Last year, I shared someone's post on Facebook featuring a segment from an interview conducted with Stanley Kubrick in 1980, but not released until after his death, in which Kubrick explained his intended meaning of the confounding scene at the end of "2001: A Space Odyssey":
The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by godlike entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form. They put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life passes from that point on in that room. And he has no sense of time. ... [W]hen they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth, transformed and made some kind of superman. We have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, and that is what we were trying to suggest.
Most artists, including movie directors, seem to want not to disclose their intended meaning of a work, but I'm such an irremediably literal-minded person who struggles and usually fails to arrive at any coherent interpretation of artistic or literary metaphors that I'm grateful to have stumbled onto Kubrick's explanation. More or less.
For there's just one problem. How does Kubrick's explanation logically connect with the movie's sequel "2010: The Year We Make Contact"? In "2010," astronauts journey to the site near Jupiter where astronaut Dave Bowman disappeared in "2001" to find out what happened to him and more about the godlike aliens implicated in his disappearance. But the problem is that Kubrick's explanation of the concluding scene in "2001" suggests that Bowman returned to Earth years before as a fetal cosmic superbeing poised to effect some kind of massive transformation of the Earth and/or its human inhabitants. Yet, "2010" exhibits no evidence of said transformation nor any mention of Bowman's prior return.
Well, I suppose one could theorize that when Bowman returned at the end of 2001 as a "Starchild," his celestial presence was unobserved by and, hence, unknown to people on Earth, and so was his carrying out his purpose. Perhaps he was sent merely to observe or monitor Earth activities, or perhaps to effect imperceptibly subtle but important changes facilitating the aliens' later plans which actualize in "2010."
So, if I look at it that way, I guess there's no real "problem" after all. The two movies can be readily reconciled, and all is well. They say writing about something can help you arrive at understandings you might not have had as soon or ever if you hadn't written about what you were trying to figure out. This little blogging exercise is proof positive of that.
