Stanley Kubrick at the age of 21. [Image from the Wikipedia 'Stanley Kubrick' page, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.]
Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928, at the Lying-In Hospital in Manhattan, New York, the first of two children of Jacques (Jacob) Leonard Kubrick (1901–85) and his wife Sadie Gertrude (née Perveler; 1903–85), who were both Jewish. When the critic Michel Ciment asked him whether he had a religious upbringing, Kubrick replied "No, not at all."[a] He had no bar mitzvah and did not attend synagogue, like many Jews who led secular lives.
Nevertheless, Kubrick's family and many critics felt that his Jewish ancestry may have contributed to his worldview and aspects of his films. His daughter noted that he wanted to make a film about the Holocaust, to have been called Aryan Papers, having spent years researching the subject. (Kubrick later noted that Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List covered much of the same material.) Most of his friends and early photography and film collaborators were Jewish, and his first two marriages were to daughters of recent Jewish immigrants from Europe.[b]
Before we connect A Space Odyssey with Hannibal Lecter, in order to begin to see what kind of statement Kubrick was making about certain evil Jews, we need to look at some basic information on Lecter:
Hannibal Lecter M.D. is a fictional character in a series of thriller novels by Thomas Harris and in the films adapted from them. Lecter was introduced in the 1981 thriller novel Red Dragon as a brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer. The novel and its sequel, The Silence of the Lambs, features Lecter as the true antagonist after the other two serial killers of each story. In the third novel, Hannibal, Lecter becomes the main character. His role as the antihero occurs in the fourth novel, Hannibal Rising, which explores his childhood and development into a serial killer.
Shown at left is Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. The first film adapted from the Harris novels was Manhunter (based on Red Dragon), featuring Brian Cox as Lecter, spelled "Lecktor." In 2002, a second adaptation of Red Dragon was made under the original title, featuring Anthony Hopkins, who had played Lecter in the motion pictures The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. Hopkins won an Academy Award for The Silence of the Lambs in 1991.[c]
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Note the similarity of the first letters of HAnnibal Lecter's name to 'HAL' - this is one indication that at least some of the Lecter movies are related to A Space Odyssey. In the analysis of The Silence of the Lambs (on this blog), it was observed that Hannibal Lecter represents Satan personified. Since HAL is a Satan figure, there is a correspondence between Lecter and HAL: Since Lecter also represents an evil Jew, the makers of The Silence of the Lambs are here giving us a hint that HAL himself represents, in part, an evil Jew. The battle between David Bowman and HAL is a clear reference to the battle between David and Goliath, with Bowman representing his namesake, the future king of the Jews. Taking this together with the aforementioned clue from The Silence of the Lambs, Bowman represents a 'good Jew' and HAL represents a 'bad Jew'. Since HAL is a Satan figure, we see that Kubrick is drawing some correspondence between evil Jews, and Satan.
Above left: A closeup of HAL's camera 'eye'. Above right: A common symbol of Freemasonry, the circumpunct, consists of a dot inside a circle with two vertical lines, one on either side of the circle. Taking the dot in the figure to correspond (graphically) to the red dot in the view of HAL's eye shown at above left, we see that HAL not only represents an evil Jew/Satan figure, but he also represents evil Freemasons.
In The Silence of the Lambs, serial killer Jame Gumb (shown at left) represents Satan's (i.e., Lecter's) 'pupil': As explained in the analysis of The Silence of the Lambs, he represents the Freemasons. Gumb desires to 'usurp' Lecter's place as a personification of Satan. 2001's HAL, representing a 'combination' of an evil Freemason and an evil Jew, desires to usurp the place of Satan himself.
Above left: Bowman requests that HAL open the EVA pod bay doors, so that he can get back onto Discovery One, but HAL refuses. Above right: Once Bowman gets back on board the ship through the emergency airlock, he proceeds to disconnect HAL's 'brain'. As implied above, the battle between Bowman and HAL is one between a 'good Jew' and a 'bad Jew', respectively. The battle's outcome has something to do with Bowman's psychology; this will be explored later in the analysis.
In subsequent posts in this analysis, we will see more evidence for a connection between certain Lecter movies and 2001, as well as more evidence that in his movie, Kubrick depicts certain Jews as evil.
a. Kubrick on The Shining, An Interview with Michel Ciment. Web. URL = http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/interview.ts.html.
b. Wikipedia, 'Stanley Kubrick'. Web, n.d. URL = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kubrick.
c. Wikipedia, 'Hannibal Lecter'. Web, n.d. URL = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_lecter.
