Nietzsche Among The Aliens

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Nietzsche among the Aliens in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey

Author(s): Rob Browning
Source: Science Fiction Studies , November 2020, Vol. 47, No. 3 (November 2020), pp.
377-397
Published by: SF-TH Inc
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.47.3.0377
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NIETZSCHE AMONG THE ALIENS IN KUBRICK’S 2001 377
Rob Browning
Nietzsche among the Aliens in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
An intriguing commonality between Nietzschean readings of Stanley Kubrick’s

“proverbial ‘really good’ science-fiction movie” is the scant attention they pay
to the representation of aliens, one of the film’s most thought-provoking sf
elements.1 Analysts supporting a Nietzsche-focused thesis usually either interpret
the monolith and other alien signs allegorically or they sidestep or downplay
these parts of the film2—and the reason why is readily apparent: perhaps the
most essential postulate of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy is the idea that there
is no God or any other otherworldly entity we can rely upon for justifying and
guiding human existence. Human beings must construct their own meanings,
Nietzsche insists, which can occur only by the exuberantly creative endeavors
of extraordinary individuals, without expectation of assistance from higher
entities.3
Symbolic correspondences notwithstanding, the overarching plot of 2001
differs emphatically from Nietzsche’s narrative of the Übermensch. It concerns
how alien benefactors guide and assist human evolution—first, in helping
hominids make the leap from ape-men to tool-using Homo sapiens and, next, in
transitioning them from spacefaring Homo sapiens to a higher species or state
of being, represented by the cosmic fetus or, as Arthur C. Clarke calls it in his
novel, the “Star Child” (297).4 After analyzing how 2001 appears to align with
many of the major concepts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), Jerold
Abrams asks the question critics tend to avoid: “Why does Kubrick—a man
acutely aware of the future of technology—use the idea of aliens as the driving
force behind human evolution?” As he observes:
there is an oddity about 2001, interpreted in light of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (on
which Kubrick obviously based his film). Aliens may make for a better science
fiction epic, but being “replacement gods” (as we may call them), they obscure
what is perhaps the most fundamental insight in Zarathustra. There is, of course,
much in Nietzsche that can be safely reinterpreted to capture the essence of his
philosophical vision in space, but perhaps the death of God is not one of them....
[I]n an age in which the idea of God is not so widely held—certainly compared
with the Middle Ages—why does Kubrick replace the old idea of a designer with
a new one? (260-61)
Abrams concludes that the film’s “introduction of a new kind of extraterrestrial
god must, ultimately, render Kubrick’s higher men, last man, and tightrope
walker”—in Nietzsche’s rank-ordering, different human types under the
Übermensch—“conceptually thin reflections of the Nietzschean personas on
which they are so clearly based” (261). He admits what other critics support
implicitly by choosing to allegorize or avoid 2001’s extraterrestrials: Nietzsche
and literal super-powerful aliens do not mix. Conceptually, they are like oil and
water.

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378 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020)
Nevertheless, there are good reasons for understanding that both Nietzschean
philosophy and intelligent extraterrestrials are essential components of 2001: A
Space Odyssey. Kubrick’s decision to begin and end the main body of the film
with the triumphant “Sunrise” fanfare from Also sprach Zarathustra (1896),
Richard Strauss’s tone poem inspired by the life and work of Nietzsche, is a
conspicuous invitation to think about how the philosopher’s ideas may be
involved in this film about alien entities guiding human evolution.5 Those who
have accepted the invitation have found various correspondences between 2001
and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, most notably how the film’s evolutionary scope
echoes Zarathustra’s commentary on the differences among apes, modern
“man,” and the Übermensch; but these studies typically stop short of tracing that
evolutionary path beyond the terrestrial scene. If, however, one takes both the
Nietzschean and alien components of the film seriously and considers them
together, how might this inform an interpretation of the film as a whole? How
does Strauss’s Nietzschean fanfare sound, and what does it mean, when we hear
it within the larger context of alien beings who possess a will to power that
vastly exceeds the reach of human comprehension and wherewithal? What is the
status of the Star Child within this extraterrestrial context? Attempting to
provide answers to these questions is the major business of this essay. While
some have characterized 2001 as a “Nietzschean” film, I think it is more
accurate to describe it as a film that challenges as much as it engages with
Nietzsche’s philosophy. One certainly can interpret 2001 as an allegorical
retelling of the Übermensch narrative, but we do Kubrick’s sf film an injustice
if we choose to read allegorically to the exclusion of its literal storyline and the
fictional realism of its created worlds. When we regard the extraterrestrial
sponsors of the monoliths to be part of the film’s imagined reality, we should
understand 2001 to be directly challenging Nietzsche’s anthropocentric position
that the otherworldly is the abode of fictions that human beings should not take
seriously, even as hypotheticals. Kubrick was earnestly interested in the
hypothetical of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and he created a film
that confronts viewers with this possibility even as they have Strauss’s
Nietzschean fanfare ringing in their ears.
In creating a compelling cinematic portrayal of this otherworldly scenario,
Kubrick relies on the sublime, an aesthetic mode for which Nietzsche developed
a strong antipathy. Nietzsche came to regard the sublime as problematic because
of its tendency to inspire feelings of self-abasing awe for the powers of an
imaginary spiritual world. While, again, one can resort to allegorical
explanations, consideration of viewers’ emotional responses to the sublime
aesthetics of the lunar monolith and to the Star Gate sequences suggests that
Kubrick is parting ways with Nietzsche in no uncertain terms.6
In the first half of this essay I will examine how the alien and the sublime in
2001 function as challenges to well-known aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
I will suggest that an important basis for this challenge are ideas and aesthetic
modes that are conventional in the track of science fiction that abuts religion, in
which the alien and the divine, the natural and the spiritual, blur together into
degrees of a phenomenological continuum. This spiritually oriented sf figures

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prominently in 2001 in no small part because Kubrick received his sf education

under the tutelage of Arthur C. Clarke, the author of Childhood’s End (1953),
“The Nine Billion Names of God” (1953), “The Star” (1955), and other works
that roam freely between science and religion. Clarke himself had been strongly
influenced by Olaf Stapledon, the author of one of the most exemplary pieces of
visionary science fiction before the 1960s, Star Maker (1937); and Stapledon,
in turn, owed a great debt to the early-modern progenitor of the cosmic epic,
John Milton. Armed with conventions from this Christian-influenced literary
tradition, Kubrick engages with Nietzsche.
In the end, however, despite their best efforts, the director and his team of
conceptual artists were unable to realize their long-standing goal of creating a
compelling visual representation of the otherworldly beings that the film posits,
which led Kubrick to rely more fully on the suggestive alien-ness of the musical
compositions by György Ligeti he features in the soundtrack. The result of this
extensive creative effort and failure—on the cinematographic level, at least—is
a lacuna that makes the film’s ending profoundly ambiguous: it enables
allegorical readings that are fully in keeping with Nietzschean philosophy, but
it also allows for faith in a plurality-of-worlds hypothesis that is anathema to
Zarathustra’s humanism. In a 1968 interview with Eric Norden, Kubrick
expressed his own space-age reflections on what may be out there:
in an infinite, eternal universe, the point is that anything is possible, and it’s
unlikely that we can even begin to scratch the surface of the full range of
possibilities. But at a time when astronauts are preparing to set foot on the moon,
I think it’s necessary to open up our earth-bound minds to such speculation. No
one knows what’s waiting for us in the universe. I think it was a prominent
astronomer who wrote recently, “Sometimes I think we are alone, and sometimes
I think we’re not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering.” (96)7
2001 effectively keeps both of these “staggering” possibilities open and in
tension with one another. Regarding God, aliens, and Nietzsche, the film as a
whole is engagingly agnostic.8
“Effing the ineffable.” The idea of intelligent extraterrestrial life appears to
have been an essential component of Kubrick’s sf film project from the start. In
his first letter to Arthur C. Clarke, dated 31 March 1964, Kubrick identifies
three of his main areas of interest for the film: “1. The reasons for believing in
the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life. 2. The impact (and perhaps even
lack of impact in some quarters) such discovery would have on Earth in the near
future. 3. A space-probe with a landing and exploration of the Moon and Mars”
(quoted in Castle, 372). These foundational ideas indicate Kubrick’s interest in
the reality of extraterrestrial life, chiefly in regard to how the discovery of such
beings would variously affect humanity. They contain the seeds of an sf
adventure to “other worlds”—both worlds such as the Moon and Mars that are
realistically within the grasp of explorers at the dawn of the space age and alien
worlds that may be impossibly beyond human reach. When Kubrick began to
introduce Nietzschean themes and references into the project, the subject of

