In pre-covid July 2019 the Sun Theatre in Yarraville held the Moon Film Festival in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landings. Over a period of 9 days a series of space films screened. One of those films was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There is a lot to unpack in 2001. Sitting in the dark theatre, my focus was on the relationship between Kubrick’s masterpiece and Nietzschean ideas. I was watching the film through the lens of Bruce Kapferer’s ‘2001 and counting: Kubrick, Nietzsche and Anthropology’.
Even if you haven’t seen the film, you will recognise the music in the opening scene. It is Also Spoke Zarathustra by Johann Strauss, the title of Nietzsche’s book published between 1883 and 1885 (there are four parts). Kapferer argues that Kubrick’s use of music from Zarathustra is no accident, but rather a deliberate nod to the connection between the mythopoeic 2001 and Nietzchean ideas.
Drawing on the Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence, it seems apt to begin with an ending. ‘God is Dead’ proclaimed Nietzsche and his anti-humanist, nihilist reputation was born. Nietzsche wasn’t, however, proposing that God was dead; rather that God never existed in the first place. He suggested that ‘a new science-influenced metaphysics that is no longer human-centric is being drawn’, and with it a need for human beings to reconsider their values.
Religion didn’t much like this idea. Nor did the Gods.
Despite his anti-humanist reputation, Nietzsche was arguably pro-human. An idealist believing in the open potential of human being’s ability to become, through overcoming. Nietzsche acknowledged ‘the tragic potential of humanity’ as integral to its very positivity. The destruction of existing values is intended to be positive and rejuvenating, albeit also painful, and often necessarily violent.
A central character in 2001 is HAL HAL is artificial intelligence. A sentient computer that controls a spacecraft and its crew on its mission to Jupiter. HAL begins to lose his sentient mind, believing the crew are trying to disrupt the mission and destroy him in the process. HAL decides that he must ensure the mission is completed at all costs, including the cost of the crew members lives. The one remaining crew member, Bowman, is forced to overcome HAL in order to survive. He does so by reducing HAL to a child-like state.
Throughout the film the boundaries between man and technology are increasingly blurred. The conversations between Bowman and HAL, more intimate. In his decision to kill the crew members HAL is pure human technology in his human violence. In reducing HAL to a childlike state, Bowman resists his own violent tendencies, rising above technology and placing himself ‘beyond good and evil’, as Nietzsche would say.
Nietzsche’s pro-human philosophies suggest that human being is not condemned to repeat its past — there is always the potential to continually create and recreate. He did not give precedence to the past in predicting the future, rather, he ‘gave precedence to the past in comprehending the future’.
“This openness to potentiality ‘manifests the intense mythological potential that is more often the force of the world’s great epic stories that are particular expressions of the imaginal, indeed, mythical force of human creative endeavours” Bruce Kapferer
The odyssey takes us to the very limits of humanity, and beyond, with the Hero’s journey being one of human being overcoming the constraints of his own making. Where there is life, there is the will to not simply exist, but to become something more. Something better..
As I take in all that’s happening in the world right now, I see this will to power; this need to become through overcoming; of man being caught in what Geertz would describe as the ‘webs of significance he himself has spun’. I see human being reconsidering its values at depth, in the midst of, what Nietzsche would describe as ‘a necessary violence’.
While our existing challenges are nothing like we’ve ever seen before, they’re also not altogether unfamiliar. Human being has been in this place, in another way, in another time. And just as the meaning of 2001 was deliberately left unexplained by Kubrick, so too is the future of human being.
In the end, as in the beginning, our future is open and circular, and the potentialities limitless.
Image: Nino Yang on Unsplash
Ref: Kapferer, B 2014, 2001 and Counting: Kubrick, Nietzsche, and Anthropology, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm.