Dr. Strangelove

Dr. Strangelove (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)

Stanley Kubrick
Initial release: January 29, 1964 (North America, UK)

Sooner or later you have to laugh. Laugh or go mad. In 2026 we've been plunged into an absolute nightmare scenario that I can only see ending one way. But there's an inherent comedy in the fall of a civilization, the irreparable fracturing of a society; the idea that the meanest, stupidest, most conspiracy-brained losers on Earth are responsible for steering us towards our own destruction is profoundly funny. Centuries of existence ended by people who believe in chemtrails. It is to laugh. In the early 1960s, Stanley Kubrick understood all too well the comedy inherent in a world run by its worst people; that's why he waded into a crowded arena of paranoid and apocalyptic Cold War thrillers and dropped Dr. Strangelove on an unsuspecting audience.

Dr. Strangelove, a film more properly known as Dr. Strangelove (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb), is a pitch-black comedy of nuclear war. Based loosely on a much more serious novel, it centers around a rogue Air Force general who unilaterally attempts to launch a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. When the president hears about it, he convenes his military advisors and the Soviet consul to try and coordinate a response. Meanwhile, one of the long-range bomber planes, led by a charismatic cowboy pilot, intends to achieve the mission aims by any means necessary. Eventually, the RAF officer on loan to the Air Force base learns the general's motivation was that he believes the fluoridation of the nation's water supply is a Communist plot to make American men impotent. The film ends with the pilot riding a bomb like a rodeo bull, hooting and hollering all the way to nuclear annihilation.

Good joke. Everybody laughs. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.

You really do have to laugh, though. Kubrick's film is from the very opening moments a brutal, biting satire of the Cold War, mutually assured destruction, and right-wing paranoia. The psychosexual element of the Cold War era is skewered in the opening credits as a long-range bomber is fueled in mid-air to romantic music. Half the cast has a funny name, from the insane Air Force general Jack D. Ripper, General Turgidson the hawkish military advisor, the whiny and ineffectual President Merkin Muffley and his off-screen Soviet counterpart Dimitri Kissov, and so on. The absurdity of the Air Force base's motto being "Peace is our profession" is never commented on, only presented for the audience to draw their own conclusions. Peter Sellers plays three different roles, all of them hilarious; the most famous one would be the titular Dr. Strangelove himself, the president's sinister ex-Nazi scientific advisor at war with his own limbs.

Produced in 1963 before the Kennedy assassination, Dr. Strangelove is something of a reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The abject terror of those two weeks can be felt stamped into every inch of footage, the fear that we might destroy ourselves as a species because we put our biggest idiots in charge. Premier Kissov is never seen or heard, but we can infer what kind of leader he is through Muffley's phone call with him: a womanizing party animal trapped in a codependent relationship with the American President, who himself is a loser, incapable of controlling his war-hungry generals. As you might imagine, the Pentagon didn't particularly like this film, and provided no support for it, unlike many similar, more serious films of the era.

I've seen most of Kubrick's movies and this is one of my favorites. While there's a lot to be said for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Spartacus, Full Metal Jacket, Paths of Glory, and others, Dr. Strangelove is arguably Kubrick at his most nakedly honest. Born in 1928, Kubrick was a member of the Silent Generation, who (despite what boomers claim) were the spearheads of the 1960s protest movement, the organizers and the satirists and the rock and roll musicians who built the foundations of counterculture that the Baby Boomers have since claimed for themselves. Dr. Strangelove is Kubrick looking at the world in the twenty years since World War II and saying, this isn't what anyone wanted. We're drowning in hate and madness and the threat of personal and societal annihilation because our leaders are bumbling fools who can't get it together.

Almost 64 years later and the joke's on us, huh?

-june❤