Originally published by Film Comment (Jan/Feb 2002)

The soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is justly famous. The Richard Strauss theme from Also Sprach Zarathustra, since parodied into submission, is so locked to Kubrick’s film that it is truly difficult to think of one without the other. And the Johann Strauss waltz “The Blue Danube,” a cliché long before Kubrick got to it, was reanimated for the machine age when the director deftly linked it to the dance of technology (and death - those are nuclear bombs floating gracefully around the earth, according to the screenplay), rather than society.

In addition, 2001 introduced György Ligeti’s chillingly difficult, beautifully chromatic music to a mass audience (many of them stoned, I gather, but some of those destined to form rock bands). The movie begins like a concert: Ligeti’s music plays to a completely black screen, a device Kubrick repeated after the intermission programmed into the original release. And in the long Fantasia-like sequence at the end of the film, “Jupiter - and Beyond the Infinite” (surely there’s a Spinal Tap song lurking in that title?), Ligeti’s music is as much the focus of attention as the abstract images. Throughout the film, Kubrick exploits the unnerving quality of what Ligeti has described as this music’s “micropolyphony. . . a polyphonic texture so thickly woven that the individual voices become indistinguishable, and only the resulting harmonies, blending seamlessly one into another, can be clearly perceived” - a description that I imagine Kubrick would have happily applied to many aspects of the film. (And Kubrick would turn to Ligeti again, for music included in The Shining, and in Eyes Wide Shut.)

Nevertheless, any album of music from 2001 fails to include the most dominant aspect of the film’s soundtrack: silence, both the absolute silence of space, and the Cagean silence the astronauts experience in their ship and spacesuits - a silence that isn’t empty, but filled with their own breathing, and the whirring of machinery. The bulk of the movie takes place not only without music, but without speech. The first section of the film, the grandiose “Dawn of Man” sequence, is pre-verbal; and the third and final section of the film, after the HAL computer is disconnected, is post-verbal: the last surviving astronaut has no one left to talk to, and doesn’t. Only in the middle of the film is there any dialogue, and most of that is marked by the sort of false and cautiously formal speech of a press conference. That is, it is speech that craves its opposite - speech designed not to communicate.

The reason for all this forced speech is that the plot of 2001 turns on a secret, something unsaid. Although this is somewhat muted in the final version of the film, the reason the HAL computer betrays the astronauts is that it has been programmed to keep this secret - and therefore programmed to lie. In a scene from the original screenplay but cut from the movie, the astronauts confront HAL as to whether there is something being kept from them.

POOLE
Hal... Dave and I believe that there’s something about the mission that we weren’t told. Something that the rest of the crew know and that you know. We’d like to know whether this is true.

HAL
I’m sorry, Frank, but I don’t think I can answer that question without knowing everything that all of you know.

HAL’s evasion is logical and ingenious (think of the scene in which HAL defeats one of the astronauts at chess, and blithely thanks him for an enjoyable game), and not a lie. But the scene continues with the two astronauts confronting HAL with a series of direct, true-or-false questions, in the manner of a courtroom interrogation - and the computer is eventually forced to lie.

This moment - elided in the film, though it remains consistent with its details - seems the key to the plot. The computer, having lied, continues to lie. What is often taken to be a parable about man versus machine is really a parable of man versus man. The government has programmed the computer to keep the truth of the mission from the astronauts, and that secret leads to the destruction of both the astronauts and the computer. It is the lie - hence the government - that kills them all.

All but one, of course. Kubrick’s Odyssey, for all its cosmic pretensions (one clever contemporary review called it a “shaggy God story”), depends on its Odysseus, just as Melville’s did on Ishmael. The end of Moby-Dick carries this epigraph from Job: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” This could apply to Kubrick’s 20th-century shipwreck too, except in this instance, no one is talking. Which points to a salient characteristic of Kubrick’s film, one that might help keep it a mystery but also perhaps a muddle: it is absent of meaningful speech. But then there’s the eloquent music, and silence.

Listening to: Khun Narin III

Cooking: purple asparagus

to: Nina at Raygun magazine

8/2/95

by fax

Dear Nina,

Here’s our review — I cut it pretty tight, you’ll find it might still be a hundred words or so too long, but maybe you can fit this all in? If not, please let me know, or please make a suggestion for how to cut it, but I really want to see the final version before it goes out — our fax number is 617-464-0802. I’ll give you an immediate answer if you need me today to approve something.

Do you run blurbs about the writers? If so, here’s one: “Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang release the second album in their future box set this November. It’s called The Wondrous World of Damon & Naomi, available on Sub Pop records at finer stores everywhere.”

Hope you like this!

Best,

Damon

Originally published by Ray Gun (October 1995)

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