Music, Science and 2001: A Space Odyssey

Music, Science and 2001: A Space Odyssey
Christopher Heathcote

Music plays a leading role in Stanley Kubrick’s films. Take the moment in Full Metal Jacket where a transitional darkness between two segments is broken by Nancy Sinatra’s 1966 pop hit “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”, and then the audience is pitched visually onto thronging Saigon streets. Or the end of the same film where, after a frightening day’s action during the Tet Offensive, a platoon of US Marines walk through the ruins of Hue cheerily singing the Mickey Mouse Club song.

Then there are—throughout A Clockwork Orange—those servings of Purcell (the first disturbing sight of theyouth gang is set to the plaintive and ominous Requiem for Queen Anne), Rossini (a Fatty Arbuckle-like speeded-up orgy is zanily accompanied by the William Tell Overture) and, especially, Beethoven reverberating in orchestral and electronic forms. The film’s plot even pivots on the use in violence aversion therapy of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony complete with a soloist singing the Schiller Ode to Joy filtered through a Moog synthesiser.

Rising over these examples stands Kubrick’s mighty use of music in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the way he mated visual imagery with orchestral and choral music in a widescreen cinematic Gesamkunstwerk, a total work of art. So much so that the trumpeting fanfare which opens Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra has never been the same since. It is now customarily thought of as the “space odyssey” theme.

Music came as a surprise when 2001: A Space Odyssey was released. Audiences in 1968 had not before heard music employed this way in a commercial movie. The director had commissioned the Hollywood composer Alex North, who wrote the soundtracks for Kubrick’s films Spartacus and Dr Strangelove, to devise a score. The director was satisfied with this music when played to him, and gave the go-ahead for an orchestral version to be recorded.

North’s score wasn’t heard at the glittering New York premiere, much to the anguish of the composer, who was sitting in the official party. Not a bar of his work remained. Weeks earlier Kubrick had set aside North’s recordings, then used instead pieces by Richard Strauss, Gÿorgy Ligeti, Aram Khachaturian and Johann Strauss. Their music hadn’t even been performed afresh in a sound studio. Kubrick used recordings from Decca and Deutsche Grammophon. Later, he defended his decision in tones that breezily belittled score writers: “However good our best film composers may be,” he said, “they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time?”

Not that the composers themselves would necessarily have been pleased at the use of their music. Gÿorgy Ligeti was mortified to hear four of his recent compositions in 2001: A Space Odyssey. No one had sought his permission. The record company let Kubrick have the music without contacting him. Ligeti sued, then agreed to settle out of court.
Potential displeasure abounded. In his choice of Also Sprach Zarathustra Kubrick wanted Decca’s magisterial recording of Herbert von Karajan conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. The company allowed this prized performance to be used so long as the version did not appear in the film’s titles. Executives feared repercussions in classical music circles. Which is why Decca substituted what music buffs considered a lesser rendition—Karl Böhm conducting the Berlin Philharmonic—on what became the best-selling record of the film’s soundtrack.

A space movie was the last thing expected of Stanley Kubrick. After consecutive successes with Spartacus in 1960, Lolita in 1962 and Dr Strangelove in 1964, the thirty-five-year-old director was what the movie industry called “bankable” by mid-decade. It was expected that his next project would be lavish, but the gossips were thwarted because Kubrick had removed himself from Hollywood.

In his Manhattan apartment overlooking Central Park, distance enabled him to develop films without interference by production company pests. This was also the reason he used studio facilities in London, well away from prying executives. After early stresses with Warner Brothers, Kubrick had signed with Associated Artists for Lolita, which was shot at London’s Elstree Studios and distributed by MGM, then shifted allegiances to Columbia for Dr Strangelove, shot at Shepperton Studios. Then came a golden offer from MGM. Kubrick might have an open ticket to do what he liked—he would be his own producer.

So two months after Dr Strangelove was released Kubrick sent a telegram, and follow-up letter, to the British science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who lived in Ceylon. Kubrick wrote that he wanted to make a film which, “assuming great plot and character”, would handle three themes: a space probe landing on and exploring the moon and Mars in the near future; the reason for believing in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life; the impact (or perhaps a lack of impact in some quarters) such a discovery might have on Earth at that time.  Would Clarke be interested in collaborating on a screenplay? This was in March 1964.

