An Isolation Odyssey

A number of the sites preloaded into one of my RSS readers started mentioning a short film recreating the enigmatic final minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey for our current age of protective isolation. (The first of the Apple-focused sites does seem to be run by someone impressed with Stanley Kubrick’s cinema, although I wound up noticing just a bit of Apple product placement in the video.) I was impressed by the matchup, but did get to thinking Lydia Cambron’s apartment seemed a good enough place to spend time in, tidy, bright, and attractive. (There’s always the contrast between Kubrick’s artistic chambers and the more mundane contemporary hotel suite Arthur C. Clarke described in the novel, even if not that long ago I started wondering about a way to rationalize Dave Bowman’s aging on film. While I have to admit to an instinctive negative reaction to Clarke’s final novel on the subject suggesting all of a sudden “there was actually no travel to another solar system; it all happened inside the monolith,” I happened to imagine interpreting the movie as “Bowman’s already ceased to exist physically even if that happened in another solar system, and is relinquishing his mental image of himself.”)