Right I had actually do some work on my dissertation rather than talk about films (imagine that), but I will take a bit of a break now.
Not that I think Kubrick read every single Nietzsche book and mined it for ideas, or that the parallels are 100% exact, but I think it's clear that he was influenced by the overall approach and read
some Nietzsche...so I think it's a good tool for analysing the philosophical content of the film:
Nietzsche said:
the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the aspect of the earth was essentially altered. Indeed, divine spectators were needed to do justice to the spectacle that thus began and the end of which is not yet in sight-a spectacle too subtle, too marvelous, too paradoxical to be played senselessly unobserved on some ludicrous planet! From now on, man is included among the most unexpected and exciting lucky throws in the dice game of Heraclitus' "great child", be he called Zeus or chance; he gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if with him something were announcing and preparing itself, as if man were not a goal but only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.-
In his unpublished work on Greek philosophers, he wrote this when talking about Heraclitus:
A coming-to-be and a passing away, a building up and tearing down, without any moral glossing, in innocence that is forever equal - in this world it belongs only to the play of artists and children. And as the child and the artist plays, so too plays the ever living fire, it builds up and tears down, in innocence – such is the game that the aeon (αἰὼν - life, time) plays with itself.
Transforming itself into water and earth, it builds up towers of sand, like a child making sandcastles by the sea, heaps it all up and then tips it over; from time to time, it starts the game anew. A moment of satisfaction: then need seizes it, as the need to create seizes the artist. Not hybris, but the ever newly awakening impulse to play, calls new worlds into being.
Europe1 said:
One thing that I've found a bit frustrating was -- and Ubermensch against what, excactly?? From what I understand, an Ubermensch is someone who creates their own values and ethics. So the star-child returns to earth in the ending -- its appearance marking as some sort of transcendent being. But what is it supposed to "evolve" or "transcend" for humaniy?
That is one of the key parts of the Nietzschean Ubermensch, but there is also an important aspect of the fusion between the Apollonian (the rational, scientific aspect of man) and the Dionysian (the instinctual, even artistic, parts of our nature). As far I understand it, he was very much against a purely rational unmediated Will to Truth above everything else. The 'beyond man'/'overman' would combine both these elements, transcending/overcoming the nihilism of modern society after the Death of God, into a state of pure creativity.
You also see a lot of metaphors in Nietzche comparing the final process of the self-creation of the Ubermensch to that of a child, he wrote, for instance, that
"The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first movement, a Sacred Yes”.
One thing that I found interesting regarding the Humans vs HAL sequence... is that, the humans actually seem very robotic while HAL is the emotional one. The actors don't emote or show emotions, barely even while they're under moral distress, going about their work like automatons. HAL, meanwhile, is the one who begs for his life when it's clear he's likely to die -- and the one who fears for his own safety, hence the plan to murder them. As he's dying, he's even recalling the circumstances of his creation, as if forlornly recollecting on his own birth. Humanity are obviously very bad parents to machines if that's the situation we ended up in. Likewise, through the film, we see a very stiff, plastic, almost robotic culture. The astronauts even eat that weird processed food. So... was humanity in it's "robotic" phase and the star-child brought them to something that was meant to transcend that?
This is actually a
really good point I think, and I think it's absolutely on the right kind of track. On the one hand they do
say in the film that HAL was programmed to sound human to make it easier for the astronauts, but the extent to which he has actual consciousness is one of the big questions I suppose (like lots of subsequent films/tv shows dealing with AI). He certainly acts like he does...as you point out, he seems to have a genuine sense of self-preservation and 'begs' for his life. On the other hand, I think HAL is still a complete abstraction and while the two men might seem somewhat distant and robotic, we identify with Dave because he is a human being, with a body; he willing to risk his own life to save Frank for example.
Even putting HAL aside, I think that you are absolutely right when you talk about human culture being 'stiff, plastic etc'. For me, this is an important element for the film in the light of what happens at the end. I think it emphasizes the point that although humans have progressed beyond the barbarism of the 'ape-men' of the Dawn sequence, it is at the point where even something as incredible and wonderous as a space-travel is completely mundane and sterile. In this sense the Monolith seems to have given the apes the kind of 'will to power' that drives their consciousness forward, but by the time we reach the main section of the film the bestial and violent remnants of man's origin:
Frederich Nietzsche said:
To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle to which even the apes might subscribe, for it has been said that in devising bizarre cruelties they anticipate man and are, as it were, his “prelude.” Without cruelty there is no festival: this the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches.
has been suppressed in favour of a purely passive, scientific rationalism. Whereas we had 'Moon-Watcher' (what the ape who uses the bone is called in the credits) gazing up at the sky in the prologue, space has become boring...science for science's sake, devoid of emotion despite mankinds achievements. In The Gay Science especially Nietzsche links this kind of Will to Truth with nihilism. The journey through the Star Gate and Beyond the Infinite - seemingly beyond any kind of human rationality - surely reflects an overcoming of that kind of nihilistic scientism.