Wheat clearly adores _2001_. His rapture at the complexities and nuances of the film are manifest.

But his analyses are a very unfortunate combination of the inaccurate, the simplistic and the unsupportable.

He claims that "chapter 21 in _The Odyssey_ is titled 'The Great Bow." The Odyssey doesn't have chapters or titles above them. He bases his conclusion that the octahedrons floating in the stargate are alien life forms (a reasonable claim, to be sure) on an interview of Steven Wolfram by David Stork. Stork says "Actually, the octahedra were Kubrick and Clarke's extraterrestials - sort of escorts bringing Dave through the stargate." Wheat, then writes "The crucial point here is that Stork refers to the aliens as _escorts_. Here we have the plural of the very word Homer put in Odysseus's mouth when Odysseus said to the Phaeacians, 'I have secured your _escort_." Last I checked, Homer wrote in archaic Greek. Wheat bases his interpretation on the choices of the translator rather than the text of the ostensible allegorical source.

He writes, "We see, then, that 'the infinite' is God. And 'beyond the infinite' means beyond God - after God, after God's death. Kubrick is alluding to the death of God. And who is it that has just died? Hal. Conclusion: Hal... is God."

He writes, "it is indeed plausible that HEYWOOD R. FLOYD encodes Helen as HE, wooden worse as WOOD, and Troy as OY. But what about that Y between HE and WOOD. And what about the R, F, L, and D? Consider these answers. Y is Spanish for 'and.' R, F, and L, in turn, are in ReFLect. And D could stand for downfall, demise, death, doom, or destruction, of which the first - downfall - best fits 'the fall of Troy.' When you put all the pieces together, Heywood R. Floyd inflates to Helen and Wooden Horse Reflect Troy's Downfall."

Wheat has undeniable insights into Kubrick's film, but they are overwhelmed by the unconvincing character of his argumentation. One of the best sections in the book is a detailed dismantling of a psychoanalytic reading by Geduld. Wheat does his most interesting and complicated work here, and for those pages alone I would reccomend this book.

Of the three allegories that Wheat finds in the narrative, there is considerable and very interesting work on at least two, _The Odyssey_ and Zarathustra, that Wheat seems unfamiliar with. Admittedly, I have not seen them delved into in such detail, but much of that detail weakens rather than strengthens the correspondences simply because Wheat seems to throw in every scrap of comment or anagram that he thinks of or finds.

Overall, this should not be your first book on Kubrick. That honour needs to belong either to Michel Ciment's book _Kubrick_ or to Nelson's _Inside a Film Artist's Maze_. Nevertheless, the ground churned over by Wheat is not at rest, and the allegories he discovers remain a realm for further inquiry.

This is an astounding work. Mr. Wheat has been, by his own admission, obsessed by this film since it opened, and it shows. Having just completed a rather intensive study of this film myself (but strictly from the hardware side) I was extremly curious to see what the latest existential thinking was. I was not dissapointed. The mind boggling detail with which Mr. Wheat turns over every stone in the search for alligorical meaning is almost overwhelming. He creates a strong logical argument for his premise that the film is actually telling an unprecidented four stories (the surface story, plus three alligorical stories) simultaneously. My only problem with the book (which kept me from giving it a full five stars) is that sometimes the arguments get divided too finely. Having some knowledge myself of the turbulent and volitile manner in which the film was made, I really have trouble believing that Kubrick had everything wrapped that tight with that sort of intricacy for the entire film. Example: Wheat says that the bug-like appearance of the moon bus, with its multiple pontoon feet, symbolizes a millipede, or "thousand feet" in latin. This, he says, represents Menelaus's "fleet of a thousand ships" with which he left to rescue Helen in Troy. I know that the Moon Bus design underwent significant evolution during production (the feet were originally catipillar-like belts)and it only became the version we see on the screen very late in pre-production. That said, this is still an astounding work. My frustration comes in that I do not posess Mr. Wheat's powers of analysis and observation. Everything fits into his logical framework, and when I come across something, like my example above, that seems like he's gone too far, I can't dispute it logically. I would highly reccomend this book for anyone still curious as to "what it all means."

