The black object: What do you make of it?

So from reading through various old posts I’ve come to adopt and except pretty much the whole star child thing, and how it is related to the beggining, yadda yadda yadda…
The only thing left to mystery to me the black object that appears in the beginning, middle, and end of the film. What do you make of it?

the mystery of life. It’s there.

I think it represents the black void in the middle of HAL’s ‘brain’ that makes him malfunction. As soon as that damn monolith appears, everything starts to go haywire. It’s all ape against ape – survival of the fittest from there on in. Darwin in a neat little black box. To make it up to the poor sick human – Dave – at the end, the monolith re-appears in his death bed scene to make amends.

In any case, this has already been covered here:
Your Favorite/Your Interpretation of the Monolith

There is nothing new under Mubi’s sun – I mean, monolith.

Sorry, Dave – we made a mistake…

Why have the latest comments on this thread been deleted?

The gateway into another era of life: apes > man > Nietzschean superman?

-Why have the latest comments on this thread been deleted?-

Server issues, apparently.

To re-post my earlier comment, the monoliths are an alien technology placed to nudge human evolution along.

Evolution. The question is, why or how does this monolith appear? Does it actually cause the change or does it just show up when the change happens? I’m sure the earlier thread dealt with this.

It encourages evolution, but does not facilitate it until the last stage. The presence of something decidedly non-natural did trigger a reaction in the ape men, possibly an evolutionary reaction. Only when human technology was advanced enough on its own could the moon monolith be discovered. Likewise, only creatures evolved enough for space travel could get to the Jupiter monolith. At that point the alien entity does take over and “creates” the star child.

The monolith was present so it could “boost” mankind’s development when it got to the point where it could no longer progress any further on its own, eventually allowing mankind to transcend its limited physical nature.

the unknown. whatever man tries to do to uncover the mystery of the world and beyonf, there will still be limitations

Maybe that’s what the monolith is, a metaphor for the unknown and the unknowable. A black (very appropriate color, or lack of in this case) object with a simple but geometrically significant shape – the medium is the message.

Yeah, I always interpreted it as symbolic; purely an indulgence of artistic license to represent the universal idea of “change” which will always be something different, unknown, and unexpected.

“It is like Christ, warning us that there are dark powers more powerful than human beings, and that these powers are, at the present time, in control of this Great Work here on earth. The monolith represents the White Pebble of Revelation, the Holy Grail, the Philosopher Stone, the Book of Nature and the Film that initiates.”

Some also see it as a symbol appearing just before we flash to another epoch – man at a different stage in evolution/technological advancement.

Isn’t it the same object that held General Zod and his buddies captive in Superman 2?