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Although Kubrick is normally treated as an artist who deals in big, important ideas, the key to his style lies in his anxious fascination with the human body.1
The animal brain is sensory and physical; communication and decision making are expressed through the body, which conveys affects relating to fear, pain, threat, pleasure, and aggression. The animal brain constitutes one form of intelligence that is often regarded as inferior in comparison with the human brain. Yet 2001 does not fall prey to this judgment.2
In case anyone might question the need for another contribution to the vast literature on Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey - which now includes no less than seven monographs or single-themed compilations alongside countless articles and chapters - Robert Kolker puts the case pretty well in his editorial introduction to a 2006 collection of 'new essays' on the film:
The power of 2001 lies in the fact that it can have no conclusion. It is the perpetual generator of the imagination, taking us on its journey every time we join it, stimulating with its imagination the imagination of others, making meaning, making us continually want to find meaning, and eluding us every time. 3
Such insistence on open-ended, reader-based interpretation might seem, by now, a standard critical trope. But if I find Kolker's introduction a useful launching pad for another pass through 2001 it is not just for its avowed faith in interpretative indeterminacy, but for its vivid illustration of just how hard it is to sustain that faith in the face of a work that, as Michel Chion once put it, 'holds up a mirror to our perpetual temptation to project'. 4 For the purposes of this essay I am primarily concerned with a single instance, which emerges when Kolker turns to the pivotal Jupiter Mission episode and asserts that the famous HAL 9000 computer is '2001's great enigma: a machine with intelligence and consciousness. A machine with feelings - in fact more feelings than any of the human characters inhabiting the film.'5
It seems from the blunt 'in fact' that Kolker is not even aware that his last, comparative assertion ('more feelings') is itself a 'projection'...