It’s a review of 2001: A Space Odyssey from my Hollywood history newsletter GROSS, but it’s also an essay about working in space and a comparison with Director Bong’s Mickey 17.
We’ll know that the exploitation of space is going to plan when they start sending workers up there. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos expect to do so. Colonies of millions – on Mars to begin with and then further out in the future. It’s obviously an exciting prospect: the promise that many – not just a tiny elite from the wealthiest nations – might exceed earth’s bounds, escape gravity, explore the unknown. But, let’s face it, in the expansion phase, once it’s all about return on investment, it’s unlikely these guys will want a fully-sentient workforce; actual humans with all their demands and the risk they might organise or take a sick day or just go rogue.
It’s safe to assume the oligarchs and the long line of wannabe space barons behind them will want their workers indentured at best; drugged, chipped or genetically-modified at worst. They’ll be dormant when not working and consuming exactly the permitted number of calories (probably through a tube).
Everything we know about the economics of space suggests it will be brutal for any worker stupid enough or desperate enough to volunteer for one of these colonising missions. If you make it up through the Kármán line at all you’re more likely to be sedated in a crate, naked to save weight, than sipping Champagne at a picture window. The insane cost of moving human flesh to distant colonies will make the whole experience much more Chernobyl liquidator than intrepid pioneer – expendable labour on a one-way trip (it costs £20,000/day to get food for one astronaut to orbit).
Don’t be surprised when the entrepreneurs advancing this off-planet production model reveal they have to cancel all those old-fashioned terrestrial employee rights to make it work too. I can imagine workers signing up for the experience making a grim and desperate bargain – perhaps to benefit family members left behind.
Real-world case studies
Every spaceship that’s not 100% robotic is, of course, a workplace. And we actually have a sense of what it’ll be like in these off-planet workplaces – Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have both provided detailed previews, right here on Earth, so we can safely conclude that the options are, roughly:
Musk: a hyped-up Versailles. Every Musk company is a patronage network; a court of high-functioning engineers in expensive athleisure, high-fiving as they float around the flight-deck and checking in periodically to suck up to their mercurial space monarch (who has made it clear he won’t be with them).
Bezos: a substantially more businesslike model; essentially an optimised corporate pyramid on the American model with a very large, exploited and precarious layer of drone labour at the bottom. Bezos and his managers will also, presumably, be issuing their orders from an on-planet management suite with decent coffee.
The Bong workplace
Bong Joon-ho’s space workplace is a very contemporary hyper-supervised dystopia
In Mickey 17, the workers who fill the unnamed prison hulk heading to planet Niflheim are pretty close to this Musk/Bezos template. They’re of the unhappy, defeated, precaritised variety. A desperate and entirely dependent crew with no visible organisation and a lot of very visible policing to keep them in line. We don’t see the circumstances that drive the escaping proles to volunteer but they’re hinted at – we assume a final climate collapse or a terrible war.
Director Bong’s latest is a satire on capitalism but actually more specifically on proletarianisation. Not the old business of recruiting peasants to the urban working class but the absolutely contemporary process that’s stripping a whole pissed-off, pointlessly over-educated generation of young people of their status, security and hopes for the future – collapsing them all into an expanded, immiserated and debt-laden working class.
And this new, refigured working class is not the proletariat of the industrial era, of course, a class that at least in principle had been granted some dignity and some negotiating power (ask your grandparents about negotiating power, kids), but a new working class characterised by the absence of both – and, in fact, by their steady removal. Just the kind of people who might, when the demand comes, find themselves volunteering to go up the gravity well to work themselves to death.
The Kubrick workplace
2001 is set in the ultimate, super-deluxe intergovernmental playground
Kubrick’s space (which is also Arthur C. Clarke’s space) is a complex hierarchy of workplaces, all of them fitted out in the slick, hyper-modern style of mid-sixties corporate America – and on an implausibly grand scale. In following Dr Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester), top American space bureaucrat, on his journey to the moon to investigate the discovery of that mysterious monolith, we encounter a sequence of space vehicles and habitats two of which are operated commercially by Pan Am and the others, presumably, by a kind of global NASA. Pan Am must have stood for the absolute state of the art in commercial transport when Kubrick was making the film, during the boom in commercial aviation that followed the introduction of the jet airliner in the previous decade. He must have known that Pan Am had rushed to fly the very first of the fabulous new Boeing 747s that were in production at the time (appropriately the firm was bankrupt and forgotten by the year in which the movie is set).
White-collar boomers – mostly from the parent class we met in the last movie I watched here The Graduate – were flying routinely for work for the first time in the mid sixties, as Kubrick was planning 2001. The slick airport lounges and business hotels invented for them are here, in Kubrick’s low earth orbit – on a huge transit hub called Space Station 5. So are forward-looking brands like Whirlpool, Bell Telephone, IBM, Hilton and Howard Johnson’s, whose logos appear everywhere – a starkly contemporary element that’s not in Clarke’s novel. This subservient role for business in space – firms providing services to the space-faring elite and their agencies – has now been flipped completely, of course. In the present, the right stuff is provided by the swashbuckling entrepreneurs and the tedious services by increasingly risk-averse legacy organisations.