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extraterrestrial life involving itself with humanity was already an essential part
of the film.
Because of his expertise in hard sf and sf invested in the imagination of
cosmic ascent, Arthur C. Clarke was the ideal teacher for a film director with
interests in these areas. In the early months of their collaboration, Kubrick and
Clarke returned again and again to questions about what intelligent
extraterrestrial life might actually be like and how such life might be represented
effectively on screen. On 5 June 1964, they consulted with Carl Sagan about
these matters over dinner. Regarding the question of representation, Sagan
advised caution:
I suggested that any explicit representation of an advanced extraterrestrial being
was bound to have at least an element of falseness about it, and that the best
solution would be to suggest, rather than explicitly to display, the
extraterrestrials.... At the premiere, I was pleased to see that I had been of some
help. (qtd. in Benson 65)
Contrary to the astronomer’s assumptions about the director’s ready acceptance
of his advice, for the next four years Kubrick and a team of conceptual artists
tried to accomplish precisely what Sagan cautioned against. The team generated
countless drawings, sculptures, and word sketches. They considered designs for
a wide array of extraterrestrial beings, including humanoid aliens; gaseous
aliens; bacterial aliens; avian aliens; aliens resembling Alberto Giacometti’s
sculptures; aliens inspired by the surrealist paintings of Max Ernst, Giorgio de
Chirico, Salvador Dali, and Jean Arp; aliens comprised of light; polka-dot
aliens; alien spaceships; alien cityscapes.... It appears that Kubrick regarded the
matter of creating a visual representation of an extraterrestrial that viewers
would find convincing and satisfying as a supreme artistic challenge. Success in
creating a truly compelling alien would be an important ingredient in “the
proverbial ‘really good’ science-fiction movie” he was aspiring to make, a film
that would pay tribute to the genre’s cherished themes and traditions while also
creating avant-garde cinematic art that would unsettle and transform the genre.9
According to Gregory Benford, “we all know that one cannot depict the
totally alien.” In order to portray something that is “very strange,” Benford
observes, “we must always gesture towards something known”—a limitation on
expression that always threatens to reduce created “aliens” to the mundane status
of metaphor (14-15). During the four years he worked on the alien
representation problem, however, Kubrick seems not to have shared Benford’s
assumptions. Perhaps his self-confidence as a creative artist working in a genre
he regarded as still quite primitive is why he could believe, for as long as he did,
that he could succeed where other sf directors, in his estimation, had failed.
It is also possible that Kubrick was thinking of the problem as a creative
challenge of Nietzschean proportions: to attempt to create something truly
“alien” in film—something that would seem to transcend the human—is an
ambition comparable to Zarathustra’s efforts to overcome the human. There are
more than passing similarities between the concepts of the Übermensch and the
radically alien, the first of which is that both terms mean, in their different

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ways, something that is not (merely) human. Kathleen Marie Higgins explains
that “the overman is by definition a goal that human beings will always fail to
achieve” because the human is intermediary—“a rope, tied between beast and
overman” (81). Because the human is a means and not an end, the best readers
can hope for is some apprehension of Zarathustra’s pursuit of the Übermensch,
conveyed to us in his speeches, which, significantly, become increasingly
abstract the nearer they approach an expression of the final, indescribable, goal
(Higgins 124-26). Similarly, the “alien” must always exceed human
understanding because, by definition, it means what lies beyond the limitations
of our human-bound analogies and other ways of knowing.10 Like posthumanist
philosophers, sf artists are in the business of striving to think and express the
radically unknown. But where Nietzsche uses the metaphor of a rope spanning
between “beast and overman” to express human evolution, inviting us to
imagine the process as continuous and human-propelled, first-contact scenarios
often (but not always) entail a leap from one world to another over the radically
disjunctive abyss of interstellar space.
Here we should distinguish between sf aliens that are basically metaphorical
and sf aliens that are serious creative attempts to express the other-than-
human—what Benford calls “effing the ineffable.”11 As the critical literature on
2001 demonstrates, the Monolith certainly can be interpreted allegorically, but
it is interesting to consider that its symbolic function may have been secondary
(or, at least, attendant) to Kubrick’s primary creative aim for the film’s aliens,
which was to create an unprecedented experience for viewers. Christiane
Kubrick, who was herself a major contributor to the alien design effort,
remembers her husband’s thoughts on the problem:
It would be great if I could think of something that took everybody apart;
something that absolutely would cause people to gasp…. I wish I was talented
and I could think of something, but I can’t. The monolith leaves that open void
that we feel when we try to imagine that which is unimaginable. (qtd. in Benson
388)12
According to this account, plan A was to astonish viewers with direct experience
of the effectively alien, a destabilizing experience that would tear apart human
frames of reference. This objective of Kubrick’s corresponds with Benford’s
point that the “one underlying message in SF is that the truly alien doesn’t just
disturb and educate, it breaks down reality, often fatally, for us. Here SF
departs quite profoundly from the humanist tradition in the arts. Science fiction
nowhere more firmly rejects—indeed, explodes—humanism than in treating the
alien” (23). Failing to devise a direct visual representation that could achieve
these contra-humanist effects, Kubrick resorted to plan B: relying on the
Monolith (and on Ligeti’s musical compositions, as I will address shortly) to
express the idea or sensation of the ineffable. In failing to give us an experience
of the alien itself, he gives us a symbol through which we can imagine ourselves
peering into what cannot actually be expressed or perceived.
Otherworldly Sublimes. Essential to any first-contact story is the conveyance
to viewers or readers of how we are to understand the nature of the relationship

