2001: A Space Odyssey | Human Error

before I even give my opening line I'd like to put on a spoiler warning this movie is incredibly fun to pick apart and try to understand and should be watched about a dozen times before having your view of it affected by any analysis like this how never malfunctioned in any way whatsoever his inconsistency can only be attributed to human error in my video on Metal Gear Solid 2 I essentially said that every second spin observing art is also spent learning about who you are as a person if art as a whole is about any one thing it's the inherent subjectivity of the human experience however as 2001 a Space Odyssey demonstrates art also exists to expand who we are and what we see when we look at the world essentially art has the power to evolve us as individuals and as a species this film has a lot going on in it and a lot of speculation will go into any analysis as a result for these reasons I'm going to be doing a linear look at this film and as a result the scope of this analysis will steadily increase from beginning to end with the scope of the film as you can probably imagine given this film's ending things are gonna get pretty strange by the end of this video my linear look will be starting a course with the dawn of man in line with what I just said about the scope of this analysis increasing in tune with the scope of the film this section will be more of a recap than an analysis simply because there isn't that much to read into things yet however it's an essential part of understanding the events and themes at the rest of the film especially on a first viewing every single shot in this sequence has a purpose but if you've seen the film recently and don't feel like you need this recap you can skip to this time code to get straight to modern humanity we start out with some pre human species which most closely resembles Homo erectus I'll just stick to pre humans we see the pre humans living in vegetarian harmony with the local wildlife save for the occasional Jaguar attack after an unspecified amount of time we see them getting territorial with each other and separating into tribes having shouting matches over a water source we see the losing tribe or more likely its ancestors being awoken by the presence of the first monolith and at this moment and the night before we see them displaying more human emotion than we've seen from them so far William Shakespeare said that the eyes are the windows to the soul and with the tight focus on the pre humans eyes during this moment of the film it's hard to disagree they look as much like worried humans as they do waves simply because of their eyes and when they see the monolith they take their biggest step towards becoming humans moments after their first encounter with the monolith we see an ape staring at a broken bone on the ground for calling it's experience with the monolith and realizing that the bone can be used as a weapon the way that everyone leaves except for this one ape who you can clearly see beginning to connect the dots for the first time in any Apes existence is just incredibly beautiful but again after an unspecified amount of time we see that this tribe of pre-human says evolved to hunting for food rather than solely being herbivores and with their newly discovered weapons they quickly take the waterhole back from the other tribe symbolizing the end of the pre humans and the beginning of tool use which beautifully cuts to humanity's future at this moment we go from a simple pre human weapon being thrown into the air to a series of military satellites all trained on the earth from orbit while the pre humans feel like animals in the beginning of this sequence after 15 minutes of watching them evolve they feel and act very human and it's here that I'll bring up one of the major ideas in this film humanity never really grew out of those pre human territorial disputes and Wars thanks to the monolith the humans learned how to use tools but with the advent of technological evolution genetic evolution quickly died out our brains only grew larger to a certain point specifically because advanced technology led to the end of natural selection in humans humans will always be able to use technology to evolve technology but past a certain point we stopped using our technology to evolve the human form which led to humanity quickly losing in an evolutionary race with technology as portrayed by this cut from the pre humans the humans of the future we're still just Apes fighting each other for territory the only difference is that we have military satellites rather than bones a large part of the rest of the film is dedicated to portraying humans as infantile in the face of their technology we see all of this amazing technology that's stunning even to us humans living 20 years passed when this film takes place and we cut to a flight attendant who is barely able to walk these people look like babies taking their first steps as we follow the crew around the space plane and we even see grown men eating paste from a juice box obviously all of these things make sense when considering the nature of a zero-gravity environment but the way it's all shown with these long drawn-out shots just emphasizes that humanity hasn't exactly gotten its space