vocal music of György Ligeti, suggesting an unfamiliar and alienating realm. A scene in space moves differently: for long periods of time, everything may proceed slowly and incrementally, as people in bulky spacesuits gingerly maneuver in an unforgiving environment; then there may be sudden dramatic movements lasting only a few seconds. Finally, for all these reasons, a scene in space often must be explained differently: either it must be preceded by expository scenes, so that viewers will understand later events, or it must be accompanied by narration, conversation, or interior monologues providing on-the-spot information. Here, Kubrick boldly assumed that the audience could figure out Bowman’s problem, and his risky solution, without any prefatory or concurrent explanation; in fact (though some hasty last-minute editing of the lengthy sequence may have been a factor too), many viewers to this day have trouble understanding this episode, which may be why it usually receives little critical attention.
After the success of 2001, one might have predicted a new wave of grim, meticulous spacesuit films; but Kubrick and Clarke were a hard act to follow. In fact, the most influential science fiction film of 1968 was Planet of the Apes, whose astronauts are never observed in spacesuits and quickly emerge from their spaceship onto the surface of an alien planet resembling southern California, eliminating all impediments to routine adventure. As for stories that focused more on space travel, it was not 2001 but another, different sort of celluloid space adventure that became Hollywood’s template of choice.
At the time when 2001 was released, a television series named Star Trek (1966-1969) was finishing its second year; and during two seasons of weekly journeys through interstellar space, a spacesuit of any kind had never been mentioned or presented. The crew of the starship Enterprise wore only normal clothing, and the women’s clothing was positively skimpy. Most of the time, they were comfortable inside their spacious craft, thanks to life support systems and artificial gravity; when they needed to leave, they entered a transporter room to instantly “beam down” to an earthlike planetary surface or into another spaceship. In rare circumstances when the transporter could not be used, crew members traveled through space in a small “shuttle craft”; however, even when they were looking through windows at space only a few feet away, it apparently never occurred to anyone to bring along some protective gear.
For the most part, then, the crew of the Enterprise experienced outer space only by watching it on television. To modern viewers, the ship’s bridge resembles a futuristic home entertainment center, with all chairs positioned to watch a huge television screen. Unaccountably lacking a remote control device, father-figure Captain James Kirk (William Shatner) must bark out orders to subordinates whenever he wants to change channels. The screen usually shows the space in front of the Enterprise, tiny stars moving from the center of the screen to its borders, a pattern now observed in a popular “screen saver” for computer monitors called “Starfield Simulator.” When necessary, Kirk can order the camera to zoom in for a close-up or recede for a long-range view. If he wants to speak with someone on another ship or a planet, he says “Screen on,” and space vanishes, to be replaced by a picture of a talking alien. In some situations, the screen can also display diagrams or video images from the computer library. For the people on board the Enterprise, quite literally, outer space is what you watch on television when nothing else is on.
When Star Trek eliminated space as a significant factor in its stories, there were several advantageous results. Certainly, life was simpler for the special effects people, since they did not have to worry about simulating zero gravity or filming actors in spacesuits; only models of spacecraft and planets had to be filmed against the background of space. More importantly, the peculiar and problematic aspects of space drama observed in previous spacesuit films were no longer present; scenes in Star Trek episodes could be filled with bright colors and evocative sounds, could be paced in conventional ways, and could be understood without annotation. In one key respect, the series famously ignored the facts of space, as Gene Roddenberry once explained:
A spaceship traveling through space, where there is no atmosphere, does not make a sound as it passes. When we did the original titles for the pilot, where we have the ship zoom past the camera at seemingly great speeds, we had no sound...just the visual movement of the ship. As a result, that sequence was literally dead. It had no feeling of speed or excitement about it at all. So we added a “swish” sound as the ship passed by, and suddenly it came alive. We are earthbound creatures, and we are used to some thing going that fast making a sound as it goes by. We had to put it in even though we know that scientifically it wouldn’t happen.17
With this concession to “earthbound” sensibilities, the producer was frankly falsifying the nature of space, making it seem more like Earth with those familiar “swish” sounds (which also accompany all spaceships in subsequent Star Trek series and films). It is a small matter, but it suggests a larger pattern of making space seem familiar and comfortable by ignoring its true features.
In one episode during the third season of Star Trek, however, spacesuits finally made a telling appearance. In “The Tholian Web” (1968), Captain Kirk and other crew members investigating a devastated spaceship must wear large, clumsy spacesuits when they are beamed aboard. Due to strange energy disturbances in the vicinity, Kirk is stranded on board the ship, which soon vanishes; as the crew gradually recognizes that there is no possibility of rescue, Kirk is officially pronounced dead, and Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) takes over as captain. To those who have only seen this episode as part of an endlessly rerun syndication package, it is hard to convey the impact of this episode when I watched its first airing on November 15, 1968. Even as a teenager, I knew that regular characters were sometimes written out of series for various reasons; and, watching an episode in which Kirk is declared dead and Spock is competently settling into a new role as captain, I and all the others watching that night could not be sure, like later viewers, that it was all a trick. The emotional power of the episode was further heightened by a scene in which a quarreling Spock and Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) watch a prerecorded video message from Kirk, who gently tells them that they must stop fighting and work together now that he is gone.
In the end, we do learn that it was all a trick; crew members start seeing fleeting images of Kirk in his spacesuit, flailing about, and after Spock deduces that Kirk is still alive, trapped in another dimension, he figures how to locate him and transport him back to the Enterprise—since the spacesuit kept him alive while he drifted through dimensional space. Still, I would argue that it is in this episode that death as a reality—as something that happens to people we know and like, not just villains, guest stars, and extras—first entered the universe of Star Trek, long before the more celebrated deaths of Spock (in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan [1982]), Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) (in “Skin of Evil” [1988], episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation), and Kirk (in Star Trek: Generations [1994]). And the apparent death of Kirk occurred at the one time in the first series when someone was wearing a spacesuit—suggesting that the presence of spacesuits in space films can both signal and enforce attentiveness to the true dangers of space.
It is a sign of some fundamental blindness in the Star Trek family that the script’s co-author Judy Burns, recalling “The Tholian Web,” regarded the presence of spacesuits in the episode as a significant flaw; announcing that her original plan was to produce “a ghost story based on fact,” she explained:
Some of the things I was a little disappointed in were caused by technical problems. Originally there were no space suits when Kirk and the others beamed over to the other ship. There were force field belts which kept them encapsulated in a kind of mini-force field.... Therefore, Kirk would have wandered around the ship looking like he looks, except for a little force field belt. I think it would have made a better ghost story. He looks silly constantly appearing in that space suit. I really had a lot of qualms about that. Not from poor designing or anything, but from a story point-of-view, it would have been better.18
Stating a desire for “a better ghost story,” though, is also expressing a preference for a more conventional story. And
