2001 - A Space Exposition

The key to understanding the opening of Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey is a simple understanding of symbolism. Accepting one can take the work of Clarke as symbolist is debatable, however the monolith is the one thing that can easily be called a symbol.

What does it symbolize? I think human progress. One day the apes wake up and there it is, like any technology really, it animates them, they rally around it and they kick the tires. Each epoch of humanity has had rallying points, flash points of technological advancement. With each step in the technological ladder, all of humanity, within the flash point, soaks up the new technology.

By that I mean, humanity takes a leap forward and your average human, over a steady period of exposure becomes a product of that technology. Basically, think about asking a person in the 70's if they think a font is a typeface or a type of Swedish dessert and they'd be likely to choose the latter.

The digitial revolution became an impetus for regular folk to educate themselves in the aspects of desktop publishing and all the sub-classes contained therein (color management, image manipulation, HTML, editing software etc...). Who would need to know any of this stuff in the 80's? And how would a person from the 80's react upon learning that one day he'll need to learn all of it?

Yet, here we are. Everybody within the sphere of the digital revolution can do these things, some to a greater degree than others, but my point is that everyone is doing and can do it. The one thing that stands before all is the computer. It is a monolith. We have poked and prodded, screamed and kicked at it (and still are) we have rallied around it and it probes each of us, drawing out these sleeping attributes. With it we have extended our selves around the entire planet.

This is what the monolith is. It is not God, not in the sense that these gods created the universe but they are playing with god-like power. Technically it's an extra-terrestrial probe/animator. It probes each ape as it approaches, seeking out attributes on which it can evolve. The monolith doesn't accelerate evolution in all the apes it touches, only a few that carry the seeds of intelligence. The is the literal function of Clark's monolith, from the book. It gets kinda deep when you read the 2001 saga.

The symbolic function is one of monolithic progress. In this case a simple bone, used as an implement to extend the apes reach. The ape teaches the others in his tribe how to maximize the benefits of this new technology, a bone. That's it. How the ape uses it is of no use to the monolith. It merely reports it's findings and in this case the sentients have decided they will check in later, a lot later.

The monolith did not create the conditions for an ape or a prehistoric-human to do murder. We see at the beginning that he is hungry, his family weary of prowlers and is struggling against his natural environment. He is not doing murder by using his bone-implement, he is surviving. He is extending the life of his family by supplying provisions that are now more easily procured and security by the brute force of his club.

These new conditions provide some leisure time, a time to dream, to plan to move forward.

Cut to Exterior of Orbiting Space Station....

I can't remember exactly if the scene of that ape smashing the bones is in the book, I think it's a Kubrick device and it's meant to convey exactly what i'm saying about the "bone". The bone is swung down into the bones of the dead animals and eventually on the upswing we cut to the space station. I think the shot is a symbol of man's low and high culture.