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2001_KAELS

                                    January 15, 2013

                                                          TRASHING_KAEL
Section VIII, of Pauline Kael's
"Trash, Art, and the Movies" (1969),
is all anti-2001 intellectual gibble-gabble.


The space walk scene at the start of
"You Only Live Twice"-- which Kael
preferred to 2001-- was way stupid, too
stupid to bother expounding on why it
was stupid, and if Kael didn't notice,
there's an obvious conclusion.

   Most charitably: we are
   of different tribes.

   The opposite tack: she
   doesn't know anything.         KNOWS_SOMETHING


                                            The idea that 2001 and
                                            Strangelove taken together
                                            show a death worship is
                                            quite a stretch: Kubrick did
                                            one film about humanity's
                                            self-destruction, and
                                            another-- arguably-- about
Putting aside the                           alien saviors stepping in
stuck dial on her                           (ala "The Day the World
sneer-o-matic:                              Stood Still" and friends).

She may have a point about the                    EXPOSURE_TO_VACUUM
implicit passivity of 2001.
The message might be taken as:
We don't know what's going on and
nothing we do actually matters, so
we might as well just worship the
Great Obelisk.


The religious overtones of 2001--
this vision of ascension, or cosmic
transcendence into the next phase of         And there are similar themes
humanity... this is perhaps a sign           throughout much of Clarke's
that Clarke, one of the great                work, though Kael, of course,
Rational Men, had not truly managed          knows nothing except them
to divorce himself from Christianity.        movin' picture shows.

   Maybe he didn't get past it
   until much later, with
   "Songs of Distant Earth".        GODDEATH




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