I’ve always thought the ending of “2001” was fairy straightforward (possibly because “2001” was one of the first novels I ever read, and the ending was explained fairly clearly), but a lot of folk seem to find it mystifying. Stanley Kubrick himself was always reticent to discuss it, preferring to leave interpretation to others (or perhaps just assuming that if you were too dumb to understand his brilliance, he wasn’t going to waste his time explaining it). But a new video has come to light that *seems* to include a phone call with Kubrick where he explains the ending.
As explained HERE, this is a clip from a 1.5 hour documentary that was shot in 1980 by a Japanese film maker exploring the paranormal, with set visits to “The Shining.” At one point the documentarian has a recorded phone conversation with Kubrick, asks him about the end of “2001,” and Kubrick (or at least someone who sounds like Kubrick) straight up explains it:
I’ve tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out. When you just say the ideas they sound foolish, whereas if they’re dramatized one feels it, but I’ll try.
The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by god-like entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form. They put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life passes from that point on in that room. And he has no sense of time. It just seems to happen as it does in the film.
They choose this room, which is a very inaccurate replica of French architecture (deliberately so, inaccurate) because one was suggesting that they had some idea of something that he might think was pretty, but wasn’t quite sure. Just as we’re not quite sure what do in zoos with animals to try to give them what we think is their natural environment.
Anyway, when they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth, transformed and made into some sort of superman. We have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, and that is what we were trying to suggest.