Butchering Kubrick and Nietzsche

The first time I watched 2001 Space Odyssey, I ran out of the room at two points: the apes and the galactic fetus.  Both were too scary for ten-year-old me.  Upon viewing the film again, in its entirety multiple times for class, the post-30 me was still a little freaked out by the apes and the fetus.  Something tells me they are supposed to be scary.  It is unnerving to be confronted by both inherent savagery and alien re-birth.  That said, I still was not sure what Kubrick was trying to say, or what media he was critiquing, so I started with the music, as is my custom where applicable.

The Richard Strauss piece, “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, indelibly linked to contemporary American pop culture through 2001, is itself a criticism of the Nietzsche poem of a similar title.  This fact alone makes 2001 a three-layered candy bar of media criticism, but it still doesn’t answer the why. Why caramel, why peanuts?  According to my music textbook¹, Strauss chose the Nietzsche poem in an effort to garner the best publicity, since the idea of the superman was blowing up around the turn of the century.  2001 also represents a turn of the century, albeit told from the perspective of 1968.  Interesting.  A clue, perhaps.  I hope we hear more about the history of the space program and other relevant bits from our professor on Monday night.

Still puzzled, I went to the Nietzsche poem and read the prologue.  Essentially a dude named Zarathustra (we’ll call him Z.) comes down a mountain to share his enlightenment with the peeps.  “What is the ape to man?”  He asks almost rhetorically, although I think the answer is not so simple, and from the looks of it Kubrick agrees.  Z. says the ape is an object of ridicule² and goes on about man’s super quest for “something beyond themselves.”  Was HAL supposed to be that something?  Is the bone famously tossed into the air by the ape only to match-cut to a glorious spaceship also that something?

In the poem, “superearthly hopes” are bad news.  God is dead.  The earth replaces God, reminiscent of the earth-hating machine that basically worms out terra firma until it becomes God in the E. M. Forster story, The Machine Stops.  Going off-planet in the film 2001 certainly seems like a bad idea, too.  We see a murderous super computer, a cabal of military men following the orders of a PR man–refusing to share vital information with the galactic community, and of course, a giant monolith capable of some mind-altering cosmic voodoo.  The monolith shows up at the dawn of man, too.  It is no coincidence that the alien form appears BEFORE the ape gets the idea to use the bone, first as a play thing, and then as a instrument of murder.  We dreamt of space travel before we came up with ICBMs.

Juxtapose the playful ape with the infant HAL in 1992 singing a song like a child, only to grow up and wipe out Dave’s crewmates when he somehow becomes sentient.  Was the monolith behind this, too?  We are given no explanation, only the collective wisdom that HAL’s model had never made a mistake.  This too connects to the machine in the Forster story, as does humanity’s over-dependence on technology.  In The Machine Stops, Kuno’s mother can’t answer the door without being carted to it, despite no actual physical handicap.  Similarly, Dave can’t open the pod bay doors without HAL.  Of course, this isn’t pure fiction.  We already rely on too much technology.  Forget fixing your own car.  Don’t try to watch a movie in the Bobst grad lounge (THAT computer has a mind of its own).  Also, you are perfectly safe going through the new airport security whizamagigs because they’ve never made a mistake (under optimal conditions).

But Dave fares better than Kuno.  He surely exercised enough for it—all that fancy special gravity running and punching.  Z. speaks of the “dangerous crossing from man to superman.”  The journey of man and of Dave, the hero, is certainly perilous.  Kuno dies enlightened, along with his more dim-witted society mates, in Forster’s technological dystopia.  By contrast, the Kubrick film is more hopeful.  Although he is extremely critical of the condition of society—of our innate violence, our over-reliance on machines, our sterile lifestyles (need some white to go with your white?), our fake food (liquid broccoli anyone?), he lets Dave not only live, but contact new life and be reborn in planetary scale.

Does Dave meet himself having dinner near the end of the film?  Since the superman is something beyond the self, as we know it, I do not interpret the final scenes so literally.  I think astronaut Dave sees himself in another dimension, made possible by the monolith.  Both Daves are alone, and I found this element rather sad, yet he lives.  Time, by my reading, speeds up in this other Dave dimension, and at his passing the alien mother visits once more delivering a new dawn of man.

¹Grout, Donald Jay; Palisca, Claude V. A History of Western Music. W.W. Norton & Company. New York, NY. 1988

²I chatted with my dad, the philosopher king, about 2001. He said that he and his best friend (now a professor at CUNY) went to see it in the theater during its original release.  They apparently laughed so hard during the ape scenes that the usher almost kicked them out.  See, even in my dad’s likely substance-enhanced state, he understood the apes were funny.  Dad, for the win.

