Above left: As mentioned earlier in the analysis, the two men piloting the moonbus are hit men sent by Satan, and the three men in back of the bus are aliens, or more properly, they are aliens occupying men's bodies. One of the three (but not Heywood Floyd) is working 'undercover' as an informant for Satan. What the audience of 2001 hears being said by the three men, and in particular, by the man sitting to Floyd's right, seems to have a straightforward meaning: An area with an intense magnetic field has been discovered on the moon, it is not simply due to an outcropping of magnetic rock, its source is an object (the monolith) that appears to have been deliberately buried four million years ago, etc. However, there is actually a hidden narrative at work here: What the men are saying to each other takes place within a context that is different from what the audience of A Space Odyssey believes it to be. Before the men start talking about the monolith, Floyd notes that the sandwich he has just been handed "looks pretty good." The man standing (it's actually this man who's the informant) says in reply, "They're getting better at it all the time." When he says this, he's not saying that it's specifically the packagers of the food who are getting better at preparing items for use in space; instead, he's speaking as an alien, and he's saying that humans in general are getting better at doing this. When the men begin to look at the photos of TMA-1 and start discussing the monolith, the man seated to Floyd's right gives Floyd a rundown on the 'discovered' object as if it is something that has just been discovered, but what he's really doing is giving Floyd the pre-planned false scenario that has been created by himself and his co-workers, which will be used to explain the object to the viewers of the film or broadcast being made within 2001 (the same partially-faked film as that mentioned earlier in the analysis, i.e., shots of the excavation at TMA-1 are to be part of the same faked movie as the recorded portions of the Jupiter mission). When Floyd ends the conversation by saying, "You guys have certainly come up with something", the "something" is the false scenario that's been created: The monolith is not really a recent discovery, but is instead the 'container' for something that has been stolen from Earth by the aliens, and that has recently been placed on the moon on its way to Jupiter. Above right: In this view of the six astronauts (the five men who were in the moonbus, plus David Bowman), the men are holding their hands at their sides in such a manner as to suggest that they are about to draw guns, as if there's an element of 'wild West' here. This foretells what is about to happen once the men descend into the excavation.
Above left: The monolith inside the excavation is being viewed by a television or movie audience on Earth, and this is the same audience that is to view the recorded portion of the Jupiter mission (along with all its feigned aspects, as discussed earlier in the analysis). However, neither that audience nor ourselves are to see the subsequent 'show-down' among the six men (which begins after the monolith starts making its high-pitched noise), as the men fight each other to gain control over that which is contained within the monolith. During this fight, some of the men are killed (by having their air hoses disconnected). However, the actual alien entities inhabiting some of the men's bodies are not killed; they merely 'leave' the bodies they were occupying in their natural form, as pure, sentient energy. As an aside, if you click on the image to enlarge it, you'll notice that the floodlights near the back of the excavation are arranged in rectangular arrays of 3 x 4. As stated earlier, the confrontation at TMA-1 is to be one between the conscious (masculine) and the unconscious (feminine), and this is further confirmed by the arrangement of the lights in these arrays, since, according to Jung, 3 is a masculine number, and 4 is a feminine number.[a] Above right: David Bowman sees seven octahedral objects during the stargate sequence. Natural crystals of diamond are commonly octahedral;[b] therefore, this is one clue that what the aliens are after is diamonds, and in specific, the diamonds that are contained within the monolith. The red coloring under the objects is a reference to Hell, and serves as an indication that when the diamonds were dug up from within the Earth, they were in some sense 'stolen' from Satan. One or more of the six men at TMA-1 somehow makes off with, or in some other way obtains control of, the diamonds in the monolith, after the 'shoot-out' at TMA-1. One question raised by all of this is, why would the aliens want diamonds in the first place? Also, why would they enlist the help of human beings (i.e., men's bodies) to obtain them? We will answer these questions later.
a. Jung, C.G. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 12. Princeton University Press, 1968. para. 31.
b. Wikipedia, 'Octahedron'. Web, n.d. URL = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octahedron.
