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2001 buries awe on purpose
Small Talk On The Moon
On the Moon, human communication turns banal. The characters have no language adequate to the unknown, and the capacity to feel awe is missing, or so brief that they turn away because it is too disturbing. The moment of wow is deliberately buried, as if someone were asking who wants coffee.
Floyd's Flat Speech
Heywood Floyd, a faceless bureaucrat, gives the most anodyne inspirational talk of all time. Actors in science fiction films are often not capable of performing sublime terror and awe, and Kubrick uses that flatness. Floyd and the others stand briefly at the edge of something, and a couple of minutes later a cosmic signal pierces their senses, which is the last the film shows of them.
Dave And Ho-Hum
Dave, in the last part of 2001, no longer has the luxury of looking away. An EC science fiction comic from the 1950s shows how ordinary the opposite can be: set in a far future where space travel is an everyday matter, its first panel shows a spaceship floating between two planets, with a word balloon reading Ho-hum.
Why did EC Comics end its science fiction line?
EC published Weird Science and Weird Fantasy starting in 1950, with art by Wally Wood and others. In 1954 a US Senate subcommittee held hearings on comics and juvenile delinquency, and the industry then adopted the Comics Code Authority. EC's publisher, William Gaines, refused to submit to the code, and EC ended its horror and science fiction comics. Gaines turned Mad into a magazine in 1955.
How did Kubrick make doomsday sound ordinary elsewhere?
Kubrick first planned Dr. Strangelove as a serious thriller based on Peter George's novel Red Alert. As he worked on the script, he found the situations absurd and recast it as a black comedy, with Terry Southern helping with the rewrite. The generals and officials in the War Room discuss the end of the world in the language of committees and procedure. Red Alert was published in 1958.
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