| Michael Koresky on 2001: A Space Odyssey
I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey at age six—appropriate
for a film that makes infants of us all. In the face of Kubrick’s
enormous, larger-than-cinema cinema, it’s hard not to feel dwarfed.
It’s difficult for me to think of a more proper introduction to the
confounding, slack-jawed pleasures of this ostensible space saga than
crouched on the floor, behind my parents’ hassock, on the carpeted
floor of my childhood family room. This was before I had any
understanding of who created this bizarre work, whose rhythms seemed at
once alien and oddly relatable, as natural as the sway of its Strauss
waltzes. This was before I knew that the aesthetic derring-do of the
film was wholly anomalous and not simply some relic of an earlier age
of filmmaking. This was before I could have any intellectual grasp of
the material, and therefore, before I could readily pontificate
foolishly, and, like so many have done in its wake, ruin the purity of
the experience. This was before I knew that the height and width of my
viewing options weren’t “optimal” and that it needed the full
encompassing dynamism of the movie theater to function as it was
intended. This was before I knew that 2001 would become my
Rosetta stone of movie-watching, that which would subconsciously inform
all other film experiences and would provide a template for what
narrative cinema should reach for, crib from, aspire to.
But then, there was no allegory, whatever that meant. No fully
formed mythos, storytelling audacity, genre explosion, religious
ascension, or philosophical inquiry. There were just tears. Sprung from
fear and exhilaration; from the elemental power of sound and image,
combined with the wizardry of a force seemingly greater than man—and to
this point, I’m sure I even had some vague notion of cinema, and all
attendant art forms, as springing from the minds and talents of human
beings. This was something else, something I couldn’t quantify, even in
that intricate childlike way that files away experiences like one would
toys in a shoebox. As towering as the film was to me, it was on a
29-inch screen that it first simultaneously cracked and crystallized my
understanding of an art form that was beginning to take its hold on me.
It hardly mattered that my mother regaled me with tales of seeing it
upon its initial release in 1968, how the film was “meant to be seen”;
she was painting it as a religious experience, a two-and-a-half-hour
pilgrimage to some other world. One which she didn’t understand I had
just taken.
If 2001, which needs no synopsis recap or analysis here to
impinge upon its brattish, holier-than-words grandiosity, remains, to
my mind, American cinema’s greatest evocation of the possibility of the
divine (and the greatest example of the divine power of the cinema),
then my response to it has probably mirrored my own in terms of my
incessant flip-flopping of embracing and rejecting religion, an ongoing
internal battle, forged in Sunday school, traces of which emanate in
walls of every synagogue I happen to enter. The repetition of watching 2001
similarly held me; by constantly revisiting its unknown reaches, I was
unintentionally returning to that one thing which would give me faith
in a higher power. While I was watching it, I believed it; whether I
still believed it once the tape was rewinding mattered little. Like the
apes in the Dawn of Man sequence tentatively trying to touch the
intruding monolith, 2001 gives us something to reach out to.
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Often we speak wistfully of our formative experiences with art at an
early age, disregarding the fact that we usually bypass those first
encounters with nonchalance. The first time I saw a Matisse painting
was probably from a sidelong glance out of the corner of my eye as I
was tugging at my mother’s arm to hurry up through the Museum of Fine
Art’s galleries. Years later, staring at his “The Piano Lesson” brought
me to tears, redirecting me to a pure spot that seemed wholly
independent of intellectual discourse. It was the same inexplicable
surge of emotion, brought on both by aesthetic pleasure and the
fullness of solitude that I had felt as a child when confronted with
Kubrick’s immense vision. Is it pleasure of the aesthetic uniformity of
the pieces that now connects them in my mind? Did the vertical majesty
of Matisse’s green column on the left hand side of the canvas, which
might be a curtain or a shaft of light as it satisfactorily matches up
with the oddly quadrisected face of the frustrated piano player,
subconsciously return me to Kubrick’s repeated vision of the monolith,
with its jarringly elegant smooth surfaces perched among the jagged
cliffs and rocks with alarming confidence? Simplicity and daring—no two
artists could seemingly be more different in their approaches to
modernism, yet both were so immense that they couldn’t possibly remain
contained by the frames that surrounded them.