legs yet even if our technology has as a microcosm of this visual metaphor the technology in these shoes is helping this woman to take her first steps like a mother helping its child to walk through the first time to jump ahead for a moment a few further examples of humanity being shown as childish compared to its technology is when dave is showing off as amateurish drawings to how the fact that all of the discovery crew in cryosleep are essentially sleeping in house arms house singing to dave how slow all of the crew TVA operations are and a few others that we'll get to as we move along going back to where we were other than that bit of infant symbolism this section is much more cut and dry than the dawn of man something was discovered on the moon and we're sending a team in to investigate it the government is forcing the few people who know about it to lie saying that the moon base shut down because of a pandemic childish lies and rumors being spread next up we get to the first truly meta part of this film when the research team arrives on the moon to investigate the monolith something interesting happens that's in line with the pre humans experience see if you can catch it [Music] the monolith activated exactly when this lens glare lined up with its source this motif of alignment leading to Revelation is everywhere in this film such as the alignment of the moon earth monolith and Sun the first time we see the monolith activate this is especially interesting when you note the shape of this light and several other things that are aligned throughout the film but I'll explain why later as it's good ending material just make a mental note that it was the camera that caused an alignment here which will relate to the final shot of the film so anyways what the monolith did just then was guide the humans exactly as it did the pre humans the humans don't learn anything as substantial as tool use but this sound is the monolith sending out a short sharp radio signal to somewhere in the direction of Jupiter thus prompting Hal Dave and Frank's mission that occupies the bulk of the film ensure this monolith was leading humanity to the Jupiter monolith and possibly testing how we would fare against the poorly instructed Hal which brings me back to my opener Hal 9000 didn't go insane he wasn't emotionally distraught he wasn't just killed crazy and he wasn't afraid for his life in the event that he was shut down he was simply given bad instructions the classic computer logic applies to an AI as complicated as Hal just as much as it does a Commodore 64 junk data in junk data owl so Hal didn't kill the crew or report the faulty ae-35 unit out of madness or spite it was a programming error made by the humans who instructed him so what was the error believe me this was hard to spot but I think I haven't figured out house chess game with Frank isn't a huge part of this but it does play a role so in case anybody's are unaware I'll go over the interesting part of this chess game when notating chess moves by referring to piece starting positions descriptive notation rather than the typical a 64 grid system algebraic notation the coordinates are notated counting upwards from the perspective of the player making the move for instance white might call a certain Square Queen's Bishop 6 while black would call the same Square Queens Bishop 3 in this game when Howe was explaining to Frank how he just lost the game he predicts the next few moves and quote-unquote mistakenly calls Bishop 6 Bishop 3 Queen to Bishop 3 Bishop takes Queen Knight takes Bishop man i theorize that over the course of this game with Frank which was of course part of how psychological report on him he concluded that Frank would not be perceptive enough to spot his mistake and so he tried it out to see if Frank would be the dominant member of the crew or not when how prove that Frank probably wouldn't be the dominant crew member he waited for Frank to go back to cryo to see if Dave would be a threat to his directives it's all massively deceitful but howl is simply creating the best psychology report he possibly can as I'm sure his directives demanded so that's Frank out of the way House sees him almost as an idiot but not in a way that's threatening to the mission so with that out of the way it's time for him to run his psychology report on Dave however the psych report is just a secondary motive for how during this scene in reality howl is aware of the rumors being spread of the monolith discovered on the moon 18 months earlier and he's testing Dave to see if he believes in them how brings up the rumors and then points out all of the strange secrecy surrounding the Jupiter mission he brings it up under the guise of making sure that Dave is on board with the mission for his crew psych report and Dave falls for it so when he answers his questions by asking how if he's working on his psych reports how thinks that Dave knows about the moon discovery and is just being subterfuge when in reality he doesn't know one way or the other this is evidenced by Howl's pause and contemplative tone after Dave changed the subject and the melodramatic touch of putting doctors hunter Kimball and Kaminsky aboard already in hibernation after four months of separate training on their own you're