I've read Arthur Clarke's novelization of 2001—and I do think that's roughly the appropriate way to regard his book. Clarke and Kubrick worked together for a while, then Clarke left while 2001 was still in production and wrote a novel based on what had been developed for the film up to that point. There were crucial changes, many motivated by the necessity to scale things back to what could actually be filmed. Jupiter was easier to put on screen than Saturn and Iapetus. A flat black monolith was a more feasible practical effect than a crystal-clear one. But the most important difference between Clarke's novel, and what Kubrick eventually finished and released to theaters, is that Clarke tried to explain things—that was always his style as a writer, dry and expository—and Kubrick didn't. And I like that.
Clarke makes the Monolith into a familiar sci-fi trope that I think is...tedious at best. He explicitly reveals that alien astronauts seeded the Monolith onto Earth, and it's doing some sort of freaky magitek on the hominids' brains. This plot device has a stink of Erich von Däniken and other promoters of various "alien astronaut" theories popular with racists—the idea being that the great achievements of non-European civilizations were in fact the work of space aliens, not the labors of actual human peoples. Kubrick simply does away with all that. There's no aliens in Kubrick's 2001, not even at the end; Bowman's journey "beyond the infinite" is ambiguous in the highest degree, and Kubrick drops no explicit hints (as does Clarke in his novel) about who, if anyone, is controlling Bowman's strange experiences. Nor does Kubrick show that the Earth Monolith does anything. It sits there, being weird and unique, and in its vicinity a hominid starts using bones in a different way. Does that mean the hominid was programmed by the Monolith? I suggest that the Monolith doesn't need to do anything: it's enough for the Monolith to be a completely bizarre and novel experience, something utterly outside the hominids' previous knowledge. Weirdness alone, I think, is enough to explain why at least one of the hominids would start thinking and behaving differently.
I don't know if this was Kubrick's intention, mind you. There's every possibility that he believed in the same kind of alien-astronaut stuff that Clarke put in his book, but he judged it was better filmmaking to keep the Monolith and the aliens as mysterious as possible. And I think Kubrick succeeds, brilliantly, in making a film that's got one of the purest cinematic depictions of the Unknown I've ever seen. His Monolith isn't just a magitek artifact; it's Mystery itself, an abstraction of the unknowable condensed into a black prism, one by four by nine.
That brings me to a childhood hero of mine: Carl Sagan. He had a poetical quality that's conspicuously lacking from the modern-day popularizers and boosters of science; he seems truly to appreciate the vastness of space, the sheer overwhelming unknownness of space, and one's personal insignificance in the face of it. Sagan's opening monologue in Cosmos sets the mood right away: the most important thing about the Cosmos is that it's too big for us:
Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us; there's tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as of a distant memory of falling from a great height.
(That last image has extreme personal significance for me...imagine, if you will, the experience of falling out of a cosmic perspective and into a painfully personal and individual one...a fall that takes but a moment, and which also lasts forever.)
Mystery doesn't need to be a religious thing. Certain Christians have a habit of talking about mystery as if they own the concept, as if the only possible source of mystery in the world were the stale formulae and tropes of Christian lore, but there's plenty of scope for mystery even if you're an atheist and a philosophical materialist. Even if you think there's nothing in the Cosmos other than matter and energy, there's so much of it and we've seen so painfully little of it. Humanity has, as Carl Sagan put it, barely tested the waters at the edge of the cosmic Sea. We've explored other bodies in the Solar System but there's only so much you can learn about a planet from sending one probe, or even a hundred of them. We have seen almost nothing even of the Moon and Mars.
It's not fashionable for scientific and technical people, in contemporary public life and especially the world of business, to dwell on how little knowledge humanity actually possesses. Capitalism and Western culture prefer to maintain the illusion that all problems have easy solutions. Space is almost completely unknown, yet to modern-day high-tech culture, space is a solved thing, a known thing, a domain of Facts™ and Science™. Also, it's a treasure chest poised to be unlocked by men of determination. There's no real humility in this culture, even though it's ritualized an insincere acknowledgement of Sagan's "pale blue dot" mindset. Does Elon Musk have any such humility?
Or is it he like Zaphod Beeblebrox? Beeblebrox gets shown a "Total Perspective Vortex", and he seems to learn that he's the most important person in the Universe—but there's an explanation for that, as it turns out, in that Beeblebrox was given the "total perspective" of a bubble Universe that was made specifically for him. It takes a while for Beeblebrox to get the point, though. Well...who hasn't made that mistake? It's taken us a long time, several years of dealing with painful spiritual experiences and moments of "personal gnosis", to learn how to put such experiences into perspective. We're still working on it. A truly cosmic perspective doesn't come easily; it's certainly not the sort of thing you learn simply from reading a book about or watching a movie.
(sighs) so many words. it's difficult to bring oneself to the point of stepping off the precipice.
~Chara / Χαρά