Who is Dr. Strangelove?
06/12/2004 . Source: Nan Hickman 
Stanley Kubrick's film, Dr.Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love the Bomb, begins with a rolling fog of rumors. A foreign country is plotting weapons of mass destruction, a Doomsday machine, against the United States. Then it segues to beautiful, romantic music and two B-52s having sex...er, refueling midair. Is this a good dream or a bad dream? Buy Dr Strangelove in the USA - or Buy Dr Strangelove in the UK  On election day, November 2nd, Dr.Strangelove was re-released on DVD
to celebrate its fortieth anniversary. In these days of preemptive
war and mysterious foreign dangers, it's just the trip we need. The
film is rated the #3 top American comedy of all time by the American
Film Institute and is influential to filmmakers from Spielberg to
Tarantino, and even to comic book writers.
People still argue about what kind of film Strangelove is. The
film is billed as a "suspense comedy". Kubrick started to make a
serious drama about the dangers in a nuclear age, but then believed
that the ideas that mankind could destroy itself was so mind-blowing,
that it could only be dealt with in a comedy. Strangelove is built
on a a wild, dangerous premise that just could've happened, and
the tone of it? Think deadpan Twilight Zone with a dry humor like
John Stewart. Outrageous in real time.
"Peace is our Profession" In a nutshell, the movie is about a nuclear
apocalypse triggered by accident. America and Russia are in the
middle of their cold war. It's the high style 60's, and the film
is in that luscious black and white reserved for Life magazine photographers.
Men in suits were smoothly running the world and smoke and drank
coolly during meetings. Our enemies were the Ruskies, a step below
our technical prowess. Jets cruised the horizon, providing a routine
nuclear shield of protection to a threat that we were above allowing
to happen. All very sophisticated.
"The Purity of our Essence..." Meanwhile at a little US air base,
Sterling Hayden as General Jack D.Ripper with a nuclear go-code,
is fully twisting off. He is privy to a danger that no one else
understands, and he jumps out of the chain of command to start a
war. Ripper believes that communists "sap and impurify our bodily
fluids." Women are in the scheme too, to take his essence -- so
he remains celibate. So he triggers unrecallable squads that will
nuke the evil Ruskies to protect our essence. Of course, Russia
will retaliate in kind, and the world will be destroyed.
It's left to Peter Sellers in three parts (he was a special effect
before CGI) to try to save our world. You've got to watch the film
if only for Sellers' performance. Peter Seller's a genius. As a
terribly polite British exchange officer, Mandrake, he's locked
in an office with the crazy Ripper. It's a slow horror for the protocol
man to realize the general is a madman, and the world is going to
be set on fire. Yet, he has to try to gingerly talk to him without
setting him off and try to get the only return code for the bombers.
When Ripper puts his arm around Mandrake and calmly explains his
theories of the world, it's funny and horrifying at the same time.
"Have you ever seen a communist drink a glass of water?" he asks.
My favorite Sellers performance is as the grey manager-type President
Merkin Muffley. When I watched Strangelove for the first time, it
was half-way through his straight man performance before I realized
it was Peter Sellers. Inspector Clouseau? But who else could deliver
such a nuanced performance? His late night telephone call to a drunken
Russian Premier to talk about the embarrassing mess of bombers en
route to Russia, is greatness. It was mostly improvised by Sellers
-- and it's like a guilty husband calling an inflammatory wife.
He navigates dangerous waters, interrupting the unstable, playboy
Dimitri Kissoff from his party, but Muffley doesn't avoid bickering
at the end about who is more sorry about the situation. "No, I am
more sorry than you are..."
"I won't say we won't get our hair mussed.." The president's military
advisor is George C. Scott's General Buck Turgidson. Turgidson is
turgid, hale, aggressively optimistic like an NFL coach in a press
conference. If you need someone to kick some ass, he's your popup
man. Turgidson breaks the news to the president that a US general
started a nuclear showdown. But he breaks the news in slow measures,
following protocol without great attachment, except to his career.
Turgidson's supremely confident that this apocalypse can be handled
with a winning body count.
Scott really vies for the funniest man award in this film. Patton?
Yes, Scott's Turgidson is funny without being a clown. He's a guy's
guy, the original military bulldog who loves his team America. Within
minutes, he goes from holding a drink in one hand, and his mistress
in another to saving America in a war room meeting. In the middle
of the war room meeting, he takes a call from his mistress at the
table, like a boy passing notes in class. He is sheepish and endearing
to her, finishing with "and say your prayers." He handles all contingencies.
