"Deliberately Buried." The 4 Markers of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): Deciphering the Monolith

The 4 Markers

First Marker: The Dawn of Man

Stage 1: Beasts. Sentient, but without the ability to deduce or reason. The first marker improves that.






Second Marker: Buried beneath the surface of the Moon near Clavius (which is an actual lunar crater)

Stage 2: Man - with the newly formed ability to deduce, grows over millions of years, steadily using their new powers of reasoning to access Space. Electronic signals are coming from the moon, despite satellite read-outs revealing only a bare lunar surface. The electronic signal is too strong and too persistent to neglect investigation. The reason the electronic signal seemed to emanate from a bare space was because the source of the signal was buried beneath the surface of the moon.


Once the astronauts get close enough to touch it, the marker emits a piercing sound. This is not an attack on the astronauts, as Heywood Floyd is very much alive when he leaves the prerecorded instructions for the Discovery mission. The high-pitched piercing sound was a communication between the second monolith and another source somewhere near the planet Jupiter. The purpose of the Discovery mission is to locate the source of the communication with the second monolith. Before the Discovery reaches its destination, there is a battle of wits and wills between Bowman and the computer mainframe, HAL 9000.


HAL with his lack of human emotions could be said to be the next level in intelligence. Artificial intelligence, devoid of pity, doubt, regret, etc. - pure, dispassionate logic. It is only natural that these two should battle to see who earns the right to enter the third stage of development.


Third Marker: in orbit around Jupiter




Stage 3: In India, the Hindu view of human development comprises four stages or Ashram: 1) Brahmacharya, 2) Grihastha, 3) Vanaprastha, and 4) Sannyasa. The third stage, Vanaprastha, is defined as “a period of secluded life in the forest with severe discipline, austerity and penance. This is a stage in preparation for the final stage of renunciation, that is, Sannyasa.”

“This stage denotes a transition phase from material to spiritual life.”

“In this phase of life, the person is in retreat from worldly life. He lives away from the city, in a jungle as a hermit...”



Fourth Marker: in the room that was prepared for Dr. Bowman by the beings that placed the Markers. You can hear these beings communicating at points during Dave's stay in the room. It sounds like ghastly chortling.


Much earlier in the film, Dr. Heywood Floyd is briefed en route to the Tycho lunar crater that the (TMA-1 ~ Tycho Magnetic Anomaly) has been caused by an artifact “that appears to have been deliberately buried.” If we assume that the second marker was placed by a higher intelligence, then we can assume the first marker was too. It seems to be a game in which the first stage of human development is set into motion and by the time the second clue is able to be accessed, then that alerts the higher intelligence that clue #3 can now be activated. Once Dave reaches the third Marker, he is sent beyond Jupiter into another plane of existence.


He is very nearly obliterated by sensory overload during this experience.


It is a wonder that he makes it through intact or still breathing.


Presumably, the fourth Marker summons and morphs Dave Bowman onto the exalted level of the Star Child: pure, self-sustaining Mind.

“I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophical content...I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does...You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film.”

-Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

“Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”
- George Bernard Shaw


The monolith: a symmetrical nomadic apparition, at once alternatively and simultaneously sinister and awe-inspiring, a configuration whose geometric proportions have been refined to the nth degree. It is the perfect embodiment of an abstraction that Kubrick wanted to communicate about the evolution of the human mind. The roughness and crudity of the apes living in primitive disarray is thrown into such wildly contrary relief in the midst of the monolith, that it is no surprise that even the most rudimentary conception of learning plants itself in the slightly comprehending brains of the feral apes. Something about the precision and the sharp corners of the 4 right angles of the uniform black shape sets a slow-burning charge on the faculties of one of the more thoughtful creatures, and one day, while thoughtlessly milling around some old elephant bones, the ape remembers… he remembers that strange apparition he saw, and then he looks at the bones, and the powder keg explodes: Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” sounds the fundaments of triumphant epiphany. Of course Kubrick’s implicit irony is generally overlooked on first viewing because the sheer grandeur of the music and imagery is so intoxicating. The irony of course is that the celebration of discovery trumpeted by the Strauss piece belies the fact that the ape’s seminal innovation is instantaneously utilized for purposes of murder. And so the evolution of mankind begins.

