"My mind's going.  I can feel it."

by Karin Lewicki


"Stop."  "Stop, Dave."  "Dave."  "Dave, stop."

"Yes, sing it.  Sing it for me, Hal."

You know, of course, okay?  Okay?  Of course.

It's the most affecting?  Yes. And it's so obvious why.  And the fact that it's so obvious, and yet for all that obviousness so affecting, shows just what embryonic, whimpering little creatures we are.  Like performing the Trilogy in Puppets in Brattle Square, with nothing but a clothesline demarking where we ended and the puppets began.  And all the kids watched the puppets, bought it completely, like we weren't even there.

The scene absolutely brings together the most primal images and the most primal . . .

I mean, look at the space.  All those glowing red lights.  And all the reflections, the plastic reflections that suggest water.  Dave in his spacesuit is floating in a womb.  He's an infant, he's more than an infant, he's an embryo, and he's bringing Hal back, back into being an embryo, into being nothing.

"My mind's going.  I can feel it."  Hal takes on the most primal attributes of a person — feeling, desiring to live — while Dave is at his most robotic.  What are we afraid of?  The computer, the robot, the machine, will kill us indifferently.  Which is what we watch Dave do to Hal.

And then he sings.  Singing.  The best way we have of taking the voice, taking language, this thing that is so rule-driven, so intellect driven, and making it . . . a thing of feeling.  Hal sings.  And what does he sing?

"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.  I'm half crazy all for the love of you.  It won't be a stylish marriage.  I can't afford a carriage but you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two."

And again — of course.  Lacan — all communication is a demand for love.  And this communication is explicitly a demand for love.  This machine intelligence asking a biological one (Daisy!) for an answer about love, making a proposal about unity.  Making a proposal for unity, exactly as it (this bicycle business is just so spot-on) being taken apart.  The "crazy," too, is significant.  The two things we aggregate to ourselves, love and insanity.  Hal sings both.

Of course it hurts.  Of course it hurts.  It's as subtle as a sack of hammers.  But for once . . . because of the target, because of what those hammers are hitting, extremity is the only way.  Stinting would have been the crime.  
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