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| Arthur C. Clarke |
2001:
A Space Odyssey (1968) is one of
the most representative science-fiction films in the world of cinema. Its
script, which took several years to develop, was elaborated jointly by Arthur
C. Clarke, a renowned science-fiction writer during the golden age of this
genre, and Stanley Kubrick, a famous film director. While he was working on the
script, Clarke wrote a book with the same title as the film, which was
published after the film’s release.
In 1972 Arthur C. Clarke published a book entitled The Lost Worlds of 2001, where he mixes reminiscences about the elaboration of the script with discarded chapters from the book. By reading this book, we can follow the process of the construction of the film by Clarke and Kubrick and the successive stages of the plot. I agree with them that the final script was much better than the intermediate versions. Reading this book has led me to the following two comments:
- In almost all the versions prior to the final
one, Clarke included a description of the aliens who greet David Bowman
after his interstellar journey. I think that the concealment of these
aliens was a good decision. Any shape given to them would have been
disappointing.
In several of his descriptions Clarke insists on two
details: a) That the aliens would have their mouths in the middle of
their torso, at the level of their stomach. b) That their
respiratory openings would be located in the chest, where terrestrial
humans have nipples. Why? Because, according to Clarke, we are poorly designed:
the fact that our respiratory and digestive tracts have a common area (the
pharynx) leads to bad consequences, such as choking, one of the most frequent causes
of accidental death. If we had our mouths on our stomach, the pharynx and
esophagus would be eliminated; the same would be true of the trachea, if the
respiratory openings led directly to the lungs.
But Clarke forgets that humans are descended
from fish, whose body shape requires that the mouth be located on the
head (otherwise they could not grasp food), and that the evolution of the lung
in these animals, prior to leaving the water and living on dry land, led to the
respiratory holes also being located on the head in all vertebrates.
For evolution to have led to the form preferred by
Clarke, it would have been necessary for the aliens not to have descended from
aquatic animals, or to have manipulated their own development to redesign their
body to Clarke’s liking.
- In one of the intermediate versions, the aliens
who receive Bowman speak to him, and tell him this:
If, like many primitive societies, [the
earthlings] still believed in gods and spirits, they must abandon these
fantasies and face the awesome truths.
I am not surprised
that Clarke wrote this, as he was an atheist and promoted his ideas in his
novels, just as I also introduce my ideas into my works. What surprises me is
that Clarke did not realize that he had sought a substitute for the idea of
God, precisely in those very advanced extraterrestrials who will come to
provide us with immortality, as can be deduced from the end of the novel and
the film.
Personally, I
prefer a thousand times to believe in God, creator and savior, rather than in
those alien saviors that Clarke likes a lot, who also appear in another of his
novels: Childhood’s End. By the
way, in the book I am commenting, Clarke confesses that he and Kubrick toyed
for some time with the idea of showing the extraterrestrials in 2001 in the shape of devils, as in Clarke’s previous
novel. Fortunately, they soon abandoned this idea.
Thematic Thread on Literature and Cinema: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca
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