By 1968, events in the real world had begun to catch up with Kubrick's prophetic cinematic visions of where we were going. In a real sense, we had been prepared for the insanity of the war in Vietnam and the military industrial complex first in Paths of Glory and later in Strangelove, and the streets of cities around the world were now filled with Hobsbawm's "primitive rebels." Young, bright-eyed Kirk Douglases were everywhere leading their cohorts out of (at least mental) slavery from Prague to Mexico City to Paris and New York, playing out their own version of Spartacus. The cataclysmic events that shook the world in 1968 were only beginning in April of that year--far, far too many to list here, but just as a reminder: we witnessed the assassinations of both M. L. King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy (among others), the Tet offensive, the Democratic National Convention, the Prague Spring, the massacre of students in Mexico City, the Cultural Revolution in China in full swing, the Paris Riots, the police attack on Columbia University. One came to fear calls in the night for what they might report. The year came to fully earn its label, "the year the world ended."
It is difficult to recreate the excitement and anticipation with which many of my generation looked forward to the release of 2001. It had the promise of being Kubrick's masterwork. Rumor had it that it was so long that Kubrick was still editing the film up to the very eve of its release. It would have its New York premiere in one of the large movie houses in Times Square that still dotted the area. At the time, my wife was working for Cambridge University Press, and I was teaching in what was then called a ghetto junior high school. We planned the evening carefully. I would meet her in front of Carnegie Hall, just outside of the 57th Street subway station, timed to get a bite to eat before the movie and then walk over to Times Square. The events of that evening came to forever encapsulate for me the experience of the sixties.
Left: President's Daily Diary for April 4, 1968 indicating that at 5:09 p.m. he would board the presidential helicopter in Central Park's Sheep Meadow. He was in town for the installation of Cardinal Cooke, who succeeded Cardinal Spellman.
When I emerged out of the train station and took a seat on the steps of Carnegie Hall, New York Times' article on Kubrick in hand, I found that 57th Street was lined with police barricades. A by-stander told me that the president was in town and his motorcade would soon be passing by. Within a very short time, black limousines began to appear, red lights flashing. Someone pointed out the presidential helicopter hovering above and then descending into nearby Central Park. The air was electric. By this time in his administration, Lyndon Johnson was everywhere being greeted by mobs of young people chanting, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" On this occasion there were no crowds in evidence. Soon, a long entourage of dazzling police motorcycles signaled the approach of the presidential limousine, and, colorful flags waving, lights shining, it suddenly appeared. LBJ and Lady Bird must have had the limo's interior lights on because one could clearly make out the president and his wife, smiling and waving at curbside onlookers. (Whenever I saw the president at a demonstration in New York, I always marveled at how handsome he appeared, his tan skin set off by an almost blindingly white shirt.) One young man standing at my side made a move that seemed intended to throw himself at the president's car, but he was instantly pushed back by a cop. For a split second, it seemed the president reacted. And then the show was over.
When my young bride arrived just a few minutes later from her office, she found me in an excited state that seemed excessive even for a Kubrick aficionado about to see one of his movies. We walked across Seventh Avenue to a small restaurant, and, over a hastily consumed meal, I told her what I had witnessed just moments before. My hands were shaking. I ordered a scotch.
In the event, 2001: A Space Odyssey turned out to be at least as prophetic as Kubrick's earlier work. The problem, as we shall see, is that he would himself be party to those events, events which would eventually prove to leave the "Left" everywhere besieged and cast into disarray. 2001 was, in effect, a shot across the bow of an entire intellectual construct that, in 1968, the smoke of rebellion everywhere in the air, seemed to promise revolutionary change. We would come to look back and realize that Paths of Glory ends in the death of innocents, Spartacus ends up crucified on a Roman road, and Slim Pickens' misguided (no pun intended) patriotism triggers our Mutually Assured Destruction. Humanity seemed incapable of altering its condition--at least without divine intervention.
If we turn to one of the fractals of American culture in the years leading up to this sea change, we might find in another science-fiction work popular with the young of the time, television's Star Trek, a swan song for classical Marxism and materialism. Star Trek, at least in its earliest manifestations, was almost pure science, almost always drawing writers for its various episodes from the Old Left. Aside from occasional lapses into silly plots designed to keep up ratings, what happened on the show, strange as those events may have seemed, at least had some roots in material possibility. After 2001, however, the floodgates of Hollywood opened to a deluge of barely disguised mysticism. George Lucas's Star Wars was warmed-over Christian myth pretending to be science fiction. From that point on, until this very day, American culture has been drowning in vampires, ghosts, angels and superheros with superhuman powers. But it was not in the United States alone that the phenomenon occurred.
Science, until this period, was a construct at least popularly held to be in rational opposition to virgin births, resurrections and other such products of fevered human imagination. In the world of physics, it would turn out, only Albert Einstein (who would come to be somewhat pejoratively--if not pathetically, labeled a "neo-realist") would attempt to hold the fort against a quantum world in which we are told that anything is possible. With Einstein spiritually at their side, some left theoreticians would struggle to point out that historical materialism was never purely deterministic, that Marx's materialism was dialectic rather than some simple-minded linear cause and effect. They proved to be voices in the wilderness, lost in one of the alternate universes that the sages at MIT and the Planck Institute had theorized. Heisenberg, already hated by the left for his cozy relationship with Hitler and the Nazi's minister of armaments, Albert Speer, replaced the long arc of history steering toward justice in one blow with his Uncertainty Principle.
The movie was spectacular. Shown on a vast wide-screen in a huge theater, it overwhelmed the viewer with its images, its music, its view of the future both playful and deeply profound. Because it was so long, there was an intermission. The first half of 2001 was already like no "movie" anyone had ever seen. As we watched an animal bone ascend--now thanks to the intervention of the monolith having morphed into its inevitable function as tool (or, more accurately, weapon)--we saw summed up for us 2,000,000 years of human evolution. And oh, that spinning wheel of a space station on a screen so large and wide it seemed to engulf the viewer, luminescent against the blackest space, being approached by a space vehicle to the strains of a Strauss' Blue Danube waltz, further summing up all human accomplishment. On to Jupiter! I turned to my wife, reaching for a much needed cigarette and said, "Honey, if the second half of this movie is anywhere near as good as the first half, we are going to be blown away!" And, as we shall see, we were indeed.
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