Rob Ager on 2001: A Space Odyssey - Food for thought (film analysis)
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- čas přidán 22. 05. 2024
- The significance of food in 2001: A Space Odyssey. By Rob Ager.
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I'm at a Chinese buffet by myself playing this video with no headphones.
Hey hey….hey….this ain’t facebook……
That’s fine chìnàmèn don’t give a fuck they speak loud all the time
You’re not missing anything
People won’t mind. Hook it to their wifi lol
Incorrect: the monolith was found in Tycho hence the name Tycho Magnetic Anomaly-1, or TMA-1.
The BASE is at Clavius.
Also, doesn't Floyd say the Monolith was found "near the crater Tycho"--?
The birthday cake and birthdays! The fact that Kubrick had GMO food and liquefied paste as a theme. Never ending things to find and love.
I love this film so much 😭
My dad found your original channel over a decade ago! Love your work Rob! ❤❤❤❤❤
TMA-1
T-M-A-O-N-E
N-O-M-E-A-T
"It helped beef up morale a helluva lot."
Another thing: "watch this now, it's hot," is a very mid-1960s thing to say, but it also introduces the last half of the film.
5:00 there is a Latin saying “in vino veritas” meaning “in wine there is truth”. Perhaps this is the idea Kubric was hinting at, which links with your theme.
Liquids poured on the moon would behave the same but would take longer for wave action to settle. Pouring would have to be slow and gentle. Buzz Aldrin took communion on the moon and noted the effect.
And the monolith was in the crater Tycho. "Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 1" far enough from Clavius to pack a lunch. Now i always wondered why the site wasn't covered with a tarp or something to keep a curious satellite from just photographing it.
8:25 - The woman on the bottom left changes her grip and points her two index finger together, like she's holding a gun.
well spotted
Great find!
2001: A Space Oddessy HAS to be the deepest movie ever made.
Interesting that they eat looking at the tablet like we do these days.
How much do you think they would have to say to each other after spending months together on the confined ship? It's not "interesting", it is simply what people do if they have the opportunity. Don't believe me? Look at "Pride and Prejudice", the scene at the breakfast table. All the family are eating and talking at the table, while the father is quietly reading a newspaper. That was set 200 years ago.
Damn this is interesting. I can’t tell how much of this is intended but I love the interpretations
5 seconds in.
I hope he talks about the perfectly square sandwiches
they eat in the moon vehicle
Yep. 50 seconds.
You could do Twin Peaks and food as a follow-up video, David Lynch gets a lot of milage out coffee, cherry pie, hospital food, etc
Also, Bowman is 'scooping' the proper food at the end, using the fork like a spoon, the way he did with the synthetic food on the ship. That means he's only been there a short time. His habit haven;t changed. Not enough time has gone by.
6:23 look how ape-like the guy in the background's movements are.
Nice catch!!
Brachiating ... aka branch swinging.
I believe the monolith is actually buried in the Tycho crater.
Hence the name TMA-1 for Tycho Magnetic Anomaly
which appears on the survey photograph that Floyd holds.
Strange that they would name it TMA-1 (emphasis on the One) when it's the only one they've discovered. Normally a "One" designation doesn't get added to a name until there's a second one that needs to be distinguished from the first. And it's even weirder because this is specifically named for the Tycho crater, and they're actually certain this is the only thing giving off a big magnetic field in the whole area; it's basically spelled out in the little dialogue there is.
Thanks for posting, this was a fascinating watch.
I always suspected that the food was a metaphor for intellect. The apes are nothing until their use of tools and weapons gets them access to meat and this provides an evolutionary advantage. The astronauts feed on bland, processed goo just as mankind is potentially about to be supplanted by a different kind of intelligence. (The ballet of spaceships that look like they are making love). At the end Bowman reaches enlightenment and to symbolise this we see him eating proper food again, most likely haute cuisine.
He accidentally breaks the wine glass, symbolising that a new stage awaits, one which invites him to supersede physical form?
And the monolith, as a metaphor for a doorway, does it physically exist, or is it just an invitation to change? 🤔
Watching this on my monolith-shaped iPad while drinking (hot?) coffee...😅
I have never liked or understood this movie, I'm guessing because I saw it when I was super young and was expecting a movie like Star Wars, but your videos have given me a healthier appreciation for it beyond just awesome effects.
Thank you.
Rob, your observation that there is never any actual references to an alien race by the characters is something that never occurred to me before. This, along with your hypothesis that the monolith is actually a cinema screen, got me thinking. I think the clip of Floyd in the conference room meeting is they key. Note his words: "You're all aware of the extremely grave potential for cultural shock and social disorientation contained in this present situation." But as you say, he never explicitly refers to aliens. So what I'm thinking is this: Floyd himself has discovered that the monolith is a cinema screen. His refence to "cultural shock and social disorientation" is not the existence of aliens, but the discovery that he (and everyone else) are all fictional characters in a fictional film!