The transition from the bone to the spacecraft is often noted for being the single biggest transitional leap in time in all of cinema. And of course, we don’t need any of the space in between to lose Kubrick’s point: man has discovered how to use the raw materials that have been rationed to him by existence to astonishing and frightening ends, the bone being the original utility and the spacecraft being the most advanced. But even after 2000 or so millennia, the banality of existence persists: aboard the impossibly sophisticated and advanced technical achievement millions of years in the making, Space Station 5, the massive floating steering wheel Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) docks with as a mid-point between Earth and Clavius, there are advertisements for Hilton Hotels, who presumably own the rights to the space station, and a placard for Howard Johnson’s, that chain of restaurant’s rustic name as glaringly incongruous with the aseptic cutting edge interior of the space station as a Taco Bell logo plastered inside a bio-lab. It’s deflating to see that Howard Johnson’s sign, just as it is deflating to witness Dr. Frank Poole’s (Gary Lockwood) insipid chit-chat with his parents via telecommunication while he traverses the lofty reaches of space aboard the Discovery One. Poole himself seems mildly disgusted during this sequence, and the music played over Poole’s birthday chat with his parents is sorrowful.

Keir Dullea seems at cursory inspection to be a rather bland choice for Dr. David Bowman, the other conscious astronaut aboard the Discovery (the remaining three astronauts have been placed in cryogenic sleeping chambers in order to preserve their energies at maximum level until such time as they will be needed once the ship arrives at Jupiter) but in fact Kubrick (who cast Dullea sight unseen after witnessing his performances in David and Lisa (1962) and The Thin Red Line (1964)) has optioned wisely, in that only an actor as preternaturally cool, calm, and collected as Dullea could convince us that he stands a chance against HAL. HAL is voiced by Douglas Rain, and is one of the most quietly psychotic antagonists in film history. Psychotic you say? Yes. It is one thing to go after Dave and Frank, who HAL has clandestinely witnessed conspiring to deactivate him, but to murder the three sleeping humans who have nothing to do with the conspiracy, is the work of a madman. HAL’s killing spree is not entirely successful; Dave is resourceful, and when HAL refuses him entry onto the Discovery after Dave returns from a finally futile attempt to retrieve the drifting body of the maliciously jettisoned Frank, Dave, without a helmet, hazards death by propelling himself over a brief but treacherous fissure between the berth of the Discovery’s emergency airlock and the exit of the EVA (extra-vehicular activity) pod.

Besides the grandeur and scope of Kubrick’s vision, and the intellectual ambition, the film intuits themes and observations that can be lost on those who are put off by Kubrick’s dispassionate remove from the proceedings. But the film, if viewed properly, should not leave the viewer cold, but rather should incite ecstatic absorption which only begins in the brain and then charges from there to all the senses. This is not a boring film. Many claim that it is, but it is only due to the scarcity of these viewers’ imaginations and interior resources that the film will fail to react. I postulate that human beings with rich inner lives have the richest and most rewarding experiences with art (some people feel uncomfortable around negative space, even indignant, because, naturally, they have nothing of their own to fill it with; and I don’t mean IQ). And that is what 2001: A Space Odyssey is beyond all else - beyond its technical proficiency, its philosophy, its cutting-edge special effects, its iconic status - an artistic endeavor, and if you’re the right type of person, you’ll feel the blissful chemistry of your senses and Kubrick’s intuition bubbling harmoniously.

Whenever I watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I see the monolith, I reflexively envision Kubrick, with his dark imposing countenance and towering cold intellect. When Kubrick’s films are referred to as “cold,” generally it is the cut-and-dried nature of his presentation that is being commented on. All of this meticulous aseptic precision can result in bothersome feelings that Kubrick’s magnum opus is too pat, too exacting, the perfection is hermetically sealed. To me, it’s like the film itself is the monolith, or maybe Kubrick is.


2001 materialized before particular absent-minded and coarse terrestrials in the same manner as the silent black monolith before the howling apes; at first, they were perturbed and bewildered:

“a film out of control, an infuriating combination of exactitude on small parts and incoherence on large ones.”

- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Historian

“a thoroughly uninteresting failure and the most damning demonstration yet of Stanley Kubrick’s inability to tell a story coherently and with a consistent point of view.”

- Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice, April 11, 1968

“Such movies as 'Petulia' and '2001' may be no more than trash in the latest, up-to-the-minute guises, using “artistic techniques” to give trash the look of art. The serious art look may be the latest fashion in expensive trash. All that “art” may be what prevents pictures like these from being enjoyable trash; they’re not honestly crummy, they’re very fancy and they take their crummy ideas seriously… In some ways it’s the biggest amateur movie of them all… It’s a monumentally unimaginative movie.”

-Pauline Kael, Harper’s, February 1969

“Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?”

-Rock Hudson at the Los Angeles Premiere, April 4, 1968, according to Roger Ebert


But it was not long after the initial apprehension that Kubrick’s film seized our collective consciousness and deposited us in the warm glow of intuitive clarity, leaving the detractors and the skeptics crowing like beasts outside the orb of enlightenment.

2001 is not my favorite Kubrick (that would be The Shining) but it would be inaccurate to find any of the work he granted us previous or subsequent to this film as more vital to international culture. 2001 is the centerpiece in a peerless oeuvre.


