In the November 1993 issue of Open Book Peter Leithart commented briefly on gnosticism. The film 2001 is a great specimen of gnosticism, and is worth viewing as a Sunday School project for an adult class.
The author of the basic story was Arthur C. Clarke, an old-school science fiction writer whose novel, Childhood’s End, provided the basic theme of the film. Stanley Kubrick, the director and crafter of the movie, is well-known for his Freudian films Barry Lyndon and A Clockwork Orange, both of which deal with the primitive sexual violence lurking in the hearts of men (the id) versus the restraining influence of society (the super-ego).
The theme of Clarke’s novel and of 2001 is mankind’s transcendence of the limitations of the flesh. The summum bonum—the greatest good—to which we can aspire is to be rid of the body, which according to these men and gnostics of all ages, limits us from fulfilling our god-like nature.
2001 is a visually stunning work of art (especially in a theater). It is packed with symbolism employed in a sophisticated fashion, and deals in a profound but pagan way with some of the most basic aspects of human existence.
As you watch the film you will notice that in virtually every scene people are shown eating food. The fact is that we need food to life. From a Christian standpoint, God gives us life by His Spirit as we eat food, which is dead and lifeless; we kill cows and tomatoes before we eat them. From the gnostic standpoint, our need for food is simply a limitation. The Starchild born at the end of the film gets his energy directly from the cosmos.
Other “limitations of the flesh” that are displayed in the film are sleep, birthdays, and the elimination of waste. See if you can count the number of meals, scenes of sleep, birthdays, and bathroom scenes. As the film moves to its climax, we are shown men running for exercise and breathing heavily, and then comes the long heavy-breathing sequence in the spacesuit. Breathing is another limitation of the flesh.
In the lengthy prologue to the film, the apes are shown sleeping and eating. Then, after encountering the Monolith, which raises them up to the next stage of evolution, they become aggressive and territorial, using tools to defeat the other tribe of apes. In a visual pun, the bone-tool becomes a spaceship as we transition to the main part of the film. The theme of territoriality is pursued as the Russians and Americans are shown in an uneasy truce on the space station.
At the end of the prologue, the “missing link” apes are shown at the end of their development. They are passive and clearly have no future. In the main body of the _lm, the human beings are shown the same way: passive and listless. Only the HAL 9000 computer, a new creation, has the drive to try and seize the next stage of evolution by killing off the men and joining with the matrix. (Ignore the stupid reworking of this aspect of the movie in the film 2010.)
The humanform character of technology is visually portrayed in two ways. First, the globular shapeship the lands on the moon has a clearly human face, seen as the ship is transported below the surface of the moon at the end of the visually beautiful and entrancing Blue Danube Waltz sequence. Second, the ship sent out to Jupiter is clearly phallic in shape, and from its spherical head the seed containing the last living crewmember is ejected into the matrix.
In an additional dimension of this theme, we see that the theme of territorial conflict moves from ape versus ape, to American versus Russian, and finally to man versus machine; for what/who is more “humanoform” than HAL 9000?
The fabulous visual effects we see as the man enters the matrix are not just for show. If you watch with your mind in gear you will see foetus-shapes in the fog. Clarke and Kubrick are inviting us to believe that the human race as a whole is the masculine part of a celestial marriage with the cosmos, which is female. From that union comes the Starchild.
Finally, we are shown a “transcendent change,” as Dave, the crewmember, becomes timeless in what looks like an expensive hotel room of 18th century design. He experiences the limitations of the flesh for the last time: eating a meal, entering a bathroom, and lying on a bed. Then he becomes the Starchild, escaping the limitations of time and space, the whole world as his new toy.
Sadly, many Christians today think of salvation and spirituality in such gnostic terms. They overlook the physical, earthy doctrine of the resurrection of the body, and think of glorification as some kind of immaterial existence. The Eastern, Roman, and Anglo-Catholic sects conceive of the saints as transcendent over the limitations of space, able to visit people all over the world simultaneously through their icons. Protestants have ignored the food of the Lord’s Supper, savoring it only four times a year, with tiny bits of bread and impactless grape juice. The earthy, “bathroom humor” of the Reformers and the Puritans is viewed as offensive and downright sinful by modern Christians, who derived such notions from the gnostic Unitarians. In these and many other respects, pagan gnosticism is very much with us today.
James Jordan is scholar-in-residence at Theopolis. This article originally appeared at Biblical Horizons.