Something Good #19: A Gustatory Odyssey
For as long back as I can remember, my favourite film has been Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (well, The Neverending Story filled that role for a long time—and I still count the book as one of my favourites). I have distinct memories of my dad showing 2001 to me on VHS and being absolutely thunderstruck by the eerie wonder of it all—the otherworldly music, the strange visuals, and particularly the haunting “hotel room” scene at the end where astronaut David Bowman is transported to what appears to be an alien intelligence’s idea of a human environment to live out his life in an abstracted four-dimensional time-flow. (When I made my short Final Offer, set in an alien’s idea of what a human office would look like, I used that set as a reference.)
When I returned to the movie as an adult, I was really happy to find that it was, if anything, better than I remembered it (this was also true of the book The Neverending Story). A friend and I decided to watch it as a way of commemorating 4/20, and as I greedily consumed a pizza in front of the television I marvelled at so many of the film’s details. Just how silent the movie was; no other sci-fi film has so thoroughly contended with the sonic emptiness of space. The way Kubrick shot the encounter between the HAL-controlled spaceship Discovery One and the EVA pod inhabited by Bowman as an over-the-shoulder dialogue scene. Every single detail of the production design.
I was full of festive 4/20 spirit (and a lot of pizza), and it suddenly occurred to me how the movie was, when you got down to it, all about food. In a film where the human characters are distanced from the viewer almost to the point of abstraction, their bodily functions remain front and center.
Let’s explore 2001 as a series of meals.
THE DAWN OF MAN
The first act of 2001 is almost entirely about food. In the very first shot we see of humans, or rather pre-human hominids, they’re eating some sort of plant. At this point in our evolution, we appear to be herbivorous, and we live alongside prey animals, even competing with them for food, rather than actually eating them.
But after the appearance of a mysterious monolith, humanity’s evolution accelerates. A proto-human picks up a bone and uses it as a tool—indeed, a weapon.
We then cut to the presumably same group of hominids, now enjoying a meal of raw meat. Humanity’s future, and our eventual conquest of the stars, all begins with this primordial crudo.
TMA-1
The film’s second act mostly concerns Dr. Heywood Floyd’s trip to the surface of the moon to examine the recently-unearthed, top-secret monolith codenamed TMA-1. It is no less food-focused. When Floyd arrives in orbit at Space Station V, the first thing he asks for is breakfast.
Traveling to the Moon via shuttle, both he and the crew enjoy a meal designed for zero-gravity consumption. This is the first, but not the last time food is presented as technology, abstracted beyond all recognition. We see pictures of what is supposed to be in the “Liquipak” packaging, but never the “food” itself. It’s consumed by straw and even has step-by-step instructions.
Later, Dr. Floyd stares, puzzled, at the long instructions for the shuttle’s zero-gravity toilet.
In a “Moonbus” travelling from Clavius base to the site of TMA-1’s discovery, Dr. Floyd and the crew joke about the chicken and ham flavours of their sandwiches and how whoever makes these artificially-flavoured meals are “getting better at it all the time.”
JUPITER MISSION
18 months later, astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole are on their way to Jupiter to investigate another mysterious monolith. Like in the Dawn of Man segment, practically the very first thing we see is a meal.
At this point, the food is totally abstracted, mere rectangular slabs of coloured paste. We’re not even told what kinds of food they’re supposed to represent (although I always thought they looked weirdly tasty). This is totally post-human cuisine.
INTERMISSION
A few years ago, back when I actually went to cinemas (😢), I was in Toronto during one of the TIFF Lightbox’s semi-regular screenings of the 70mm 2001 print the TIFF organization owns. I was very, very stoked to be seeing it on a big screen, projected on large-format film: heaven!
As per above, one thing I absolutely love about 2001 is its generous use of silence, or silence broken up only by the sound of breathing, like when Bowman is maneuvering around outside the Discovery One in his tiny EVA pod. To me, this gives the impression of the emptiness and isolation of space in a way that is truly unsettling.
So I was not pleased to be sitting next to a guy with a giant bag of popcorn, who slowly, methodically, ate one single kernel AT A TIME throughout the entire goddamn movie. The audience was otherwise hushed: I swear, you could have heard a pin drop during those space-walk sequences were it not for this guy’s metronome-regular crunching. Now, I am usually very quick to “hush” in the movie theatre environment but a) I had to sit next to this guy for two and a half hours and I didn’t want it to be tense and weird and b) on the whole, I am a big supporter of the movie popcorn experience and it seemed against my values to call a guy out for it.
Finally, the intermission arrived. I figured this has to be the end of it; there’s no way the guy’s gonna just go back to his agonizing corn-crunching after the intermission, right?
Wrong.
JUPITER AND BEYOND THE INFINITE
Finally, the scene that mystified, captivated and troubled me the first time I saw 2001: the “hotel room” sequence, in which David Bowmans of varying ages seem to co-exist in the same zone of time-space.
What is Bowman doing?
Of course. He is eating.
This is one of a few details in which Kubrick’s film diverges from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 novel, which was written simultaneously with the script. In the movie, Bowman appears to be eating a room service meal, complete with vegetables, a roll, cutlery, a glass of wine, etc.
In the book, though, he finds a refrigerator in the alien environment full of what looks like familiar brands of packaged food. When he opens what appears to be a box of cereal, though, he finds a strange but edible blue substance.
The blue bread pudding had a faint, spicy smell, something like a macaroon. Bowman weighed it in his hand, then broke off a piece and cautiously sniffed at it…
He nibbled at a few crumbs, then chewed and swallowed the fragment of food; it was excellent, though the flavor was so elusive as to be almost indescribable. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine it was meat, or wholemeal bread, or even dried fruit. Unless there were unexpected aftereffects, he had no cause to fear starvation.
While this image has stuck in my head for decades, it feels more appropriate that in Kubrick’s version, the only recognizably human meal in the film has been cooked up by a distant, alien intelligence.
EPILOGUE
Bowman floats above the Earth, transcendent—the Star Child.
No umbilical cord is visible.
In doing some last-minute research for this issue, I discovered that I was not the first person to make the 2001/food connection. A 2007 paper by Josh Ronsen, “The Hidden Meaning of 2001: A Space Odyssey” covers similar ground, and ends with an intriguing theory:
Why are the dimensions of the Monolith 1 to 4 to 9? Sit down: the answer will shock you.
1:4:9 are the proportions of ingredients in a recipe. What recipe?
These are the proportions of butter to half-and-half to sugar used in chocolate fudge, a bar of which the Monolith resembles.
This week’s #nojacketsrequired, an edition of Natsume Sōseki’s 1906 novel I Am a Cat, was kindly provided by reader Alex DelPriore. Please send your discoveries directly to [email protected]—I welcome them all!
Thanks as well to reader Dan Selzer, who provided me with this vindicating quote from legendary typographer Jan Tschichold (1902-1974):
It is regrettable that over the past thirty years the quality of book covers has declined; at the same time the design and form of the jacket, which lures the buyer, has been further and further refined…
Books that are still inside their jackets cannot be held very well, and the visible advertising is annoying. The true garment of the book is its cover; the jacket is merely the raincoat. To protect the jacket itself with an additional one made from cellophane is about as ludicrous as wrapping paper around the protective cloth cover of an expensive leather suitcase.
This week’s bonus track is as Something Good as it gets:
You know what else? The arguably most “human” character in 2001, HAL-9000, isn’t even capable of eating. In other news: I won an award. Every Wednesday I’ll send you Something Good. If you like it, please tell a friend.
