2022: A Space Emergency
THE BONE THAT BECOMES a spaceship is the most famous scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and probably the most famous cut in all of cinema. A human ancestor, having used a tool, throws it into the air. As it falls with a spinning motion, Kubrick cuts to a spaceship of some kind, the first of six, each gracefully orbiting a gorgeous blue planet as Strauss’s “Blue Danube” waltz gives the viewer a sense of peaceful wonder.
The cut elegantly represents the entire evolution of humanity from the discovery of tools to the achievement of space flight. Those spaceships, though, are not what they seem. Kubrick had originally intended for a narrator to explain that the first three objects we see were not space stations or ordinary satellites—but orbiting nuclear weapons. Kubrick had meant to demonstrate that the Cold War nuclear stalemate had followed humans into space. After all, to what first use had early humans put that first tool at the dawn of man? Murder.
But Kubrick nixed the idea of using a narrator. Perhaps he was trying to keep up with current events. While Kubrick was filming 2001, the United States, the Soviet Union, and other countries of the world agreed to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which would prohibit nations from placing nuclear weapons in orbit. The treaty entered into force just as filming wrapped. Some authors think Kubrick worried that some moviegoers would have been distracted by the apparent incongruity, making a movie about the near future seem out of date. Others say Kubrick was worried about comparisons to his epic comedy about nuclear war, Dr. Strangelove. That’s what Arthur C. Clarke, who cowrote the screenplay for 2001 with Kubrick, thought. “I think that Stanley felt,” Clarke said, “that after Dr. Strangelove, he didn’t want to have anything more to do with nuclear bombs.”
Kubrick’s change of heart illustrates the difficulty of explaining how the Cold War nuclear arms race played out in space. The United States and the Soviet Union made incursions into the heavens that raised the possibility of placing nuclear weapons in orbit. But neither power came to
