Space in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Voyage to the Moon and Space is the Place
Space-based science fiction has mined a great deal of symbolic and subtextual meaning out of the vastness of space. At once, space has been something to fear and aspire to, and respect in all instances. Three of the most fascinating cinematic portrayals of space have their own unique spins on the black void of the cosmos – Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey paints space as a mysterious frontier that both threatens the very existence of humanity and heralds its ascension to a new level of consciousness. Georges Melies’ 1902 silent film Voyage to the Moon advances Jules Verne’s optimistic story of space being the setting for the new Manifest Destiny. Finally, the Afrofuturist film Space is the Place sees Jazz performer Sun Ra finding a new home for the beleaguered African-American population among the stars. In all three of these films, space becomes uniquely symbolic for humanity’s fear of the unknown and their desire to learn, grow and thrive.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 adaptation of the Arthur C. Clarke novel of the same name, 2001: A Space Odyssey recounts several crucial moments in mankind’s interaction with a mysterious black monolith of strange, possibly alien origin. In the first act, the presence of the monolith seems to teach early man how to use tools to defend itself and kill. In the second act, a group of scientists in the near future explore an monolith that has recently appeared on the moon. In the third and final act, the crew of a spaceship investigating a signal coming from Jupiter must contend with the monolith’s enigmatic powers, and the journey’s effect on their increasingly-sentient AI computer HAL 9000. All throughout the film, space is treated with cinematic awe and majesty by Kubrick; the opening shot, in which a series of planets and moons are aligned along a vertical line, eclipsing the sun, while the epic brass of Thus Spake Zarathustra plays, solidifies the central importance of space as something that inspires a sense of vastness and insignificance.
Throughout the film, man is depicted as an explorer, hoping to find answers and enlightenment among unfamiliar climes – space is the setting for most of this exploration. While the Cro-magnons explore their earthly setting and, through the magic of the mysterious monolith, learn to use tools to conquer the Earth, Kubrick transitions humanity to space with a match cut of a thrown femur (used to bash in the head of a rival) cutting to a space station in the exact same position. This is the film’s introduction to space, firmly establishing man’s seeming mastery of it by pointing out man’s use of tools has expanded. 2001’s visual style accentuates the vastness of space and man’s insignificance within it; all of the ships and models appear tiny, like toys; this is not to say the effects look unconvincing, but that Kubrick often frames the ships and vehicles against gargantuan planets for scale, or that ships are filmed in extreme wide shots in which they look small in the frame. Space looms large around all of the human characters and settings in 2001, making it both awe-inspiring and a huge source of fear.
All throughout 2001, humanity’s space travel is shown to be quite fragile, as evidenced by the many perils that Dr. Bowman (Keir Dullea) experiences during the Discovery act of the movie. During the film’s many EVA sequences, space constantly surrounds the characters, covered in thin spacesuits that look as though they will collapse at any time. The death of Dr. Poole (Gary Lockwood) is especially compelling evidence of the tactile terror of space as evidence of man’s insignificance; when HAL knocks the space-suited Poole out into space, his body tumbles end over end into the blackness, increasingly tiny. During the climax of this particular act, in which Bowman must risk decompression by entering the Discovery without a helmet on; the tension in this scene, as conveyed through harsh red lighting, Dullea’s panicked performance, and special effects, showcases the smothering and suffocating hold that space has on mankind.
Thematically, space acts as both humanity’s doom and salvation in 2001. As the source of the monoliths, and the potential home of beings that surpass humanity’s intelligence and grasp of the universe, space is a constant reminder that humanity is not the masters of their own world. At all turns, space surrounds characters and threatens them with death, while at the same time inviting them to expand their consciousness. Despite the horrors he experiences dealing with HAL on Discovery, Bowman is nonetheless drawn to the monolith’s signal, space acting as the vast frontier, he must conquer in order to ascend to a new level of consciousness. In this respect, space is presented with a grandeur and majesty that inspires its characters (and the audience) to treat it with the reverence it deserves. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, space has the ability to grant power and to take it (and your life) away.
