Esoteric Brezhnevism

  The enigmatic recurrence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey of the form of an ominous black monolith confronts both the characters and the audience with the possibility of the existence of a much more advanced intelligence predating man’s own by many millennia. Less accurately from an architectural standpoint, many writers refer to the object as an “obelisk” – an interesting word choice in view of its allusion to Middle Eastern antiquity. Obelisks are associated with solar veneration, sunrises, and sunsets in ancient Egyptian religion. Indeed, Kubrick famously utilizes the “Sunrise” from Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra in the sequence illustrating the painful “Dawn of Man”. Alternatively, “The whole movie is like watching a sunset,” George Lucas remarks in an interview included in the documentary Standing on the Shoulders of Kubrick . In 1968, when MGM released the disturbing science-fiction masterpiece, the largest share of the company’s stock was held by t...