Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #26: Dr. Strangelove

 

One of the most fascinating things about human beings is that, as George Carlin once explained, they were smart enough to invent both napalm and silly putty. Stanley Kubrick’s satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) perfectly illustrates the ingenuity, insanity, and stupidity of the human race as nuclear Armageddon rears its ugly head. The pilots flying the airplanes that carry the atom bombs are all smart enough to fly their aircrafts, but the people giving them orders are either insane or incompetent. It’s scary stuff, and yet you can’t help but find the humour in the madness.

I think I first saw Dr. Strangelove over 15 years ago when it was playing on TV for some Stanley Kubrick retrospective. Despite the fact nowadays the news is constantly saying the world is one bad day away from imploding, I felt like revisiting it and sharing my thoughts. Maybe it’s because I needed some dark humour, maybe it’s available for free on CTV, or maybe it’s because I haven’t seen a movie on a big screen since March and I feel like watching anything to escape. Either way, it is still as prescient and entertaining now as it was in the 1960s, perhaps even more.

The movie is set just two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the United States and the Soviet Union had been playing a game of chicken with their nuclear arsenals to see who would blink first. Fortunately, no missiles were fired thanks in part to reasonable people in the Oval Office (I miss the days when that was normal) but what if one person in the chain of command had gone rogue?

That is exactly what happens within the first minutes of Dr. Strangelove as insane General Jack D. Ripper (get it?) sends the attack codes to dozens of American bombers flying near the Soviet border. Ripper, played with no hint of irony by Sterling Hayden, is convinced the Soviets have hatched a plan to pollute Americans’ bodily fluids through water, and soon, ice cream. Politicians, in his worldview, are too weak to deal with this threat so he has taken it upon himself to commit nuclear genocide. These are clearly the ramblings of a paranoid man, which somehow did not stop him from slipping through the cracks and obtaining a crucial position in the army.

Thanks to unfortunately perfect failsafe systems, it is impossible to recall the planes without Ripper’s access codes. The fate of the world therefore rests in the hands of a few more or less good men. First there is Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers), a British exchange officer stationed at Ripper’s base who has discovered his plan and desperately tries to reason with the madman. In the War Room at the Pentagon there is President Merkin Muffley (Sellers again) who tries to make sense of the situation while trying to calm a drunken Soviet president over the phone. Then there is the titular Dr. Strangelove (Sellers, amazingly pulling triple duty) an ex-Nazi who is somehow America’s nuclear war expert.

In an ideal world there would be smart and level-headed people who could easily steer away from catastrophe. Kubrick doesn’t portray an ideal world, but one that might sadly be closer to reality. Also inside the War Room is General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott, almost stealing the show from Sellers) who rants about American pilots’ skills and argues the armed forces may as well go ahead with the attack. At most, they may lose 10 million civilians in the conflict, which to him is a reasonable number. Meanwhile, one of the bombers is well on its way to its target and its commander, Major T.J “King” Kong (Slim Pickens), is determined to drop his bomb even if he has to push it out of the plane himself.

The scariest thing about the movie is how accurate it feels. Despite the fact major Kong wears a cowboy hat for most of the flight and talks like a rodeo performer, his crew almost sound like they are on a documentary. They speak a complicated technical jargon, make complicated calculations after they spring a fuel leak, and are skilled enough to avoid enemy detection. Kubrick, a meticulous researcher, clearly knew what he was doing when it came to portraying the plane scenes.

There is of course tension as Kong’s plane nears its target and the clock to Armageddon winds down, but also a surprising amount of humour. As soldiers engage in a firefight to capture Ripper at his base, the words “Peace is our profession” are plastered all over the building. President Muffley awkwardly trying to keep the Russian president from losing his temper is hilarious. Then of course there is the immortal line of dialogue: “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”

Even though the only female character in the entire movie is Turgidson’s secretary/mistress, one could read a certain anti-testosterone sentiment throughout the movie. All of the people in charge of these deadly weapons are men, and they are either too incompetent to defuse the situation, are hell-bent on firing their toys, or in Dr. Strangelove’s case, are focused on instilling polygamy for men in order to restore the human race. If I may reference George Carlin again: “And of course the bombs and the rockets and the bullets are all shaped like dicks.”

I imagine Kubrick made this satire as a warning against the use of nuclear weapons and to point out the absurdity of stockpiling so many of them that they could destroy all life on Earth. Decades later his message is still as resonant as ever because plenty of countries either still have them or want them. The big difference is the people in charge seem to somehow have become more reckless and less intelligent. These days I’m not afraid of a general going rogue, I’m afraid of the leaders giving the orders to the generals. Given that satire has now become fact, I think Kubrick wouldn’t know what to make of today’s world.