Stanley Kubrick’s strangely literal explanation for the ending of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’
There’s a reason many artists avoid explaining their work. Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci penned an accompanying paragraph to the Mona Lisa in which he said, “Right lads, what I meant by that supposedly inscrutable expression is that the subject was bored out of her mind, and we had absolutely nothing to talk about. Wouldn’t read too much into it”, then no one should spend a minute trying to interpret it.
Most of us would be pretty disappointed, and the humanities branch of academia might collapse altogether. For the most part, artists recognise that when they make an enigmatic work, it ceases to belong to them the moment people watch, read, look at, or hear it. Allowing it to remain up for interpretation allows the audience to connect with it personally and gives it a type of immortality. As long as there are new people to interpret it in new ways, it will always resonate.
Such is the beauty of Stanley Kubrick’s 1967 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. Charting the evolution of humanity from squabbling apes to planet-hopping masters of the universe, it features some of the most cryptic storytelling committed to filmstock. Some plot points are more confounding than others. There is the supercomputer HAL, who lip-reads his astronaut masters’ plans to disconnect him and decides to kill them before they get the chance. And then there is the shiny black monolith which appears throughout the film but is never explained.
A lengthy, warp-speed trip through the cosmos is also gorgeous but unexplained, and when it comes to the film’s final section, it’s anyone’s guess. Bowman (Keir Dullea) finds himself in a neoclassical bedroom, where he rapidly ages until the monolith arrives and he becomes a foetus. In the final image, the foetus floats in a transparent sphere above the earth.
Quentin Tarantino called the film “one of the great questions of cinema”, saying that the elusiveness is part of the brilliance. Film scholars have been debating its meaning for decades, proposing a spectrum of interpretations that range from the foetus positioning itself to destroy the earth to the foetus mirroring representing the rebirth of humanity.
Kubrick was initially evasive about the ending, saying in a 1968 interview with Playboy that he didn’t want to “spell out a verbal road map” because it would prevent people from creating their own interpretations. In 1980, however, he did just that. In a phone conversation with Japanese filmmaker Jun’ichi Yaoi for a documentary that was never released, the director offered his strangely concrete explanation for that cryptic ending.
“The idea was supposed to be that [Bowman] is taken in by god-like entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form,” Kubrick said, “And 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.”
As for the final image of the floating foetus, the director explained, “When they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of superbeing and sent back to Earth… that was what we were trying to suggest.”
The idea of a human zoo is not a prominent one in academic interpretations, but Kubrick’s revelation is remarkably similar to the other end of the spectrum, in which the foetus symbolises rebirth. The director was still adamant that he wanted people to build their own interpretations, so luckily, we can all continue to disagree with each other.
