(wasn't even a damn line in the movie)

When I was a little kid, I always enjoyed shutting my eyes, like really tight, and watching the…I still don’t know what it’s called. The after-effects of light? The weird colored shapes that play across your eyelids. I would watch them slowly diminish, thinking they were germs or something. I distinctly remember one time, playing hide and seek in a classroom in elementary school, and my head was resting against a wall, eyes shut tight, and as I was counting, I was watching these…they looked like islands, and the way they moved across my eyelids made it seem like I was flying.

Then, years later, in the ninth grade I saw 2001 for the first time. Well, not all of it. I was flipping channels and I caught the word “INTERMISSION” on TCM, and I stopped, transfixed by that Futura font and the haunting music. I didn’t take my eyes off the TV until the end of the movie, and when it was over, I felt changed.

It was the Star Gate sequence in particular, the dazzling lights, that ever-present haunting music with the pitch steadily rising, the blink-and-you-miss-it frozen shots of Dave as it appears that his mind is SHATTERING, just like mine was while watching. And then you see those solarized landscapes, all blues and greens and oranges. The camera passing over canyons and valleys…and islands.

It’s like deja fucking vu. But I have no memory of ever seeing the movie before. It’s weird.

And it still gets to me to this day. I mean, I’m always hypnotized by Kubrick’s films, but 2001 is possibly the closest I’ll ever get to doing mind-altering drugs, more so than anything David Lynch or Alejandro Jodorowsky could ever shoot. And once it hits Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite, I can’t blink, I can’t breathe, my hands are always pulled up to my chest, gripping my shirt tightly.

I usually never think to mention the movie whenever I’m listing my favorite films, sci fi or otherwise, and I’m not sure why, because there isn’t any other movie out there that makes me feel the way 2001 does…

[Brett]