Sports Analogies Hidden In Classic Movies – Volume 145: “2001: A Space Odyssey”

• Today’s Movie: 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Year of Release: 1968
• Stars: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester
• Director: Stanley Kubrick

This movie is on my list of essential films.

NOTE: This installment of Sports Analogies Hidden In Classic Movies is being done as part of something called the 10th Annual Rule, Brittania Blog-A-Thon being hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts.

You can see all the contributors to this blog-a-thon here:

• Days One, Two, and Three

The Story:

This is one of my all-time favorite films, but I must admit…I had to give it more than one viewing before I even felt like I understood it. If noting else, the first-time viewer will notice the importance of the soundtrack. Starting from title sequence, Johann Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra both sets the tone for how Kubrick uses music to drive this film. That’s the main reason why in my first few times watching this film, I didn’t realize how little dialogue 2001: A Space Odyssey contains. For a film running just a shade under two and a half hours, there’s only around 2,500 total words of dialogue. In many respects, Kubrick makes the music do the talking.

The importance of the cinematography is also more essential than most. Obviously, all motion pictures rely on the visual, but with suck a lack of the spoken word, Kubrick’s lens pulls double-duty driving the plot.

However, both of those themes remain a constant across the three acts of 2001: A Space Odyssey; they really are the binding agent linking what really feels like three separate films.

I – The Dawn of Man

The film opens in a barren landscape where a group of pre-historic hominids are locked in a struggle to survive with other animals for the sparse available resources. If it weren’t enough to be in competition with the animals, they end up in a confrontation with another group of hominids over a source of water. One group is driven off to huddle in fear in the rock formations.

During the night, a massive black rectangular monolith appears towering over the rocks. Once the frightened hominids touch the monolith, they become calm. In the first example of the importance of music in this film, the interaction between the pre-humans and the monolith plays out over the the strains of György Ligeti’s Requiem.

After this interaction, one of the hominids takes a large, long bone from a carcass and realizes it can be used as a tool. In no time, he discovers the tool’s power as a weapon as he destroys the other bones in the pile. Finding more bones suitable to be weapons, this group emerges from the rocks to attack and vanquish the hominids holding the waterhole. In celebration, the leader of the victors tosses his bone into the air. Thus Spake Zarathustra weaves through this scene as well.

II – TMA-1 (The Monolith on the Moon)

Unlike the other two acts, this one is not placarded. It is introduced by what may very well be the biggest chronologic “jump-cut” in cinematic history; the tossed bone spinning in the air by the pre-historic man suddenly becomes a spaceship. As the scene progresses, it is intended to show the viewer we are now in an age where space travel is much like what airline travel is now. Again, the scene is narrated musically; this time with Johann Strauss’ Blue Danube. To underscore the dearth of dialogue in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the first-time viewer might not ever realize they will be over 25 minutes into the film before the first words are spoken.

At that point, Dr. Heywood Floyd (played by William Sylvester) meets an old friend in the arrivals lounge on the airport-ish space station on which they’ve just arrived. As Floyd awaits his connecting flight to the moon, he makes small talk with his acquaintance, then makes a video call home speaking to his young daughter (played by Vivian Kubrick…Stanley’s daughter). All of this is designed to demonstrate the routine nature of space travel.

In a space-station lounge lounge, Floyd encounters a group of Russian scientists traveling back to Earth. After Floyd mentions he is going to a lunar outpost near the crater Tycho known as Clavius, the Russians tell him no one has had contact with Clavius for 10 days. They elaborate by saying there have been rumors of an epidemic; Floyd deflects this by stating he is not at liberty to discuss the situation.

Now that the end of the “routine” nature of this trip has been foreshadowed, Kubrick re-stablishes it with his tired and true formula, imagery narrated by music. In this case, the tale of Floyd’s journey to the moon is shown complete with an in-flight meal and an encounter with the zero-gravity toilet, all over Strauss’ Viennese Waltz.

