2001: A Space Odyssey—or, false starlight

You don’t like 2001: A Space Odyssey—you just think you do. You’ve been told to like it—again and again. You’ve been programmed, like HAL-9000. It’s to do with the author, and the director—they’re in it together, though it started with the author. Arthur C. Clarke liked to write stories that cut the divine down to size; hence he has a short story, The 9bn Names of God, in which a computer is programmed by Buddhist monks to repeat the apocryphal 9bn names of God and beam them into the universe; at the end, as Western technicians retreat from the monastery—the program has completed—behind them the stars blink out of existence one by one. So you see, religious truth will be attained through technology—that’s the Clarke schtick. In fact, you’ve probably seen his little phrase about “any sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be magic” repeated so many times it has a hole in the bottom (which lets water in).

Yet magic is magic, Mr. Clarke—and, in fact, by its very nature it has nothing to do with technology. At this point, we should recall how Clarke lived—in Ceylon, Sri Lanka. A white man who lives in South Asia…what possible…Oh, yes—the boys, the young boys. It was all hushed up of course; and, somehow, unlike Gary Glitter (young girls), Clarke remains respectable. Boys will be boys.

So 2001 is another variation on the old Clarke idea, on The 9bn Names of God. In this iteration, we are watched over by a mysterious supra-species that has laid a breadcrumb trail, made from black monoliths, that once followed will lead to our accelerated development (as happened before, when we were apes). Our fate is to become “a star child”—as represented in the film by a foetus that floats among the galaxies. As viewers said at the time, as they came down from their LSD trip and the credits rolled, “Far-out, man.”

Look, it’s an inversion: we can become the eternal stars—that was what the pyramids were about, they were a massive ceremony to transmogrify Pharaoh into a star; it’s what the Christians mean when they say the faithful will become angels in heaven, the angels are taken to be stars; it’s what Dante met when he ascended the mountain and went to heaven; it’s what David Bowie meant when he said he was a “star man”—it’s what the UFOs are, star-gods. Yet the way to the eternal stars is not through technology, it’s through magical rites and rituals; and these are qualitative, not quantitative, processes. So when the whole process is represented as technological, about our spaceships and how the gods will help us to “reach the next level”, that’s an inversion—it’s Satanic.

It even inverts the core Western myth, the Odyssey, in its name—yet even the Odyssey didn’t take place in this realm entire, as when Odysseus’s men, lacking in phroensis, stole the cattle of Helios; and the Argonauts were promoted to the stars too, the Golden Fleece being a magical operation. So the entire idea behind 2001 that the godhead and the gods are aliens and will “super-boost” us to the next level is false. It’s because Hollywood is Satanic: after all, it’s where “the stars” are, right? The false stars.

They don’t like ancient Egypt much, perhaps due to the Hebrew influence, and so the Egyptians always get demonised—you see a similar theme in Stargate where the Pharaoh is portrayed as an evil alien overlord; then again, perhaps he was just a ruler with a rebellious Hebrew staff, with Moses as a nascent Karl Marx, and they nabbed his magic, made off into the desert, and started their own religion. I’m not sure you should believe what the slaves say about Pharaoh, especially to judge by their post-Egyptian record—Pharaoh was fair-o, I think.

There’s this tick where radical rightists will say they really like Stanley Kubrick. It’s to do with the notion you’re not a total monster like Hitler, you don’t want to kill all the Jews—see, I like Stanley, he’s all right, this one (rubs head with knuckles). It has an odd effect, since when someone generally dislikes a group but then makes an exception it seems to carry a menace (you’re alright—for now). Anyway, it fulfils a certain psychological need for some people. However, Kubrick was a bad guy. 2001 is a Satanic film—that’s why it’s really boring. Satanism is dull. You only think it’s good because you’ve been told that your whole life.

Further, there’s some idea, especially on the radical right, that Kubrick is “our guy”—a spiritual Aryan, you might say; an honorary Aryan. It’s because he made Eyes Wide Shut and this supposedly “blew the lid” on the Satanic elites, so they had him killed—eh, I think if it blew the lid on anything, they’d have nixed the film (or killed Kubrick before he could make it). Further, people seem to really buy the film critic line that “Kubrick is a great auteur”—perhaps, but mostly he’s boring; even his best film, Barry Lyndon, is exquisite in a Vaseline-smeared lens way—yet dull.

Worse, Kubrick’s film Paths of Glory is straightforward anti-militarism and subversion of authority. And his Dr. Strangelove is even worse—by the way, it’s not funny either; as with 2001, you only think it’s funny because you’ve been told it’s funny all your life and so when you watch it you think it’s funny—as with the laugh track on a sitcom (“Oh yeah, I’m meant to laugh here, right? This is very funny.”). Strangelove is malicious because Strangelove himself, the Wernher von Braun-like scientist played by Peter Sellers, promotes a “doomsday device” that could blow up the whole world—typical Nazi, right? Yet, in reality, the main figure who discussed the real-life doomsday device and its possibility, in his On Thermonuclear War, was Herman Kahn—a Jewish scientist. It’s like projection—projection of your race’s actual willingness to countenance a technology that will destroy the world and placing it on your enemies. Which race invented the bomb, the counterfeit sun, anyway?

Hence, I cannot say I value Kubrick much—and that is because he made films that inverted the spiritual reality. His films were Satanic, just like Polanski’s films—his films openly celebrate the triumph of Satan on earth. “Oh, but it’s just a film.” No it isn’t. It’s a move by the agents of Satan to cover up the eternal stars and consign us to perpetual night and ugliness—and that’s why 2001: A Space Odyssey is a bad film.