Grade: A+



+ "Deliberately Buried." The 4 Markers of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): Deciphering the Monolith

Spartacus (1960)

“The script could have been improved in the course of shooting, but it wasn’t. Kirk [Douglas] was the producer. He and Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter, and Edward Lewis, the executive producer, had everything their way.”
-Stanley Kubrick
Vincent LoBrutto’s Stanley Kubrick: A Biography

I watched Spartacus for one reason and one reason alone: out of obligation to finish viewing every single one of Stanley Kubrick’s 12 available features (his first, Fear and Desire (1953) has never been released on video). I’m happy to say it was more compelling than I had imagined and despite the worrisome quote above, basically a success, though one that feels a little dated. Kirk Douglas is best in the first Act of the film, when he silently anguishes in a subterranean holding cell for slaves being trained to fight as gladiators for Lentalus Batiatus (the great Peter Ustinov), a man who is less nasty in lording over his doomed than Oliver Reed’s gnarled Proximo in Gladiator, but still cheerfully pitiless. There is a powerful and moving moment when Kirk Douglas’s eponymous hero is beaten in a impromptu gladiatorial battle by Draba (Woody Strode), a tall fearsome black slave.


Draba is given the thumbs down by Senator Crassus (Laurence Olivier) and his female companion, but instead of plunging his trident into Spartacus’s throat, Draba hurls it at Crassus and leaps up to the balcony where the royals spectate, only to be incapacitated by a spear, and then brutally slashed by Crassus, sacrificing his life for human decency. It is a devastating moment of noble heroism that is all the more effective for transpiring without bluntly informing us of how noble it was.

Unlike, say, a crucial scene near the end, when the captured Spartacus talks to his loyal soldier and friend, Antoninus (Tony Curtis) outside the gates of Crassus’s fortress.

Antoninus: “Could we have won, Spartacus? Could we ever have won?”

Spartacus: “Just by fighting them, we won something.”

This exchange and the many others where characters talk incessantly, faces shining while violins play, about F-R-E-E-D-O-M is not too far removed from the platitudes of Braveheart, and if the screenplay of the film had been written by Kubrick (he wrote, or co-wrote all of his other films, including Lolita, for which he went uncredited), such clichéd aphorisms would have been excised. As would the mawkish romance between Spartacus and Varinia (Jean Simmons), who frolic in a meadow in one scene while warm gooey music strums insufferably.

Spartacus: I’m free. And what do I know? I don’t even know how to read.

Varinia: You know things that can’t be taught.

Spartacus: I know nothing. Nothing! And I want to know. I want to. I want to know.

Varinia: Know what?

Spartacus: …I want to know all about you. Every line…every curve. I want to know every part of you. Every beat of your heart.

No doubt Stanley Kubrick was in pain when it came time to shoot this scene. I was in pain watching it. Again, Spartacus was the one film on which Kubrick had no involvement in preplanning, notably in crafting the screenplay. That is not to say that Dalton Trumbo’s dialogue is without merit; on the contrary, there is a wealth of it. There is the relief of Charles Laughton’s cynical, decadent old Gracchus, who when informed by Peter Ustinov’s Batiatus that he’s “…found something I never had with all my wealth…dignity,” says, “In Rome, dignity shortens life, even more surely than disease.”

Much credit should go to Saul Bass. Bass is the most famous graphic designer in film history for his revolutionary opening title sequences, often combining animation and live action to create energetic film credits which sucked the viewer into a film in a way that had never been done before. His most famous sequences are the ones in The Man with the Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho, and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. While the one he designed for Spartacus is not one of his most dynamic, his contributions to the film went beyond title design. He scouted locations, worked on set design, and single-handedly blueprinted the battle scenes of the film. “He storyboarded the scene in which the slaves break down the fence of the gladiator school and originated the concept of the slaves’ using the fence as a weapon” (LoBrutto, 171). He also was responsible for thinking up the ingenious concept of the flaming logs that Spartacus’s army roll down the hill at the charging Romans. Spartacus has the look and the impact of many different collaborators’ achievements and failures being stirred together in the same pot, which gives it the ultimate, vaguely dissatisfying feeling of not cohering into one visionary whole.

