![]() ![]() These movies gleefully foresee that “democratic” order will be enforced from orbit, and that all the world’s nations will coalesce into a militaristic government devoted to shielding the world’s populace against badly dressed freaks from outer space.īear in mind that most of these movies were made with the gratefully acknowledged assistance of one or another military branch. Examples, if you can stand them, include Rocketship X-M, The Phantom Planet, and exactly one other cosmic Earth- uber-alles flick for each particle in the known universe. Instead, our steadily militarizing, “globalizing” space program - SDI, the International Space Station, the Shuttle with its casual mix of civilian and military missions - is more like the fulfillment of prophesies found in the red-scare space invasion movies of the 1950s. To the gee-whiz crowd wowed by its special effects, 2001 seems to ask, Will humankind make it this far into the vastness of space? But in the Year 2001, unfortunately, it’s becoming pretty clear that exploring space was never the intention. To return to the main question, then, 2001 - like 1984 - has neither come true nor been proven false, at least if we look at what has happened to the space program since the movie was made. We’ll finally have ourselves dead to rights. And so much for finding people a new home with SDI, our last remaining escape route will finally be cut off. So much for the space program’s double iconographies (or, actually, so much for iconographies at all: who can plant a flag in near-earth orbit?). Now that we’re all at “war”, the next we hear about this space station will probably be years hence, when - just as unfinished as it is now - it follows Skylab and Mir back down on top of us.Īnyway, while we wait for this we can enjoy our new space-based Strategic Defense Initiative, which seems to have taken an unrequested encore in the past few months. ![]() ![]() In our own time, alas, the closest anyone has ever gotten to Kubrick’s Blue Danubian Vision of Orbital Bliss is the notoriously smelly Mir, or the over-budget, behind-schedule International Space Station. Since Apollo 11, the Russians and everybody else have done a smashing job of looking bad on their own. Yes, NASA’s mammoth undertaking was a first step toward finding a new home for a humanity that was rapidly poisoning its old one, but it was also just aimed at making the Russians look bad. Like many another colonization or exploration, then, the moon shot had a dual purpose: part human consciousness-raiser, part overwrought flag-raising exercise. Iconographies of exploratory missions and those of forcible colonizations are symmetrical as well, the television image of Neil Armstrong’s tinfoil flag in Tranquility Base evoking the Peary expedition to the North Pole and the Iwo Jima ceremony in equal measure. The ICBM and the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo rocket series are close siblings some of their replicas and gutted fuselages appear at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum right next to the V-2. Still, linking the technologies of the space race and those of mass killing isn’t hard. This is probably the military-industrial establishment’s greatest achievement in a line of work it has since shown little taste for: technological advances that don’t annihilate, or promise to annihilate, people by the thousands. Let’s recap: the year after the movie came out, Apollo 11 landed on the moon to much, much fanfare. But bear with me: Now that we’ve seen 2001, was 2001 right? Cast against high-minded promises of lunar colonies and Mars missions, the space program - with all its current troubles - should make the answer to the following question seem pretty obvious. This image’s grace and beauty, which the intervening quarter-century has not at all diminished, has made the real-life space program look awfully ungainly by comparison. It’s been tricky these past 33 years, to maintain faith in the grandeur of 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s most publicized vision: that vast double-decker space station twirling around Earth, Strauss lilting on the soundtrack as humanity drops its own humble clockface into a universe of rotating, revolving bodies. ![]()
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