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between humanity and the extraterrestrials—the respective roles each shall play
in the sf narrative. There are a number of conventional alien plots and character
types in sf that Kubrick could have chosen: the Wellsian alien invasion; the
Heinleinian body-snatchers variation on the invasion plot;13 the western frontier
scenario popularized by E.R. Burroughs and Doc Smith; the alternate human
evolution mythos (H.P. Lovecraft); the alien as seducer (C.L. Moore’s
“Shambleau” [1933]); the discovery of an alien’s “humanity” or personhood
(Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” [1934]); the alien as galactic police
(The Day the Earth Stood Still [1951]); the alien super-civilization (Forbidden
Planet [1956]); the alien as intractably alien (Lem’s Solaris [1961]); and the
more subtle scenario of aliens impassively watching Earth from afar (Wells’s
“The Star” [1897]).
The three basic film ideas Kubrick described to Clarke in his letter of 1964
did not preclude many of these sf possibilities, but the director chose to go in the
direction for which Clarke himself was best known: the narrative of alien as
gardener of humanity, such as we see in Childhood’s End. In adopting the plot
of aliens boosting human evolution, Kubrick was contributing to a branch of
science fiction that engages strongly with questions that are traditionally the
provenance of religion. We can trace the major exemplars of this branch of sf
from Clarke back to Olaf Stapledon and back again to John Milton. Each of
these writers narrate versions of the same basic story: humans are assisted by
higher beings in overcoming their self-inflicted terrestrial problems and,
ultimately, in ascending to the stars or heavens as transhumans capable of
joining a higher order of spiritual community. In Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667),
assistance comes in the form of guiding angels who encourage Adam and Eve,
answer their questions, deliver warnings and admonishments, and provide hope-
inducing views of humanity’s future history. The questing narrator of
Stapledon’s Star Maker finds the wherewithal to broaden his comprehension of
the cosmos through the challenging process of learning to communicate with
alien entities. The outcome of each successful communication is the ability to
perceive realities previously inaccessible both to the narrator and to the
extraterrestrials, who have themselves gained from the cognitive and spiritual
contributions of Homo sapiens. After many dozens of such exchanges and
expansions, the narrator eventually becomes part of a transgalactic mind that is
capable of perceiving the “Star Maker” itself. In Childhood’s End, humanity is
guided by benevolent “guardians” who prove to be the literal basis for Christian
conceptions of the devil, an ironic reference to Milton’s cosmic epic. As with
Star Maker, Clarke’s story is about humanity’s contribution to the development
of a collective mind comprised of a multitude of alien species. This contribution
cannot happen without the intervention of the alien guardians, however. The
leader of the guardians describes their relationship to humanity metaphorically:
“we till the field until the crop is ripe. The Overmind collects the harvest ...”
(206). One of the novel’s major points is that the crop that is humanity will not
yield fruit without this cultivation by higher intelligences. Milton’s Christian
epic makes much the same point: spiritual evolution requires the assistance of
others. Individual will alone is insufficient for ascent.

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In adopting this narrative of evolutionary assistance from above, 2001

incorporates a number of conceptual and aesthetic elements that are closely
associated with Christianity, each of which creates dissonance with the film’s
Nietzschean references and allusions. Perhaps the most significant of these are
the film’s suggestions in its first part that humanity may not be capable of
overcoming evolutionary challenges on its own: the ape-men of “The Dawn of
Man” appear to be a full rung lower than the leopard in the natural order of
things, and the modern Homo sapiens of the space age appear to be in the middle
of a nuclear crisis they are unable to resolve. In both cases, extraterrestrial
assistance provides the impetus for humanity to overcome a threat to its survival.
Without such help, the film implies, the Homo genus might never have evolved
to become a tool-using species or, if humanity did manage to reach a modern
state of development (as it has), it may annihilate itself in the near future in
failing to manage weapons of mass destruction. The fact that Kubrick depicts the
latter scenario in Dr. Strangelove (1964), the film he completed just prior to
2001, provides some intertextual emphasis on this warning about the possible
insufficiency of human ingenuity.
On four separate occasions in 2001, assistance comes in the form of the
Monolith: the African Monolith helps Moonwatcher make the creative leap that
enables him to begin using weapons; the lunar Monolith provides evidence that
humanity is not alone and directs those who discovered it to travel to Jupiter; the
very large Jovian Monolith provides David Bowman entrance into the Star Gate;
and the hotel Monolith appears to facilitate Bowman’s transformation into a
cosmic fetus. The recurring Monolith functions both literally and figuratively as
representative of a power that enables humanity to evolve and realize its
potential. Many specific interpretations of what this power may be have been
suggested by critics, including human intelligence, technology, superstition,
cinema, phallic energy, the will to power, and discontinuity or the essence of the
“alien” itself. Critics forwarding Nietzschean readings of the film tend to argue
that the Monolith symbolizes creative principles that enable the human mind to
make radical leaps beyond itself.14 But if we interpret the Monolith and its other-
than-human engineers literally, we are left with two main areas of possibility:
the extraterrestrial and the divine. In his interview with Norden, Kubrick
elaborates on his comment that “the God concept is at the heart of 2001” with
musings about the likelihood of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Norden had to ask
what this has to do with God and Kubrick answered: “Everything—because these
beings would be gods to the billions of less advanced races in the universe, just
as man would appear a god to an ant that somehow comprehended man’s
existence” (94). The differences among God, aliens, human beings, and ants,
in his view, are not essential ones, but relative matters of perspective and
degree. All we know for sure about the Monolith is that the aid it provides
humanity derives from a higher power that we are incapable of comprehending.
2001 creates an experience of the relational powers of humankind to the
divine and the alien in three sequences characterized by successive degrees of
aesthetics, from wonder to different kinds of the sublime: Heywood Floyd’s
landing on the Moon, the moon-bus trip to Tycho Crater, and Floyd’s first

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encounter with the lunar Monolith or TMA-1 (Tycho Magnetic Anomaly).

Accompanied by Johann Strauss’s waltz “On the Beautiful Blue Danube”
(1867), Floyd’s lunar landing in the Ares-1 spacecraft conveys a Golden Age
“sense of wonder” about human accomplishment: the ship moves precisely and
gracefully; the space-suited astronauts watching from a promontory in our
foreground converse casually; and the lunarscape artwork is a clear reference
to the planetary illustrations of Chesley Bonestell, encouraging viewers to
fantasize about the beauty and excitement of space exploration much as Strauss’s
waltz invites us to join the dance. In this sequence we witness humanity glorying
in its accomplishments and knowledge, a mood qualified only by Floyd’s cryptic
conversation with the Russian scientists at the space station and by his
bureaucratic speech to the American scientists at Clavius Base.
The two succeeding sequences shift us by degrees from knowledge to
incomprehension, from wonder to the sublime, from the human to the
ambiguously alien-divine. The moon bus travels through the relatively familiar
setting of the Romantic sublime as the vehicle is utterly dwarfed by starkly
imposing lunar mountains and craters, imbued by the choral strains of György
Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna (1966) with a sense of the supernatural. The voices sing
text from the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass—“May everlasting light shine
upon them, O Lord, with thy saints in eternity, for thou art merciful. Grant them
eternal rest, O Lord, and may everlasting light shine upon them”—but one does
not need to discern these words to appreciate the scene’s religious resonances,
which are conveyed by the strangely ethereal and reverent-sounding choral
music. The sequence at the site of TMA-1 pivots us from mountains to an
archeological dig, from the divinity of the Romantic sublime to the more
threatening alien sublime.15 Mountainous grandeur and notions of God are
relatively familiar inducements to feelings of awe, supported as they are by rich
cultural traditions; the alien artifact that is dug up threatens, on the other hand,
because it has the potential to upend all established mythologies and theologies.
The shift from Lux Aeterna to another of Ligeti’s choral works, Requiem (1965),
amplifies this difference in that the microtonal composition of the latter departs
more radically from conventional tonality and rhythm and makes the sung text
even more difficult, if not impossible, to decipher semantically. Words become
dense waves of sound, confounding any attempt to discern them.16
As contrasts to Strauss’s waltz, both Lux Aeterna and Requiem are aural
representations of the otherworldly, whether we understand this to be divine or
alien. Each inspires a sense of awe and a degree of fear that positions the human
hierarchically lower in the relationship and makes us conscious of our
epistemological limitations. In the interview with Norden, Kubrick comments
that it is possible to “construct an intriguing scientific definition of God” based
on reasonable assumptions about the evolution of extraterrestrial life: “They may
have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind
at best, into immortal machine entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they
could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure
energy and spirit.” “Their potentialities,” he reflects, “would be limitless and
their intelligence ungraspable by humans” (Norden 94).

