I forgot to add a detail to my last post re: screening a 70mm print of 2001 recently. At some point in the evening it occurred to me that the three spacesuits (red, yellow, blue) on the ship Discovery looked exactly like our Fiestaware!
Instead of the puffy white marshmallow suits we’re used to, these strange and beautiful suits wore their exuberant non-primary mid-century color palettes proudly! I’d never noticed it watching the pan-and-scan VHS version of this film, but the red is more like a brick red, the yellow a mustard yellow, and the blue approaches something more of a cobalt blue. Just like our plates!
I like that each astronaut has his a different color suit; they are easy to tell apart that way. Bowman gets the red one, no doubt due to the violence and rebirth that accompanies killing off HAL. Or something like that. The blue dude died already in peaceful hibernation. Poole wears an innocent yellow before HAL cuts his breathing cord while working on the “broken” dish out in space.
These vibrant suits are an interesting choice, especially within the blank white context of Discovery. Once could say these suits have way more personality than the astronauts themselves, which seems to be much of the point of the movie (that AI computers have evolved past humans – HAL is irrational, breaks the rules, is vindictive, etc.. more human than the blank-slate astronauts). Perhaps it’s when the astronauts put on the colorful suits that they begin the transition toward (more evolved) machines?
Oh, and did I mention we have a Fiestaware gravy boat that looks like this:
6 comments:
It's been so long since I saw this movie. I'd forgotten about the colored space suits. Now all I can think of is "What are you doing, Hal?"
And I'll never be able to look at Fiesta ware the same again.
Also, I hope you use that gravy boat.
I wonder when Fiesta ware was designed?
Yeah, I remember nothing of 2001 a space odyssey. So these colored suits? Wow, did not remember that.
Apparently invented in 1936, with a major restyle in 1959. Who knew it came so early?
Actually I will agree with you on this one, but I will say that donning the suits leads to their deaths--or transfigurations, to go the Richard Wagner route.
HAL, by the way, probably has more personality than any of the astronauts--something that ties 2001 and The Right Stuff Together. Astronauts were chosen because they lacked personality. We sent our most boring folks to the moon. Save Buzz Aldrin, they've all lived up to that.
That's a good point, Orris. What's interesting is that both filmmakers were able to simultaneously ridicule and lionize their blank heroes (remember Ed Harris as John Glenn?).
Actually there is a good book on the subject of being an astronaut by Chris Jones: _Too Far From Home._ The sterility of space (represented well in 2001) requires them to be bland and have what might be best called an engineer's mindset: dedicated to the mission and unemotional about--dedicated with full faith to the machinery that sustains them in an unsustainable environment. In 2001 they were betrayed by the system because the system found out that it was based on a lie (HAL had that inner conflict.) Fascinating stuff, indeed. Brilliant piece of filmwork that old Kubrick pulled off.
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