I finished the audiobook of Flowers for Algernon a couple of weeks ago, and it was very well done.

As for the question, I think a lot of it has to do with connection to others. Charlie got so focused on the changes in himself as his intelligence increased that he got distracted, and lost touch with those around him. But then when he was getting ready to lose it, that refocused him on the people around him. As Khalil Gibran said in The Prophet,

Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

I don't think it's a case of him necessarily realizing that his priorities were wrong before, just that they had changed as his life did. We always take things for granted to a point, and it's only when we're about to lose them that this changes. It's also a case, at least to an extent, of his being unable to do the things that had occupied him before. He can't understand scientific things he wrote, he loses his faculty for other languages. So naturally he gravitates elsewhere.

I also think there's something to this line from Dune, "Wisdom tempers love." Charlie was devoting all this time to intellectual pursuits, and it made him cynical and "worldly." In a lot of ways he lost his soul. Some of this of course was simply his functioning on another level from those around him, to the point that he was almost another species. But still, even someone as smart as he was couldn't encompass the entire world of human experience, and a more mature person would have been able to see the value in connections with others even then. Ironically, new Charlie could've learned a lot from old Charlie.

The interesting thing about 2001, as a movie and as a book, is it was a mutual project across two media by two artists who rarely worked with others. After Clockwork Orange two years later, Kubrick never did sci fi again (although he kept working on AI as long or longer than he worked on his unmade Napoleon piece) and Arthur C Clarke never wrote another screenplay. In the opening of 2010, Clarke explains that the second book is a sequel to the movie, not the book, for the simple reason that the movie had a greater audience and the divergence was so great that a choice had to be made.

What makes it more interesting is it was a project where the weak spots of both artists weren't cancelled out, they were magnified.

Arthur C Clarke, as flagamuffin mentions, sucks at people. He always has. I've often described him as a Conde Nast Traveler writer going on an imaginary vacation; his descriptions of places and things are evocative and colorful but the people he places in them are cardboard cutouts. Things happen to people in Clarke stories, the people never make things happen. And, lo and behold, everything happens to people in 2001. With the one notable exception where Bowman manages to not die, every other event in 2001 is "something happens to people." More than that, the internal motivations and emotions of characters in Clarke stories are effectively absent. On screen, 2001 unfolds as a bunch of emotionless ciphers moving about the board like a bunch of non-player characters.

Kubrick, for his part, packs a lot of emotional depth and interest into tense situations. But aside from the monkeys, 2001 is about people who must have tight emotional control as part of their job descriptions. The end result is certainly tense but it's noteworthy far more for its imagery than its acting.

Kubrick was also brilliant for two acts. I can't think of a Kubrick movie that doesn't devolve into nihilistic denouement in the third act. 2001 is particularly guilty as the entire third act is effectively Douglass Trumbull masturbating on the slitscan followed by an incomprehensible and slow adventure in the world's cleanest hotel.

Here's the thing:

The ending of the book is clear. Bowman goes through the stargate, evolves into the starchild, returns to Earth and saves the planet from USA-USSR nuclear annihilation. It's explicit and obvious. The ending of the movie is not. They had no fucking idea how to film it. There was the constant assumption that they'd work it out, they'd fix it in post, they'd get the idea across and it wouldn't suck. There would be omnipotent aliens, there would be transformation, the world would be saved.

Eventually, they figured out that Carl Sagan had been right years earlier:

They had no idea how to end the movie - that's when they called me in to try to resolve a dispute. The key issue was how to portray extraterrestrials that would surely be encountered at the end when they go through the Star Gate. Kubrick was arguing that the extraterrestrials would look like humans with some slight differences, maybe à la Mr. Spock (Ed. note: like Clindar). And Arthur was arguing, quite properly on general evolutionary grounds, that they would look nothing like us. So I tried to adjudicate as they asked.

I said it would be a disaster to portray the extraterrestrials. What ought to be done is to suggest them. I argued that the number of individually unlikely events in the evolutionary history of man was so great that nothing like us is ever likely to evolve anywhere else in the universe. I suggested that any explicit representation of an advanced extraterrestrial being was bound to have at least an element of falseness about it and that the best solution would be to suggest rather than explicitly to display the extraterrestrials.

What struck me most is that they were in production (some of the special effects, at least) and still had no idea how the movie would end.

Kubrick's preference had one distinct advantage, an economic one: He could call up Central Casting and ask for twenty extraterrestrials. With a little makeup, he would have his problem solved. The alternative portrayal of extraterrestrials, whatever it was, was bound to be expensive.

So Kubrick ended up not showing aliens in a script that had always had aliens, for a movie where the actors have been unallowed to convey emotion in a story where they do exactly nothing to move the plot along.

And I love it. It's an incredible work. Nobody has touched the verite of 2001 in fifty.fucking.years and the ending is a star-spangled clusterfuck.

It's interesting to me because in 2007 I got to pitch the Sci Fi Channel on an alien contact movie. We'd come up with the idea the day before the call and my buddy observed that the problem with any monster/alien movie is the minute you see the monster you cease to believe. So I wrote an alien contact movie without aliens... and then read up on the Sci Fi Channel and opted not to pitch. But I wrote the script anyway. It remains one of the two works I've ever optioned.

Don't show the monster. But hey, if you can, also don't plan to show the monster. That way your movie makes sense even without dropping acid.

Thanks for posting this, and specifically Flowers for Algernon. I was about 10 when my sister was in the play in high school. I remember being deeply affected by it. I look forward to going back and reading it now.

I'll confess I haven't read the book version of 2001 yet. I'm curious to see how Clarke's version compares to Kubrick's. Strangely I think Kubrick's style is well-suited for the type of removed narration that is ever present in Clarke's writing, although it comes across with a very different feel. I recall hearing that Clarke was opposed to Kubrick's obscurism in the film, leading to the book.

I'll say for the next item we do, I'm very intrigued by Blood Music after what kleinbl00 said in the past club thread.

Incidentally Flowers for Algernon has always been hella boring. The book is too overwrought and the short story's progression is ridiculous. I don't know. It has a sublime plot -- explain it to someone in a sentence and they'll be deeply affected every time -- but just terrible in every other way.

Sorry I wrote like 27 words and everyone who likes it wrote five paragraphs. I kinda hate deconstructing books, which makes me not a great fit for this, I'm mostly into reading them, I'm always quite drunk on brandy now.