Floyd meets with a larger group which is soon shown to be tasked uncovering what happened at Clavius. It becomes clear there has been a major discovery, at which point Floyd stresses the need to maintain secrecy, and the “epidemic” mentioned by the Russians was a deliberately-planted cover story. At the same time, Floyd tells the group he has been sent on what could be called a “fact-finding” mission and he is to report back to what is ostensibly a governing body referred to only as “The Council.”

In an attempt to maintain the now largely-blown veneer of “routine.” Kubrick depicts Floyd and two other scientists enjoying sandwiches and coffee while they are on a lunar shuttle heading for Clavius. Over their déjeuner, they discuss what was found at the lunar outpost. They have no idea of it’s origins or it’s purpose; all they know is they are dealing with a large object which emits a powerful magnetic field and that it was deliberately buried at the site now known as Clavius four million years ago.

Upon arriving at Clavius to what looks very much like an archaeological dig site, Floyd and a larger team of scientists are greeted by what the viewer immediately recognizes as the black monolith from the pre-historic first act. Again, the interaction between the now modern humans and the monolith is underscored by Ligeti’s Requiem. However, as the group poses for a picture with the monolith, it emits a high-intensity burst of sonic energy.

III – Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite

The third act is also introduced by the sight a a spacecraft on a journey. Once the viewer is taken inside the craft, the “routine” is again established. Dr. Frank Poole (played by Gary Lockwood) jogs on an artificial gravity device reminiscent of a human-sized “sci-fi” hamster wheel. As he runs, the rest of the crew compartment is shown including work stations, communications equipment, and other fixtures one might expect to see in a starship.

There are also five life-support champers which eerily look like glass coffins. Two of them are empty, while three contain sarcophagus-like pods which hold hibernating members of the crew. At meal time, Frank is joined by mission commander Dave Bowman (played by Keir Dullea). As they eat, Frank and Dave watch a news report from Earth about them and their ship Discovery, which is said to be 80 million miles from Earth.

In the report, it is told that the life-support chambers are to keep the other three crew members in hibernation to conserve supplies during the long journey, and that they will be needed for tasks once the destination is reached. However, there is a sixth crew member which comes into view in this scene. Known as HAL9000, it’s a computer which can talk and mimics human thought processes. The term “artificial intelligence” didn’t exist yet when this film was made in 1968, but that’s the immediately analogy today’s viewer will see in HAL9000. The newscaster is then shown interviewing Frank, Dave, and HAL9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain). In an important bit of foreshadowing, HAL900 is personified when he states he is infallible.

As per Kubrick’s modus operandi after a hint of what might be coming, the “routine” is re-stablished. This continues until HAL9000 says their is a problem with the AE-35 unit; it will fail with 100% certainty within 72 hours. As Frank and Dave discuss the problem with Mission Control, it is decided the need to go outside the ship and replace the AE-35.

Afterward, as Frank and Dave exam the removed AE-35 unit, they can’t find anything wrong. HAL9000 suggests putting the unit back into service to let it fail. At this point, Mission Control believes HAL9000 is mistaken because an identical computer did not find a flaw in the AE-35 unit. HAL9000 once again declares his infallibility stating past similar instances “can only be attributable to human error.” Frank and Dave now share the suspicion of Mission Control. As a result, they go to a pod where Dave disables its communications under the guise of troubleshooting a problem so they can speak privately.

They decide if the AE-35 unit doesn’t fail after placing it back into service, they will disable HAL9000’s higher functions. Dave believes this will be difficult and does not know how HAL900 will react as this has never been done before. The problem is their conversation is not secret; HAL9000 can see them and has read their lips.

As a result, when Frank goes outside to re-install the AE-35 unit, HAL9000 engineers an accident to kill him. When Dave goes to the pod bay, HAL9000 denies any knowledge of how Frank was left to float off into space. Dave takes a pod out to retrieve Frank’s body, but while he’s off the ship, HAL9000 terminates the life functions of the three hibernating crew members.

When Dave returns, HAL9000 refuses to open the pod bay doors and tells Dave that he knows they intended to disconnect him. In a twist, HAL9000 states the mission is “too important to allow humans to jeopardize it.” Dave managed to get back into the ship, but has to release Frank’s body to do it.

