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Starts with New York underwater... ends with New York on ice (was RE: A.I.)


--- "Peter T. Chattaway" <petert at interchange_ubc.ca> wrote:
> But the key idea here is not the virus, so much as it is
> the idea that humanity is a passing phase.  It's an idea 
> Kubrick had already explored in _2001: A Space Odyssey_, 
> where humans exist somewhere after the apes and somewhere 
> before, um, machines or star-children or aliens or ...
> 
Thanks, Peter... That's the idea I was missing when trying
to compare "2001" and "Close Encounters"... Kubrick's idea
that human beings will one day join the dinosaurs in the age
of antiquity... and contained within that idea the notion
that humanity matters less to Mother Earth than it likes to
think it does. Especially given that the film opens with the
melting of the polar ice caps at what is conceived to be the
height of human civilization and ends 2,000 years later (I
cannot escape the religious and philosophical significance
of this amount of time) with humans long extinct (well,
recently extinct in the cosmic scheme of things... but still
utterly gone) in the midst of an ice age, again reinforcing
Kubrick's fascination with natural evolutionary and
ecological cycles which, for all the tree-huggers whining we
are destroying the planet, are far more powerful than
mankind's combined presence upon the earth... indeed, that
presense is a part of that cycle... but i digress.

=====
Bradley S. Caviness, Bigwig
Bigwig Enterprises

http://www.bigwigenterprises.com

"We're all writing everyday with our lives, whether or not we ever pick up a pen." – Linford Detweiler, Over the Rhine

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