No one will tell us how all this fits together; it's up to us to make it work. When Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey (based on Arthur C. Clarke's story "The Sentinel of Eternity"), audiences were bewildered. The film was filled with objects and events that seemed to have meaning, and we struggled to put it all together. Many dismissed it as psychedelic babble, a sign of an unhinged mind. Critics were unimpressed. And yet the film was clearly a riddle begging solution. What is the rectangular monolith that keeps appearing from the prehistoric past to the future? What happens to David Bowman at the end of the film, when he's suddenly drawn into a Louis XIV drawing room somewhere near the moons of Jupiter? Why does Bowman transform from a decrepit old man in a Howard Hughes bedroom to a celestial embryo? What does it all mean? Figuring it out was like trying on new clothes at a department store. If you didn't like how it fit, you tried on something else. Who knew what it meant?