Once he’s back aboard, Dave goes to the computer room and climbs into an access compartment. HAL9000 pleads with Dave as the begins disconnecting the machine. Once HAL9000 is powered off, a video recording of Dr. Floyd explaining the secret purpose of the mission begins playing.

“This is a prerecorded briefing made prior to your departure and which for security reasons of the highest importance has been known on board during the mission only by your HAL9000 computer. Now that you are in Jupiter’s space and the entire crew is revived it can be told to you. Eighteen months ago, the first evidence of intelligent life off the Earth was discovered. It was buried 40 feet below the lunar surface near the crater Tycho. Except for a single very powerful radio emission aimed at Jupiter, the four-million-year-old black monolith has remained completely inert. Its origin and purpose are still a total mystery.”

~Dr. Heywood Floyd

Once Discovery nears Jupiter, the black monolith appears amongst the planet’s many moons, again sound-tracked by Ligeti’s Requiem. Dave takes another pod to leave Discovery. As the monolith comes into alignment with the moons of Jupiter, the “hippie’s favorite” and arguably “signature” scene of the movie plays out.

Once again, music serves in the role of dialogue. As a wormhole through time opens and Dave enters it, a psychedelic series of visual effects flood the screen, all to the strains of György Ligeti’s Atmosphères. Seen through Dave’s eyes, a series of oddly-colored landscapes appear as if he were flying over them. At the end of the wormhole, Dave finds himself in a bedroom furnished in the style of Louis XVI with a luminous white floor. Dave exits the pod…but now he is an old man. Next door in an identically styled bathroom, Dave sees himself in a mirror.

The scene shifts back to the bedroom, where an older version of Dave is seen eating while seated at a table. While Dave is drinking wine, his glass falls and breaks. Another shift shows the viewer an even older Dave sleeping on the bed. As Dave awakes, the black monolith appears in the center of the room. Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra plays as Dave is transformed into a large open-eyed fetus in the amniotic sac as the “Star Child” casting it’s gaze on the nearby Earth as the film ends.

The Hidden Sports Analogy:

While there are many reasons why this film has achieved legendary status, I honestly believe one of them is you simply cannot watch this movie only once. The ending gives nearly every first-time viewer the feeling “Uhhh…what the hell just happened?”

One need not possess the Ph. D in “Filmy Stuff” to understand Kubrick is clearly making a a commentary. But the beauty lies in the fact that there’s literally no limit to the possibilities. Think about it. If three’s ever been a film in the history of cinema with and ending more wide-open for interpretation, I’d like to know what it is.

I’m pretty sure I’m not alone when it comes to those who had to give 2001: A Space Odyssey multiple viewings to a) understand the ending and b) understand it well enough to form an interpretation. For purposes of full disclosure, I took five.

Having said that, one of the things I always try to do in these bits is avoid the dreaded spoiler. Even a film was shot on stone tablets, there’s always a first-time viewer. That means While I have my own such conclusion on the conclusion of this film, I’m going to keep them to myself here so as to not unduly bias the aforementioned first-timer.

Instead, I’m going to stick to the hidden sports analogy.

Much like how 2001: A Space Odyssey is broken into three distinct acts, a hockey game is comprised of as many periods, each of which can play out as their own “match-within-a-match.” As such, like today’s movie, hockey can be a difficult sport to understand for the newer viewer. Even Walt Disney himself tried to tackle that subject back in 1945.

More importantly, one theme shared by movie-making and sports broadcasting is they both serve as prima facie evidence tracking the development of the relationship between mankind and the technology it has created. One need not be a film fan to see the difference in movies made at the dawn of cinema versus today. The exact same statement can be said about televised sports. They both underwent their very own transformative process from “the bone” to “the spaceship.”

Regardless of the topic, all such progressions hit the proverbial “fork in the road;” that point where the application of the tool becomes as important as the tool itself. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, it takes no time at all for the bone to go from productive tool to a destructive weapon. Today’s comparison came when Fox acquired the broadcast rights to the National Hockey League (NHL) in the 1990s.