Spartacus has many of Kubrick’s stylistic touches, but the actual story has zero: no subversive humor, no lack of sentimentality, no wicked perversity. The film does end mostly tragic and carries an inexorable gloom, but it has a generic sort of pessimism, glum, without Kubrick’s impish gallows humor. Another massive deficiency is the lighting and photography – reading about Kubrick on the set of Spartacus, it is clear that he showed a once in a lifetime complacency about the film he was working on. In Vincent LoBrutto’s Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, he writes, “Although Kubrick was under the enormous pressure of an epic production and having to cope with ubiquitous power struggles, his disengagement from a film that wasn’t really his and his inbred sense of dark humor helped move him through the project.” While he was uncompromising about many things, the long takes, calling for scenes to be covered in every possible angle, the shooting ratio (the ratio between the total duration of footage shot for a film and the footage which results from its final cut), he did not show his characteristic attention to the lighting as he had in The Killing and Paths of Glory. This could have been a result of the open hostility from Spartacus director of photography, Russell Metty, who was heard to say, “Let’s get that little Jew-boy from the Bronx off the crane” (LoBrutto, 185). There was much in-fighting between the two on the set, all of which Kubrick endured without raising his voice or becoming angry, another sign of his disengagement from Spartacus. Anyone who has watched Vivian Kubrick’s 35-minute documentary detailing the making of The Shining, has witnessed Stanley Kubrick being disquietingly irascible with Shelley Duvall.

He just didn’t care as much, and it shows. There isn’t a hint of the brilliant Expressionistic lighting of The Killing and Paths of Glory, the very thing that made those films so astonishing. In Spartacus, the photography is adequate, but not particularly interesting to look at: the daylight scenes are too bright and the night scenes are too murky. Indeed, Spartacus has the least impressive cinematography of the 11 Kubrick films I’ve seen. Considered alone, it is a fine handsome epic, but among Kubrick’s oeuvre, it is an unfortunate weak spot.


Grade: B

Paths of Glory (1957)

“The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
- Elegy written in a church courtyard, Thomas Gray


Everything you’ve heard is true: Paths of Glory is as potent and gripping today as it was when it was released 51(!) years ago. After conquering the crime genre with The Killing (1956, only his 3rd film), Kubrick conquered the war genre, producing the single best English-language war film in cinematic history (excepting perhaps Apocalypse Now), a vicious satire of military bureaucracy and the farcical allegiance to the chain-of-command. Paths of Glory alternates between compassionate irony and bleak absurdity to illustrate the horrendous folly of war. 10,000 men’s lives are lost for a few yards, to capture a building on a spot of land, which they have been told, means something.

A man’s life is not terribly important to him, unless, of course, it is his own, but if it’s not his life, why not sacrifice it for 15 meters, as long as it promotes his reputation? That is the ugly mindset of General Mireau (George MacReady), the officer putting his promotion in jeopardy if his men do not accomplish the impossible. He has been ordered by the genial sociopath General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) to take a particularly pesky battlement, the terribly important “Ant Hill” in order to show tangible results of progress. Broulard is the highest ranking officer in the film, but the subtle pressure he puts on Mireau implies that he himself is being pressured by another, even more aloof higher-up.

The two Generals negotiate promotions in ivory ballrooms lined with towering windows, coldly determining ideal strategies to overcome impossible circumstances at the great bodily risk of pawns under their command. The Grandmasters chat as the outside floods the inner rooms, penetrating their sequestered plotting, bathing it in naked daylight. Later, the same daylight lurks in a ballroom where a devastating injustice is taking place, flooding, and remaining, stubbornly, like an elephant in the room.

It is in the use of light, the use of color (yes, black and white provides a color all its own), that Paths of Glory rewards the attention that has been apprehended by the cruel story of three men chosen, by lottery, to serve as scapegoats for a major tactical setback for the French Army during World War I. Like The Killing, Paths of Glory presents lustrous black-and-white imagery with deep rich blacks, cinematography crisper and sharper than most other black-and-white films from that period, and even more arresting for the meticulous manner in which Kubrick lights it, every image a marvelous raising of the bar of brilliant photography.

There are many powerful performances, especially George MacReady as the monstrously proud General Mireau, and the great, sometimes volcanic force of Kirk Douglas as the heroic Col. Dax.

The considerable acting is integrated so well into Kubrick's vision and served so proficiently by the photography that it is no surprise that, after Kubrick completed it, he was hailed as some sort of prodigy with a prescient sensibility peerless in its cunning assuredness.

Kubrick was well known for his devilish sense of humor and inevitably his black irony was misinterpreted as misogyny, nihilism, and misanthropy. The devilish sense of humor may have been magnified in later works like A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket, but they are prominent in The Killing and Paths of Glory as well. From the man condemned for cowardice for not leaving the trenches despite being knocked unconscious, to the condemned man with the skull fracture roused alert just in time for his execution, Kubrick is already pushing his exceptional cynicism to the breaking point for maximum poignant horror and dismay.

After the film was released, it was banned in France, as the film was considered “an offense to the honor of their army.” The film was also banned in Spain for its anti-military message and in Germany because they feared it might “strain relations with France.”

It would not be allowed to be exhibited in France until 1975.



Grade: A+