At forty-seven years of age, Clarke was hungry to do a movie. He shot back a telegram embracing the prospect: “Frightfully interested in working with enfant terrible.”  A week on, having thought about the possibilities, he followed with a long letter crammed with detailed ideas, as well as suggesting further themes and potential plot lines. Clarke said he would soon be in New York on business so they could meet then. He was emphatic that he wanted a credible film of scientific merit, not a corny space adventure. He included in the fat manila envelope sent to Kubrick copies of pieces he’d published on the realities of space flight.

By April 22, Clarke was in New York. Time-Life had flown him across to negotiate his writing a popular science book, Man and Space, although his immediate goal was to see the huge NASA display at the World’s Fair which had just opened in Queens.  The director and the novelist hit it off when they met in a bar. Clarke accepted the Time-Life deal, so, staying at the Chelsea Hotel, he spent much of the year researching and writing a manuscript.  This enabled him to see Kubrick often. Together they visited the NASA display repeatedly, discussing space exploration, as well as going to art museums looking for visual stimulus.

Quite early Kubrick and Clarke fixed on two of Clarke’s published works for a movie treatment. One was his 1948 short story “The Sentinel”, in which a pyramid of immense age is found on the moon’s surface. How it came to be there, and any details of those responsible, were impossible to determine. The thing just sat in the lunar wilderness, an enigma defying explanation. Kubrick liked the cinematic possibilities. The pair also discussed Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End, which concerns benign aliens taking charge of Earth. These rulers supervise terrestrial affairs to build a paradise, although by engineering the emergence of telepathy in the planet’s inhabitants, creativity is accidentally stamped out and human evolution damaged. Kubrick and Clarke could not work up a screenplay as another director had purchased the option on this novel, although it suggested a theme.  The pair toyed with ideas.

Of course, their project would tap the high-tech spirit of the times. Around the world, people were enthralled by the ambitious space programs of the Soviet Union and United States. In 1961 the Russians had put the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin, following this with several manned Vostok missions in Earth orbit, as well as sending the first successful probe to Mars in 1962. The United States toiled to catch up with its Mercury program, under which seven Americans likewise each singly orbited the earth, although the flamboyant Russian response was to put a woman, Valentina Tereskova, into space in June 1963. Flouting the aeronautical expertise America boasted of its astronauts, she wasn’t a trained pilot.

When Kubrick and Clarke began work there was excitement over the Gemini missions where paired American astronauts took capsules on increasingly longer space flights—although in 1965 the Russians again upped the stakes by having Alexei Leonov perform a space walk. The two superpowers had eyes set on reaching the moon, President Kennedy pledging America would get there by decade’s end. The space race was intense. Having been repeatedly beaten by the Soviet Union, the United States was in an all-out rush to have an astronaut plant the Stars-and-Stripes on the lunar surface. Mind you, the Russian government announced its scientists had begun advanced planning for a manned Mars expedition.
With Clarke’s Time-Life assignment providing entrée, the novelist and the director talked with scientists at MIT, astronomers with the Smithsonian Institution, engineers and rocket designers from NASA, even inspected—and touched—a Mercury capsule. The meetings cemented Kubrick’s determination that plausibility be the rule. They listened to expert guidance throughout. One young astrophysicist, Carl Sagan, warned against ever showing aliens: “Suggest them,” he advised.

The film’s screenplay would use the confident predictions being made by scientists and technical experts. Already telecommunications, meteorology, agriculture and mineral exploration were benefiting from a host of specialised satellites placed in orbit; indeed, having decades earlier published an influential paper proposing that such satellites be developed, Clarke looked on their presence with almost paternal pride. The prospective benefits to humanity of industrial expansion into space seemed boundless.

In keeping with this optimism, the storyline would be framed by a portrayal of regular work as humanity expanded off-planet. The film was to be set thirty years into a popularly forecast—and credible—future when space flight was routine, commercial space stations orbited the globe, and settlements were dotted across the moon.

Kubrick and Clarke co-wrote a treatment in December 1964. Kubrick then met his backers in early February. MGM was pleased with the proposed film—called Journey Beyond the Stars—authorising a $4.5 million budget.  Kubrick would be free of executive supervision. The film would also be shot in Cinerama.

Using three synchronised cameras and three projectors, the Cinerama company had launched the widescreen innovation of the 1950s, although by 1965 the firm had converted to single-strip 70mm productions released in cinemas with broad curved screens.  This allowed directors to shoot spectacular landscape displays which conveyed to theatre audiences the overwhelming visual impression of being within an extensive vista. Cinerama delivered sights not seen before. For this reason films using the process were often marketed as virtual tourism, and besides being used for commercially lucrative documentaries and travelogues, the format was embraced for historical epics like How the West Was Won.  In fact, referring to the hit western when he made his pitch, Kubrick presented the project as a tale of pioneers taming a new frontier in space.  He promised MGM an epic filled with sublime vistas of Earth, the moon, and the solar system.
Cinerama signed on for Kubrick’s project, although the company stipulated in the contract that the “photo-play does constitute a road-show”.  This was a Hollywood marketing device used by big-budget movies to combat television.