Check and Balance This, Jerks

I encourage everyone to read this editorial in the New York Times about First Amendment interpretations and the recent Supreme Court decision which deconstructs much campaign finance law, allowing corporations and individuals to spend unlimited amounts.

"Do you ever have one of those days when everything seems unconstitutional?"

It would seem from reading the article that the Supreme Court majority is vehemently opposed to censorship and sees this as very much in keeping with our right to free speech.  Although I am quite opposed to the majority ruling in this case, I must concede that I passionately agree with them on this one point.  Someone (I think at the NAACP?) once said that the answer to hate speech was not censorship, but more and better speech.  This, I believe, is exactly what our founding fathers intended, but not clad in the jargon of “the marketplace of ideas.”

While I am all for diversity of ideas, the word marketplace is troubling.  I appreciate and reap the benefits of this wonderful capitalist economy in our country.  The marketplace has done right by me, and I have taken advantage of many opportunities that I was simply born into by being of the middle class.  The majority Justices tell us that government interference of any kind in this marketplace of ideas is wrong—that it censors free speech.  They conflate dollars with voices however.  They also ignore, on principle, a very disturbing fact about our government and its long history of being controlled by corporate interests.

The notion that a corporation has the same rights as the individual is folly, but it is American law.  Yet our law also states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I read a heavy emphasis here on keeping Government power in check, do you?  The issue for me with the ruling is that it gives corporations a blank check to essentially buy elections.  Congress actually made a law to make sure the last part of the sentence is upheld, not the other way around.  I believe that our government, far from being just heavily influenced by corporate interests, has essentially been taken over by corporations with the politicians as merely figureheads.  I’ll give you some links to chew on another time as far as evidence, but play with me here for the sake of argument.  Let’s say I’m right, and you then substitute the word Corporation for Government at the end of the First Amendment sentence above.  How on earth are the citizens supposed to petition, to dissent, when corporate interests have out spent our voices to the point where they will not be heard in any meaningful sense?

Many people point to the democratizing power of the Internet here.  To this I reference the significant portion of the American populace not online, and the overwhelming flow of information in front of those who are online.  The Internet is a marvelous, revolutionary invention and we should fight like hell to keep corporate interests from taking it over, too.  The Supreme Court decision reverses the essential work of legislators like McCain and Feingold who spearheaded the most recent effort to protect our citizens from those we elect to represent us.  How incredibly self-aware they were and how destructive the Supreme Court majority is in the name of our fore fathers.

“We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest — which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves.”-Thomas Jefferson

The public is mired in apathy, numbed by the onslaught of consumerism and enormous debt created by a system that has fallen prey to wolves of our own creation.  Those who have the courage to speak are disadvantaged with a tiny megaphone called the Internet.  That printing press on every desktop is lost in a cacophony of courageous voices on all sides of the political spectrum.  The voice that rises above the din is the voice that outspends us, the voice that is incorrectly deemed to be equal to the individual by law, the voice of the corporation.

The majority judges are playing alpha dog and ripping the throat of democracy out in the name of liberty.  I would kennel the majority, but I don’t believe in censorship.  I would vote them out, but the U.S. is not set up that way, and for good reason.  I would lobby my elect to curb the court dogs, but I fear I am outspent.  I’ll do it anyway because I’m an optimist, and I’m not going down without a fight.

To Joy, with love

I’ve been stressed lately.  The last time I was genuinely stressed involved a software company in Washington and a overdeveloped sense of responsibility.  The culprit this time is academia and a overdeveloped sense of politics.  I’ve been playing the “what should I get my PhD in” game, and losing.  A friend helped me realize today, through one of her web sites, that I was putting the strategy before the horse.

Before I pick mad gifted doctoral program #1 (of 6-10), I need to stop, collaborate and listen.  Who knew Vanilla Ice was a philosopher?  Me, that’s who.  What do I WANT to do?  I chose NYU and grad school even though it meant some pretty large professional sacrifices, not the least of which was working for the best PR agency in the universe.  This choice has proven to be a magical one–exactly what I was destined to do.

My dad and I talk about destiny a lot.  He believes that we already know what we know, we just have to uncover it.  Sounds a bit like Heidegger, Plato and a lot like my dad–my Cuban American poet/anarchist. I toss a certain spiritual, God directed element into that mix thanks to my mother and her mother before her.  Walk on down the line.  I wish more people could look at life in this manner.  It might not be the most productive system, but it sure feels good. Kudos to mom and pops.

I want to perform, period.  I love sharing, be it through writing or singing in particular. A doctorate would work wonders for my writing, no matter the Humanities field.  I relish the scholarly discipline and the incredible feedback of the academic process.  Yet, I also want to share broadly (hello, blog; next stop world) and the academy holds very few open houses.  Then there is the music.