- ‘Dear Mr. Kubrick’: Audience Responses to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the Late 1960s (participations.org)
Stanley Kubrick’s highly unconventional Science Fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was one of the biggest hits of the late 1960s in the US. This success has traditionally been explained with reference to the film’s particular appeal to youth. This paper examines a wide range of letters sent to Kubrick by cinemagoers in the late 1960s, and identifies four types of audience responses to 2001: rejection, dialogue, celebration and appropriation. The paper concludes that the largely positive letters, together with additional research on the film’s box office performance, strongly suggest that 2001 was a success with very diverse audience segments, and that an optimistic belief in the possibility of fundamental personal and social transformation may have been at the root of this success.
- Groypers (Wikipedia)
Groypers, sometimes called the Groyper Army, are a group of alt-right and white nationalist activists, provocateurs, and Internet trolls. They are notable for their attempts to introduce alt-right politics into mainstream conservatism in the United States, their participation in the January 6 United States Capitol attack and the protests leading up to it, and their extremist views. They have targeted other conservative groups and individuals whose agendas they view as too moderate and insufficiently nationalist. The Groyper movement has been described as white nationalist, homophobic, nativist, fascist, sexist, antisemitic, and an attempt to rebrand the declining alt-right movement.