A roadshow release had long runs in premium cinemas equipped with curved screens and using the trappings of theatre performances. There were special screening times, tickets were booked, there was an orchestral overture before the film proper commenced, and the film must have an intermission. This accounts for certain characteristics of Kubrick’s film, as well as its unusual staggered release using a global chain of Cinerama-equipped venues. MGM and Cinerama were anticipating a substantial movie even before a foot of film had been shot, and would market and distribute it accordingly.
By July 1965, Kubrick and Clarke had written a screenplay, and were in Britain assembling the crew.  The base of operations was a serviced apartment taken by Kubrick in the Dorchester Hotel. Kubrick scheduled twenty weeks for shooting, twenty weeks editing, then twelve weeks preparation for cinema release.  Filming would begin before Christmas at MGM’s Borehamwood studios on the outskirts of London.

Production staff focused on planning logistics, drawing up timelines for, then seeing to, set construction, costumes, the development of special effects. Intensive work got under way with a crew of specialist designers—Kubrick recruited thirty-five designers and twenty-five technicians with backgrounds in documentary and science films, as well as hiring commercial artists from NASA.  And there was casting. MGM had anticipated a vehicle for major stars, like Paul Newman or Steve McQueen, although Kubrick recoiled from testosterone-charged heroics. “The astronauts had to look and act like the men of NASA,” his biographer Vincent Lobrutto clarifies, “outwardly pleasant but cool and emotionally enclosed.”
Activity increased exponentially as the work needed for a challenging production became apparent. Complex sets were engineered for a space station’s interior and the centrifuge-like living quarters on the Jupiter mission. Production was difficult, with filming in the studios stretching from December 17, 1965, and July 14, 1966.  Another unit prepared a brief documentary prologue where scientists, intellectuals and religious leaders are interviewed on the possible existence of alien life.  A further crew travelled to Africa to shoot material for a prehistoric segment, then to the United States for material used in a stargate sequence.

Expecting their costly production in roadshow cinemas by Christmas 1966, MGM was poised to publicise the movie with full media spin. Over in London, Stanley Kubrick delayed.

The director had attempted a rough edit. It wouldn’t cohere into a firm whole, so he and Clarke revised the script, rethinking the plot and writing new material. It is apparent that the director and the novelist were sometimes at cross purposes. Sleek, sexless, preoccupied with style, Clarke was the gifted collaborator.  He crafted evocative details, such as when the character Haywood Floyd is served a meal packaged for a weightless environment, then Floyd goes to use a “zero-gravity” toilet. These moments evoked a convincing fictional world. But Clarke was spellbound by the romance of space exploration and wanted to include too much.

Kubrick, who had weighty ambitions for the tale, was forced to assess what might be cut. He began with a voice-over narration for the entire movie.  Was this to be a feature film, or a science lesson? It came out. Likewise he removed scenes which did not significantly contribute to the story. Much of the segment on the space station, including a tourist shop and Floyd’s meal in the restaurant’s “Earthlight Room”, went on the cutting room floor.  It was a distraction. Then Kubrick discarded the ten-minute prologue. Who wants to hear—before the main feature—scientists, a priest and a rabbi speculating on aliens? Kubrick sent a telegram to Clarke in November 1967 on the deletions. Clarke replied from Ceylon that he was “rather upset”, but accepted that it was the director’s film.

Piece by piece Kubrick took away the narrative scaffolding customary in movies, distilling cinema to images, sounds and music.  He later explained his purpose:

It’s essentially a non-verbal experience. It attempts to communicate more to the subconscious and to the feelings than it does to the intellect. I think clearly that there’s a basic problem with people who are not paying attention with their eyes. They’re listening … Those who won’t believe their eyes won’t be able to understand the film.