I agree with Wheat's postulate that 2001 is a triple allegory because he has so extensively and patiently depicted the details of each that the reader is left with no alternative. Wheat is perhaps too thorough, however, in that he leaves no stone unturned and many of his arguments become annoyingly meticulous. This grows from his constant obsession with proving the details of similarities between 2001 and all of the three related storylines. Many of these supposed similarities are far fetched and Wheat acts almost like a maniac trying to compulsively prove that he is correct while stating over and over where his contemporaries went wrong. There is a feeling that pervades the book that Wheat believes that his material might be quoted and therefore he repeats certain sentences almost word for word throughout the numerous paragraphs so that if indeed any particular paragraph is quoted, the necessary sentences will be present and his ideas cannot be taken out of context. I must admit however that the book is intriguing and that Wheat has proved himself The Master Teacher of the previously hidden factes of Kubrick's 2001. I found the book to be fascinating. Even if only on an academic level, Wheat's 2001 should be required reading for any serious student or connesuier of film, as it blows open the doors that previously confined the possibilities for the genre.

Leonard Wheat's book on Tillich is a perverse endeavor that gives the "hermeneutic of suspicion" a bad name. It strikes me as very, very strange to begin an interpretation of a thinker's work with the assumption that he (Tillich) is systematically trying to deceive and mislead the casual reader, that his true goal was to subvert the Christian faith by masquerading as a Christian when all the time he was simply an atheist and secular humanist! Wheat attempts to decode Tillich's talk about God as the Ground of Being, the God above the God of theism, etc., boiling it all down to the arbitrary result that for Tillich "God" was simply humanity as such.

Wheat is misled by his insistence that Tillich, having been influenced by the Dialectics of Hegel, Marx, and Feuerbach, must have (secretly!) shared their conclusion, that there is no God but man. Another key misstep by Wheat is his insistence that, since Tillich rejected supernaturalism as well as metaphysics, then he cannot have been referring to anything metaphysical whenever he spoke of God or the Ultimate Concern. Wheat says Tillich's theological system is nonsensical, but it is so only when one approaches it as Wheat does with the reductionist chainsaw. If indeed Tillich meant what Wheat says he meant, it would be nonsense. But he didn't. Wheat, I think, failed to grasp that, when Tillich rejected metaphysics as a supposed knowledge of unseen realities allegedly behind the visible world, the only alternative remained materialism. Wheat knows Tillich denied that his "ontology" is the same thing as "metaphysics," two terms usually considered synonyms, but Wheat denies there is any difference. He does not seem to grasp that Tillich's ontology was based on the existential-phenomenological analysis of his Marburg colleague Heidegger. This meant, not an intuitive or speculative "knowledge" of unseen worlds of angels and epicycles, like Swedenborg's "Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell," but rather an analysis of the structures of being implicit in the visible world, revealed precisely by huamn life in the world. It is this element that makes Tillich sound so often like Schleiermacher, who inferred all theology from the experience of piety.

Heidegger denied that the Being-itself he talked about was to be identified with God. Another Marburg colleague, Rudolf Bultmann, differed. Adopting the Heideggerian framework, Bultmann reasoned that Being-itself did correspond to God (as Aquinas had said long before). Tillich thought so, too. Hence for him, Being-itself is a superhuman ontological reality in which all beings participate. More recently, Derrida has also seen the implicit theism of Heidegger's Being concept. Derrida calls Heidegger's approach not ontology but "onto-theology," because it hypostatizes an abstraction and in effect posits a God, at least a God-analogue. Derrida says Heidegger sought to banish metaphysics but wound up a metaphysician nonetheless, and this, it seems to me, is what Wheat ought to have said about Tillich: as a Heideggerian, Tillich thought that with his talk of Being he had somehow replaced and stultified traditional metaphysics, though we in retropect can see that he hadn't. Wheat is right in one sense: Tillich made an untenable distinction between his own "ontology" and traditional "metaphysics," but he is wrong in assuming that Tillich did not proceed to engage in metaphysics. Thus his claim that Tillich meant humanity and humanism when he was talking about God and Christianity seems utterly arbitrary. And his ugly allegations about Tillich being a deceiver, a fraud, a hypocrite, etc., do not deserve being taken seriously. It is not as if Wheat is reporting gossip from Hannah Tillich on observed shortcomings in her husband; Wheat gratuitously infers Tillich's supposed dishonesty because he cannot belive Tillich would say what he does and mean it!

Tillich may be criticized at several points, and has been. But this book seems arbitrary and wrong-headed. Any reader of Tillich seking help here is looking to get royally messed up!