2001: Odyssee im Weltraum (1968)

2001: Odyssee im Weltraum: Directed by Stanley Kubrick. With Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Daniel Richter. After discovering a mysterious artifact buried beneath the Lunar surface, mankind sets off on a quest to find its origins with help from intelligent supercomputer H.A.L. 9000.

“Iu0026#39;m always surprised, given that the famous title track of 2001 is called u0026quot;Also sprach Zarathustrau0026quot;, that nobody (nobody Iu0026#39;ve read, anyway) has noted the parallels between the movie and Nietzscheu0026#39;s famous work, u0026quot;Also sprach Zarathustrau0026quot;. The idea of manu0026#39;s rebirth into a star child; an infant form of an indescribably more advanced being, is an explicit part of N.u0026#39;s u0026quot;Zarathustrau0026quot;; there is a prominent passage called u0026quot;On how a camel becomes a lion, and a lion becomes a childu0026quot;, in which N. describes the first incarnation of the overman as a child, transcending both the ascetic, altruistic side of man (the camel; always asking to bear more weight) and the rapacious, brutish, will-to-power side of man (the lion). The fact that the song plays during the star child sequence can hardly be coincidence. And also, Zarathustra said that u0026quot;man is a rope tied between beasts and the overman.u0026quot; The structure of the movie fits that description: a brief history of man as beast, until we become truly man by mastering weapons and acquiring reason, then a long sequence about man (the rope, as it were), and then a brief glimpse of the overman. The inscrutability of how these transformations occurred, and the suggestion that an external force caused them, is also Nietzschean; in u0026quot;Zarathustrau0026quot;, he makes it pretty clear that he doesnu0026#39;t have a clue how people are going to be able to enact these changes themselves and suggests that we will have to depend on an outsider (Zarathustra) to show us how to u0026quot;go underu0026quot;. Bowmanu0026#39;s psychedelic sequence at the near-end could be seen as Kubricku0026#39;s best 1960u0026#39;s-style attempt at depicting the mystical u0026quot;going underu0026quot;.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eI know these parallels are pretty broad, and almost certainly have been noted elsewhere despite the fact that I have not personally seen it. But I just wanted to mention them, if for no other reason than to try to dispel the myth that Nietzsche was ultimately a gloomy philosopher. Few people find the ending of 2001 to be gloomy, and it is in my opinion, explicitly and unmistakeably Nietzschean. The case could certainly be made that 2001 is above all a dramatization of u0026quot;Zarathustrau0026quot; updated for the modern age. Feel free to disregard the outright snobbishness of my tying everything to Nietzsche.”