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mr. kubrick: My pupils are still dilated, and my breathing sounds like your soundtrack. I don’t know if this poor brain will survive another work of the magnitude of 2001, but it will die (perhaps more accurately “go nova”) happily if given the opportunity: Whenever anybody asks me for a description of the movie, I tell them that it is, in sequential order: anthropological, camp, McLuhan, cybernetic, psychedelic, religious. That shakes them up a lot. Jesus, man, where did you get that incredibly good technical advice? Whenever I see the sun behind a round sign, I start whistling Thus Spake Zarathustra. My kettledrum impression draws the strangest looks. dear mr. kubrick: Although I have my doubts that your eyes will ever see this writing, I still have hopes that some secretary will neglect to dispose of my letter. I have just seen your motion picture and I believe— please, words, don’t fail me now—that I have never been so moved by a Wlm—so impressed—awed—etc. The music was absolutely on a zenith. The Blue Danube really belonged in some strange way, and the main theme with its building crescendos was more beautiful than John Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus” and from me that’s a compliment. The story in Life magazine, of course, showed the most routine scenes, as Life has a tendency to eliminate any overwhelming virtue in a motion picture, and the three best scenes were lumped together and were almost unrecognizable. But lest I run oV at the mouth, let me conclude by saying that if the ill-voted Oscars doesn’t give you a multitude of awards in 1969, I will resign from humanity and become a soldier. 2001 A Cold Descent  m a r k c r i s p i n m i l l e r 122 It is, at least to me, the Wrst movie to be a true art form. It is one of the few truths I have experienced in my lifetime that has left such a strong impression. I mean more than an impression—it is constantly on my mind and has loosened some of my prejudices. For the life of me, I cannot understand why the critics (all of which I read when they reviewed the Wlm) haven’t stood up and shouted with enthusiasm in their reviews. Sadly, I have come to the conclusion that for so many years Wlms were made for the 12-year-old mind that at last, alas, our critics have emerged with 12-year-old minds. Pity. I am 14 and loved every minute of 2001. Anybody who says it was dull is an idiot. How can a movie so diVerent, like 2001, be dull. Oh, well, some people are dumb. Some thirty years after the release of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, such fan mail has an unintended poignancy—in part (but only in part) because the letters are so obviously dated. Those Werce accolades are pure sixties. To reread such letters now—and Jerome Agel’s 1970 The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, the ecstatic, crazed homage that includes them—is to look back on a cultural moment that now seems as remote from our own as, say, those hairy screamers of prehistory, erect with murderous purpose at the water hole, might seem from the low-key Dr. Heywood R. Floyd, unconscious on his umpteenth voyage to the moon. The Wlm’s Wrst devotees were knocked out, understandably, by its “incredible and irrevocable splendor” (as another letter-writer phrased it). Others—also understandably—were troubled, or infuriated, by the Wlm’s disturbing intimation that, since “the dawn of man” so many, many centuries ago, the human race has gotten nowhere fast. That subversive notion is legible not only in the famous match cut from the sunlit bone to the nocturnal spacecraft (two tools, same deadly white, both descending) but throughout the Wrst two sections of the narrative. Indeed, the negation of the myth of progress may be the Wlm’s basic structural principle. Between the starved and bickering apes and their smooth, aVable descendants we can discern all sorts of broad distinctions, but there is Wnally not much diVerence —an oblique, uncanny similarity that recurs in every human action represented. In 2001, for example, the men feed unenthusiastically on ersatz sandwiches and steaming pads of brightly colored mush—edibles completely 2001: A Cold Descent 123 processed, heated imperceptibly, cooled down, and very slowly masticated, as...

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