The year 2001 has entered into history, but it will always be remembered for two things: Stanley Kubrick's legendary motion picture 2001: A Space Odyssey and the terror attacks in New York and Washington D.C. of September 11, 2001. Recently, I started thinking about the movie one year after the terrible events of 9/11 and noticed several remarkable coincidences which I present on this page.

Ever since 1968, Kubrick's film has puzzled generations of audiences around the world. 2001 remains an enduring enigma in the history of film. It seems to be saying something, but we're not quite sure what. The structure of the film and the images are quite unlike any other movie ever made, and it is safe to say this film alone put Kubrick into the pantheon of history's great film makers for all time. Sadly, Kubrick died before he could witness the year which he had immortalized, but even this visionary could not have possibly predicted what would happen on September 11th of 2001. Or could he? In an eerie way, perhaps the story and images of 2001 foreshadowed that terrible day on a Jungian, archetypal level. After all, the thesis of 2001 was the history of mankind itself, and 9/11 may very well change mankind's history forever.

1. The Twin Monoltihs of New York

The most obvious parallel (sorry about the pun) between 9/11 and 2001 are the monoliths -- the monoliths of the film and the twin monoliths of the World Trade Center. The first monolith in the movie appears in "The Dawn of Man" sequence, and the second one appears in the year 2001, on the moon. Actually, there is a third monolith which appears in the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" section, but the moon monolith is technically in "The Dawn of Man" section of the film; in one of the most famous edits in the history of film, the flying bone becomes the satellite in orbit. Kubrick seems to be saying that in terms of the cosmic scale of time, several million years on planet Earth is really just an instant. So we can safely say the the monoliths are twins.

2. A "Bush" Baby

There are a series of birthdays in 2001. In reverse chronological order, there is the birth of the Star Child, there is astronaut Frank Poole's birthday, and there is the birthday of Dr. Heywood Floyd's daughter. Many fans of 2001 know that the cute little girl who plays Dr. Heywood Floyd's daughter is actually Stanley Kubrick's own daughter Vivian. She really steals the scene and adds one of the most "human" moments in what has been called a "sterile" film, in terms of the way the human characters behave. When Floyd calls his daughter from the space station, he asks her want she wants for her birthday, and she answers, "A telephone." But as the Floyd family has plenty of telephones already, he asks her what else she would like. And she says, "A bushbaby." Well, who was the President of the United States when the attacks happened? Bush, baby. Perhaps it's a silly coincidence. But of all of things in the world, she asks for something with the word "bush." And some people have said that President George W. Bush kind of looks like a monkey.

3. "The Base"

To those who saw the original on the big screen in 1968 and on television in the 1970s, it was disappointing that there was nothing close to a base on the moon in real life by the year 2001. Indeed, we have not been back to the moon since 1972. The only base we came to know in 2001 was the name of the terrorist group which undoubtedly conceived and perpetrated the dastardly act -- Al Qaeda, which means "the base."

4. Ground Zero and the Moon Monolith

Kubrick is by training and by temperment a photographer who is interested primarily in the composition of the shot, the quality of light, and color and the texture of film. No other film maker with perhaps the exception of David Lean has been as influential in the art of composition as Stanley Kubrick. Every shot in 2001 is beautifully conceived and in perfect balance. Nothing was left to chance, everything was positioned methodically. It was therefore strange when I saw a photo of the memorial ceremony at Ground Zero, exactly one year after the day of the attacks. It looked familiar, as if I had seen it before. Then I recalled the scene when Floyd and the astronauts approach the moon monolith. Compare how the ramps in the backgrond match up almost perfectly to each other. They are at nearly the same angle. Even the shadows are the same. Also, the sides of the monoltih excavation look identical to those of the World Trade Center in this photo. Look at the phase of the Earth in the sky. It is the phase that would appear on September 11, 2001. Here is a link to the moon phases of September 2001. The Earth phase would be the exact opposite of the moon phase (in other words, it would look like the moon phase of Sept. 27, 2001), and this is indeed how the Earth appears in this scene. Perhaps it is just a coincidence.We don't have to use our imagination to see that the human beings in both photos are concentrating at what lies at the bottom -- the monolith and Ground Zero. The monolith on the moon looks like a gravestone, and sadly, Ground Zero is also a grave marker for thousands of Americans. It is hallowed ground. The similarity is more profound when we recall that Gyorgy Ligeti's disturbing atonal music called "Lux Aeterna" is used for this sequence, and it is integral to the eerie mood of the scene. After Heywood Floyd touches it, the moon monolith emits a powerful sound which causes great pain to the astronauts; similarly, Ground Zero will forever be a place of great pain for Americans and for all humanity. Could Kubrick have dreamed such a nightmare of the future in 1968 -- about his home city of New York? We will never know. The other possibility, of course, is that the photographer of the Ground Zero photo was aware of Kubrick's film and of this scene, and wanted to create a parallel intentionally.

5. The 9-11 Spaceship

There a lot of weird coincidences about numbers. Many have commented on the fact that American Airlines Flight 11 was one of the planes to have crashed into the one of the buildings. The two towers themselves also form an "11". But what about the spaceship Discovery in 2001? The numbers 9 and 11 are found in the design of the ship. There is one scene in the movie which shows the entire length of the long spaceship. The round living section is separated from the engine section by segments. There are 11 segments. Count them.

However, if we look at the spaceship from the other side, and take the engine and put it next to the round living section, we can form the number 9.

OK, so maybe it's a stretch of the imagination, but there can be no doubt that there are eleven sections between the living globe and the engines. There are probably many more hidden coincidences, such as the running time of the film itself.

FastCounter by bCentral