A short entry this time. I remember one Thanksgiving on Cherokee Trace, the entire family had gathered and the meal was over. Uncle and I were sitting in the “TV room,” which was also my bedroom where Granny Bernadette had one of those large, wooden floor-model televisions installed. It’s also the room where we played videogames, I remember we had a NES, a SNES, and a Genesis at the height of its popularity.
Anyway, the Stanley Kubrick film classic “2001” was playing on one of the channels, and me and Uncle were watching it. All of a sudden he just starts tearing into the film, mocking everything about it, from the wooden, lifeless acting to the overall thematic elements. I remember specifically he mocked the bed the old man lies in at the end as the new “Conception” where the Universe has sex with him to make the giant space baby at the end.
I wondered at the time why he had such hostility to the film, but reflecting on it now after the seasoning of many years, I think it was basically an overt reaction to the intellectual nature of it all. Uncle is a rural, conservative voter and views things primarily in Intuitive terms (he would call them Spiritual) and 2001 represents the antithesis to that. He has preached against manifest intellectualism many times, and tried to coax me away from it on several occasions.
Also, the film “2001” essentially represents a film without God, or a film where Humanity becomes its own God, as it were. This conflicts with Uncle’s deeply Christian nature. Maybe he even felt a little threatened by it, I dunno. I don’t think Uncle would feel the same way today if he were to view the film again, he might even be able to appreciate certain aspects of it, as he has mellowed a great deal with age. But he would still probably feel an overall sense of scorn.