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Authors: Jill Lepore
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intended to take a hibernating crew past Saturn. After HAL kills the crew, Bowman disconnects the computer and is left alone on the
Discovery.
Orbiting a satellite of Jupiter, he finds another monolith and rides in a space pod to get a closer look. He passes through some sort of star gate, which takes him on a journey past the stars and into a room in an eighteenth-century mansion—it has the look of Versailles—where he eats some blue goo, falls asleep, ages into a very old man, and regresses into a baby and then a fetus. 56
As with the rest of the film, which contains very little dialogue, this regression is not explained, but in the novel, Clarke refers to the unborn Bowman as the Star-Child. 57 Both the novel and the film close with the Star-Child approaching a blue-green earth. “Down there on that crowdedglobe,” Clarke writes, “history
as men knew it would be drawing to a close.” 58 The final scene of
2001
is that cover of
Life
magazine: aLennart Nilsson–style shot of a fetus, cut out of a woman’s body, floating through space, in an egg.
“Morally pretentious, intellectually obscure, and inordinately long,” the American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called
2001
, in a review in
Vogue.
Jay Cocks, a writer for
Time
who had been assigned a feature story about Kubrick, reported that at the appearance of the Star-Child at the first public screening of
2001
, one critic snorted and walked out. The reviews were, Cocks
said, “almost uniformly devastating.”
Time
canceled the feature. 59 Renata Adler andPauline Kael, two influential reviewers who, to say the least, didn’t often agree, despised it. They were both women. Adler, writing in the
New York Times
, found it extravagantly inane that
2001
, the story of human history, ends with man’s “death and rebirth in what looked like an intergalactic embryo.” Kael, writing for
Harper’s
, called
2001
“monumentally unimaginative”: “Kubrick’s story line—accounting for evolution by extraterrestrial intelligence—is probably the most gloriously redundant plot of all time.” 60 ’Twas believed by the critics that he was crack-brained.
Kubrick waved all this aside, dismissing his detractors as “dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound.” And the reviews were far from uniformly devastating.
Life
celebrated the film’s gadgetry and “hard science.” 61 Audiences, meanwhile, adored it. It was a happening, good to watch while getting stoned, a
different kind of voyage of life:
2001
was, as its ad campaign had it, “the ultimate trip.” 62
Kubrick’s
2001
told the story of the origins of man—without women. Women, meanwhile, were campaigning for equal rights with men, for what they called “personhood.” The National Organization for Women was founded in 1966,NARAL in 1969. In a speech in Chicago that year,Betty Friedan said, “There is no freedom, no equality, no full human dignity and personhood possible for women until we
assert and demand the control over our own bodies.” In 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment, written byAlice Paul and first introduced to Congress in 1923, passed and went to the states for ratification. Opponents of the ERA, led byPhyllis Schlafly, supported, instead, a “human life amendment,” first proposed in 1973, eight days after the Supreme Court ruling in
Roe v. Wade
. The ERA waseventually defeated. The language of personhood was adopted by thepro-life movement. By the beginning of the twenty-first century,personhood amendments began appearing on state ballots. A 2011 Mississippi Personhood Amendment read, “The term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization.” If a fertilized egg has constitutional rights,
women cannot have equal rights with men. In American political history, this debate goes back only decades, but in the history of ideas, it goes back to a time before almost no one, least of allWilliam Harvey, could imagine
Discovery.
Orbiting a satellite of Jupiter, he finds another monolith and rides in a space pod to get a closer look. He passes through some sort of star gate, which takes him on a journey past the stars and into a room in an eighteenth-century mansion—it has the look of Versailles—where he eats some blue goo, falls asleep, ages into a very old man, and regresses into a baby and then a fetus. 56
As with the rest of the film, which contains very little dialogue, this regression is not explained, but in the novel, Clarke refers to the unborn Bowman as the Star-Child. 57 Both the novel and the film close with the Star-Child approaching a blue-green earth. “Down there on that crowdedglobe,” Clarke writes, “history
as men knew it would be drawing to a close.” 58 The final scene of
2001
is that cover of
Life
magazine: aLennart Nilsson–style shot of a fetus, cut out of a woman’s body, floating through space, in an egg.
“Morally pretentious, intellectually obscure, and inordinately long,” the American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called
2001
, in a review in
Vogue.
Jay Cocks, a writer for
Time
who had been assigned a feature story about Kubrick, reported that at the appearance of the Star-Child at the first public screening of
2001
, one critic snorted and walked out. The reviews were, Cocks
said, “almost uniformly devastating.”
Time
canceled the feature. 59 Renata Adler andPauline Kael, two influential reviewers who, to say the least, didn’t often agree, despised it. They were both women. Adler, writing in the
New York Times
, found it extravagantly inane that
2001
, the story of human history, ends with man’s “death and rebirth in what looked like an intergalactic embryo.” Kael, writing for
Harper’s
, called
2001
“monumentally unimaginative”: “Kubrick’s story line—accounting for evolution by extraterrestrial intelligence—is probably the most gloriously redundant plot of all time.” 60 ’Twas believed by the critics that he was crack-brained.
Kubrick waved all this aside, dismissing his detractors as “dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound.” And the reviews were far from uniformly devastating.
Life
celebrated the film’s gadgetry and “hard science.” 61 Audiences, meanwhile, adored it. It was a happening, good to watch while getting stoned, a
different kind of voyage of life:
2001
was, as its ad campaign had it, “the ultimate trip.” 62
Kubrick’s
2001
told the story of the origins of man—without women. Women, meanwhile, were campaigning for equal rights with men, for what they called “personhood.” The National Organization for Women was founded in 1966,NARAL in 1969. In a speech in Chicago that year,Betty Friedan said, “There is no freedom, no equality, no full human dignity and personhood possible for women until we
assert and demand the control over our own bodies.” In 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment, written byAlice Paul and first introduced to Congress in 1923, passed and went to the states for ratification. Opponents of the ERA, led byPhyllis Schlafly, supported, instead, a “human life amendment,” first proposed in 1973, eight days after the Supreme Court ruling in
Roe v. Wade
. The ERA waseventually defeated. The language of personhood was adopted by thepro-life movement. By the beginning of the twenty-first century,personhood amendments began appearing on state ballots. A 2011 Mississippi Personhood Amendment read, “The term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization.” If a fertilized egg has constitutional rights,
women cannot have equal rights with men. In American political history, this debate goes back only decades, but in the history of ideas, it goes back to a time before almost no one, least of allWilliam Harvey, could imagine
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