Last night (at a rather jolly party I was attending), I got into a rather heated discussion about cinema as art versus cinema as entertainment. The subject of Steven Spielberg came up. The opposition claimed that Spielberg pioneered shooting inanimate objects in a way that gave them life. I claimed this was utter poppycock. Thankfully, having just watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, I was able to argue that, unfortunately, my opponent was completely wrong. HAL-9000 is completely inanimate. As this film was shot long before any of Spielberg's movies, this rather stymied the swine.However, it did lead me to contemplate HAL as a character. How is it that we, as an audience, identify with HAL, more a concept that in inanimate object. All we see of HAL is the glowing eye and the inside of his mainframe. There is nothing to identify with beyond his voice. However, the scene where Dave kills HAL is one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the film.
Further, HAL is the most memorable part of the entire movie. Kubrick is such a master that he can manipulate us into identifying and sympathizing with a malfunctioning computer.In a way, this genuinely reflects the way people actually grow attached to technological devices. We pour all our social contacts into our cell phones, all our musical taste into iPods, and everything else into computers. When we lose one of the objects, it feels almost like the loss of a friend...or the loss of part of yourself. Technology becomes, in essence, an extension of ourselves.
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The movie itself is an odd experience. The first time I watched 2001, I disliked it intensely. I thought it was a masturbatory power trip on Kubrick's part. The second time I saw, my opinion on the film didn't really change. However, by that time, I had taken several cinema classes. This is all a round-about way of discussing cinema-as-art vs. cinema-as-entertainment. As entertainment, I think 2001: A Space Odyssey is completely awful. Taken from a the point of view of a story, the film is boring. Honestly boring. However, from the cinema-as-art perspective, 2001 is truly a beautiful film. It is extremely well shot, the music is perfect...I don't really have a conclusion, so I conclude with a quote:
“The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions”
--Italo Calvino
