7. What is the Star Child? (2001: A Space Odyssey)
The musical cue accompanying the hominids contact with the monolith is Thus Spake Zarathustra, the piece repeated at the films conclusion when David Bowman is reincarnated as the foetal entity known as the Star Child, to be delivered face to face with Mother Earth. The climax of Strausss tone poem evokes a sense of profound realisation, providing a perfect accompaniment to the pioneering hominids reconceptualization of a femur as a club. But what does it signify in the final act? What realisation has occurred? And to whom does it belong? One possibility is that Bowman is the ultimate realisation of the alien project begun with the hominids all those aeons ago. Human evolution, culminating in detection of the monolith on Jupiter, and subsequent mission to assess it, is a kind of capture the flag test. As a reward, humanitys Bowman (its front man) is rewarded, like the club-wielding hominid, with a new lease on life as a higher being. Another is that the Star Child is symbolic of life being reset by alien intelligence. After reaching a level of technological proficiency sufficient to reach Jupiter (which coincides with having developed machines intelligent enough to be our usurpers), the aliens reset the project, returning Earth, or any other planet to a primal state, ready to begin again. Perhaps this is signified by the fact that Strauss' work was composed to evoke Nietzsches philosophical work of the same nameone which elaborates upon the notion of eternal recurrence; that the universe always has and always will begin and end and begin again, exploring every possible permutation and possibility for all eternity. Accordingly, its impossible to say that 2001s space odyssey isnt one such permutation.