And it’s the frames we become obsessed with—the search for the right
method of presentation, the correct aspect ratio, the appropriate
setting. Later in life, when I saw “The Piano Lesson” again, reproduced
and shrunk to one-fifth its size in a sturdy coffee table book
excavated from the shelves at my parents’ house, it retained a similar
power, if one wholly different from that first encounter. Likewise, my
second, seminal confrontation with Kubrick’s daunting object, this time
projected onto New York’s most impressive screen (the now defunct Times
Square Astor Plaza, an underground journey to widescreen nirvana), with
nearly a quarter century of life/art experience separating it from my
first viewing, remains as vivid in my mind. Even after multiple
viewings, on TV and theater and classroom screens of differing widths
and heights, this viewing felt like a rediscovery—every nook and cranny
of the film, each way in which Kubrick wedded his philosophy
(alternately bleak and staggeringly optimistic) not just to oblique
narrative construction but to every camera angle, shot duration, and
drenching gel, was suddenly visible on a broader canvas. The revelation
was that this enormous work, this celluloid thing, was made up of
minutiae, and I could suddenly see it all, as though finally rubbing my
fingers across the rough stone tiles of a mosaic I had only previously
seen from afar.
Yet despite all this, despite my sense of finally seeing 2001
with the right optical prescription, it still remained filtered through
my initial non-letterboxed, decidedly unrestored videotape viewing,
plagued as it undoubtedly was by errant tracking blips and unrefined
“stereo” sound. The truth is that, even as I was told while first
watching it, that I was “watching it incorrectly,” I was already
trained to absorb and process information in a particular way. And it’s
not simply that the small box would crease, crinkle, and cram
large-screen works for an increasingly complacent viewer, for films had
been shown on television regularly for decades. At the whim of local
channel programmers, the generation directly before mine would wait to
see what the week would bring—and though it would take a long while
before a good deal of the folkloric films I had read and heard about
would be readily available on video, I was already used to the luxury
of selection. Watching 2001 on home video was then a simultaneous spiritual enthrallment and instant de-mystification. As had been the case with Star Wars,
seen on TV first at a similarly early age, outer space fit within the
TV’s borders—it was containable. Like all films great and small, 2001
was already just another box on the shelf when I first let it overwhelm
me. And because of its inherent accessibility, I watched it again. And
again.
I was barely ten years old and I had already seen 2001
multiple times, none of which were yet informed by “trying to figure it
out.” Even in its relatively muted sensorial impact, I acknowledged the
film as a purely physical escape, one which I understood didn’t play by
the narrative rules adhered to by almost every other movie I had ever
seen, save perhaps Fantasia. That film, with its ceaseless
swirl of confounding shapes and slavishness to the classical music that
provided its backbone, was, however, imbedded in my mind as only a
theatrical experience, since Disney films were the only ones regularly
brought back to big screens in those days, especially to suburban
outposts such as mine. Unavailable on home video until 1990, Fantasia remained a phantom in the dark, a collection of images I could only see in my mind or companion coffee-table book. Fantasia had yet to be brought down off of its pedestal; the equally abstract 2001 had yet to be elevated.
So, countless viewings between the initial video rental in the early
Eighties and the epochal showing at New York’s Loews’ Astor Plaza on
New Years 2001, each one carrying with it different emotions,
quandaries, and confusions than the one prior. There was the classroom
screening off of a laserdisc, with my pencil properly in hand floating
over my open notebook; there was the late-night, post-drinking
dorm-room DVD screening; there was the sold-out Walter Reade Theater
screening as part of a Cinemascope retrospective. The exact progression
of feelings and realizations would probably be somehow equivalent to
the development of a mind—from the unvarnished experience of childhood
to the curious befuddlement of adolescence to the haphazard
interpretation and haughty condescension of teenage-hood to the
academic inquiry of postadolescence to the spiritual epiphany (the
letting go!) of my mid-twenties.
What will a thirtysomething viewing add to my stages of evolution? My methods of watching 2001
have been an education in reverse, a trip back through the stars to a
sublime state of acceptance. It’s a long journey between the video
rental and the event at the 1500-plus seat, 70mm-wide theater. Now, my
video tape sits alone, collecting dust, a fatality of warped tracking
and a frayed cardboard slipcase; meanwhile the Loews Astor Plaza closed
down in 2004, which summarily ended the singular pleasure of seeing a
movie on a single-screen theater in Times Square. Two eras coming to a
close, the childhood couch and the movie-house shrine, both imbued with
the same promise for the future that the film audaciously mixes in with
its often damning vision of human foible. Even if tomorrow holds the
numbing image of 2001 broadcast on an iPod screen, the sounds
of subway tracks clanging in my ears, surely then the film will morph
again, continue to float on its own terms, refuse to play by the rules
of earth’s gravity, and emit from its tiny box through my ear buds a
scream as rapturous as the heavens. |
