SOURCE: “‘The Awful Power’: John Updike's Use of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in Rabbit Redux,” in Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 3, 1993, pp. 209-17.

In the following essay, DeBellis asserts that John Updike's references to 2001 in Rabbit Redux underlines the major thematic concerns in the novel.

“The power of the cinema, the awful power of it.”

—John Updike¹

John Updike's dozens of references to films and allusions to screen actors and actresses reveal not just a passing knowledge of an important aspect of American popular culture but offer verisimilitude and nostalgia, while providing a clever disclosure of character and support for theme. So adept is Updike at using every element of film that even titles on marquees foreshadow and counterpoint his themes. Individual films reveal ironic relations to his images, plots and characters, most suggestively in the use of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in Rabbit Redux, where parallels...