Voyage to the Moon
While Kubrick’s 2001 is filled with ominous portent and incredible significance when it comes to space, Georges Melies’ 1902 silent classic Voyage to the Moon is somewhat more irreverent and joyous in its depiction of space. Filmed using some of the earliest special effects known to cinema, Melies adapts tJules Verne’s tale of an astronomy club that decides to take a trip to the Moon, getting into a fantastical adventure while there. Both Verne’s novel and Melies’ adaptation take a decidedly idealistic, imperialist approach to space – Professor Barbenfouillis (Melies) and his entourage simply decide to take a trip to the moon because they wish to go there and see what they find. Filmed with the same kind of accelerated, broad pomposity as many silent shorts of that era, Voyage manages to convey a kind of naïve optimism about space and man’s ability to conquer it that is not shared by 2001’s awe and terror of the vast unknown.
Voyage’s lighter attitude toward space is personified in the film’s most iconic shot (and one of the most iconic images in film history) – the image of the Astronomic Club’s bullet-shaped spaceship shooting a hole in the eye of the Man in the Moon. Rather than take a photorealistic approach to space, Melies anthropomorphized the Moon as having a cheery face planted in the middle of it. Once the bullet hits him in the eye, the Man in the Moon makes a disgusted face, but is not truly inconvenienced or upset. The space around him is painterly, the stars simply an artistically-designed backdrop devoid of movement. This is the aesthetic that Voyage takes all throughout its runtime, a consequence of the limitations of the era that Melies nonetheless embraced, turning Voyage’s look at the cosmos into a bold, artful comic book.
Space is uniquely two-dimensional and eminently conquerable in Voyage, as the astronomers quickly learn in their colonialist journey. The astronauts do not need spacesuits unlike in 2001, and they are able to see many astronomical wonders as happy, welcoming phenomena. The Earth welcomes them in the distance as it rises behind them, and the stars of the Big Dipper peer down at the sleeping astronomers when they sit down for a nap. During this sequence, Saturn also looks down at them from his planet, and the Moon’s own goddess Phoebe regards them with curiosity rather than hostility. While the Moon’s native creatures, the Selenites, are hostile toward them and manage to capture them, the astronomers manage to escape them, kill the King, and return back to Earth, one Selenite in tow to corroborate their story and be paraded to the rest of European society. In many ways, Melies’ film treats space like the Orient or Africa, yet another colonialist setting that white Europeans can explore and conquer. Even the Selenites are depicted like unrelatable savages, another tribal population with strange customs that can be overcome through white ingenuity and superior technology. In many ways, this kind of narrative does not hold up as particularly progressive or forward-thinking, unlike the transgressive Afrofuturism of Space is the Place. However, Voyage treats space with a similar sense of optimism and splendor as Space and 2001, even as its goals are much more modest and its universe smaller.
Space is the Place
While 2001 is much more explicitly and universally humanist in its depiction of space, and Voyage offers imperialist and colonialist approaches to space, John Coney’s 1974 Afrofuturist film Space is the Place offers space as a sanctuary and salvation for beleaguered African-Americans discouraged by the racism they find on Earth. The tale of Jazz musician Sun Ra, playing a version of his stage persona in which he was an alien sent from Saturn, and his attempts to locate a new planet in outer space to relocate African-Americans to a place where they can live and thrive. This film is a quintessential tale of Afrofuturism, a cultural aesthetic combining science fiction and Afrocentric politics to allow people of color to revise, investigate and rewrite their destiny through the realm of sci-fi. In Space is the Place, this Afrocentrism is present in the film’s general conceit that the Earth is simply too unkind to black people: “the tale of planetary exile narrates the possibilities that lie in the willful relocation of African Americans (and often their diasporic counterparts) to outer space” (Fawaz 1103). In many ways, Sun Ra in Space is the Place “rescinds the transparency of blackness posited by cosmic liberalism and asserts, simply and boldly, that space is the place for black people” (Youngquist 341).