Network executives thought they could boost the number of potential viewers by making the televised game easier to comprehend. These same suits believed the key to this simplification was to make the puck easier to follow. After all, most people who don’t enjoy the sport share a common complaint about the difficulty in keeping an eye on that little black disc which can travel at speeds over 100 miles per hour.

To this end, they created “FoxTrax;” or as hockey fans not so affectionately called it…the “Glow Puck.”

Honestly, it was actually a rather sophisticated and ingenious bit of engineering. FoxTrax started with major modifications to the puck itself, all without deviating from the weight and balance of an unmodified NHL puck. This proved to be even more of a challenge than originally anticipated because the players could tell even the minutest differences simply by the way the puck handled.

To make the system work, the puck needed to contain several electronic components, such as infrared-light emitting diodes (LED), motion sensors, a circuit board, and a battery to power it all. Despite the complex electronics, the theory of operation was fairly straight-forward.

The LEDs emitted light pulses invisible to the naked eye, but could be electronically converted into a visible signal by computers connected to the television camera. This gave the puck a bright blue phosphorescent glow which did greatly increase the ability to see it. Not only that, any time the puck achieved a speed over 70 miles per hour, it would be seen on television with a bight red, comet-like tail.

There was no question the technology worked spectacularly; FoxTrax undoubtedly made the puck exceptionally easy to follow. However, there were some drawbacks. The players all said they could still discern the FoxTrax pucks from the original ones. The puck’s batteries had a life-span of less than 20 minutes. Between their short life and the number of pucks lost into the stands or knocked into non-functionality, the broadcasters had to keep as many as 50 of the rather costly pucks on hand for each game. Those were all issues that could be mitigated if not solved outright by a bit more engineering. But FoxTrax had one problem no amount of brainiac-ing could solve.

The fans absolutely hated it.

The hardcore hockey fans felt the graphics were not only distracting, but made the broadcasts seem to be geared more toward the casual fan. There were more prominent opinions which were also far more pointed.

Canadian-born journalist Peter Jennings was interviewed as a guest during the 1996 NHL All-Star Game during which FoxTrax had it’s debut. He stated point-blank on live television that his fellow Canadians would “probably hate it.”

Greg Wyshynski, the sportswriter who would go on to create Yahoo! Sports’ ice hockey blog Puck Daddy described FoxTrax as “cheesy enough that it looked like hockey by way of a Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers production budget.”

He didn’t stop there.

Wyshinski also said it was “a sad commentary on what outsiders thought of both hockey and American hockey fans.” Wyshynski may very well have driven the final nail into Foxtrax’s coffin with the tacit admission that American viewers were “too ‘hockey-stupid’ to follow the play” or “need to be distracted by shiny new toys in order to watch the sport.” Those words may border on cruel, but they are certainly fair.

To this “puckhead,” FoxTrax was even worse that that. It was only separated from the “Star-Gate/Hippie’s Favorite” scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey by a liberal dose of a suitable hallucinogen.

The first time I saw FoxTrax, the star-gate opened and hurtled me through a rip in the time-space continuum where I became Vince Lombardi wondering what the hell is going on?

All tears through that time-space continuum inevitably encounter the fabric of history. There’s on old saying about history being written by the “winners.” Well, let’s just say the inventors of FoxTrax never got to pick up a pen. In 2002, a poll by ESPN asked sports fans what they considered to be the worst innovations in sports history. FoxTrax finished high on the list. As for the writing, sports scribe Aaron Brown of Slate called it “one of sports broadcasting’s most-ridiculed experiments.”

Again, that’s cruel…but fair.

Speaking of fairness, it does need to be mentioned that despite FoxTrax’s initial failure, the technology behind it lives on in the sports broadcasting world. The most common example comes from football; the very same ability to make things invisible to the naked eye yet appear on television is how on-field graphics are produced, such as the yellow “first-down” line.

The Moral of the Story:

Be it a bone, a spaceship, or a visual effect, the beneficial or detrimental nature of a tool is just like beauty…it’s all in the eyes of the beholder.

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