Though I have written before about it, I’m surprised that I can’t shake off the impact of watching Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 at this age. The perspective we have now turns his premise into an absorbing look at our history. So let’s start with his premise and then go to the impact.
In addressing his three stages of the evolution of Man, Kubrick began by showing us how apes discovered weaponry by picking up a big skeletal bone to kill a predator. His second evolutionary stage is the history of man, and, if we stop for a very long moment to think about it, the history of man is all about war with weapons – increasingly destructive weapons. We went from the skeletal bone to nuclear bombs, and the question that stuns is the one Kubrick asks at the end of his movie: will the third evolutionary stage be the end of Mankind? And the corollary: if we limit ourselves just to America, are we enough of an example to prove the belief that man is an inherently violent creature? Continue reading
2001: Space Odyssey was made 46 years ago in 1968. I was raising young children then and missed it. Tonight, 46 years later, I saw it in the Count Basie Theater with four friends and several hundred strangers. I was dumbstruck by this simple truth: In 1968 director Stanley Kubrick was anticipating what the world might be like 33 years hence in 2001. That would be our imagining of 2047 today in 2014. I can’t imagine the progression from here to 2047 in my wildest projections. But Stanley Kubrick did. Continue reading
17 March 2014
How long did we spend looking for reflections of ourselves in others? At what point, if ever, did we come to celebrate differences, to stop measuring compatibility in terms of similarity? And finally we see the fun in being with minds very unlike our own. At last, that makes us smile. Continue reading