Kubrick's 2001 and the Possibility of a Science-Fiction Cinema

Stanley Kubrick might be described as a metageneric filmmaker, since his major works tend to take apart and to reconstruct the inherited conventions of the pertinent filmic genre (horror in The Shining, historical romance in Barry Lyndon, and so forth). Kubrick's most intense and complex metageneric analysis is of science fiction in 2001. A historical and theoretical consideration of the science-fiction film reveals that it is structured on a central and virtually disabling contradiction: between the cognitive and critical structure of science fiction as a literary mode, on the one hand, and, on the other, the general association of science-fiction cinema with the dominance of special effects, which tend to induce an anti-critical intellectual banality. Nearly alone in science-fiction cinema, 2001 manages to short-circuit this contradiction by dialectically thematizing the whole matter of intellectual banality and thus, so to speak, solving the problem by raising it to the second power. 2001 is the first and last great masterpiece of science-fiction film. (CF

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