The Very Meaninglessness Of Life

Some People Demand A Five-line Capsule Summary. Something You'd Read In A Magazine. They Want You To Say, 'this Is The Story Of The Duality Of Man And The Duplicity Of Governments.' I Hear People Try To Do It -- Give The Five-line Summary -- But If A Film Has Any Substance Or Subtlety, Whatever You Say Is Never Complete, It's Usually Wrong, And It's Necessarily Simplistic: Truth Is Too Multifaceted To Be Contained In A Five-line Summary. If The Work Is Good, What You Say About It Is Usually Irrelevant.

Everything Has Changed, But The Process Of Telling A Story Has Not Changed. It's Like Cavemen Sitting Around The Fire; Somebody's Going To Tell The Story. Somebody Is Drawing On The Wall. You're Communicating. You're Trying To Learn And Teach At The Same Time. You're Your Own Student And You're Your Own Teacher, But The Process Is Of The Communicating.

You're Free To Speculate As You Wish About The Philosophical And Allegorical Meaning Of The Film—and Such Speculation Is One Indication That It Has Succeeded In Gripping The Audience At A Deep Level—but I Don't Want To Spell Out A Verbal Road Map For 2001 That Every Viewer Will Feel Obligated To Pursue Or Else Fear He's Missed The Point.

If Man Merely Sat Back And Thought About His Impending Termination, And His Terrifying Insignificance And Aloneness In The Cosmos, He Would Surely Go Mad, Or Succumb To A Numbing Sense Of Futility. Why, He Might Ask Himself, Should He Bother To Write A Great Symphony, Or Strive To Make A Living, Or Even To Love Another, When He Is No More Than A Momentary Microbe On A Dust Mote Whirling Through The Unimaginable Immensity Of Space?

Don't Do Anything. Just Tolerate Me And Let Me Suffer, Knowing How You Feel.