Berube on Kubrick's Silence in 2001

While he attends the MLA, Michael Berube has posted, in two parts, his 1993 essay offering a novel explication of 2001 as, inter alia, a political rumination steeped in the Cold War that prevailed at the movie's 1968 release. The point is not the accuracy of the account; I've read no scholarship on the movie, and can't gauge whether Berube was fair to the accounts he sought to correct. I do find his account salutary, however, and it does an excellent job of combining excruciatingly close analysis of the film's very limited dialogue with big-picture consideration of the political context (not just the Cold War, but the space race generally as well as the near culmination of the Apollo missions), as well as an intriguing contrast between the movie as filmed and the novel treatment Arthur Clarke offered as a post hoc explication of the bare screenplay. (Indeed, when Berube's done with this part of the analysis, one wonders how Clarke and Kubrick worked together well enough to bring the film into being.)

Regardless, for those who love the movie and the filmmaker as much as I do, it's a worthy, if lengthy, read.