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Michael J. Crowe’s extensive research reveals that debate about the question
of extraterrestrial life was vigorous during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, engaging about “three-fourths of the most prolific astronomers and
nearly half of the most prominent intellectuals” of the period (547). Immanuel
Kant, G.F.W. Hegel, Charles Fourier, Friedrich Schelling, Arthur
Schopenhauer, Auguste Comte, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ludwig Feuerbach, and
Frederick Engels are among the philosophers of the time who extended their
speculations to the possibility of life beyond Earth. In Universal Natural History
and Theory of the Heavens (1755), Kant wrote extensively on the subject,
speculating that the quality of intelligence of life on the other planets of our solar
system is “in proportion to the distance of their habitants from the sun”—the
inhabitants of Mercury being the dimmest bulbs, the Saturnians the brightest,
and Earth’s humans falling in the middle (qtd. in Crowe 52). Hegel engaged in
the debate primarily to dismiss notions that any exoplanetary worlds could rival
the Earth or that any extraterrestrial beings could rival the primacy of human
reason (Crowe 258).
Considering his strongly held view that divine theologies threaten to eclipse
the creative potential of humankind, it is not surprising that Nietzsche was closer
to Hegel than to Kant regarding the question of intelligent extraterrestrial life.
In “On the Afterworldly” (“Hinterwelter”), an early chapter in Also Spoke
Zarathustra, Zarathustra alternates between sympathy and derision in describing
those who invented heavenly worlds as an attempt to ease their despair about
their mortality:
From their misery they sought escape, and the stars were too remote for them.
Then they sighed: “O that there were heavenly paths by which to steal into
another existence and into happiness!” Then they contrived for themselves their
sneaky ruses and bloody potions!
Beyond the sphere of their body and this earth they now fancied themselves
transported, these ungrateful ones. (30)17
This passage suggests that by “Hinterwelter” Nietzsche has in mind those who
dream of other worlds of both the divine sort and the exoplanetary sort. His
account suggests that people invented the former only after they realized that the
latter could not be reached, suggesting that divine and alien worlds are objects
of the same basic desire. This philosophy is predicated on the non-reality of both
kinds of other worlds and both kinds of higher beings that hypothetically reside
in these places. Rebuking the fundamental desire for other worlds, the
Übermensch is a radically terrestrial, anthropocentric being—a “new human
type” (Rosen 39). What separates this individual from other Homo sapiens has
to do with willful creativity, not genetics or metaphysics or alien intervention.
Although Nietzsche contributed little to the extraterrestrial debate, one
fleeting instance where he does engage in ET speculation is revealing. Writing
in Daybreak (1881) on the question “how far humanity, considered as a whole,
could take steps to encourage the advancement of knowledge,” Nietzsche muses:
Perhaps, if one day an alliance has been established with the inhabitants of other
stars for the purpose of knowledge, and knowledge has been communicated from

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star to star for a few millennia: perhaps enthusiasm for knowledge may then rise
to such a high-water mark! (Daybreak 46)
The Nietzschean extraterrestrial relationship is characterized by “alliance”
(Verbrüderung) and collaboration between relatively equal parties in a mutual
pursuit of higher knowledge. Absent here is the dramatic disparity of knowledge
and power that essentializes the Christian relationship between God and
humanity; also absent, therefore, is the torrential dynamic of the sublime. The
kind of movement Nietzsche imagines, in clear contrast, is made possible by the
slow work of communication over millennia.
While initially supportive of the sublime, Nietzsche became increasingly
critical of the aesthetic category because of his worry about its tendency to
reinforce the hierarchical dynamics of Christian worship, specifically the humble
posture of humanity before the incomprehensible (Ansell-Pearson 231, 202-03).
Zarathustra repeatedly expresses his disdain for the practice of human
individuals attributing their creative revelations to God or some other paternal
fiction rather than acknowledging their own authorship:
At one time Zarathustra also cast his fancy beyond man, like all the afterworldly.
The work of a suffering and tortured god, the world then seemed to me....
Ah, you brothers, that god whom I created was humanly made madness, like
all gods!
Man he was, and only a poor fragment of a man and his “I”: out of my own
ashes and glow it came to me, that ghost, and truly! It did not come to me from
beyond!...
It was suffering and impotence—that created all afterworlds; and that brief
madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer most deeply.
Weariness, which seeks to get to the ultimate with one leap, with one death-
leap; a poor ignorant weariness, unwilling even to will any longer: that created
all gods and afterworlds. (Nietzsche, trans. Martin, 29)
The sublime is a “death-leap” in that, first, it creates a hierarchical relationship
between the “gods” and “Man” that entails the self-sacrifice of the latter; and
second, the experience is sudden—it feels like “one leap”—which we should
understand as owing to the “weariness” of the individual succumbing to the
fiction of the divine and the force of sublime aesthetics. The sublime, from this
perspective, is a way of absolving ourselves from the responsibility of making
our own meanings and recognizing these as our own creations. According to this
account, the creation of other worlds and divine beings entails imagining a vast
gap between these extraterrestrial entities and humanity, a gap that is
unbridgeable except by enthusiasts and the delusory transport of the sublime.
Such transport is precisely what Kubrick provides in the Star Gate sequence
of 2001. After having been lulled during the Jupiter mission by the slow-moving
realism of Poole’s and Bowman’s navigations in the zero-g environment of outer
space, viewers are suddenly swept into the alternate reality of the Monolith’s
portal, which is characterized above all by otherworldly strangeness, irresistible
force, and tremendous velocity. In a series of frozen frames we watch Bowman
break down, and then we assume his first-person perspective for the rest of the
cosmic ride. Or rather, we are positioned at this perspective, because the Star