working up your crew psychology report course I am sorry about this I know it's a bit silly hal is expecting too much of dave and so he assumes dave is trying to hide that he knows about the monolith which according to the mission directives is supposed to be classified until they reached Jupiter this is what I mean when I say junk data and junk data out how suspects that Dave knows about the monolith well before he was supposed to according to the mission plan so when how's mine the only solution is to kill Dave and Frank definitely won't go along with that so Frank has to be killed first howl isn't insane he's just too logical for humans to work with the humans that gave Hal as mission directives are to blame for Frank's death you couldn't blame Howell any more than you could blame Windows 7 for poorly coded program running on it so as soon as howl thinks that Dave is aware of the monolith he says just a moment just a moment and detects the fault in the ae-35 unit here is another mostly solid piece of evidence that how hasn't gone mad it's incredibly convenient that he falsely detects the ship malfunction that would lead to Frank's death at the very moment he decided the Frank and Dave had to die too convenient for me to believe is random how fabricated this story and his entire plot to kill Frank and Dave as soon as he suspects Dave of lying so you might be asking why doesn't he just kill Dave during his initially VA to retrieve the ae-35 unit well like I said earlier killing Dave is his objective and Frank is just an obstacle how knew that Dave was more friendly towards him than Frank was and that if Dave died Frank wouldn't hesitate to shut Hal down thus jeopardizing the mission we even get this moment just before the chess game where Frank shows that he's not as sympathetic towards Howell as Dave is happy birthday Frank [Music] it's fatter so if Frank died first Dave would go into E VA to retrieve his body before attempting to connect the murder to hell so Frank had to die first in-house mind it didn't matter to how the Frank and Dave were discussing shutting him down in secret Hal had already decided he was going to kill them and the bad report about the ae-35 unit was just a fabrication to give him an opportunity to take them both out while the radio communications with earth were disabled for repairs the directives that led how to falsely reporting the ae-35 unit malfunction and to his attempt to kill Frank and Dave were a human programmers fault this is one reason why when he's confronted about the twin computer reporting the ae-35 is functional Hal says well I don't think there is any question about it it can only be attributable to human error he's not talking about an error of Frank or Dave it's an error of the human who gave him his directives regarding the secrecy of the monolith this leaves two questions about how one why did the twin computer on earth display a different outcome than Hal and - why did Hal kill the Jupiter team that was in cryo sleep given that they were allowed to know about the monolith and were not at any point in communication with Dave or Frank I initially thought that the discrepancy in the twin computer could only be attributed to the eight-minute communication delay between the discovery and the Mission Control on earth both computers were loaded to the exact same programming and mission parameters and everything Hal observed would have been relayed back to the twin computer so that delay is likely the only difference whatsoever the only thing that can make one of the computers want to kill Frank and Dave using the ae-35 unit lie and the other not want to is how psychology report of the two the chess game and the questions about Dave's belief in the secret discovery on the moon so how would a time delay have affected the twins interpretation of the events well it wouldn't that was just the logic I was following until I couldn't reasonably connect this communications delay to any discrepancy and I reconsidered this line we are reviewing telemetric information in our mission simulator and will advise the only thing I can say for certain about the twin computer is that it doesn't have access to house observations that led him to deciding to kill the discovery crew the phrasing of that line we are reviewing telemetric information in our simulator leads me to the only reasonable conclusion I can come up with the twin computer isn't a perfect duplicate it was only activated once the crew reported the ae-35 failure back to Mission Control otherwise the Mission Control operator would have said that the twin computer reported no malfunction during this first report back rather than after the ae-35 unit was disconnected if the twin computer were running constantly only on the same eight-minute delay as their communications as I initially believed then by the time the discovery had made this report to Mission Control their computer would have already come to a conclusion current to house report about the unit the twin is not a duplicate of all of house under workings and thoughts rather it's only duplicating house bare-bones observations regarding the physical operation of the ship and it's not even running parallel with how instead being activated only in the event of a failure on