Read Online The Mansion of Happiness by Jill Lepore - Free Book Online

a camera, and Kubrick, as a very young man, became a photographer for
Look
magazine. He made a series offilms in the 1950s and found box office success in 1960 with
Spartacus
, followed by
Lolita
(1962) and
Dr. Strangelove
(1964).
Strangelove
ends with a nuclear Armageddon: the extinction of all life on earth. The
     year
Strangelove
came out, Kubrick decided he wanted to make a science fiction film about outer space, where life might last forever, in another kind of mansion of happiness.
    He enlisted the help of science fiction writerArthur C. Clarke. The film, Clarke suggested, ought to be based on his 1948 story “The Sentinel,” which is set in 1996, although Kubrick was, for a time, much more interested in a novel of Clarke’s from 1953, called
Childhood’s End.
Clarke liked to imagine men without women, worlds in which generation, if it takes place at all, is the work of men of science, or men of
     the future, or aliens who, however inhuman, are, somehow, male. He had the idea that he and Kubrick ought to write a novel together, then write a screenplay from the novel. They began collaborating on the novel, which was to be called
Journey Beyond the Stars
, in April 1964. Clarke was also working at the offices of Time-Life, finishing a book called
Man and Space
for Time-Life Books. 53
    Kubrick and Clarke consulted withNASA. They met withMarvin Minsky at MIT. They talked toCarl Sagan at Harvard’s Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. They worked withIBM on HAL, the computer on board their fictional spaceship,
Discovery.
At the time, Kubrick was obsessed with sex, aging, death, andlaboratory mice. He told
Playboy
,
     “I understand that at Yale they’ve been engaging in experiments in which the pleasure center of a mouse’s brain has been localized and stimulated by electrodes; the result is that the mouse undergoes an eight-hour orgasm.” 54 He met with Robert Ettinger, a physics teacher from Michigan who was interested in freezing the dead. He decided that the
     crew on board the
Discovery
would have to travel in cryogenic suspension.
    In April 1965, when Nilsson’s photographs of the “Drama of Life BeforeBirth” were published in
Life
, Kubrick decided to call his film
2001: A Space Odyssey.
Two months later, an unmanned probe,
Mariner IV
, came within six thousand miles of Mars and sent twenty-two photographs of the planet back to earth. Kubrick contactedLloyd’s of London, “to price an insurance
     policy against Martians being discovered before the release of his film.” In September,
A Child Is Born
, the book version of Nilsson’s photographs, was published. On October 3, Kubrick decided how
2001
would end: its main character, David Bowman, a crew member on board the
Discovery
, would turn into an infant. Clarke wrote in his diary: “Stanley on phone, worried about ending … gave him my latest ideas, and one of
     them suddenly clicked—Bowman will regress to infancy, and we’ll see him at the end as a baby in orbit.” Shooting began in December. An unmanned Russian spacecraft landed on the moon in February 1966. On March 29, 1968, a special screening of
2001
was held for
Life.
The film was released in April and Clarke’s novel in July. Within the year,Neil Armstrong andEdwin Aldrin walked on the moon. 55
    In
2001
, Kubrick and Clarke tell the story of human history; the film is
Pilgrim’s Progress
as told by MIT andIBM, with extraterrestrials playing the part ofGod. It begins with the dawn of man. Apes on an African plain become men not by evolution but by way of aliens, who send to earth a stone slab, a rectangular monolith (“the New Rock,” Clarke calls it in the novel), which makes possible
     conceptual leaps, including the use, by primates, of tools—the firstmachines. The discovery of a monolith on the moon in the year 1994 leads to another conceptual leap, interstellar travel, resulting in the voyage of the
Discovery
in 2001. Bowman serves as the ship’s captain on a voyage