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Gate sequence creates an experience of passivity. As Pseudo-Longinus explains

of the effect in oratory, “the influences of the sublime bring power and
irresistible might to bear, and reign supreme over every hearer” (95). But are
we to interpret the sublime power of the Star Gate as part of an allegory of a
soul’s awakening will to power or as a tool of otherworldly beings who are
guiding human evolution?
Ambiguities beyond the Infinite. One of the enduring qualities of 2001’s final
section, “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite,” is how readily it lends itself to both
terrestrial Nietzschean and otherworldly interpretations. Making a case for the
former, Stephen Zepke argues that the Star Gate’s sublime differs from the
Romantic sublime because “Nothing in Dave’s emergence into the Regency
room implies his comprehension of an infinite and unchanging metaphysical
realm” (57). The Star Gate provides “the necessary pulverisation of the self in
a sublime experience” as “the necessary condition for the emergence of the
new,” Zepke observes, but this process is catalyzed not by any higher
entity—whether divine or alien—but by Bowman’s own “vision encompassing
the unknown rhythms of the chaotic universe” (58). Zepke, like others who
support Nietzschean allegories, interprets Bowman’s experiences beyond the
Star Gate as aspects of a soul evolving beyond the “camel” and the “lion” into
the third of Zarathustra’s “Three Metamorphoses”: the child, overman, or
Übermensch. The hotel room sequence, according to Zepke, shows Bowman
overcoming his human selfhood: “These images don’t show a reconstituting ego,
they show Bowman’s gaze dissolving time. Bowman is animated by something
inhuman, and his non-responsiveness is remarkable. Bowman is simply willing
the will to power, which means nothing more than that he wills overcoming, his
own will in its own overcoming” (58).
For viewers who take the Monolith aliens literally, it is logical to interpret
the Louis XIV hotel room as some kind of holding cell—a place designed by the
aliens to put Bowman at his ease as he is prepared for metamorphosis. This is
a reading Clarke and Kubrick devised together during the early months of their
collaboration.18 During production nearly two years later, Kubrick mused: “If
you were having an extraterrestrial in your bottle in your chemistry lab, and you
wanted to make it comfortable so you can observe it, you would try to learn
what it likes. And if you milk the brain of a human being, it might like a fancy
art-book hotel room” (Benson 217). In his novel, Clarke chose to make his hotel
room nearly contemporary and generally American—in keeping with what
Bowman would find familiar—but otherwise he shares Kubrick’s logic, including
in the matter of art (well-known paintings by Van Gogh and Wyeth hang on the
walls) (279). Insofar as this interpretation understands Bowman to be a passive
subject within the care of extraterrestrial handlers, ones who act upon him to
induce the Star Child transformation, it is a view antithetical to the Übermensch
reading. Bowman has done much to arrive at this Louis XIV room “beyond the
infinite”: he has traveled half a billion miles across interplanetary space to the
Jovian Monolith, which entailed resourcefully surviving H.A.L.’s assassination
attempt and completing the mission entirely on his own. Once within the Star

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Gate, however, his agency is minimized. Bowman does not exit the space pod
like Neil Armstrong purposefully exiting the Eagle lander; he suddenly finds
himself outside of it. The affect of everything we see him do during this
sequence seems passive: slowly walking into the bathroom, consuming a meal
that was prepared for him, accidentally knocking over a glass, aging, dying….
And in keeping with this aesthetics of passivity, the transformation of man into
cosmic fetus occurs instantaneously, as if by magic or divine power. Utterly
gone at this point in the film is the scientific realism of the lunar sequences. For
viewers to continue to take the aliens seriously, the film requires their belief in
the aliens’ higher will to power, faith in the aliens’ literal existence. Anticipating
what Clarke would later formulate as his “third law,” Kubrick takes viewers
into a realm of technology that seems to be magical or divine because one can
believe it exists beyond the limits of our present knowledge (Clarke, Profiles
39).
So on the one hand, “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” supports interpretive
confidence in the validity of allegorical reading and, on the other hand, it
sustains the faith of those who would prefer to believe (along the lines of
Clarke’s own narrative) that Bowman has indeed been transported by alien
beings to a far-flung place on the other side of the galaxy, if not further. This
ambiguity is unique to Kubrick’s film; as their respective projects developed,
Clarke, in general, was seeking to increase the narrative and conceptual clarity
of his novel, whereas Kubrick was making decisions that multiplied the
ambiguities of his film, including those with Nietzschean resonances.19
Nevertheless, Kubrick persisted in his efforts to create a compelling
representation of the film’s alien entities—an objective that, if realized, would
create a phenomenological certainty about the aliens that the film does not
otherwise provide. It is worth wondering how Nietzsche-oriented interpretive
perspectives would be affected if Kubrick had somehow succeeded in this
endeavor. Engaging in the exercise of imagining what success in this impossible
task might have been like is akin to the speculative pleasures of Jodorowsky’s
Dune (2013), a documentary in which Frank Pavich attempts to construct and
promote appreciation for director Alejandro Jodorowky’s unrealized visionary
dreams. In the case of 2001 we do have a completed film; speculatively,
however, it is a composition with a hole at its core—a lacuna created by
Kubrick’s documented intentions, plans, and failure to anchor the film’s signs
of extraterrestrial agency in the spectacle of embodied alien otherness.
Filming of the hotel room sequence occurred in June 1966, when Kubrick’s
plans for incorporating a glimpse of at least one representative alien were still
very much alive. “If deemed successful,” Benson reports, the extraterrestrials
“would be seen at some stage during Bowman’s vault through the Star Gate, or
perhaps during the hotel room scene. This was never quite clear, and Kubrick
may not have known himself” (383). But the director remained determined to
solve the alien representation problem into the winter of 1967-68. Just months
before the film’s premiere, Douglas Trumbull was in the process of creating
“humanoid shapes” with the slit scan technique he had used for the Star Gate
effects when Kubrick finally had to call him off: “You’ve just got to stop,” he

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said. “Even if you succeeded with this, I can’t cut it into the movie anymore”
(Benson 387).
Judging by accounts of the various concepts Kubrick and his team developed
up to that point, success would have entailed the visual depiction of an alien
body—something audiences could experience as an ontological reality, not
reducible to symbol.20 Hypothetically, the presence of such an alien body in the
film, if such were possible, would serve as “a rub” to the smooth functioning
of readings that are primarily symbolic, such as allegorical Übermensch
interpretations. At the same time, it would reduce (by some degree) the need for
literalists to assert faith in the aliens as a reality. The absence of any such alien
“rock of the real” effectively unmoors the film’s sf alien narrative, which now
opens itself to the viewers’ subjective experiences and beliefs and to interpretive
play with the hotel room sequence’s rich symbolism. Lacking a spectacle of the
alien that would “take you apart,” to recall Christine Kubrick’s words, the final
part of the film leaves us to our own interpretive devices.
Having failed to create a depiction of the Monolith aliens in his own primary
medium of cinematography, Kubrick again resorts to auditory expression, this
time to Aventures (1962), Ligeti’s bodacious effort to take vocal music beyond
semantic meaning. Scored for three voices and seven instruments, the
composition calls for vocalists to perform—often in rapid succession—a wide
range of syllabic and emotional sounds, including grunts, giggles, pants,
whispers, whoops, wheezes, and nonsense words (such as
“PEtomopodonorobolotodorobomono”). As Bowman adjusts to the alien
environment of the hotel room we hear an electronically distorted portion of this
already outré piece, which one can interpret as the diegetic utterances of the
unseen alien proprietors. This musical reference contributes to the scene’s fusion
of the creatively ambitious and the surrealistically comedic, an amalgam one
also finds in Aventures: in both cases, the artists qualify their serious efforts to
move beyond human norms with the eccentric sense of humor they bring to these
avant-garde endeavors. It is significant that our closest encounter in the film
with an extraterrestrial has this comedic charge. The attitude of those pursuing
the riskiest of creative pursuits on the frontiers of human experience—in these
two cases, at least—is not gravity but humor, since retaining a sense of humor
in such work better enables one to persevere after inevitable missteps or failures.
Interestingly, this is one of the major points of the “Fourth and Last Part” of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra.21
The fourth and last appearance of the Monolith occurs at the foot of
Bowman’s death bed. Having previously seen it in primeval Africa, on the
Moon, and in orbit around Jupiter, one may find this new, artificial setting
humorously out of keeping—a further instance of the film’s finale of surreal
incongruities. Critics tracing Nietzschean allegories follow their readings to
completion without acknowledging the ironic humor of this oddity. Kapferer, for
instance, reads the scene as a possible reference to Michelangelo’s Sistine
Chapel depiction of God giving life to Adam, only here “Man gives life to Man
and recreates itself” (88). He compares the Monolith to Zarathustra’s “bridge
or transitional point for the ontological leap of human being” (88). Abrams