This is a thought provoking video but I think there's a simpler explanation than staging and making it all up. It's like what you said with 'The Shinning', there's logical inconsistencies concerning the layout of the hotel and gardens, but Kubrick did that to mess with our minds. It doesn;t mean nothing is happening.
Look at terry Gilliam;s Brazil. There's things there meant to confuse you and make you wonder what's real and what isn;t, but the story is real up to the point of the torture at the end when he begins to hallucinate as an escape mechanism - which is a thematic escape/victory too.
You know what looks exactly like that monolith? The thing many of us are watching this on, our "phones". There's several huge differences between the movie screen and this phones, but the biggest one is that they're capable of watching us as much as we watch them. I'm not at all saying it's the case but if I were an alien and I wanted to study humans what better way than to give them a device that could not only record them nearly all the time but would tell me what they were most interested in via what they choose to look at while on the device. Maybe aliens aren't watching us through these things but I can guarantee you that something is tracking and compiling all the data that's collected with them.
Hmm HAL’s camera is enclosed in a vertical rectangle too.
@@variable5515 some people say this world is an illusion/simulation. If so it could embed clues of it's nature in something like a film, so it could possibly stick a clue about the way it plans to monitor the denizens of the simulation even if the method to be used won't be created for decades after the time in which the clue is given. I'm not sure why it would do that but it is interesting to think about.
I don't get the theory that Floyd & Co staged the moon monolith. How can that possibly fit with the ancient monolith encountered by the monkeys, and the one floating around Jupiter? Did Floyd just guess at the right monolith design? It seems such a strange idea that I'm assuming I must have misunderstood what you meant.
Perhaps there was only one monolith near Jupiter and they staged the Moon one to raise funding for the longer mission. And perhaps the intro was more like a staged commercial for the same...
I've done a whole video about an hour long on my site breaking this down, and it makes sense of all the details at the end of the film that are otherwise baffling. Think of the ending (everything after HAL is defeated by Bowman) as a dream sequence, which Bowman is having now that he is able to properly sleep and dream again. (this means getting away from Clarke's novelization, which is massively different anyway). The film and novel tell completely different stories.
The monolith is technology itself. Or techne.
Note the white screened walls behind Floyd at 6:56? Looks like the same dimensions as the monolith. (You've probably pointed that out before, Rob)
I’ve noticed the same. Monolith and coffin-shapes are all over this movie. The doors of the Discovery are coffin shapes and the walls around the monolith are made of panels with the same shape in each one!
Have you ever done an analysis on Eraserhead? I think it would be interesting.
The man at 15:15 isn't Floyd. He is wearing a grey flight jumpsuit. At 16:10 Floyd is dressed in black.
Of course an alien race is referred to! The lines in the moon shuttle - Bureaucrat: "It seems to have been deliberately buried." Floyd: "Deliberately buried!" Bureaucrat: "Deliberately buried." [All chuckle.] - And this after Floyd is shown multiple photograph charts (magnetism and so forth) related to its discovery. None of which would make any sense if this was a plot by Floyd and his cronies. I admire your earnest ruminations, and I have great admiration for Kubrick, especially in this period, but you're overthinking this.
Hey Rob, ive never been able to think of a good reason why there is a video of martial artists sparring on the screen behind Floyd (16:06 in your video). Do you think this might be a suttle reference to the "verbal sparring" Floyd is partaking in with the cover story?
I always figured it was to contrast with the monkeys fighting savagely which we were seeing directly before the space sequence. The fighters are now practising a de-fanged version of fighting, in which it is done for sport/entertainment but without damage. It goes along with the "artificial" stuff talked about in respect to food in this video. It's fake fighting. But I think it's more to about showing the change in the method of violence. Now that we have nuclear bombs on orbiting satellites, actually fighting man-to-man is useless and becomes a soft abstracted version of the bloody fighting the monkeys were doing.
It could be to contrast the way people move in space with the fast energetic moves of the fighters.
As it's the women watching, maybe they like to watch Alpha Male activity.
When the monolith emits the sound do we know what frequency it is?
Right around 2664 Hz. I suspect you did the math.
@@RideAcrossTheRiver I hadn’t done it, but I figured someone out here knew what it was! Thanks!
Turns out 266Hz is the frequency of regeneration
@@woodedarea 666 x 4?
I do believe the moon monolith was supposed to be located withing the Tycho crater not Clavius. Hence its designation as TMA1 (Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 1)
Actually...starting in 2025 there will be commercial space stations being launched and built in space.
After the intensity of 2001 and what would come with The Shining it is funny to think of A Clockwork Orange being a bit of fun for Kubrick.(Not that the layers aren't there in Clockwork Orange just there seems to be a bit more light hearted approach, a little bit of Alex as the influence on SK rather than Hal, Bowman or Jack Torrance.)
Author Christopher Jon Bjerknes has some very good insights into 2001: A Space Odyssey and Kubrick's Kabbalah symbolism
I am sure you are onto something with the real food vs fake food .
