Robert Mills wrote before Christmas:

> My experience with '2001 A Space Odyssey' is a good example of the best
>  approach. I was supposed to go and see the film with a friend but was in
the
>  hospital when he went to see it. He came to visit me a few days afterwards
>  by which time I had read the book. We spoke about our impressions and it
>  transpires that I had a better understanding about the story. I gave him
the
>  book and later on I went to see the film. During a subsequent conversation
>  with him we agreed that I gained more from the film than he did.
>
>  My conclusion: Read the book first THEN see the file.

Robert's last statement is proof enough to me that he was as much as anyone
in need of a vacation from computers :-).

However, "2001: A Space Odyssey" doesn't count in the normal course of things
in determining whether you should read the book first or not. Stanley Kubrick
said that he purposefully designed the movie so that it had to be seen two or
three times before you could begin to get a philosophical hold on the film.
Even with that caveat, most people don't.

Jim Phillips also wrote:

> According to http://kubrickfilms.warnerbros.com/video_detail/2001/
>
>  2001 began life as the short story The Sentinel, written by Arthur C.
Clarke
>  in 1950.

That's absolutely correct. Because I had read "The Sentinel" when I was
younger, I instantly recognized the story in the movie when I first saw
"2001" at the Kachina Cinerama theatre in Scottsdale, AZ, on the day of its
premeire. However, even more philosophically pertinent to the movie was
Clarke's "Childhood's End" and the notion of unseen alien beings so powerful
that they were called the Overmind.

Kubrick took these two stories and placed them on an even more
philosophically profound backdrop, and the book you must read and discuss to
fully understand "2001" is Fredrick Nietzche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra"
("Thus Spake Zarathustra"). Clarke's "2001" novel is a very shallow
interpretation of the story Kubrick is telling. "2001" is not a science
fiction story; it is rather perhaps the most philosophical theological movie
ever made, and that's what I'm going to explain on this last day of 2001, if
you don't mind.

When I write things like this, I tend to get 50 private responses for every
response that is posted to the list. I certainly don't mind that, but let me
apologize in advance. I'm sure that I'm not going to have time to answer them
all, but I do read them all carefully.

In "2001", God exists, but it's not likely to be the God that you imagine.
Rather than being merely a cartoon character sitting on a cloud, God exists
as a tangible being. God is the Overmind, not an individual, but a species
that has become nearly omniscient, nearly immortal, but beyond that, nothing
more than another species that has evolved in a Newtonian, Einsteinian,
Boltzmannian, Darwinian universe to a point of immortality, and perhaps one
of enormous loneliness as well. God has become God only because of an
extension of Clarke's Law: "Any technology so advanced will appear as if it
were magic."

By contrast, Nietzche's "Zarathustra" is mocking satire of the parables and
life history of Jesus, and I've always been offended by it, simply because it
turns on its head the morality of Christianity, the part of the religion that
I hold in extremely high regard. Nonetheless, there are a few paragraphs in
"Zarathustra" that give away the entire story of "2001". They occur in
Chapter 9:

    "Companions, the creator seeketh, not corpses- and not herds or
    believers either. Fellow-creators the creator seeketh- those who grave
    new values on new tables.

    "Companions, the creator seeketh, and fellow-reapers: for
    everything is ripe for the harvest with him."

In the movie, four million years ago, the Overmind visits Earth and places
computer-like devices on the African plane, on the Moon, and in orbit around
Jupiter. "2001" is a story of Intelligent Design, or of at least highly
Directed Evolution. While life evolved on Earth as the natural result of
physico-chemical processes, just as it has everywhere else in the universe,
the monoliths redirect the course of that evolution. When the apes touch the
African monolith, they are transformed by it -- and the subtexts of the movie
are introduced: Man is defined as much by his instrumentalities as he is by
his physiology, and the distinction between his weapons and tools is
essentially moot. In a span of time that amounts to no more than a blink of a
God's eye, the ape throws his bone club into the air and it's transformed
into orbiting nuclear weapons platforms.