This visual sense is instantaneous at the film’s new beginning. The MGM clip employed at the movie’s start was reinvented. Instead of the roaring lion used since the 1930s, a flat yellow modernist logo of an abstracted lion’s head against a cobalt blue field appeared for several seconds. Next followed an opening sequence where, to the strains of Strauss’s Zarathustra, the sun rises over the Earth and Moon, three vast spheres aligned in the dark maw of space. Then the main title appears, which is set in sans serif Futura typography. The swollen circles of 2001 and Odyssey rhymed visually with the heavenly bodies; the rotund zeros and letter o of this white modernist script are the same size as the risen sun, making a visual balance with it. Kubrick was composing upon the cinema screen.
Release of the film was held over while Kubrick had more special effects shot, and went through increasing re-edits. MGM was anxious. But, with US$6 million expended on the project by late 1966, the company accepted what would become an ever-mounting delay.

When it did appear in cinemas in 1968, the costly US$10.5 million feature film was unlike any in movie history.  With a title evoking the threshold of a new millennium, 2001: A Space Odyssey begins nearly four million years ago near the African Rift Valley, the approximate dating and known location for the emergence of hominids.
The audience watched a band of Australopithecus, the first bipedal primates, who are struggling to survive. Suddenly, an alien device is set for a day near their den. By some unseen means, this upright rectangular monolith acts on the cognition of one primate, inducing higher brain function. As a consequence he conceptualises about basic tool use—he invents the club. With his leadership, the troop begins to hunt collectively to obtain food. The thinking primate also clubs to death the alpha male of a rival primate troop which is competing for access to a soakhole. It is subtly inferred during the overarching course of the film that these actions set Australopithecus on the evolutionary path that led to Homo sapiens.
The audience is then abruptly taken forward to the late twentieth century when humanity is starting to expand off-world. Settlements have been constructed on the moon, and a mining survey there has found the alien mechanism. Scientific evidence shows it was deliberately buried forty feet beneath the lunar surface, and this action has been dated to four million years ago. Upon being exposed to sunlight, the uncanny object sends a radio transmission to Jupiter.
The story then moves along eighteen months. A scientific expedition is travelling by interplanetary rocket to Jupiter to find what or who the alien signal was sent to. The remote mission is managed by HAL, an advanced computer which possesses a form of consciousness. But, deciding it cannot trust humans, this thinking machine kills all except one of the crew. The remaining astronaut deactivates HAL and continues the mission alone.
Arriving at Jupiter, the astronaut finds a copy of the alien device in orbit over the planet. As he moves in to investigate, it acts as a gateway to another dimension, and the astronaut endures a long disorienting psychedelic passage. Kubrick explained:

The artefact sweeps him into a force field or stargate that hurls him on a journey through inner and outer space and finally transports him to another part of the galaxy, where he’s placed in a human zoo approximating a hospital terrestrial environment drawn out of his dreams and imagination. In a timeless state, his life passes from middle age to senescence to death. He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman if you like, and returns to earth prepared for the next leap forward in man’s evolutionary destiny.

Visually, the film ends with the glowing, semi-embryonic child watching Earth from space.

There was bafflement when 2001: A Space Odyssey filled cinemascope screens in April 1968. Audiences were entranced by the arid beauty of the African and lunar landscapes. These breathtaking vistas set a contrast with the futuristic sets, especially the stylish curving concourse of a space station orbiting earth. A bold statement in 1960s design values, its white minimalist interior was conspicuously furnished with Olivier Mourgue’s red “Djinn” chairs and Eero Saarinen’s pedestal tables. Staff on the space station and lunar base fittingly wore trim apparel influenced by couturiers including Pierre Cardin and Yves Saint Laurent, while even the alien device smacked of high 1960s culture. A smooth grey geometric slab which seemed at once absolute and ambiguous, it conveyed a similar visual authority to recent abstract art—it was a contemporary sculpture at one remove. (Art historians have since wondered at possible links with the 1960s art of Anne Truitt and John McCracken.)
But audiences were confounded by the storyline. Many struggled with an oblique plot that went over their heads. Some viewers walked out during screenings. Stumped by a symbolic, slow-moving tale, mainstream reviewers likewise spurned the film as boring and pointless.
Popularity swung around on the film’s general release. This was boosted by mounting exhilaration over America’s space program: Apollo 8 made the first manned circumlunar flight at Christmas 1968, and NASA had scheduled a moon landing for Apollo 11 the following July. Audiences came to see much-praised sequences in space and on the moon. The younger generation treated Friday and Saturday night screenings as a 1960s “happening”—publicity promoted the film as “the ultimate trip”—although the intelligentsia applauded a screenplay which tapped into lively debates on human nature. Kubrick admitted in interviews he wanted to open up humanity’s relationship to technology.  So talk focused on potential connections with Marshall McLuhan’s controversial theories on the evolution of human thought.
A literary historian, McLuhan’s book The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) had offered a curious perspective on how civilisation was changed by the advent of the movable-type printing press. It had long been accepted that Johannes Gutenberg’s remarkable press transformed the world of human affairs. The new print shop became a forcing chamber for learning, ideas and innovation; because cheap, rapid printing allowed information to spread widely and quickly, thereby causing knowledge to be advanced. McLuhan pressed the implications of this further to claim that Gutenberg’s press changed what it was to be a person: intellectual horizons irrevocably opened out across Europe due to acceptance of the printing press. In this confident vein, he said the introduction of mechanical linear typography had led to:

