Kubrick's Warning in 2001: Space Odyssey

2001 as a Technological Iconoclast

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey, his vision of the future, is breathtaking in both detail and in consequence. Kubrick spared no effort in portraying the future as a cold, dark foray into technological dominance. All of the scenes in 2001 show an aspect of technology destruction of every aspect of humanity. Kubrick is showing the loss of human autonomy and feeling by showing the transposition of human and mechanical action. From this, Kubrick also states humanity’s yearning to return to something simpler while realizing that our course has already been plotted.

The opening sequence shows the evolution of man from beasts, most importantly the creation of tools. The primates encounter the Monolith, a foreboding and mysterious obelisk that resonated with strange sounds. Upon encountering this object, the primates take up bones and rocks as tools to utilize what they could not before. Apes fight against one another for territory and kill other animals for food in a much more efficient manner than before. The previously dependent primate becomes reliant on only his tools to make his way, a parallel to modern ideas of progress.

Kubrick does not show this progress in the most positive of lights. While I would not doubt that Kubrick would be for progress to survive, it seems that the primates are some disgusting beasts that are now provided with the options of forsaking their clan in order to find more food for the individual primate. Soon after the monolith bestows this gift of utility, the primates kill animals with ease but without interaction. They lay bone to the flesh of another animal with little regard to its social effects. In fighting with other primates, we see the primate asserting an idea of territory that was not as practical before the monolith. The independent primate is the epitome of man’s regression into dependence on technology and the evolution of non-human elements for survival.