the ship given the how was lying about the ae-35 he knew that it was working properly and the fact that it was in truth working fine is the only information that the twin computer would have received regarding it this is another reason the house says that it can only be attributed to human error there are two errors firstly the poorly thought-out mission parameters that led him to attempting to kill the crew and secondly the fact that the twin computer isn't able to see anything how does beyond the purely mechanical functions of the discovery so the last question that remains is how's reason for killing the rest of the crew that was in cryo sleep don't worry the answer here is much simpler how knew that they would shut him down when they realized that Frank and Dave were dead as Mission Control would probably have assumed Howe was insane and thus inferred that he killed Frank and Dave and tried to warn the cryosleep team when they woke up so with how being the only member of the ship capable of carrying out the entire mission on his own the logical thing to do is to prioritize preserving himself over all others as for whether or not the Europa monolith could activate without a human present it doesn't really matter because nobody not even how knew exactly what they were looking for around Jupiter and he couldn't possibly have assumed it would be an alien device designed to evolve mankind so with that in mind everyone would have assumed that how could carry out the mission without any human crew and that's that every single thing how does in the film has been explained or as simple and tangential enough that I didn't bother touching on it and with that we can move on to how's death and the thing that this film is most well-known for Jupiter and beyond the infinite the Stargate sequence you can compare my case for how's perfect functionality with various other readings that have been posted online but I think that my interpretation requires the least leaps in logic and explains every questionable thing that occurs with how whereas other theories are incredibly clever but require a bigger jump to conclusions for instance one states that hal interviewed dave so closely to the camera so that he could use CIA interrogation tactics to interpret stress levels based on dilation and Dave's pupils which would be easier to do on the blue eyed Dave than on the brown eyed Frank like I said incredibly clever but nonetheless requiring a bigger jump to conclusions and failing to mention things like the twin computer discrepancy my case only requires that we look at what is explicitly stated in the movie and doesn't factor in any knowledge external to the movie other than that chess notation point which is only important in explaining why how than it killed Dave on the first DVA instead waiting to kill Frank first which we already have another reason for Frank's obvious indifference towards Hal as indicated in this scene on top of all of that though House dedication to his mission parameters above all else is confirmed in his death scene which is another strong piece of evidence that he never malfunctioned one which we'll get to soon when debating this movie people like to refer to howl as either being sane or insane I've even done it here however I would argue that he can't truly be either as he's just running his code and capable of error or miscalculation so with this we can finally begin to connect the events of the Jupiter mission to the themes of the rest of the film the dawn of man the unnamed moon monolith chapter and Jupiter and beyond the infinite the entirety of the Jupiter mission chapter is dedicated to one phrase it can only be attributed to human error the main story of this movie the Jupiter mission is entirely about how was more sophisticated and more capable than humanity and therefore was a sign of the future irrelevance of humanity to relate this back to the dawn of man and the moon monolith discovery chapter man's evolution had stopped at a certain point while machine evolution continued on to the point of outdoing humans in every possible metric the humans that gave him his mission parameters were holding how back so with the cry of sleeping crew members killed and how's intention to kill Dave confirmed it's time for Dave to make humanity's first small step before it's giant leap of finally evolving past the machine using one of man's simplest tools to destroy man's most complicated tool a perfectly ordinary screwdriver was all it took to kill Hal only once Dave started doing the thinking for himself again rather than letting his thoughts be manipulated by a machine so as I mentioned earlier how singing Daisy to dave during his death is the final example of humanity being portrayed as infantile compared to its machines however the big difference here is that dave is essentially growing up here hal is portrayed as a mother singing a lullaby to its baby but the baby kills it and the song ends humanity has finally surpassed the machine also mentioned earlier was the house last action and death proves both said he didn't malfunction and that he was 100% dedicated to this mission shortly after house voice dies out he plays a briefing recording for Dave one that was meant to be played only when the crew reached