My past demands that I add 2-----------HOLY COW!!! I WANTED TO WRITE THE
SIGN FOR CENTS, AND I REALIZED FOR THE FIRST TIME THAT MY KEYBOARD
DOESN'T HAVE IT....PENNIES MEAN NOTHING ANYMORE!------2 cents.  I was a
very young graduate student (a *very* young one) at SUNY Buffalo when
this film came out, and some colleagues of mine, to whom I had been
introduced by a Professor I highly regarded, took me to their place for
dinner and said they had something very special in mind for later in the
evening.  I don't remember what we ate, pasta probably.  Then they
whipped out some strange looking cigarettes.  Then they showed me how to
use one of these, and approved various stages of my developing behavior
(see Becker, OUTSIDERS, chs. 3 and 4), and then, around 7:45 or so, we
piled into a VW bug and drove into town---they lived in a farm outside in
the country, it was quite beautiful--and there was a movie theater, and
everything by then had begun to swim a little, and deliciously, without
gravity as it were, and somebody bought tickets and led us inside, and
this was, as it turned out, the first week of release of this thing, and
it was in a very wide screen format--70mm probably--and these folks took
us down the aisle, and they planted us right smack in the center of the
first row, and the seats were exceedingly plush--they had theaters then
with plush seats and with one great auditorium with only one screen and
with cupidons on the ceiling--and the film just came on, bang, and there
we were, at the top of our private mountains but together, watching
the apes at the dawn of time.  This is all true.  I remember distinctly
that when the film showed the docking sequence (with the Blue Danube) I
was myself actually piloting that docking craft, and that every screen on
the dashboard had a meaning for me, and that I understood everything.  I
understood everything about the entire film, it was totally clear, there
was nothing missing and there were no obscurities.
 
Later, of course, I had to try to talk about it.  And so did everybody.
And if people nowadays are flabbergasted at the number of varying
commentaries, you ain't seen nothin!  Everybody I met or heard talking
for months had a commentary on this film.
 
The person who thinks Kubrick is a tease is, of course, right in some
respects.  But long live teasers of that sort!  He teased me out of
downtown Buffalo and into the future in many ways, but I was too callow
then to realize that it was not just an interesting narrative; it was an
interesting piece of filmmaking.  I suggest skeptics might begin by
looking seriously at Godard, and *then* proceed to 2001.  Or something
like that.  But it was all a long long time ago, and now I'm sitting here
patiently writing this.
 
Pomerance
Toronto
 
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