If the bombers can't be recalled, the Russians will have to shoot
them down. Some critics label Strangelove as anti-war, but Kubrick's
Strangelove is anti-stupidity and anti-arrogance. To save the world,
troops are sent in to attack their own general Ripper and to shoot
down our errant planes. The military men are presented as decent,
ordinary men just doing a job, even if the commands don't make sense.
When out of the blue, the US airmen receive Ripper's orders to bomb
Russia, it's surprising. James Earl Jones makes his film debut in
a role as a airman who questions the orders and wonders if it's
a test. And yet they all serve.
"We didn't come this far to dump it in the drink" The bomber's
leader, Major T.J. King Kong, played masterfully as a buoyant, cowboy
Texan, by Slim Pickens, regrets the commands and when the enormity
of it sinks in, he figures the president must have information they
don't, and they must do the deed. And dag nab it, they will do it.
One of the iconic scenes of Strangelove is Pickens riding the cylinder
of the nuclear rocket to explosion, joyously whooping and uniting
with his fate like it was something he was made to do. Cowboy zen.
Strangelove's comedy deals with ordinary men dealing with outrageous
situations. Seller's characters of Mandrake and Muffley have to
save the world, not by a big hero moment, but lots of little moments
with small minded or crazy people. His heroes have to handle people
who can't operate outside their frame of the world, their theories
and obsessions - when the world has shifted dangerously. It's the
crazy, "purity" man holding the only return codes or a Russian leader
more cranky about his feelings than the world ending, or a soldier
who must be persuaded to shoot a coke machine at risk of incurring
the wrath of the coca-cola corporation. It's maddening that even
when you're making a call to save the world, it still requires fifty-five
cents to connect.
"It could be easily accomplished..." As his third part, Sellers
plays Dr.Strangelove, in his most over-the-top comedic part, as
a brilliant, spastic Nazi weapons scientist who understands the
Russian Doomsday device. Here is the icon of so many later comic
books: a mad genius, but damaged somehow, in a wheelchair. Underneath
his grimacing smile, are crazy forces, pure id, he can hardly contain.
Out of cool logic, he slips like Tourette's and spasms "mein fuhrer"!
He understands the terrible situation, on a certain level, and
when it gets unsalvageable, Dr. Strangelove points the way: underground
sex lairs for the selected seeds of a new race. Ah, now the point
emerges.. 10 women to each man. What a way to arrange sexual popularity
with that "master race" fetish. He is so overcome with joy at apocalypse
that he rises from his wheelchair and walks toward his fantasy of
embracing his dictator.
Weird ...nuclear war triggered by one general...communists are
poisoning the water..women are stealing men's essence...an adolescent
repopulation fantasy of 10 women to every man. When Kubrick and
Terry Southern wrote the screenplay, they wanted to write the most
outrageous, unlikely theories possible for their characters. But
40 years later, we try to piece together the 9/11 terrorists' swirling
motivations, and a few things are clear.
Many of the terrorists were indoctrinated that the west was impure,
and had to be stopped, and we know that they were told there'd be
72 willing virgins waiting on the other side for them. We know at
least some of them held odd ideas about women. One requested that
no women attend his funeral, because their presence would be irreverent
and impure. Also, Strangelove's fictional nuclear premise was oddly
a possible one. Years later, the real Chrome Dome system of the
60's was declassified, and we learned nuclear jets really did cruise
the air just waiting on go codes.
But Kubrick's film is not about event prophecy, it's a comedy about
how people can be so sure of their controls in the world. The film
deals with human nature and the mechanics we create, both in protocol
and in programs in our machines. In the end, one man's actions in
an automated, military structure wasn't enough to trigger apocalypse.
A small group of men cut off from communications was. Machines aren't
evil, soldiers aren't evil, and cloying social protocol isn't evil.
Procotol and military might are just tools: to save the world or
to be used by crazy, obsessed people. We shouldn't look to the existence
of these tools as signs of wisdom.
Kubrick's men plan in the extreme, and yet they locked down their
options, ironically for their own protection, to deal with a future
problem they could not predict. It was a world view outside their
own frame that took them by surprise. Clinging to their fetish world
views doomed them. They suspected secret plots in predictable patterns
against one another, but in their planned cold war, they didn't
count on the wildness and oddities in the world. Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove
is something wild to wrap your mind around, a mind trip you've got
to take: a suspense comedy, Expect the unexpected. Life is fluid.
Nan Hickman
(c) Nan Hickman 2004 
|