The God of "2001" is not the God of Martin Luther and John Calvin, a God that
watches over your every move and plots your life out for you. The God of
"2001" simply doesn't care. In fact, God is no longer even present. God has
left the Earth to its own fate, to choose between good and evil. That freedom
is the fundamental to the ancient concept of free will, an idea older than
Christianity. The denial of the existence of free will lies at the core of
the Protestant Reformation. Although almost all Protestant denominations have
now reverted back to a belief in the existence of free will, it was
absolutely forbidden in the theology of John Calvin.

A Catholic bishop said on last week's NBC News' "Meet the Press" in answering
the question, "Why does God let such bad things (as September 11th) happen to
good people?" that God so respects humanity that he endowed them with the
choice between good and evil and gave them free will. Of course, you can
regard that form of the answer to be merely marketing spin, in the same
manner that "we killed the HP3000 for the good of the customers," but it is
wholly consistent with the theology of "2001."

For a simply excellent explanation of the history of free will (and much
other well-explained philosophy), see the Catholic Encyclopedia, which was
written almost a century ago:

    http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06259a.htm

In the highly plausible theological universe of "2001", God doesn't bless
America. He doesn't give a hoot about America, any more than you care which
set of ants won their territorial battles in South America 30 million years
ago. Nor is the Earth likely to be the only site of such directed evolution.
Similar processes may have been started on 10,000 other planets. Most
certainly, not all of them are going to survive to the next step, but some
will.

The God of "2001" is seeking companions, fellow creators, and God is
accelerating evolution to its own ends to create its fellow creators.

The highly directional signal that the "purposefully buried" monolith on the
Moon sends when it is unburied acts as an alarm clock. It is a signal that
the apes on Earth have progressed to the point in their history that they are
nearing the next stage in their directed evolution. Once Jupiter space has
been reached, they ("they" being the one remaining crewman) is transported
across time and space into a zoo-like condition of extraordinary luxury to
live out his life. At the very end of that life, a final monolith/computer
appears and transforms and transports the star-child back to Earth.

Unspoken in "2001" but explicit in "Childhood's End", the star-child
represents the next stage in human evolution, and as a result will rapidly
wash away all of the humans currently occupying the planet. The first few
phases in the directed evolution of humanity that appear in the movie may not
be the last, but only the beginning stages of a fairly large number of such
transformations, but the end point will be the same: the creator is seeking
companions, fellow creators, and it is evolving them as need be.

Richard (RICK-ard) Strauss composed a lyrical tone poem also called "Also
Sprach Zarathustra", very loosely based on Nietzche's story, although
Strauss' story is far gentler and much more faithful to the original ideas of
Zoroastrianism. If you get a chance, it's a piece of music very much worth
listening too. To further understand "2001", the music is important.

Strauss' "Zarathustra" begins with the prelude, the music that begins "2001"
and that everyone loves. In this prelude, the kettle drums rattle off the
question: life/death, death/life, life/death.

In the first chapter of Strauss' "Zarathustra", man is a troglodyte, fearful,
living in caves, and the music deeply reflects that dread.

In the second chapter, man evolves religion and this most lyrical chapter is
filled with as beautiful a hymn as has been perhaps written. But at the end
of the chapter, a french horn blats out a "No!", and religion is denied and
replaced by science in the third chapter.

By the fourth chapter, man, finding no real meaning to life, simply goes
insane.

In the fifth chapter, man works his way out of his long insanity and rises to
the level of God (Zoroasterianism is a religion of man as God and is still
practiced primarily in India today, but many of its early ideas and ideals
were absorbed into Christianity), and Man/God now has the power to wave his
arms and cause the planets to go spinning.

But the final chapter leaves man unfulfilled, exactly where he began, and
ends with the same fading questions: life/death, death/life, life/death.

The Overmind God is as much a product of the physical universe as are the
ants of the Earth, and although the Overmind has conquered vast spans of time
and space, it too is left with the questions, life/death, death/life, and in
the interim between its birth and its death, it can do no more than seek
companions.

Wirt Atmar

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