But up on Space Station 5, the people we encounter are are about as far from Bong Joon Ho’s bruised and humiliated precariat as it’s possible to get. They’re from what we’d probably call the Professional Managerial Class. Everyone is a government functionary of some kind – and literally everyone is credentialed to the rank ‘doctor’ – you obviously can’t get anywhere near a flight to orbit without a PhD (unless you’re a cleaner or a bartender presumably – we see a group of what must be pilots, wearing peaked caps). It’s almost a running gag – in a council meeting on the moon, one doctor introduces another doctor who then thanks a couple of other doctors; when space cruiser Discovery sets off for Jupiter to investigate the source of the film’s central mystery with a crew of six, the only non-PhD is HAL the AI.
Anyway, on the space station, members of the cosmopolitan space elite gather in a bar (furnished by Eero Saarinen, who came up in the Brutalist review) uncannily glued by the ship’s rotation to the inside of the hull – a group of Russians (Aeroflot logos on their carry-on luggage) on the way down and doctor Floyd on the way up. And it’s appropriate that Kubrick chooses to recruit his space elite from the established worldly elite of the intergovernmental organisations. There’s a United Nations vibe. An ‘IAS Convention’ is cited, and another undefined three-letter body ‘the IAC’. It’s still possible, in the late sixties, to imagine space exploration as a global effort, an aspect of the civilising post-war order. Even now, as the system falls apart and Musk’s footsoldiers dismantle liberal institutions in real time here on earth, there are four Americans, five Russians and one Japanese on board the ISS.
Crisis
Arthur C. Clarke wrote his novel 2001: a Space Odyssey after he’d been contracted to work on the movie. He’d written a short story back in the forties that’s probably the seed of the thing, but the novel and the movie are basically part of the same project – a very Kubrick solution to refining a screenplay. The way Clarke puts it, in the introduction to the novel:
Perhaps because he realised that I had low tolerance for boredom, Stanley suggested that before we embarked on the drudgery of the script, we let our imaginations soar freely by writing a complete novel, from which we would later derive the script. (And, hopefully, a little cash.)
He’s not a great writer. Like a lot of science fiction authors he’s all about the ideas. And the ideas here are an odd mix of the prescient and the pedestrian. For Clarke (and Kubrick) to have imagined zero-gravity living and to describe an essentially complete space economy in such startling detail at a time when barely half a dozen humans had made it as far as earth orbit is unarguably brilliant. But Clarke’s sense of the world in 2001 is weak: it’s your basic Malthusian breakdown story: over-population and resource wars force humanity to venture into space.
So, with birthrates almost everywhere falling, it won’t be overpopulation that drives humanity off-planet, but what seems perfectly plausible is that it’ll be a crisis in capitalism that kicks it off. We’ve got enough case studies now to know that when capitalism reaches a deep enough impasse – when economies everywhere grind to a halt because average returns on investment have fallen away – and when kicking the can down the road no longer works, there’s often a catastrophic reset. It’s usually a war that drives unprofitable activity out of the economy and forces workers to ask for less. It’s easy enough to imagine that, once the technologies are cheap enough, a reset of this kind might be the trigger for a rush to Mars. But that rush won’t be the deluxe version offered in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’ll be the crappy, exploitive one offered by the space oligarchs.
- Bezos has won a contract from NASA to build a replacement for the International Space Station called Orbital Reef and it is very much a workplace. The new space station will be a ‘mixed-use business park’. The publicity reads like a brochure for serviced offices: “Shared infrastructure efficiently supports the proprietary needs of diverse tenants and visitors. It features a human-centered space architecture with world-class services and amenities that is inspiring, practical, and safe.”
- Frederic Raphael, a British author who collaborated with Kubrick on his last film Eyes Wide Shut, wrote a brilliant, literary memoir about the process. It’s out of print but you’ll find it second-hand. It’s one of the most illuminating things I’ve read about the brilliant, fastidious and obviously maddening director.
- 2001: A Space Oddysey is on Amazon Prime and there’s a lovely 4K Blu-Ray.
- On my blog I wrote about what it might be like to work on one of Musk’s space missions. What would a disciplinary be like, for instance? More Klingon that Star Fleet.
- Olga Ravn, a Danish poet, has written a short novel about how a crisis in deep space might be handled by a contemporary HR department. It’s dark and funny.
- Kubrick’s glorious, cathedral-vast spaceships, absurdly over-specced for the task, continue to be the approximate norm in sci-fi. 2016’s Passengers, in which an HR dilemma reaches a happy conlusion, is set on an enormous and ultra-luxurious spaceship with no obvious function that has multiple atriums and a swimming pool (!) Even the most realistic space dramas tend to allow astronauts far too much space to roam.
- Read essays like this on Substack and reviews on my Letterboxd.
