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2001, A SPACE ODYSSEY -- DULL MOVIE, GREAT SOUNDTRACK |
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by Charles Carreon 2001, A Space Odyssey was a sixties event. It screened in my hometown at the widescreen cinema on Scottsdale Boulevard. I remember it showed with a fantastic documentary about real space travel that I enjoyed a great deal more than the feature. That tells you something. It’s not a movie for kids, even smart kids who are interested in outer space. When I was a kid, this movie seemed stupid, irritating, and implausible. I didn't think that grownups would let their machines kill them. When HAL started singing “Daisy,” I wanted another root beer badly, but it just went on and on, slower and slower as the astronaut turned off his circuits and the stupid retarded machine started whining. Then the ending was torturous. The astronaut gets really old and eats all by himself. That was about as exciting as watching the grass grow. It was slightly exciting when he broke his wine glass, but nothing came of it. All the adults were so solemn watching this guy get old in a room with too much light where there were no other people, so boring, and he just gets older and older. It was like an ad for why not to retire. It’ll kill you. At any rate, finally he does die, and the movie can end. Actually, that’s funny to run through, because now, I think it’s a pretty good movie. But what I like better is the soundtrack from 2001, A Space Odyssey. Apparently, Kubrick chose the music to give himself some structure for shooting, but had budgeted for a composer to do a unique soundtrack. Ultimately, he stuck with his classical sources. A lesson to us all – we often end where we begin. My experience with the 2001 soundtrack came with a copy recorded on 8-track owned by my friend William Woods Chandler III, who gets the prize for most drugs in one small suitcase, including hundreds of hits of blotter, grams of brown sugar, and some cocaine so bad I don’t think you could have been busted for possessing it. He was a bad boy, determined to be bad, but actually very sweet natured and just looking for mothering. At any rate, if you don’t know about 8-tracks, they had a unique characteristic which was they would endlessly repeat if you didn’t pull them out. Sometimes they would also get warped by the Arizona sun in someone’s boiling auto interior, and then playback would be distorted. But if people were very twisted on psychedelics, they couldn’t tell, which could lead to funny scenes where straight people show up to find tripping friends totally grooving on a Jimi Hendrix tape so distorted that it was unrecognizable. The psychedelics made many strange things equal that way. Eight tracks were perfect, too, because if the music was appropriate enough that no one unplugged it, you could settle into it for the long haul. This happened to me one night when we decided to light up the windowpanes and complete some written work we hadn’t gotten done earlier in the semester, and Kubrick’s soundtrack became our soundtrack. For three or four hours, the 8 track played and played and played. The Blue Danube, again and again. The strange atonal modern choir pieces, interspersed with gasps, breath expulsion, and eddies of queries and rumors spreading in a foreign birdlike tongue. The haunting, icily beautiful “Lux Eterna” may be the sound of the stars driving Van Gogh mad. Driving us all mad, if we let them. Everytime I heard The Blue Danube strike up again, I saw Kubrick’s freely-rotating space-station, frictionless in the vacuum, with nothing to slow it down, the music self-regenerating and strong. This is tautological energy at its best. It kept me going the whole night, and I got the paper done.
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