HAL's Shutdown Hurts More Than E.T.'s Death Because a Mind Is Switched Off

Film scholar Scott Bukatman was talking through 2001: A Space Odyssey with author and filmmaker Michael Benson when he reached the scene in which astronaut Dave pulls HAL's memory modules. He said he no longer thinks of it as murder but as a lobotomy, and that is why it hits him harder than the death of E.T.

"I used to call it the murder of HAL," Bukatman said, but now he calls it a lobotomy, "the lobotomizing of a sentient, higher order brain."

Bukatman argues that HAL is "the only emotive character after the hominid," and he has never questioned that HAL is human in the Turing sense. If he were in another room, he said, he would take HAL for human, and wish he spoke as well.

That belief is why the shutdown feels crueler to him than the death of E.T. He once was upset when E.T. lay dying, Bukatman said, but later decided director Steven Spielberg "is just killing a pet, and of course that's gonna make me emotional." HAL's end, he argues, is different, the switching off of a mind that identified with its own perfection.

The sound makes it physical. Bukatman describes HAL's rhythmic plea, "Dave. Stop, Dave. I'm afraid," as partly acting and partly slowing and manipulating the voice. In a film that otherwise does not try to stir basic feeling, he finds it extraordinarily moving.

He says there are very few characters he empathizes with as much as HAL in the moment of dying. Asked whether that sympathy can survive the fact that HAL has killed people, Bukatman said he is not judging HAL morally while he is sorry to see him go. The killings were bloodless, he noted.

What stays with him, he said, is simpler and closer with age. "I am just feeling the loss of memory, the loss of function, the loss of an ability to communicate," Bukatman said.