Stanley Kubrick Was Worried 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000 Might Offend IBM
Of all the things Stanley Kubrick has been called over the years, in the excessive number of interviews people give about him, I would think the two rarest would be “corporate-caring” and “the ideal subject for an iOS app.”
But neither one of those is an accurate description anyway. In 2013, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) had a large Stanley Kubrick exhibit going and have released an accompanying app filled with videos, audio, and an excellent timeline of the artist’s life.
In that exhibit was featured a series of letters between Stanley Kubrick and colleagues revealing the perfectionist director had more than just an inkling that IBM would take offense at the artificial psychosis that was HAL 9000, from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Because IBM played its part in consulting for the Stanley Kubrick film, as well as having the company logo placed front and center of the cockpit’s command panel, Kubrick was worried that IBM might see HAL’s calculated malfunctioning as specifically targeted against them.
Strange that Stanley Kubrick’s eccentricity allowed him to care more about an intangible company than the hundreds of people who suffered through his obsessive multi-take filming process, especially Shelley Duvall. But I guess that’s what makes his sense of genius arguable rather than universally agreed upon.
In one of the letters, seen below, Stanley Kubrick asked, “Does I.B.M. know that one of the main themes of the story is a psychotic computer? I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, and I don’t want them to feel they have been swindled.”
His associate responded with, “IBM’s position is that if IBM is not associated with the quipment [sic] failure by name they have no objection if it is decided to give screen credit to the advising companies…they will not object to getting screen credit as long as their name is buried in a list with others…”
In a world of hyper-sensitive people who seem to thrive on finding offensive things everywhere they look, this is a great example of level-headed thinking, something that Stanley Kubrick wasn’t always known for. And the whole one-letter sliding between HAL and IBM (H-I, A-B, L-M) has long since been proven to be a coincidence by Kubrick and the novel’s author Arthur C. Clarke, so don’t go there.
Look, is it a coincidence that HAL is essentially each one letter off from IBM? Maybe, but probably not. Stanley Kubrick really caring about IBM’s reaction to the HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey could have been a fair bit of self-preservation more than anything else. It’s hard to know.
Regardless, it is interesting to see the director worrying about this. That being said, in the end, there was little to really fret considering computers and this tech became so ubiquitous, so fast. Humans were able to do their own fear calculations. They didn’t need to worry if IBM was coming to get them.
