Hey Boy Blue is Back

It has been suggested that ELO's Mr Blue Sky sums up the mood at the end of 2001 ASO.

Well maybe yes, if you take the path that everything will be hunky dory when the SpaceBrat grows up as an Ubermench and saves us all from OURSELVES.  But I for one do not see that as I look into the eyes of "Old Blue Eyes is Back" [a ref of course to the comings and goings of Kranky Franky Sinatra].

And the sky itself is not blue [the inspiration for the ELO song].  However there are some great vibes there given ELO wrote it on a walk in the woods in Swiss Alps, as was the case 100 years before when Nietzsche got his inspiration for Zarathustra, the theme of which is used in ASO to signify monolithic moments.

But I prefer a different ELO Blue song [along with David Bowie's Space Oddity], so please take a look and I'll explain.

Here is Wiki on Boy Blue:

"A song about an all-conquering hero from the middle ages." — Jeff Lynne (Eldorado Remaster, 2001).
The song is an anti-war song set during the Crusades and forms the second dream as part of the overall Eldorado dreamscape. It tells a story about a hero returning from a far off war and the rapturous welcome he received from his town folk. Boy Blue (the character of the song) rebuffs the hero worship and declares his hatred of war and stating his refusal to ever take up arms again. To those in the military in the early 1970s, it was set in their lives, in a war far too near.

As one of those fitting the category of the last sentence, AGAINST my will, I don't even need to confirm from Full Metal Jacket Kubrick's disdain for America's treatment of young men "required to take up arms" - I can see it on Dave's face as he arrives "home" to "the biggest piece of nothing in history" [to use the FF Coppola expression].

It is almost as if in 1969 Kubrick has forecast how in 1970s HAL would pull the Napalm Girl gig, J Doe would fall for it and we "returning heroes" would be spat on.

Dave dies, the mission was a failure and Kubrick gives us Boy Blue as a sort of embryo in a planet of his/her own, so my take on that is that one may take it as they wish, ie the baby Jesus icon as hope for the "New World" or a "Rosemay's Baby" type AntiChrist.

If asked to choose which I would say it has to be the latter for the simple reason Kubrick shows there WAS no welcome home as there were no people left, and a secondary item of evidence is Kubrick has staged the whole movie [even down to the very year 2001] in line with Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, where the final scene has a similar brave American returning from "Jupiter and Beyond" to find nothing left.

Or in other words, per David Bowie:
"Planet Earth is blue
and there's nothing I can do"

Bigger Musical Nods in Movie

My take on the White Tiles on the floor is that they signify the very latest artform in this McMansion hotch potch to which Dave returns, ie the White Album by the Beatles.  We know that Kubrick was talking to the Beatles at that time about a Beatles version of Lord of the Ring and that Kubrick had said it was just too big an undertaking [which was probably code for his assessment that The Beatles were simply not serious actors].  So it is likely that they came to a compromise by agreeing to include the tiles and the song Long, Long, Long [or a hint as shown below].

This would tie in perfectly with The Beatles' story of the vibrating bottle of Blue Nun wine that is recorded at the end of the song and mimicked by Ringo with a drum roll.  The fact it was Blue Nun would have slotted perfectly into the "crass" nature of all the other "artforms" that Americans unceremoniously accumulate and lump together into a McMansion soup.

Small Musical Nods to Movie

David Bowie performed the song A Space Oddity as a type of nod to this movie:

Then he added StarMan

Hope you like the video associations I rendered.

Wagner - Das Rheingold

This of course is my own personal Monolithic Moment "chune", but it goes well here as we head for the conclusion of The Seven Ages of Man

Wagner's Tannhauser helps out

To add to Jupiter, here is the classic Tannhauser to help the boys overcome HAL

Jupiter with Attitude

Of course the one thing Kubrick was determined to NOT forecast for 2001 was ATTITUDE, but let's break the rules a bit.

Because if you are off to Jupiter you NEED Jupiter music to INSPIRE you, but from the look of Frank's butt [and the other end], hope and inspiration had been surrendered to HAL long before.

So here is the visionary video.

The REAL Monolith

In Nietzsche sprech a Monolith is a "block of rock" that serves to INSPIRE one to see a PATH [as in Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven] that ENABLES the viewer to "Morph" to a higher level of understanding of [to use Col Kurtz's words] "seeing clearly what has to be done, without judgment but using primordial instincts".

Nietzsche uses a character called Zarathustra [from Persian times] to take such a journey [and do a spot of spreching], BUT to get the ball rolling Nietzsche himself needed to be inspired, and that happened in 1880s on a holiday in Switzerland where he looked up from Lake Silvaplana to a pyramid shaped rock and got his inspiration on the spot.

He wrote his book about Zarathustra's journey of discovery at that time and 10 years later Strauss [or one of them] "put it to music".

In 1968 this movie used the Monolith concept to inspire, inter alia, Apes to "improve their lot" - by violence if need be, and also used the "sunrise" movement of the music to make it all "dramatic and mysterious" [and as esoteric as possible so the movie would be considered "gay" - but not the meaning pronked in 1980 to launder the word faggot, rather the Gay Science meaning of the 1800s].

OK, I have gone back to these roots ["rowts" in American, as root means sex and Americans are not allowed to think of sex, as Zarathustra might do - I will return to that!] and combined the original Monolith with the music - please ENJOY.

This video and GoogleEarth photo below are taken from 12,000 feet, whereas Nietzsche was in the lower right of the photo in Surlej, so was looking up at the Monolith some 4,000 feet above, meaning it would have been far more "inspiring".