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suggests that the scene, “taken almost directly out of Nietzsche,” mirrors
Zarathustra standing over the fallen tightrope walker at his moment of death
(254). Zepke reads the Monolith as “the immanent outside of our future,” “the
eternal return of will to power as such, the will that wills itself” (60); and Wheat
suggests that Bowman’s will asserts itself to grasp the Monolith
“metaphysically”: “Power flows into his feeble body, and he evolves into the
first member of a new species. Symbolically, Bowman has become overman”
(116).
From these interpretive perspectives, the return of Strauss’s “Sunrise”
fanfare is the affirming musical conclusion to the film’s allegorization of the
Übermensch narrative. Bowman’s transformation into the cosmic fetus
symbolizes the spiritual metamorphosis of the lion into the child, which occurs
without the interventions of otherworldly entities. The fact that the final
Monolith is accompanied by Strauss’s fanfare and not Ligeti’s Requiem can be
read as support for the view that humanity alone, including whatever powers it
has been able to summon or acquire on its own, has been responsible for human
evolution.22
If, however, one continues to take the Monoliths literally as powerful tools
employed by extraterrestrials to alter the course of human evolution, then the
final Strauss fanfare cannot be heard as a mere affirmation of Nietzsche’s
Übermensch concept. One possibility is that it is a parody of this idea and a
critique of Nietzsche’s optimism about humanity’s unaided potential—a
perspective informed by the knowledge of two world wars and anxieties about
the nuclear age. Hearing the “Sunrise” fanfare this way, 2001 becomes a cynical
film, possibly even more sardonic than Dr. Strangelove, which at least does not
tease viewers with an ironic deus ex machina.23 Setting aside consideration of
the film’s extraterrestrials narrative, the fanfare may still sound ironic if one has
in mind William Barrett’s Irrational Man (1958), a popular study of existentialist
philosophy Kubrick may have read, first published just a few years before he
began work on 2001.24 Barrett presents a tragically heroic, but also pitiable,
Nietzsche, who sought to live his own philosophy: “He projects himself into the
situation where God is really dead for the whole of mankind, and he shares in
the common fate,” each day choosing to “lop off some comforting belief.” “It
is in this light,” Barret suggests, “that we must look upon Nietzsche as a culture
hero: he chose, that is, to suffer the conflict within his culture in the most acute
form and was ultimately torn apart by it” (165). What makes Barrett’s Nietzsche
pitiable (a sentiment the philosopher would find devastating) is the idea that he
used “grandiose inflation of the ego” as a device for replacing God (162), but
this technique blinded him from seeing his own demons—not any “dazzling
Miltonic” demons such as Nietzsche would be happy to own, but the shabby and
mediocre vulnerabilities that are common to human nature (172). The “Sunrise”
fanfare, heard through the filter of Barrett’s argument, is full of pathos.
A more appealing alternative is to hear in this fanfare the dissonances of
Kubrick’s space-age engagements with Nietzsche, which entails taking seriously
the existential challenges to humanity that the existence of extraterrestrial life
might pose. We can retain both the hypothetical actuality of the film’s aliens and

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the triumphal spirit of the fanfare if we interpret Bowman’s transformation in

the light of Clarke’s, Stapledon’s, and even Milton’s respective visions of
humanity ascending to membership in a higher order of community. From the
perspectives of Childhood’s End, Star Maker, and Paradise Lost, however, the
triumph that the Star Child represents can be no more than a baby’s first steps.25
In Star Maker, the rise of a terrestrial Übermensch would warrant little more
than a single sentence within the half paragraph Stapledon devotes to the entire
history of humanity. If one takes the film’s associations with this cosmically
oriented branch of sf seriously, the final fanfare sounds assertive and hopeful,
but also very small and primitive.26
2001: A Space Odyssey seems to suggest that Nietzsche’s dismissals of the
otherworldly are conclusions we would be foolish to accept. In fueling viewers’
imaginations about the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life and
suggesting how humanity might already be involved with such life, Kubrick, as
I have suggested, creates a challenge to Zarathustra’s terra-centrism. It is
instructive to compare the film’s treatment of extraterrestrials and the Ass
Festival of the “Fourth and Last” part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra—a rite in
which Zarathustra’s disciples worship a donkey with incense and prayers. Both
inventions ostensibly are expressions of belief in the otherworldly; but where the
disciples’ religious ritual, after it has shocked Zarathustra, proves to be satiric
(“‘one does not kill by anger but by laughter’—thus you spoke once, O
Zarathustra” [271]), Kubrick’s treatment of extraterrestrials remains ambiguous.
Zarathustra receives confirmation of the disciples’ satiric intent: “But we
certainly do not want to enter into the kingdom of heaven: we have become
men,—so we want the kingdom of Earth.” (trans. Martin, 271; emphasis in
original). Kubrick’s film, on the other hand, provides no such clarification about
the nature of the beings who created the Monoliths. They may be in some way
ironic, or they may not be. In order to express the profound ambiguity of space-
age agnosticism, Kubrick withholds his film’s allegiances and faith from God,
aliens, Clarke, and Nietzsche alike.27
NOTES
1. In a letter dated 31 March 1964, Kubrick invited Arthur C. Clarke to collaborate
with him on his new science fiction film project: “I had been a great admirer of your
books for quite a time and had always wanted to discuss with you the possibility of doing
the proverbial ‘really good’ science-fiction movie” (qtd. in Castle, 372).
2. I am referring specifically to studies that construct a sustained interpretation of the
film in light of Nietzsche, for example by Kapferer, Redner, Wheat, and Zepke. In the
section of his book focusing on 2001 as an allegory of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Wheat
interprets the film’s monoliths as symbols of abstract human qualities: intelligence,
superstition, and power. Both Kapferer and Zepke read the film’s alien elements in terms
of Nietzsche’s idea of human self-overcoming, a process they indicate is relevant to
neither God nor extraterrestrial beings. Focusing on the occurrences of Richard Strauss’s
“Sunrise” fanfare in the film’s score, Redner illuminates these musical cues in the light
of Gilles Deleuze’s readings of the Nietzschean concepts of “becoming” and
“active/reactive force” (182-183). He does not extend this discussion to consideration of
the film’s aliens. While Jerold J. Abrams claims that 2001 “captures the entire

