A Space of Uncertainity

As part of it's 31 Days of Oscar, TNT has been showing movies that won or were nominated for Oscars. On Saturday they showed 2001 A Space Odyssey which won an Oscar for Best Special Effects.

I've seen this movie a number of times and always come away from it with something different. As the Wikipedia article linked above states, this movie consistenly makes the lists of best movies ever made. And, yet, there's no dobut this is a difficult film in that it doesn't do something that I believe more and more movies, books and televison shows are doing.

It doesn't explain every single thing. It doesn't solve every mystery. It doesn't give answers to every question.

If you've seen the movie, you know exactly what I mean. In the article it says that Stanley Kubrick, the film's director, refused to give an explanation of what the movie was about.

He wanted viewers to discover their own interpretations. Therefore, we have no idea what the huge, black monolith that first appears on earth to a trible of pre-historic man-apes and then is found again on the moon in the 21st century is. We don't know who built it or why.

We have no idea what happens to Astronaut Bowman when he comes upon another monolith in orbit around Jupiter, leaves his larger spacecraft in a smaller shuttle to encounter it and is, we assume, transported through both time and space and comes out the other side of his galactic journey, transformed and transcended into a gigantic cosmic fetus which slowly approaches the Earth, while Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra swells and pounds in the background.

It's a total mystery, this movie, and it bravely leaves it up to the viewer to determine just what in the heck it all means and why.

One of the things that seems to be almost a given in writing fiction is that the author must, at some point, provide explanations or answers for whatever dilemmas or mysteries she presents in her work. By the end of the story all the loose ends must either be tied up or snipped off so that the reader can close the book with a sense of order having been restored.

But is it always necessary to explain everything? Is there room in a piece of fiction for the open spaces of uncertainity? Isn't that one way of making the reader a part of the reading experience? Leaving those empty rooms, so to speak, where the reader can wander in and decorate it themselves and thereby make their own meaning or create their own interpretations without the author leading him or her by the hand?

I wonder.