{"id":93052,"date":"2015-12-21T10:58:01","date_gmt":"2015-12-21T15:58:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=93052"},"modified":"2015-12-21T10:58:01","modified_gmt":"2015-12-21T15:58:01","slug":"hal-mother-and-father-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/12\/21\/hal-mother-and-father-2\/","title":{"rendered":"HAL, Mother, and Father"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re away until January 4, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"starchild\"<\/a>

From 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n

Watching the sixties and seventies through <\/em>2001 and <\/em>Alien.<\/p>\n

It was April 1968 and my father was sitting in a theater in Times Square watching 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em>, certain that what he was seeing wasn\u2019t just a movie but the future. <\/em>When it ended, he got up and walked out into Times Square, with its peep-show glitz and sleazy, flashing advertisements; he found the uptown subway beneath the yellow marquees for dirty movies like The Filthy 5<\/em>; and through all of it, he thought that when humanity hurls itself into the depths of the cosmos, this<\/em> is how we will do it. In the film\u2019s iconic final shot, the space baby looks down at the planet to which it is no longer bound. Freedom, this shot says, is imminent.<\/p>\n

My father was twenty-four then, and perhaps at his most world-historical: he was becoming an expert in computers. He\u2019d worked for IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York, a corporate labyrinth of beige cubicles and epochal breakthroughs; a world of punch cards and reel-to-reel magnetic tape, where at least some of the employees were deadly serious about making sure to wear the company tie clip and then, once they were off duty, to switch to their own personal tie clips.<\/p>\n

When 2001 <\/em>premiered, he was working at Columbia University\u2019s Computer Center, in the academic computing branch. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s unreasonable to say that the movie summed up everything my father was in April 1968. It became something of a talisman for him, a semisacred object invested with all the crazy hopefulness of his youth. For as long as I can remember, my father had talked about 2001<\/em>. He told me often of HAL, of the monolith of evolution, of how glorious the future would be. Of course, when I finally saw the movie, well after the actual year 2001, it bored me out of my mind. Too slow, too bizarre. Ah, my father told me, that\u2019s because evolution is slow, evolution is bizarre. It wasn\u2019t until much later that I started to understand the movie\u2014and, maybe, to understand my father. Read More >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re away until January 4, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year! Watching the sixties and seventies through 2001 and Alien. It was April 1968 and my father was sitting in a theater in Times Square watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, certain that what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":490,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20653],"tags":[1158,16254,8267,16554,16549,16550,1981,1716,16551,10985,4697,16555,2270,81,125,16021,7403,1001,200,1161,224,16553,16552,12699,13512],"class_list":["post-93052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2015","tag-1158","tag-alien","tag-arthur-c-clarke","tag-carl-sagan","tag-columbia","tag-columbia-computer-center","tag-computers","tag-evolution","tag-hal-9000","tag-hannah-arendt","tag-ibm","tag-marcuse","tag-mother","tag-movies","tag-new-york-city","tag-optimism","tag-philosophy","tag-ridley-scott","tag-science-fiction","tag-stanley-kubrick","tag-technology","tag-the-discovery","tag-the-nostromo","tag-the-seventies","tag-the-sixties"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSeeing the Sixties and Seventies Through 2001 and Alien<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The two classic sci-fi films reflected the spirit of their times: 2001 full of hope for an evolving humanity, and Alien full of fear about the Me Generation.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/12\/21\/hal-mother-and-father-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"HAL, Mother, and Father by Jason Z. 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