“Daisy Daisy” actually was one of the first computer vocalizations
Yesterday on the “Gravity” thread we were discussing that trailblazing (and, IMHO, superior) movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Who can forget that memorable moment when astronaut Dave was forced to dismantle the malfunctioning and paranoid (hey, you’re not crazy if they really are out to get you) computer Hal? The computer was, paradoxically, the most emotional character in the entire movie.
Here’s the scene:
And here’s some background about the choice of the song “Daisy, Daisy” for the scene. I’ve cued the video to start at the correct point if you watch it on the blog:
The entire documentary is pretty good, if you’re interested in the background of “2001.”
I haven’t seen Gravity, but I recently watched 2001 again, which I think makes a total of four times since I saw it on original release. I thought then that it was unquestionably the best sci-fi movie ever made–in fact the first really good sci-fi movie ever made–and although it has some competition now I still think it ranks very high. This time around I was struck by the “paleo-future” quality of some of it. But I still find that whole sequence with HAL, Dave, and Frank very powerful.
For those interested,
The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey is a modification and expansion of a short story, “The Sentinel” written in 1948 and first published in 1951 by one of the Grand Masters of SciFi, Arthur C. Clarke. I read “The Sentinel” in the late 50’s/early 60’s and was ‘blown away’ by it, so when 2001 came out I was all over it.
I was struck however by how many failed to grasp its symbolic themes, which I attribute to not having read Clarke’s original story. In “The Sentinel”, Clarke is much more explicit as to the symbolic theme, than Stanley Kramer was in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Clarke’s highly symbolic central theme asks, what if humanity’s evolution is unfinished? He posits that our cave man days were similar to the child’s and that mankind’s current stage is comparable to a teenager’s, with mankind not yet having entered our maturity.
The early scenes of man’s discovery of tools and their use as weapons is comparable to the child’s undisciplined, ‘egoistic’ stage, where moral behavior and conduct is strictly rooted in self-interest, i.e. the ‘selfishness’ of the child.
Homo Sapiens or modern man’s stage, comparable to the teenager’s egotistic stage of self-involvement…where there is an excessive sense of self-importance, too-frequent use of the word ‘I,’ and general arrogance and boastfulness. (sound familiar?)
Hal and spaceflight represent the last achievement of mankind in the egotistical stage and simultaneously, Hal’s insanity represents the necessity to abandon our dependence upon technology, which of course starts with our discovery of tools.
The ‘trip’ that the astronaut takes represents the permanent expansion of consciousness necessary to evolve into the next stage of evolution.
And, at the end of 2001 when we see the baby floating in space symbolizes the onset of mankind’s mature stage, when we escape our ‘planetary cocoon’ with mankind ‘born again’ ready to advance to our final state of evolution.
I had not read “The Sentinel”, but I had read Clarke’s similarly-themed novel Childhood’s End, so I was able to figure out roughly what the movie was driving at.
I haven’t read “The Sentinel”, and I was only 10 when the movie came out in 1968. I didn’t see it until a number of years later, and by then I had read some critical analysis of the movie before I saw it.
I’m sure there was quite a bit of head-scratching among film-goers in ’68, though.
***
As is my wont, I was mainly interested in the spacecraft and the movie’s attempt to depict spaceflight realistically, which was groundbreaking and had a lasting impact in how spaceflight was shown in the movies.
One important point is that the movie showed a variety of different spacecraft which were specialized for different roles. There was an airplane-like passenger carrier which flew between Earth and the space station. It bore the Pan Am insignia, which recognized that privately-owned spacecraft would have a role to play in the future. Then there was the Moon shuttle, which was optimized to fly between the station and the Moon, and landed with legs and thrusters. Finally there was the enormous Discovery interplanetary craft, which I believe was nuclear-powered.
The same applies to airplanes. There is no single design of airplane that is suitable for every role. There are lots of different specialized designs which are optimized for their purpose, such as passenger planes, fighters, bombers, spy planes, crop dusters, traffic helicopters, etc.
But in the 1970s, we got the Space Shuttle, which was a one-size-fits-all spacecraft which didn’t perform any role efficiently and turned out to be not only much more expensive than advertised, but extremely fragile as well.
One thing that bothered me a little about 2001 was the way it portrayed spaceflight as sterile and antiseptic, almost inhuman. There was one scene where an astronaut was eating a meal. It was a plastic tray filled with different colors of paste which was apparently supposed to represent different foods.
About a decade later, the first Star Wars movie again revolutionized the way spaceflight was depicted on screen. It made it seem more human in a way that 2001 didn’t. It had spacecraft that were a little dingy and banged-up, and “lived-in”. My favorite scene was in the Millennium Falcon, which was portrayed as an old junker. They were flying along and the lights in the cockpit suddenly went out. Han Solo banged on the instrument panel, and they came on again.
And here’s a really interesting take on Gravity, which I just read tonight. It was linked at the NSF.com thread that I linked here last night. (It’s up to 30 pages now.)
How “Gravity” is a metaphor for the grieving process
HAL. Shift the letters one character right in the alphabet, and you get IBM. This was scary stuff before NSA.
rickl:
That’s a very interesting article you linked to, and I agree with it to a certain extent. The problem is that although we see Bullock’s character go through the grief/rebirth process there is something very shallow about our connection to her nevertheless.
Also, I just want to add that the stages of grief are not a linear progression, as they are sometimes portrayed.
Neo-neocon:
How is the connection shallow…nevertheless? Nevertheless of what? Of all the evidence in that article? How so?
It’s at least shallow compared to their hate fest propaganda for Sarah Palin. That had a lot more emotional depth and impact, I thought.
It’s not a paradox that HAL is the most emotional character in the movie; Kubrick intentionally portrayed the humans as more robotic than the computer, to highlight the duality of organic life vs. artificial life, and to make HAL a more compelling villain.
Eric Brown:
Yes, it was an intentional paradox on Kubrick’s part.
Don’t kid about Skynet now. I’m pretty sure if they could, they would program our computers to send enough energy pulses to scramble our brains… if they could.