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Real Feelings: Music as Path to Philosophy in 2001: A Space Odyssey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2011

DAVID J. CODE
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Abstract

A recurring trope in the literature on Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey holds that the HAL 9000 computer has more feelings than any of the human characters. But the film itself presents the question of HAL's ‘real feelings’ as something no one can truthfully answer. One way to begin negotiating this contradiction is by attending anew to the way the Jupiter Mission episode, in which HAL appears, is cut to the Adagio from Khachaturian's ballet Gayane, the excerpt that remains the least discussed in this renowned compilation score. Suggesting that the elusive affect of this music, as it is deployed through several interrelated scenes, brings focus to questions of emotion and embodiment that fundamentally inform the conflict between human and machine, I go on to offer a new hearing of HAL's unforgettable death song ‘Daisy Bell’ in this light, and to re-evaluate some of the director's own words about his film. Ultimately, I carry the same questions forward to inform a contribution to the ongoing debate about the Nietzschean philosophical inflections occasionally thought to enter the film with its much more famous cue from Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra.

Type
Articles
Information
Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , September 2010 , pp. 195 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

Filmography

Kubrick, Stanley. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Written by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, music by Aram Khachaturian, György Ligeti, Johann Strauss jr, and Richard Strauss. With performers Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, Douglas Rain (voice), and William Sylvester. MGM, 1968. Reissued DVD, Region 2, Warner Home Video D065000, 2001.Google Scholar

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