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evolutionary epic” of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (247), he offers a significantly different

account of how the film expresses the stages leading to the Nietzschean overman,
including, as I discuss below, recognition of the problems that the Monolith aliens create
for this narrative. Conversely, in his sustained study of the alien entities of 2001, Richard
I. Pope avoids any discussion of Nietzsche.
3. Blending philosophy, astronomy, and “sense of wonder,” Kubrick makes the same
point near the end of Eric Norden’s 1968 interview with him for Playboy:
The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.... Both because
of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense
of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was
born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most
terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we
can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the
boundaries of death—however mutable man may be able to make them—our existence as
a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must
supply our own light. (195)
4. While I will refer to Kubrick and Clarke’s collaborative work on the early phases
of their project, I avoid using Clarke’s novel as a gloss on Kubrick’s film since the
respective works moved increasingly in their own creative directions. For a detailed
account of Kubrick and Clarke’s collaboration and how their creative divergence
developed, see Benson’s Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the
Making of a Masterpiece.
5. For an illuminating analysis of complications involved in hearing Nietzsche’s
philosophy in Strauss’s fanfare, see Code (210-215).
6. Among the many accounts of filmgoers’ transportive experiences of the Stargate
sequence, this one is especially memorable: “As the monolith beckoned the astronaut into
infinity, a young man in the audience succumbed to some kind of mystical trance, rose
to his feet, ran down the aisle and crashed through the screen, shouting, ‘It’s God! It’s
God!’” (Williams 279).
7. The “prominent astronomer” is Arthur C. Clarke.
8. In forwarding this argument, my essay supports the often-expressed view that 2001
is a film that defies settled conclusions. In an early review of the film, John Allen
remarks on its indebtedness to Nietzsche and notes the “basic problem” that its signs of
extraterrestrials creates for viewers; then he asks: “Where does the search for the
ultimate cause of intelligence lead, inside or outside this film, inside or outside time and
space?” (233). As Michel Chion suggests, “2001 could be understood as a spiritualist
film, but this would be to force its meaning: the film does not conclude anything. The
extraterrestrials do not strike up contact; they bring no message of peace; they say
nothing…” (149). “Very simply,” he continues, “2001 fills us with wonder because, in
the face of the stars, it sings of the mystery of our life as humans” (150). Similarly,
Robert Kolker observes that 2001 “is a film that shows and hides, gives and takes away,
promises to reveal great secrets of the universe and then reneges” (4). His own
conclusion is that “The power of 2001 lies in the fact that it can have no conclusion”
(12).
9. This is what Carl Freedman calls “aesthetically consequential science-fiction
cinema” (303).
10. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. observes that “most artistically ambitious SF artists
strive to imagine truly extra-ordinary beings. This almost always begins with privatives:
aliens are not what we recognize, because what we recognize is not alien” (16).

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11. For examples of aliens that function metaphorically, Benford points us to H.G.
Wells’s Martian invaders in War of the Worlds (1898) and to Stanley Weinbaum’s
Martian Tweel in “A Martian Odyssey” (1934)—“stand-in symbols for bad humans” and
“trusty native guides,” respectively (14). Other prominent examples are Robert A.
Heinlein’s parasitic slug aliens in The Puppet Masters (1951), standing in for Cold War-
era communists, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Gethenians in The Left Hand of Darkness
(1969), representations of the fluidity of human sexuality and gender. As an example of
an effort to represent the intractably alien, Benford cites Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961).
12. As Christine Kubrick recounts, the goal proved to be an impossibility: “If it’s so
surreal and so crazy that it’s unique, then it doesn’t work as an astonishment or scare.
We have to relate it to something. And if we relate it to something, then it’s no longer
original” (Benson 388).
13. Kubrick acquired the rights to the BBC radio drama Shadow on the Sun (1961),
a variation on the body-snatcher plot written by Gavin Blakeny: intelligent aliens arrive
on Earth by meteorite and infect human beings like a virus, eliminating people’s sexual
inhibitions and respect for authority (Benson 37).
14. Wheat, for instance, interprets the four Monoliths as intelligence, creative
superstition, power touched, and power attained, respectively (92); Zepke suggests that
the “monolith as creative disjunction is, in Nietzschean terms, the will to power—the
ontological power of the future qua becoming …” (40); and Kapferer reads the Monolith
as “the expression of the religious as secular or as nothing other than the self-creative or
self-transcending capacity of Human Being” (42-43).
15. A comparable juxtaposition occurs in H. P. Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains
of Madness (1936), which is set in Antarctica and moves from the sublimity of a
mountain range higher than the Himalayas to the terror of an alien city nearly a billion
years old.
16. A fascinating analogue for the epistemology of this aesthetic may be found in a
description of the cosmic dancing of angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost: “That day ... they
spent / In song and dance about the sacred Hill, / Mystical dance, which yonder starrie
Sphere / Of Planets and of fixt in all her Wheels / Resembles nearest, mazes intricate,
/ Eccentric, intervolv’d, yet regular / Then most, when most irregular they seem ...
(5.618-24). There is an order and meaning to this dance that is not directly discernable
to human eyes, much as Ligeti’s micropolyphony represents a higher order than our ears
can follow. David W. Patterson shows how the various musical compositions included
in 2001 work together structurally to affirm “the film’s central quest toward the
confirmation of a fundamental, higher order” (470).
17. Clancy Martin notes: “Hinterwelter, translated here as ‘afterworldly,’ can also
be translated as ‘afterworlder.’ It refers to those who believe in another world or a world
after this one” (note 3 to page 29). Kubrick likely read Thus Spoke Zarathustra in a
translation by either Walter Kaufmann (1954) or R.J. Hollingdale (1961). Kaufmann,
Hollingdale, and Martin translate the quoted passage similarly. All translations quoted
in this essay are Martin’s.
18. On 17 October 1964, Clarke noted: “Stan’s idea ‘camp’ robots who create
Victorian environment to put heroes at ease” (Benson 75-76).
19. On the growing distance between Clarke’s and Kubrick’s respective visions for
their projects, see Benson, 367-74.
20. At an early stage of the project, Kubrick had imagined the aliens as Giacometti-
like humanoids, twenty feet tall, so that “at the end of the film, they could reach down
and grab this little guy from Earth by their hands and walk into the sunset” (Benson 92);