Nationalism, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, the whole concept of causality, Cartesian and Newtonian concepts of the universe, perspective in art, narrative chronology in literature and a psychological mode of introspection or inner direction that greatly intensified the tendencies towards individualism and specialisation.

In McLuhan’s follow-up book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), a list of inventions that changed personal behaviour, he expanded this reasoning to contend that modern man has not so much used communication and information technology, as these technologies have reconfigured us. For McLuhan, how we experience the world has been reinvented by major shifts in print then electronic media. Pointing to how television mediates understanding of the modern world, he contended that electrical networks extend the human: “With the arrival of electric technology,” he wrote, “man extended, or set outside himself, a life model of the central nervous system.”  This implies that human perception and thought will be subordinated by new technology, the theme of his next book The Medium is the Massage (1967). He postulated that society would adapt in pace with communications and data storage systems, claiming computerisation moulds human experience: “Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are interfaces within the new environments created by electronic informational media.”
McLuhan’s taxing theories stood large in debates on changing technology when Kubrick contemplated making a film on space exploration-cum-scientific discovery. And some viewers suspected an influence in how the film suggests an interconnectedness of human development and technology due to the discovery by Australopithecus of the club: “all of man’s technology grew out of his discovery of the tool-weapon”, Kubrick said in interview.  The film’s plot implies that the first lethal club sets primates on the path to Homo sapiens, thereby shaping human destiny, indeed, using montage, we jump forward visually between segments, shifting from a close-up of the elongated club to watching a satellite orbit the earth. In this way Kubrick implies a primitive tool has led to this sophisticated instrument, seemingly affirming McLuhan’s point that human development is necessarily entangled with technological progress.
The main part of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is set in space, does stress how machines must define the human world when off-planet. Whether orbiting the earth, on the moon, then travelling across the solar system, people are physically encased within technology; and this condition’s limitations are shown in a crisis when technology breaks down. The computer controlling the Jupiter mission to all intents goes mad, killing much of the crew. It requires a clever feat of human imagination for the astronaut Dave Bowman, who has been locked out of the spaceship, to work out how to re-enter and take charge.

Kubrick’s film offered a vision of space that was non-military. There are no uniforms, ranks or military insignia visible in the space station, at the moon base, or on the Jupiter mission. There aren’t even national badges on space suits. Instead, this is an affluent social environment of elegant business suits and smart corporate uniforms. As for authority, apart from a limp American flag in a corner of the conference room at Clavius base, there are no allusions to governments or political masters. No reference is ever made to a president, congress, or senate.
The Cold War appears over. All is amicable when Dr Haywood Floyd encounters several Soviet technicians in the transit lounge of a space station. The Russians, who have been installing a lunar antenna array, likewise lack military uniforms, ranks, badges or insignia, nor do they mention their government, even tangentially. And if there is tension between Floyd and the ingratiating Dr Andrei Smyslov, it is because the smarmy apparatchik tries to ply the executive for sensitive information.
In the absence of military rank among those employed in space, the only title—which is uniformly used—is “doctor”. But while science is invoked, once, the characters encountered are not evidently research scientists. Instead, we move among technicians and administrators who are enmeshed in the work of management. The reason why Dr Floyd of the National Council of Astronautics travels to the moon is to “prepare a report”. Likewise the briefing he addresses is subdued and routine. In low-key friendly tones, Floyd thanks the staff on their performance. “And, of course,” he adds almost as an afterthought, “congratulations on your discovery, which may well prove to be among the most significant in the history of science.”
There is no bristle of excitement in the room, no Archimedes leaping up and hollering “Eureka!” Instead, the gathered personnel are soberly focused on managing science; and, for them, a major discovery amounts to a big administrative problem. Routines have had to be disrupted. Security has been stepped up, secrecy imposed, staff must sign oaths. Much paperwork needs to be processed by these organisation men and women, Floyd explains, before decisions might be taken on when, and how, to make a public announcement. No one expresses dissent. “The way we look at it,” the base manager reassures, “it’s our job to do this thing the way you want it done, [and] we’re only too happy to oblige.”
Kubrick shows audiences a future where space exploration has been absorbed into business. The lunar anomaly which triggered events in the main part of the story was detected in a mining survey (“We thought it was an outcrop of magnetic rock,” someone explains). Later still, a message to Dr Frank Poole aboard the Discovery One mission assures him the accounting office at Houston is aware he is moving up a grade, and his salary change will take effect from next month. Mind you, we soon learn that the lunar discovery eighteen months before is still a secret, and the crew of the Jupiter mission don’t know their real objective.
Of course, Kubrick prepares the audience for this future at the outset with space segments that show corporations have proliferated off-world. After arriving at the space station orbiting earth, Floyd makes a call home from a “picturephone” booth operated by Bell Inc. Adjacent to the booth is the concierge’s desk for a branch of the Hilton Hotel which is up here, and further along we can see the Howard Johnson’s restaurant chain has a franchise. After breakfasting there, Floyd is booked on a regular Pan-Am commuter flight onward to the moon. Lest we think commercial expansion is wholly American, the Russian women Floyd chats with in the transit lounge have Aeroflot travel bags.
These subtleties were not carried into Arthur C. Clarke’s novelisation of the project. He may have toiled amicably with Kubrick on the screenplay, although they did not see eye-to-eye on certain points—which explains significant differences between film and book in scenes, characters, conversations and details. The novel is more an adventure encumbered with the detritus of Cold War popular fiction, including messages from the American president, a contest with the Soviets, and extensive military paraphernalia.

