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Commerical success The fear of many theater owners that 2001 would be a commercial catastrophe because of its lack of advance bookings was soon quelled when large numbers of college-age moviegoers made cash purchases on the day of screening. As word about the film spread, many people went to see 2001 again and again. Arthur Clarke’s oft-repeated motto on the press junket that “If you understand 2001 on the first viewing, we will have failed”[30] played right into MGM’s new strategy of marketing the film toward a youth audience. The second round of publicity for the film focused much more on its psychedelic aspects, and the advertising slogan was changed from “An epic drama of adventure and exploration” to “The Ultimate Trip.”[31] In its initial release, 2001 played at some theaters for over a year and a half. It ran 79 weeks at the Pacific Cinerama Dome Theater in Hollywood, California. It was canceled in the middle of a profitable New York run in late 1968 because MGM wanted to get Ice Station Zebra, the Cold War thriller starring Rock Hudson and Ernest Borgnine, out in time for Christmas. 2001 had a very profitable re-release in the summer of 1974, and a new crop of young fans, many who had been too young to see the film when it first came out were born. Youth Appeal Kubrick and MGM apparently failed to anticipate the extent that 2001 would catch on among the youth audience. Kubrick wanted the film to appeal to a mass audience in the hopes of providing intellectual stimulation. In a 1968 interview for Playboy magazine he stated, “I think if 2001 succeeds at all, it is in reaching a wide spectrum of people who would not often give a thought to man’s destiny, his role in the cosmos and his relationship to higher forms of life.”[32] These early viewers described 2001 as unlike any other film they had seen. In the 70mm Cinerama format, the curved screen wrapped slightly around the audience, drawing them into the picture. The unusual musical choices made by Kubrick, his use of ambient sounds like breathing and heartbeats, and the fantastic special effects light show overwhelmed the senses of many. As one college-age audience member recalled the reaction of one of this friends after seeing the film for the first time, “He had to wait huffing and shaking in the car with his head on the dash board for several minutes before he could start the engine.”[33] Another wrote a letter to Kubrick, saying, “My pupils are still dilated, and my breathing sounds like your soundtrack. I don’t know if this poor brain will survive another work of the magnitude of 2001, but it will die (perhaps more accurately ‘go nova’) happily if given the opportunity.”[34] For these people, 2001 became much more than a movie. 2001 as Religious Experience Many described the film as a religious experience, saying that it opened up new doors for them in their spiritual lives. One audience member who first saw the film at the age of seven recalled how 2001 filled the place of religion for him, saying, “My family was atheist and I had no religion as a child. The realm of ideas was given a somewhat exalted status as I grew up around dinner table discussions of philosophy, astrophysics (layman level), and the universe. But certainly there's a great human capacity, perhaps need, for wonder and awe, and in that way 2001 filled the gap for my "Godless" upbringing.”[35] As another letter-writer wrote to Kubrick, “I would not be at all afraid to state that with 2001 you may have quite possibly saved any number of spiritual and physical lives. For it is within the power of a film such as yours to give people a reason to go on living – to give them the courage to go on living.”[36] Others used language reminiscent of “born again” Christians, like the person who wrote Kubrick, “Your movie has given me many moments which I seek out in my life – moments of feeling alive. After your movie one thought kept coming back into my mind. It is one that I have had many times, but which seemed more clear than ever now; how many times must I be born to realize what I am.”[37] At one screening of the film in Los Angeles, a young audience member rose to his feet at the film’s conclusion, ran down the aisle and crashed through the screen, all the while shouting, “It’s God! It’s God!”[38] Counterculture The members of the counterculture were another group of people who drew inspiration from 2001. Legions of young hippies went to theaters carrying blankets and sat down on the floor between the first row of seats and the screen, “turning on, tuning in, and dropping out” with marijuana, LSD, and other substances to the long special effects sequence at the movie’s end. Both Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick have denied using any illegal substances during the writing or production of 2001, although Clarke points out that this may have been the case for some members of the art and special effects departments. Some of the first film shot for the movie in 1965 was from the “psychedelic” Star Gate segment, but most of the special effects were added in 1967 and early 1968 during post-production.[39] While staying at the Chelsea Hotel, Clarke did seek inspiration from the company of beat writers Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, but there is no evidence that he participated in any of their well-documented experiments with illegal drugs. The science fiction author has described himself as being “only mildly in favor of the death penalty even for tobacco peddling.” At a science fiction convention shortly after the film’s premiere, one anonymous fan passed him a packet of cocaine, along with a note that this was “the best stuff.” Clarke says that he promptly flushed his gift down the toilet.[40] Similarly, Kubrick disavowed the use of drugs, arguing that “the artist’s transcendence must be within his own work; he should not impose any artificial barriers between himself and his subconscious.”[41] Anecdotes about drug use should not distract, however, from the vast number of young people who went to see the film with more critical motivations in mind. A Toronto theater owner noted that many young people came to see the film over and over again, but said that he had not noticed any drug use and that if he did, he would “put a stop to it in a hurry.”[42] 2001 as Satire Many early fans of 2001 responded to what they perceived as its satire of future society. The film’s depiction of travel to an orbiting space station and the moon is filled with corporate logos, trademarks, and other “product placements” for companies such as IBM, Pan Am, Howard Johnson’s, and AT&T. Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of film and media studies at Johns Hopkins University, has written that
The fact that almost all of the human dialogue in the film was bland, dry, and meaningless was seen by many to be a satirical commentary on the futility of the spoken word. F.A. Macklin points out that many critics missed this satire inherent in the films use of inept language. He argues that space scientist Heywood Floyd “is the character who brings out the most obvious satire, not black this time as in Kubrick’s Lolita or Dr. Strangelove, but a revealing of the wretched decline of language, so close to our own present jargon and conversation that the critics took it as a bad script by Clarke and Kubrick.”[44] An audience member recalls, “While many criticized it for its low-key dialogue ("Did you have a nice flight?" is about as passionate as it gets), others say [sic] that far from poor writing, lines like that brilliantly reveal the mind-numbing and de-personalizing effects of too much technology.”[45] Next: Effect on Baby Boomers |
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