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and in August of 1965, Kubrick and Clarke were considering an ending with an
“unbelievably graceful and beautiful humanoid” leading Bowman into “infinite darkness”
(Benson 114). Yet another ending, conceived by Clarke, had the hotel suite vanishing,
leaving Bowman standing “alone on the skyrock with the ship of the super-race” (Benson
116).
21. One of the primary lessons Zarathustra teaches his disciples in the final part of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is that the high-striving creative individual must learn self-
laughter: “The higher its type the less often a thing succeeds. You higher men here, are
you not all—failures? Be of good cheer; what does it matter! How much is still possible!
Learn to laugh at yourselves as you ought to laugh!” (251). If Kubrick had read
Irrational Man (1958), he would have encountered the distinction William Barrett makes
between Zarathustra’s laughter and a healthy sense of humor. We know Zarathustra’s
laughter “all too well,” Barrett writes, “it is the laughter of insanity” (174). He goes on
to suggest that the “antidote to the hysterical, mad laughter of Zarathustra’s vision may
be a sense of humor, which is something Nietzsche, despite his brilliant intellectual wit,
conspicuously lacked” (175). Starting with F.A. Macklin’s “The Comic Sense of 2001”
(1969), this aspect of 2001 is well-traveled territory (Jerome Agel refers to 2001 as
“Kubrick’s musical comedy,” a film “riddled with humor,” 10). In light of the
distinction Barrett makes, it would be interesting to consider the differences between the
film’s humor and Zarathustra’s laughter.
22. Focusing on the film’s “exploration of embodiment and transcendence,” Code
suggests a different (and qualified) way in which one might hear an affirmation of ideas
from Zarathustra in Strauss’s fanfare (213-14). Drawing insights from Deleuze’s work
on Nietzsche, Redner interprets the film’s three “Sunrise” fanfares as markers for “the
key instances of becoming animal, becoming man, and becoming new,” respectively
(186). He then provides interesting analysis of the relational powers of the musical cue
and the mise-en-scène in each instance, concluding that the final fanfare actively leads
the reactive cinematography in expressing “the becoming-pure-consciousness of the
human” (189).
23. Kubrick took issue with critics who have found a “deep pessimism” and “a kind
of misanthropy” in his films: “You don’t stop being concerned with man because you
recognize his essential absurdities and frailties and pretentions. To me, the only real
immorality is that which endangers the species; and the only absolute evil, that which
threatens its annihilation. In the deepest sense, I believe in man’s potential and in his
capacity for progress” (Norden 190). We can understand the conceit of necessary alien
intervention in 2001: A Space Odyssey in the same way we interpret the idea in The Day
the Earth Stood Still: as a strategy for provoking attention to real problems that threaten
human survival.
24. Supporting the possibility that Kubrick read this book, an external reviewer for
SFS noted that the original cover art for Irrational Man features Alberto Giacometti’s
“walking man” sculpture, a design Kubrick’s art team considered for the film’s aliens.
25. Also supporting this notion is Scheurer’s observation about the prefatory nature
of the “Sunrise” fanfare: “This theme, which serves as the preface for Also Sprach
Zarathustra, is also the preface for 2001 and a blueprint in miniature for the quest: as the
final reprise of the Zarathustra theme swells up to accompany the image of the Star Child
floating toward Earth we are reminded that our odyssey is never really finished or
resolved ... but is always a preface, a beginning” (181).
26. The preceding discussion may shed light on the film’s first use of the “Sunrise”
fanfare, which plays during the opening credits—specifically the moment when Kubrick’s

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name appears precisely as we hear the climactic chords. According to Douglass

Trumbull, Kubrick was self-conscious about how audiences might respond to this effect:
“Spotting Trumbull in the hallway, he brought him into the editing room for a reaction.
‘Is this going to work, or is this completely over the top?’ he asked with a flicker of
anxiety.” “As Trumbull recalled it, Kubrick was worried it might seem like overreach....
[H]e was painfully aware that if it didn’t work, he might look ridiculous” (Benson, 364).
Kubrick’s worries about the effect reveal how fine the line is between Nietzschean
triumph and pathos.
27. The concluding thoughts of Michael Crowe’s 559-page study The Extraterrestrial
Life Debate, 1750-1900 sheds light on the ideological dynamic that 2001 creates in
placing Nietzsche among aliens: “The point that seems to stand out most clearly is the
need for greater humility in dealing with the philosophical, religious, and scientific issues
so central in this debate” (559). Drawing from Crowe’s historical insight into the basic
value and effects of ET speculation, I would suggest that the extraterrestrial aspects of
2001 prompt humility regarding strongly held views in religion, science, and philosophy
alike, including Nietzschean philosophy.
WORKS CITED
Abrams, Jerold J. “Nietzsche’s Overman as Posthuman Star Child in 2001: A Space
Odyssey.” The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick. Ed. Jerold J. Abrams. Lexington: U
of Kentucky P, 2007. 247-65.
Agel, Jerome. “‘Are You Coming to My Party Tomorrow?’” The Making of Kubrick’s
2001. Ed. Jerome Agel. New York: Signet, 1970. 10-13.
Allen, John. “From the Christian Science Monitor.” Review of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
1968. The Making of Kubrick’s 2001. Ed. Jerome Agel. New York: Signet, 1970.
229-34.
Ansell-Pearson, Keith.“Nietzsche, the Sublime, and the Sublimities of Philosophy: An
Interpretation of Dawn.” Nietzsche Studies 39.1 (2012): 201-31.
Barrett, William. Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy. New York:
Doubleday, 1958.
Benford, Gregory. “Effing the Ineffable.” Aliens: The Anthropology of Science Fiction.
Ed. George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.
13-25.
Benson, Michael. Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making
of a Masterpiece. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018.
Castle, Alison, ed. The Stanley Kubrick Archives. Cologne: Taschen, 2008.
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Crowe, Michael J. The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900. New York: Dover,
1999.
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English Studies 37.2 (2007): 1-23.
Freedman, Carl. “Kubrick’s 2001 and the Possibility of a Science-Fiction Cinema.” SFS
25.2 (Jul. 1998): 300-18.

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Higgins, Kathleen Marie. Nietzsche’s ZARATHUSTRA . Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP,

1987.
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UP, 1999.
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Milton, John. Paradise Lost. London: Samuel Simmons, 1667.
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158, 180-95.
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Hollingdale. Ed. Maudemarie Clarke and Brian Leiter. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
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ABSTRACT
An intriguing commonality among Nietzschean readings of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A
Space Odyssey (1968) is the scant attention they pay to the representation of aliens, one
of the film’s most thought-provoking sf elements. If one moves beyond allegorical
readings and takes the film’s storyline about extraterrestrial entities guiding human
evolution literally, it is apparent how 2001 mounts a challenge to Nietzsche’s staunchly

194.94.18.130 on Mon, 11 Jan 2021 08:21:45 UTC
human-oriented, terrestrial philosophy. An important basis for this challenge is the

Christian-influenced branch of sf defined by Arthur C. Clarke, Olaf Stapledon, and even
John Milton, which the film reflects in both its plot and sublime aesthetics. The film’s
musical evocations of extraterrestrials prompt us to contemplate otherworldly possibilities
that Nietzsche dismisses, but Kubrick’s extensive effort and failure to create a viable
visual representation of the aliens creates a lacuna that makes the final part of 2001
profoundly ambiguous and agnostic.

194.94.18.130 on Mon, 11 Jan 2021 08:21:45 UTC

Nietzsche Among The Aliens

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Nietzsche among the Aliens in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey

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Nietzsche among the Aliens in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

An intriguing commonality between Nietzschean readings of Stanley Kubrick’s

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prominently in 2001 in no small part because Kubrick received his sf education

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In adopting this narrative of evolutionary assistance from above, 2001

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encounter with the lunar Monolith or TMA-1 (Tycho Magnetic Anomaly).

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Gate sequence creates an experience of passivity. As Pseudo-Longinus explains

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the triumphal spirit of the fanfare if we interpret Bowman’s transformation in

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evolutionary epic” of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (247), he offers a significantly different

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name appears precisely as we hear the climactic chords. According to Douglass

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Higgins, Kathleen Marie. Nietzsche’s ZARATHUSTRA . Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP,

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human-oriented, terrestrial philosophy. An important basis for this challenge is the

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