There was a probable point to military omissions—by the mid-1960s it was anathema for Stanley Kubrick to heroise any aspect of martial endeavour. This pattern was set by his film Paths of Glory (1957) which had brought him to critical attention.
The plot focused on an officer elite living in a moral vacuum. Kubrick revealed French military justice in the Great War, where ceremonial scapegoats were punished for cowardice whenever an infantry company was defeated. The audience is taken through this warped process by following three frontline soldiers who do no wrong, but, after being chosen by lot, must endure a sham court martial then be executed by firing squad. Most striking is a recurring contrast between the muddy troops crammed in cold and dangerous trenches, and the braided generals living in ornate palaces and chatting about casualty rates as they quaff Bordeaux and nibble grilled pheasant. With arresting accuracy to detail, Paths of Glory remains one of the finest films on the First World War.
Then there was Kubrick’s recent commercial feature, Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Crafting it as a black comedy, Kubrick again showed the twisted, self-interested values of an officer-and-politician class disconnected from society.
Dr Strangelove had been prompted by the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when a young American president, John F. Kennedy, and the seasoned Soviet Cold Warrior Nikita Khrushchev faced off with fingers poised beside nuclear command buttons. Kubrick approached the subject via the sage warnings of the former president Dwight Eisenhower, who had publicly denounced what he called “the military-industrial complex”.
As a career officer, Eisenhower believed defence spending in peacetime was dead weight, being inflationary and subtracting from the nation’s vitality.  In the eight years of his presidency he oversaw a military spending cut, a curb on weapons development, and a reduction in the armed forces, while steadfastly resisting when others pressed for action.  Besides authorising an armistice in Korea, Ike held that staying out of Suez, Hungary and Indo-China was essential to American well-being and world peace. Experience had also ingrained his suspicion of “the munitions people” and their chorus of Pentagon generals. Air Force glory-seekers were worst in his view. “I’m getting awfully sick of their lobbying,” he told Republican leaders. “You begin to see this thing isn’t wholly about the defense of this country.”  Besides, as Eisenhower assured his successor when vacating the White House, the United States had overwhelming nuclear advantage.  Due to Polaris, the much-fretted-over “missile gap” was a political fiction.
So there was jockeying for influence from the military-industrial complex when Kennedy entered the Oval Office. Styling himself as a dynamic leader who would shape a new global order, he eased the valves on military spending. Presidential resolve was soon tested when Kennedy handled flashpoint crises over the Berlin Wall, then the Bay of Pigs, then missiles in Cuba. Behind the confrontation with Khrushchev, the new president had to stand his ground against vested interests.
Kubrick modelled Dr Strangelove as a parody of another crisis. The military-industrial elite is shown driving America into war through unprincipled powerplay. Military, business and political leaders are reckless clowns, greedy fools and conceited buffoons. Presiding over all is Dr Strangelove, the master strategist and scientific expert. Kubrick is unsparing in this caricature of the ex-Nazi engineer Wernher von Braun, who had blasted allied cities with V-2 ballistic missiles, and was latterly the US’s head of missile and rocket development. Strangelove is portrayed as frigidly insane. The movie ends with nuclear annihilation.
Dr Strangelove was immensely funny, yet bleak. After finishing the film’s edit, Kubrick told friends he wanted something optimistic for his next project. No conflict, no armed forces, no power structure. It would be a story that wouldn’t aid the Jeremiahs forecasting imminent world war—a future-affirming movie about some positive aspect of humanity. Space exploration seemed the likely path. But he recoiled from science fiction which depicted civilisation’s future as a militarised American space empire.

