I was thinking about Kubrick in the mid-sixties making it, when the year 2001 was in the future, and me in my living room last night watching it, with the year 2001 now more than a decade in the past.

And I was turning over the four-part structure of the film:

• The dawn of man, in which a group of ape creatures, driven from their water hole by a rival tribe, awaken to a thrumming black monolith, and thereafter make the giant leap forward: they use a bone as a weapon and take back their water hole.
• The near future, 2001ish, and the discovery of the monolith buried on the dark side of the moon.
• The mission to Jupiter, 18 months later, in which the HAL 9000 computer malfunctions, then kills four of the five crewmembers before being deactivated.
• Whatever the fuck is going on at the end. Old age and new births. A new dawn of man? A dawn of AI?

And I thought about what the year 2001 meant to its creators and what it wound up meaning to us.

To Kubrick, it meant a bland, clean, artificial efficiency. To us, it’s the year a rival tribe grabbed a new weapon and beat its enemies. It’s a year you would associate with the first part of the film (millions of years ago) rather than the last three parts (the near future). 

I think Kubrick would've smiled at that.

A vision of the future from the past, with Pan-Am flights to the moon and Howard Johnson’s Earthlight Rooms.