Zepke Stephen: Head in the Stars. Essays on Science Fiction

The sun rises. 61 This first image of 2001: A Space Odyssey so
memorably accompanied by Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach
Zarathustra appears as a portent, as a vision of things to
come, and as an echo of these words of Nietzsche’s:
Zarathustra has become ripe, my hour has come!
‘This is my morning, my day begins: rise up now, rise up,
great noontide!’ (1961 336)
2001 is not just ‘about’ Nietzsche’s noontide, it is an
ambitious effort to project us into a new future by
overcoming the human, all too human. In doing so the
film extends science fiction cinema both technically
and philosophically, offering images of the future more
convincing than any seen before, but as well, the film
explores a new ontology of the future, its every epic surge
defining a new stage of transformation. From the ape’s who
beget us, humanity comes to itself before transforming
into something new – the overman. In this way Kubrick’s
1968 film echoes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s
contemporaneous interpretation of Nietzsche’s eternal
return, one in which the future emerges as the repetition
of difference, the return of the new, overcoming the known
to take us beyond our humanity. 62 Deleuze is vital to
our appreciation of what 2001 achieves, because it is his
insistence on the importance of the future that allows us to
read the film philosophically – a philosophy that cannot, as
we shall see, be separated from its aesthetic merits. This is
to explore, for real, the possibilities of a cinema-thought,
one that attempts to enact a transformation worthy of its
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