Having the film’s plot start with Australopithecus inventing the first tool—a club—was a signal move in 1968. Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey tempered enthusiasm for space exploration with fresh scientific questions about human ancestry arising from archaeological discoveries in Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia.
This was bound to provoke hostility in the United States. By affirming that the human race originated in East Africa, the feature film underlined an awkward truth as America struggled politically and socially over Civil Rights. It was an incendiary theme. Then there was how Kubrick pressed the point hard that science cannot be selectively edited: one cannot have space travel and creationism. They are inconsistent. This epic movie designed for family viewing not only endorsed evolution. Removing God from the human equation, it asserted that an alien species caused the emergence of Homo sapiens. Audiences across the United States were torn. The film was a rousing celebration of American know-how and technological mastery in space, although it offended religious beliefs.
These were side issues, however, because the “Dawn of Man’ sequence grapples with a deep post-war pessimism. Faith in humanity had been tested in the 1940s, with the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials raising more questions than they settled: why had civilised, educated men succumbed to barbarism? Even as people struggled to comprehend these evils, the Cold War arose, police states emerged in Eastern Europe, former colonial nations were torn by violent upheaval, while the world edged closer to nuclear cataclysm. Some Western thinkers, the distinguished writer Aldous Huxley chief among them, wondered if human violence is innate: might aggression be so tightly wired into our neural pathways that we are compelled to destroy? Huxley’s 1948 book Ape and Essence pressed a doom-laden view that the purpose of civilisation is to allow fighting to escalate. Stones flung by rival apes had led progressively to spears, arrows, swords, guns, cannon, bombs, then atomic missiles. Man is a killer ape, Huxley concluded, so self-extinction through large scale militarised violence is inevitable.
Intellectuals found this “killer ape’ theory most attractive during the early Cold War. It carried weight and set experts looking for suitable evidence. Most prominent was the animal psychologist Konrad Lorenz, whose investigations into aggression supported a view that violent behaviour was the motivating force behind human evolution, so much so, that it is innate to Homo sapiens.  Publishing a definitive book in 1964, Lorenz later won a Nobel Prize. The polymath Arthur Koestler also explored claims for and against latent violence in his major book on the human mind, Ghost in the Machine (1967), a sophisticated historical study which considered moral capacity and social change, not just technical cleverness. But the presiding voice in the “killer ape” argument was the archaeologist Raymond Dart, who, in thirty-nine scientific papers published between 1949 and 1965, posited that aggression emerged with Australopithecus.
Dart believed a cluster of fossilised animal bones found in a cave in the Rift Valley had, over three million years ago, been struck down by clubs made from femora or tibia bones. He decided they had been hunted by Australopithecus, using skulls to assess increasing brain size. He also speculated that this new primate was successful in the survival stakes because it was violent, being prone to fight—and kill—social rivals. Dart made his case in a 1953 essay, “The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man”: surveying the evidence he had assembled, he reasoned that “Man’s predecessors differed from living apes in being confirmed killers”. With colourful language, the article ended on a pessimistic note:

The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history from the earliest Egyptian and Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War accord with early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices or their substitutes in formalised religions and with the worldwide scalping, headhunting, body-mutilating and necrophiliac practices of mankind in proclaiming this bloodlust differentiator, this predacious habit, this mark of Cain that separates man dietetically from his anthropoidal relatives and allies him rather with the deadliest of Carnivora.

This interpretation of the fossil record would be discredited in the 1970s. But it was accepted as valid when Robert Ardrey popularised Dart’s ideas through his 1961 book African Genesis.
Kubrick and Clarke had used the book Adam’s Ancestors, by the foremost archaeologist Louis Leakey, when researching hominids for their screenplay. Then they read African Genesis.  The pair agreed to build “The Dawn of Man”, their film’s prehistoric section, around the “Killer Ape” theorem; those key fifteen minutes would illustrate Dart’s thesis that Australopithecus was set on the evolutionary path forward by taking up bone-clubs and using them to hunt and kill. 2001: A Space Odyssey gives this a further fictional twist by proposing that aggression was implanted in hominids by an alien mechanism. The plot relies on grasping the cognitive implications of that encounter—an action later inverted when instead of becoming agitated and violent, the calm and collected Dave Bowman removes the murderous mission computer’s microchips. (“My mind is going,” a worried HAL says, “I can feel it. I’m afraid.”) Man is not an impulsive ape.

