Music, Science and '2001: A Space Odyssey'

The article begins by asking what purpose is served by music in Stanley Kubrick’s later films - It muses loosely over the role played by music in ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and ‘A Clockwork Orange’, then points out how Kubrick ceased hiring cinema composers after making ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, then introduces some implications of his using classical and contemporary music in that film. - It briefly recounts how Kubrick came to make the film, his contact with Arthur C. Clarke, what project Clarke was working on, and the then current state of the space race; then speeds quickly over their collaboration in writing the screenplay, and the making of the film, followed by a short summary of the plot. - It points to the overt influence of Marshall McLuhan’s ideas on key aspects of the film's plot, especially McLuhan’s contemporaneous arguments about evolution and technology, and technology-human interfaces, showing where and how McLuhan's theories connect with issues in the plot. - It discusses how Kubrick's film presents a vision of the future that is non-military, and space travel and exploration is corporatised. Clarke rejected this, and gave a very different view in his novel, making the mission a military expedition. - In light of this, it considers Kubrick’s earlier fatalistic films with military themes, ‘Paths of Glory’ and ‘Dr Strangelove’, suggesting that Kubrick was pressing a significant point in eliminating military involvement in space exploration—by removing the military the film was future-affirming. - It discusses the ‘killer ape’ theory which became popular across anthropology, psychology and archeology in the 1950s and early 1960s, highlighting the then accepted theories of Konrad Lorenz and Raymond Dart (ideas now discredited); it shows that Kubrick and Clarke learned about Dart’s ideas of violence, human evolution and cognition when researching the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence (it identifies which book they picked up the theory from), and then built the film around the 'killer ape' theory. - The article returns to the original puzzle about the purpose served by music. Going over the music used in certain passages of the film, it shows how Kubrick used music symbolically. It further concludes that alert intellectually informed audiences of the mid 1960s would perceive the use of Richard Strauss’s music at key points in the film as bringing to the fore the well-known theories about humanity of Nietzsche, McLuhan and Dart.