarily) by sex. I have also heard the idea of fairy courts divided divided by their benign or malignant natures. These, I think, were attempts to bring order to what was an historically disordered state of affairs. The post pagan world just continued to see spirits everywhere.

But really, the motif of earth linking to who the person was is very strong (Atlas too, his strength come from it) and it is different from being underground. A man is his nation, something like this.

Ossian (Ossin, etc) poems by MacPherson, you mean? They are, but his tale with Niamh still part of the tradition. She is a faery queen, visits ireland on her magical horse, takes Ossian (willingly) with her. After centuries he is homesick (no killing, fighting, bloody sports), she let him go but tell him to not dimount and he does to help some old man, the years he was away take over him and his is old and the horse gone. The mottiff of the elf queen in a magical horse is there, just like in Thomas and Tam Lin, so does the contact with the ground breaking the enchantment (obviously, Ossian got the nicest queen of the 3, there is some catholic link already to this story - it is about the end of Fionna age and Ossian ends nursed by Saint Patrick), but it was probally born in a nicer time.

I think I see what you mean now, although it seems to me to have more to do with contextual magic than the land per se. It's a bit like Persephone eating the pomegranate seeds and finding out that he sort of belonged in hell as much as she wanted to leave. I may have the it wrong (as I said I haven't read the tale), but it sounds like his problem was not that he had reconnected to the mortal realm and so grew older, but that he dismounted before the enchanted ride finished and became accountable for the centuries of fairy time during which he had not aged. Compare that to the Fairy Queen returning Thomas the Rhymer to the very spot where she had found him and his discovering that their seven years together had lasted only seven days. It's also a little like "one forbidden thing" stories (Lot, Orpheus, etc.) in that supernatural will ttrumped more human or humane tendencies (curiosity, love, compassion, etc.). But again, you know the story better than I do.

Well, all gods have authority, or they wouldn't be gods at all.

Ah, but remember that Trinitarianism is still centuries in the future. The readership/audience of the canonical Gospels might not have thought of Jesus as divine, although he acts with the authority of God (and in some recognizably similar ways). This would have been a radical assertion at the time, so it's not like, hey, all gods have authority. It was a downright peculiar thing to have claimed.

But I think you misunderstood me, I mention Jesus and God as different characters here because they are in different books, only that. I mean here, pretty much that God still without a home (pretty much logical, as his followers had no home either) that was linked with the Desert, had those ideas to cause storms, one or another plague in egypt, burn like fire, etc. Jesus abides most of those F/X (when things happen, like the darkness when he dies, it is not like something that is linked to his manifestation), even if he walks over water, it is not his biggest trait. As you said, he based most of his sayings in what was written, even if worked in peripheries (in this case, geography), there is always some urban center (Jerusalem) for his story. A quite educated guy (and mostly natural, as the hebrew culture and religion was always moving towards culture, to the point the were the people of book and eventually, this would lead to muslim, where the biggest miracle of God is writting a book). Meanwhile, those natural gods would naturally fit in the barbarian style. Obviously, this difference makes no sense in term of dogma (even if Jesus is a new pact, etc). There is obviously an uderline that being educated like Jesus or Budha are would imply bigger capacity of understandment and civility, meanwhile, being a sexual predator lighting bolt like Zeus would lead to a bit of unfariness and emotional conflicts. Obviously, it is not always the way the followers of either act, but that is another dime.

SO much to say, but I'll try to keep it short. First of all, not two books, not one book, that's all illusion. The Hebrew Bible alone was written over a period of more than a thousand years. The authors pulled this way and that, and the redactors took their own (very marked) directions, too. The Greek Bible was composed over a shorter period but the idea of a canonical New Testament was an afterthought. Writings that could be theologically harmonized (or that were perceived in that way) were eventually consolidated and others were excluded. It is therefore another illusion (in my opinion) to look at either Testament as a homogenous literary work. You can't say, "Well, as a character, Jesus was [whatever]" because Biblical perspectives on who Jesus was vary so much between writers and exegetes. The synoptic Jesus is different than the Johannine Jesus, and the Pauline Jesus is different than the various pseudo-Pauline Jesuses (and others), and all are different from the Jesus of the Apocalypse of John. True you can try to harmonize the various versions as systematic theologians do, but then you are "doing theology" not literature. And despite the claims, there is no one way to do theology. You say Jesus was "quite educated," for example, and their are texts to support this; but many liberation theologians will insist that Jesus was a backwoods religious radical whose message to the poor was God favored them to the educated elites in Jerusalem. My point is not that they are right and you are wrong, but that stable literary characters cannot be derived from harmonizing Biblical texts. At some point you are choosing someone's Jesus over someone else's. That works for theology, but is theology really what you are trying to do?

And yes, that was the short version.