Europa this recording was meant to teach the discovery crew the true nature of their mission revealing the moon monolith this sent a signal to Jupiter and revealing the hell was the only one who knew the true nature of the mission the fact that even in death how was willing to use his last little bit of energy to give dave the smallest chance of completing the mission tells me that everything hal did over the course of the film was in his head optimal procedure for completing the you could say that I went crazy if that's the terminology you prefer but a more accurate description is that is programming as created by humans was flawed and led to him miss calculating a risk factor and deciding to kill everyone on board as a result it wasn't a malfunction in Hal it can only be attributed to human error so with humanity having shown that it's finally ready to grow out of its infantile state when compared to its technology it's time for the Europa monolith to evolve us to the next level the moment you've all been waiting for Jupiter and beyond the infinite this is where the last couple mysteries surrounding this film get their answers and where things get incredibly interpretive and abstract most of what I'll be saying regarding the rest of the film is straight from my own head as most of this analysis was but one or two key details will be derived from others interpretations most points that aren't my original ideas will be noted in the description I've intentionally avoided looking at others interpretations of art since I started this channel so maybe someone else has said everything I've put in this video so far I can't say moving on let's start the beyond the infinite sequence by looking at the very last shot of the film dave has finally evolved into what we're going to call star child for familiarities sake and as the film closes star child gaze quickly locks directly on to the camera and never leaves for the first time in this film the character is directly reaching out and interacting with its audience which opens a whole new can of worms which merits several repeat viewings so why is star child looking at us well to understand what exactly star child is and how it relates to us we're going to have to look more abstractly at the most concrete thing in the beyond the infinite sequence the monolith what does the monolith represent well it's a large flat black slate which species can learn from by interacting with its a film screen as I write this I vaguely remember hearing that the book actually describes the monolith with moving images on it but as far as I'm concerned that has nothing to do with the proper analysis of the film so going purely off of what's in the film can we still interpret this as a screen yes we can aside from star child looking directly to the camera there's a good bit of evidence suggesting that certain things in this film should be turned at a 90-degree angle for instance this shot of Dave jogging in the discovery or these shots of landing you eyes which represent an alignment as well as a rotation of rectangle these lights aligning with their lens glares during the moon monolith interaction are shaped like a sideways monolith the shuttlebay on the space station all of the mind-boggling artificial gravity shots we see the way that we go from a vertical view during this sequence immediately to a horizontal view and many other small visual cues but the most obvious is the fact that when we see this monolith aligning with Jupiter and its moons the monolith is sideways while the originally projected aspect ratio if this film has been lost a time many people theorize that it was identical to the aspect ratio of the monoliths which would be an incredibly interesting touch of it's true this idea of the monoliths representing the theater screen is the interpretation I mentioned earlier that I have seen prior to shutting myself off from others interpretations but you can watch the film and constantly notice visual cues hinting that the monolith is meant to be turned sideways so combined with Starchild looking at the camera I think it's an incredibly compelling interpretation and that's not all the evidence I could find here to get to the final and most interesting piece of evidence we have to look closer at Dave and what he represents Dave is a generic man with a generic face a generic attitude a generic voice and a generic name this is a common trick when creating protagonists make them blank slates so that the audience can project themselves onto the character just look at Gordon Freeman or link or Ness almost no personality but we love the characters nonetheless just because it's so easy to put ourselves in their shoes however I think Dave's generic nice is a bit more meaningful than that Dave has meant to be a symbol not just a few an individual viewer but of the entirety of humanity seeing as he's symbolic of humanity's growth beyond the machines you could even draw David and Goliath metaphor with him and Howell if you want but for a more meta perspective that's more in line with the monolith film screen theory Dave symbolises every member of the audience learning and expanding their mind by seeing this film and more particularly the beyond the infinite sequence he's a single lens through which