Dr. Strangelove

First off, as I have stated before, I love this movie. I have three copies of it (two DVD and one VHS), and I've seen it more times than I'd probably care to remember (because revealing how much might mark me as some sort of weird fellow who watches one movie a lot, when I'm actually a weird fellow who watches tons of movies a lot). I feel like I know the movie backwards and forwards, yet on each viewing I pick up something new that I missed.

In regards to this class, the film is very relevant because it shows the mistake we humans make, putting our logic in the hands of cold machines. Kubrick gets a lot of flak for having unemotional, distanced human characters who are less compelling than the machines that they use (the polar opposites of this are two of his best characters, Jack Torrance in "The Shining" and Alex in "Clockwork Orange." Their inherent savagery isn't placated by any appliance). But I think the point that he's making in this film (and in the next film he made, "2001: A Space Odyssey") is this: we lose our humanity as we become more reliant on machines and technology to do the hard work for us. We become desensitized to the fact that great wonders or horrors can be perpetrated with just the pressing of a button. The machines go haywire in "Dr. Strangelove" and "2001" not because they're programmed to do so, but because we allow them to. The scenes in the War Room, where Buck Turgidson is citing various statistics about the human toll of a nuclear attack as if they're just numbers on the page shows the ways in which technology allows us to distance ourselves from the reality of carnage.

I remember during the First Gulf War how the media were kept at arm's length, only allowed to show the war through computer graphics that turned a real conflict into just another video game. As our weapons get more advanced, we lose the realization that war is very horrible and very real. I think Kubrick was dealing with a lot of that in "Strangelove," where we don't see much beyond the War Room, General Jack D. Ripper's office, and the interior of the B-52 bomber. The wider world is merely a series of maps on the Big Board, where lights indicate flight plans but not how much damage is about to be wrought.

Interestingly, Kubrick intended the film to be a serious drama that would deal with the potential nuclear conflict that the Cold War threatened. With the Soviet Union and America armed to the teeth with nukes, it seemed like only a matter of time before all hell would break lose. Yet somehow the film became a dark comedy, one in which the only way to deal with the insanity of all-out nuclear war was to mock the very people most likely for its eventual manifestation. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 showed just how callous both sides were when it came to maintaining the image of supremacy, even if they shared the fear that such an outcome would cause. It's safe to say that, for all the terror that we live in today, we can't begin to imagine what kind of a world our parents grew up in. The possibility of nuclear war was very real, and all you could do was laugh at it.

The film does a very good job (for a comedy) of playing it straight. None of the characters seem to be in on the overall joke (the end of the world can be funny). To what extent they are over-the-top and unbelivable, they make themselves very real when they decide that nuclear conflict is an allowable occurance. The disregard for humanity at large is another theme in Kubrick's work, as men and women often treat their fellow humans like so much waste and garbage. Dr. Strangelove (one of the three roles that Peter Sellers plays to perfection) is a mangled relic of the Nazi regime, and his presence in the War Room is a damning indictment of the U.S.'s policy of using German scientists who once worked for Hitler to help them beat the Russians. In a weird way, he's the most rational character in the film apart from a more logical choice for that title, Group Captain Mandrake (Sellers again). The stereotypical British military man, Mandrake is Ripper's aid, and he figures out the code that Ripper sent to unleash his forces on the world. Of course, he's too late to stop the last bomber, and all hell breaks lose as the film comes to a close.

One of the things that I didn't pick up on so much the first time around was the sexual nature of the film. Character names refer to slang for the penis or, as Jack D. Ripper can attest, the violence that can be a part of sexuality in general. Ripper's impotence (real or imagined) triggers his paranoid attack against the Russians, and I get the feeling that a lot of men in the film are trying to one-up one another in their desire to show potency. The military comes off as little boys playing with big toys, albeit ones that can destroy the world. I didn't notice anything in the credits about "this film was made with the full cooperation of the United States Air Force," and I'm sure that is the reason why.