What makes 2001: A Space Odyssey such an exceptional film musically is how those compositions convey meaning. Kubrick should be distinguished here from directors who have skilfully used music to set mood. Lucino Visconti’s adaptation of the Thomas Mann novella Death in Venice relies entirely on how Gustav Mahler’s music is employed throughout. That film’s rapturous opening is little short of breathtaking. The cinecamera evokes a Turner painting by showing the sun rising from a misty lagoon while the audience is being lifted by the strains of the fourth movement to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.
At the other extreme, Carol Reed’s The Third Man would be a diminished production if not for Anton Karas’s unrelenting zither plunking along in pace with the camera. There had been belligerent arguments with the producers over that insistent noise. Karas was a busker who struggled to read music; besides, the film company had an agreement with the Royal Philharmonic not to use any other ensemble. But Reed had heard Karas at a Vienna wine tavern, and wanted this unrefined sound for his still-to-be-shot thriller.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey Kubrick not so much arranged as structured music to enhance cinematic meaning. For instance, he had it in mind all along to have spacecraft moving in synchronised flight and docking accompanied by a waltz, and asked Alex North to write a light piece. Then, late in the edit, Christiane Kubrick pressed her husband instead to use Johann Strauss’s The Blue Danube, making him listen to a newly released record of von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic.  He embraced her choice.
Then there is the introductory sequence to the Jupiter mission. Aram Khachaturian’s score from the Kirov ballet Gayane is mostly known for the sabre dance and peasant wedding sections, although Kubrick used the adagio movement, “Carpet Weavers”, as the astronaut Dave Bowman jogs and shadow-boxes around the spacecraft like a solitary hamster in its wheel.  There is a haunting poignancy to this melody, which is carried solely by strings.
But it was his use of Gÿorgy Ligeti’s recent compositions that mated Kubrick’s imagery with exalted harmonics in ways that seemed to approach the profound. This was established with a polyphony of textures and sounds from the instrumental Atmosphéres (1961), used as the film’s overture. Ligeti’s beatless choral work Lux Aeterna (1966), a Latin prayer for the dead, is later played when a moon-bus flies across the desolate lunar surface; and the Kyrie section of his Requiem (1965), where soaring voices implore God’s mercy in Greek, is matched with those scenes where apes, then astronauts, encounter the alien monolith. That convergence of climactic imagery with Ligeti’s uncanny choral music is where the film approaches a gesamkunstwerk, a total work of art. Later, a disquieting, electronically altered form of Aventures (1962) is heard in the long psychedelic sequence. Despite his initial upset at these uses, Gÿorgy Ligeti came to appreciate Kubrick’s efforts; a friendship grew and he advised on music in later films.
Overarching all is the introductory fanfare “Sunrise” from Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem Also Sprach Zarathustra, a homage to Friedrich Nietzsche’s great philosophical work of the same name. There is purpose in the choice because the film’s plot summons to mind the declaration in Nietzsche’s prologue:

I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? … You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now man is more of an ape than any ape.

The composer’s intentions were in keeping with this outlook, Strauss saying of this work, “I meant to convey by means of music an idea of the development of the human race from its origin”, culminating in it reaching the Übermensch, a morally advanced “Superman”.

Stanley Kubrick presses this point by having the Strauss composition accompany the film’s opening and concluding visual passages, as well as when Australopithecus discovers and uses a club.  The first use does underline a recurring “Sunrise” symbol as the sun breaks over the earth. Beyond this motif, on each occasion the music invokes humanity’s capacity to self-surpass and achieve a next evolutionary stage; with the film’s conclusion Kubrick refutes those cynics who held that man cannot purge himself of “the Killer Ape”. Far from still being prey to instinctive aggression and violence, the rational self-possessed space traveller Dr David Bowman represents the point where evolution takes another transformative step—as the exultant horns, thunderous drums and throbbing organ of Richard Strauss’s music emphatically announce.
Christopher Heathcote is the author of Inside the Art Market: Australia’s Galleries, a History (Thames & Hudson). He wrote on Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining in the December 2013 issue.