Dr. Strangelove at 50

Southern Illinoisan, February 4, 2014

 Fifty years ago, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick launched a bomb into the middle of American culture and shattered the era's political discourse with the release on January 29, 1964, of Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Coming less than a year and a half after the Cuban missile crisis had taken the world to the brink of destruction, the movie pushed audiences over the brink into total nuclear annihilation. Out of such unlikely material, Kubrick fashioned perhaps the funniest movie of the 1960s, culminating in one of the most famous images in cinema history—Slim Pickens waving his cowboy hat, shouting “Yippee!” as he rides a bomb on its way to detonate the Soviet “doomsday machine.”

Dr. Strangelove was not the only 1964 film to deal with this issue. Fail Safe, released in October, had virtually the same plot—the accidental launching of a nuclear war in which all the built-in procedures designed to prevent such a catastrophe end up making it impossible to stop the process once it is set in motion. But whereas Fail Safe is unfailingly earnest, Dr. Strangelove is darkly humorous in a way nothing else in mainstream American culture was at the time, except perhaps Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22.

Like Catch-22, Kubrick built humor into the characters’ very names—President Merkin Muffley, Soviet Premier Dimitri Kissoff, General Buck Turgidson, General Jack D. Ripper, Colonel “Bat” Guano and Major “King” Kong.

But the movie also traded on several of the period’s familiar images, ideas and figures. The deranged Ripper, who launches the nuclear war because he’s worried that fluoridated water is a Communist conspiracy to pollute our precious bodily fluids, bears resemblance to General Edwin Walker who recently had been forced to resign from the military for spouting similarly paranoid craziness.

The only slightly less insane Turgidson represents the crackpot realism of military commanders who argued that nuclear wars are winnable when he urges the president, now that the war has been launched, to engage in full-scale attack, admitting, “I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops, depending on the breaks.”

Dr. Strangelove, a wheelchair-bound, unreconstructed Nazi scientist who reflexively calls the president “Mein Fuhrer,” is based on Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who worked for the Americans in the Cold War. And President Muffley is an Adlai Stevenson-type liberal whose very reasonableness satirizes Cold War liberalism, as in the phone conversation in which he explains the situation to Kissoff as if he’s speaking to a slow child—“Well now, what happened is, uh, one of our base commanders . . . well, he went a little funny in the head, you know, just a little funny. And, uh, he went and did a silly thing.”

Kubrick’s satire, then, is based on exaggeration, but his caricatures are easily recognizable realistic types. And as much as possible the film is shot realistically. The sets look true to life and the battle sequence is shot cinéma vérité style with hand-held cameras.

In fact, Kubrick had originally planned to make a serious movie about this most serious of topics. As he explained, “I started work on the screenplay with every intention of making the film a serious treatment of the problem of accidental nuclear war. As I kept trying to imagine the way in which things would really happen, ideas kept coming to me which I would discard because they were so ludicrous. I kept saying to myself, ‘I can’t do this. People will laugh.’ But after a month or so I began to realize that all the things I was throwing out were the things which were most truthful. After all, what could be more absurd than the very idea of two mega-powers willing to wipe out all human life because of an accident?”

Not only did Kubrick approach the subject humorously, but he skewered the entire range of respectable debate within the cold war consensus. As film critic Robert Brustein wrote upon the film’s release, “Conservatives will find it subversive, liberals will find it irresponsible, utopians will find it bleak, humanitarians will find it inhuman.”

Where America’s political and military leaders presented themselves as tough-minded realists, Kubrick portrayed them as absurd and neurotic sociopaths who were as morally crippled as the mad scientist Dr. Strangelove was physically disabled. In doing so, he provided an ideological framework that would allow Americans in the 1960s to understand the developing Vietnam War, which would be justified by such Strangelovian logic as “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”