millions of people saw the world in a new light and saw the future of humanity as a whole and the future of themselves as individuals I would say that that's what he represents even without the final scene in the bedroom but that scene just solidifies this interpretation in my eyes Dave's experience during the Jupiter and Beyond the infinite sequence represents the audience's experience going throughout the film getting philosophical and the world and humanity from a new perspective and with the final scene featuring Dave's human form we see Dave's experiences projected onto the whole of humanity that's what this room represents it's all of human history and culture tastefully distilled into one room Dave sees classical paintings architecture and decor mixed in perfectly with more modern furniture and floor panels that are clearly from the future he sees himself in his aged ancestors and in his future generations this room has Dave living through many different periods of history both before and after the film's events and to me at least it symbolizes humanity finally moving past the violent tendencies that urged us to use tools in the first place after all the bones the military satellites and the screwdriver used to kill Hal humanity is finally shown as one race unified with the whole world in the scene so how does this relate back to the monolith film screen idea well Dave had his first experience evolving from interacting with the monolith and he's about to have his last however before he evolves one last time to Starchild he's going to bring us into the film with him when we see Dave as an older man he's eating at a table when he accidentally knocks over his water glass no tell the cut from glass falling - shattering reaction shot takes place exactly when the cup is touching the edge of the letterbox this of course also depends on the original aspect ratio which again has been lost a time however it's so close to it that I think it's safe to assume that this was the intention this glass represents the barrier between screen and reality being shattered and with this the final monolith appears and solidifies that idea we see the dying Dave raise up a hand as if to activate the final monolith and with that he's turned into Starchild and we slowly zoom into the monolith until the entire screen is filled with its blackness and we cut to the black of space with Starchild slowly coming towards the frame from the way that this cut is inserted the black of the monolith is paralleled with the film screen one last time the glass breaking brought us into that room with Dave and the zoom in on the monolith brought us both into space i theorize that when star child is looking directly at the camera he's looking at us and we've become star child alongside him through interacting with the film screen we've evolved into a more sophisticated version of ourselves we'll always be able to use technology and art to better ourselves and our species but it's always going to be easier to just focus on developing technology so we don't have to blame our shortcomings on ourselves instead blaming them on our devices I believe that when it was released in 1968 2001 a Space Odyssey was a warning about how weak the coming age of computers was capable of making us and a way of reminding us that we can always use technology to better ourselves rather than to replace ourselves and 2019 it's a plea to not let ourselves continue to be replaced by our technology to continue focusing on growing developing and becoming smarter rather than offloading those duties to our technology that doesn't just apply to technology either it applies to art as well as the film screen model with comparison represents our and technology giving way to each other in a cycle and making a review of a work of art for example a film it's easy to dedicate all of your mental processing power to pointing out what the film did right and what it did wrong and using that information to make the next film a little better by looking at the film objectively you've done nothing but serve the next film however if you instead choose to learn from a film project your own experiences on it use it to see the world from a new perspective and challenge yourself with it suddenly you might find that you're looking at the world from a whole new perspective evolving yourself as an individual and as a species or it doesn't exist to find a perfect optimal state art exists a challenge humanity and to put the human condition into view for everyone to see with their own unique perspective art is a mirror that we can use to evolve seeing a film is no different than interacting with the monolith it's easy to look at it from a distance but to touch it and let it touch you as a terrifying mind-blowing and perspective warping thing you never know what you're going to see but you'll always come out better for enduring the fear of examining yourself you

Channel: Leadhead

Views: 174,771

Rating: 4.9113455 out of 5

Keywords: Stanley, Kubrick, sci, fi, science, philosophy, evolution, ending, explained, discussion, analysis, postmodern, meta, monolith, theory, Hal, ai, crazy, star, child, Dave, frank

Id: ljeSe1j5a9E

Length: 27min 17sec (1637 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 17 2019