In Space is the Place, Afrofuturism eagerly looks to space as the means by which black men can pursue their destiny in a fair and just way, far too disillusioned with the state of racial politics to truly trust the establishment or the white majority to grant them rights. In many ways, the blackness of space appeals to the African-Americans of this film due to their feelings of kinship with it: “the blackness of space itself is reread as an affinity to both racially coded blackness and a more general openness to the polyvalency of cultural meanings that might attach to bodies read as abject or undesirable on Earth” (Fawaz 1104). Since the rest of the white world fears space, blacks may well find sanctuary by going there. As Sun Ra notes in the film, “Outer space is not based upon highness. Space is not only high, it’s low. It’s the bottomless pit. There’s no end to it.” By likening space to ‘low’ black culture, Sun Ra allows it to become transgressive in many important ways, and thus appealing to a marginalized population looking for hope.
Music is a fundamental component to the diegesis of Space is the Place in very important ways that differ from the treatment of music to represent space in 2001. The Intergalactic “Arkestra” of Space is the Place offers an afro-black jazz-centric alternative to the white-heavy casts of 2001 and Voyage, eagerly seeking out space not as a means to expand the course of all humanity on Earth, but to offer people of color an escape from the tyranny of capitalist white culture. As Sun Ra battles with the film’s villain, an establishment-friendly black man named the Overseer, in a cosmic game for the souls of all black folk, Sun Ra equates the blackness of space with the true blackness all African-Americans need to celebrate. He does this through Sun Ra’s signature jazz music, expressing their “world-making vision in musical form” and finding their souls in black music (Fawaz 1106).
The climax of the film, in which Sun Ra and his Arkestra put on a concert after reaching out to Oakland’s black community to offer them a place in space with him, is the major way in which space is equated with black culture and soul. Sun Ra, as our space-based protagonist, acts as a messiah figure to disenfranchised black youth, offering space as a new home far from the evils of the world. When Sun Ra creates the “Outerspace Employment Agency” Infinity Inc., he uses the promise of space travel to solve a trenchant problem among black youth – unemployment. By creating a black NASA, Sun Ra in Space is the Place showcases a particular kind of black egalitarianism that seeks to specifically correct the problems plaguing poor black communities, using space as the way to uplift them.
The film’s decidedly different approach to space is perfectly encapsulated in the scene in which he talks with a white NASA engineer about getting a job. The white engineer wants to avoid going on welfare, while Sun Ra replies, “We don’t really have salaries in our mission. We creators never receive anything for our work.” However, when he explains the holistic, socially-conscious mission to space to the engineer, he is confused; his NASA training, as well as his whiteness, has not prepared him for the very different goals and perception of space Sun Ra (and the film) have in their mission. This cements Space is the Place’s emphasis on space as an engine for social change, a new mythology that can only really be parsed by the people of color it was truly meant for.
Conclusion
Space in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Voyage to the Moon, and Space is the Place is treated with varying levels of reverence, fear, and excitement, conveying some of all those factors in different ways. The Afrofuturist aesthetic of Space is the Place posits the blackness of the universe as a new hope for black people who are disenfranchised by the white-centric population and culture of the Earth; in this way, the abject can find an equally abject place to claim as their own. Taking a more conservative approach, Voyage views space as yet another safari upon which the Great White Hunter can go and expand Eurocentric ideas of knowledge, supremacy and technology. 2001, meanwhile, views space both as the source of our destiny and the place in which we may ultimately perish, deftly combining the treacherous environment of outer space with the transcendence of knowledge and evolution that can come from a better understanding of the universe (as evidenced in Bowman’s ‘starchild’ at the end). All three of these works explore the vast spectrum of emotions and approaches humanity takes toward space, particularly in media such as film. It can provide fantastic backdrops for all manner of social and cultural ideas carried by the filmmakers, from Sun Ra’s anti-establishment Afrofuturism to Verne and Melies’ Eurocentric colonialism to Kubrick and Clarke’s philosophical explorations of man’s place in the universe and its relationship to technology.
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