Perhaps they found a way to make the coffee 5 times heavier than Earth coffee. ;-)
Yeah they used mud lol
13:54. Look at the panels in the background - they are all rectangles similar to the Monolith...My God!! Kubrick must be telling us something. And the table is round, just like planets...and the chairs are red, just like blood. And notice the 2 men sitting with picture screens behind their heads - meaning they are imagining and conspiring, while the women are sitting against pale white backgrounds. It's ALL symbolic. We can play this stupid game all day with every image in the movie.
Hi Rob - some comments get ghosted by AI (Algorithmic Interference), but can sometimes still be seen if you click 'Newest First" in the 'Sort by' list, it you're using a computer. On a smart phone, it can't be seen at all! If you check my comment there, you'll know why that's happened.
This one time in college I had to write an essay on Moby Dick. I was a freshman and I knew that the teacher was going to get 200 essays all basically saying the same thing: the message of the novel is do not screw with nature or it will kill you. And I knew that that was going to be very boring for the professor, and I knew that was going to get a B or a C for that incredibly superficial reading, and I knew that I was not insightful enough to come up with a better reading so just for the hell of it, I wrote that obi. Dick was an allegory about the republic of Ireland.
I mean, obviously I knew that it wasn’t. The Republic of Ireland didn’t even exist at the time the novel was written. I knew well that it was nonsense, but I knew that after reading hundreds of nearly identical, equally boring essays, the professor would enjoy something different even if it was complete nonsense . I did build up some really tendentious arguments to support my claim. They were obviously wrong, and I intended them to be obviously wrong, And I’m pretty sure the professor knew what I was doing anyway, but I still got the highest grade in the class.
I can only assume something similar is going on with this video .
Not sure I'm swallowing it whole, either.
Of course that is what is going on with all these movie "analysts". They are tripping over themselves to prove how insightful they are. Show me any frame from the movie and I will analyze the sh!t out of it. See my comment above.
Writted?
12:50 I guarantee you that if we had built a space station and moon base like in this film all of humanity would be better off. None of it is beyond our technological ability.
Many the worlds problems can be boiled down to stagnation. An expansion into The Expanse would remedy this existential angst of humanity. We need to spread out or we turn on ourselves.😮
Since the beginning of the p@ndemic, the U.S. government has spent 6 trillion $ on "economic relief", which of course only resulted in inflation. Just one of those spending bills would give us rotating space stations and a permanent moon base.
Me tries again. Check your 'Sort by newest' first comments
yeah we landed on the moon for sure 🫢🫢🫢
You regard space program budgets as "incredibly expensive". Apparently you haven't been following the latest expenditures of today's American government. Just one of those "economic relief" bills would have paid for everything we see in "2001".
Fast food in North America is easily a $300 billion a year industry. That's a dozen times what NASA gets for a budget.
over analysis can end up deconstructing something and proving the opposite of any intended meaning.
Under analysis can prevent understanding of any intended meaning.
More like "Ager bites." Am i right.
Ager rulez u mean
Hiyooo!
Conditioning of public? Is Soviets In the game of Moon landing hoax? Smyslov named after soviet chess player. And outside space and arms race in reality it was Olympics games race were two countries compete for medals and it was Soviet monopoly on chess winnings in international games. Fisher beats Spassky in Iceland in 1972 amateur Brooklyn boy beats 6 billion dollars chess industrial complex, it is joke that Soviet invested more money in chess than in weapons but amateur American citizen beats Soviets in Iceland in 1972. "Pawns Sacrifice" (2014) movie
You would fit in well with the Flat Earth conspiracists.
You'd fit that better.
interesting but be aware of over analysis
and YOU be aware of unintended irony…..
@@malfeitor1349 please expand....
@@zarg05 you REALLY don’t get it?
This is a Rob Ager joint. Some over analysing is inevitable and part of the fun. Loosen up bro
Over analysing is an art
Rob, I think this movie is the biggest hype of a movie that is an absolute boring, nonsensical, conceited, self absorbed and 100% pretentious joke of a movie I have ever watched. And I have watched Neil breen movies. You’re obviously smart. Been a fan for years so I know your background as a person outside of CZcams with the little you have spoke about yourself. Why do you go on about this movie? Makes no sense to me, even after I watch you discuss it. Avant-garde to me is a joke. Let’s make this movie that makes no sense, then choose not to explain it ever and wow it’s amazing. Sorry dude. The movie sucks. It’s a self indulgent piece by self indulgent Director.
You keep up the great work dude. peace.✌️
Haha, if you've seen my videos on the film and still don't appreciate Kubrick's master chess moves of taking corporate money on the false prretense of delivering them a propaganda movie, but instead delivering a movie that comunicated in a new double narrative, visual language ... then I'm afraid there's much I can do for you.
Ironically, the very frustration, slowness and confusion people feel with this film makes it more accurate to space exploration than any other movie out there. But it's not what people want to hear. They want the fantasy, false reality of standard sci-fi.
@@agerbytes2492 I didn’t ask you to do anything for me. In fact I was respectful to you personally, purposely. I enjoy a lot of your content and just wish you would stop going on about this movie. It’s your channel. Consider it a request from a fan.