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

(dir: Stanley Kubrick, 1964)

March 5, 2008

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Anyone who’s ever pondered the origins of the Coen brothers’ twisted comic dialogue should look no further than Stanley Kubrick’s accidental-Armageddon rib-tickler, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” I wish I had been cognizant enough (I was hanging out in a crib in Cleveland at the time) to know how people were reacting to this picture when it was released back in 1964.

At that point, of course, both musicians and filmmakers were tentatively starting to document a seismic shift in our culture. But Kubrick cruised right past peace and love, opting instead to deal audiences a star-spangled hand of death and destruction. And he built his broad anti-Valentine on a foundation of caveman testosterone that, even today, is conceptually audacious.

You have to process information a little differently than everyone else does to recognize nuclear holocaust as the ultimate orgasm. Only Kubrick could have imagined a pair of B-52s making sweet love to each other to the strains of “Try a Little Tenderness,” an image that plays beneath “Strangelove”’s opening credits. By the time he and his co-writers, Terry Southern and Peter George, are through with you - and Slim Pickens rides a phallic missile to our negative Big Bang - your side hurts from 90 minutes of cackling at technologically-enhanced mass murder.

Think the Marx brothers by way of the Angel of Death, with a re-write by a horny, “Mad” magazine-loving film professor.

Kubrick’s doomsday narrative kicks into motion when Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), who’s shit-crazy, holes up in an office at Burpelson Air Force base, and takes it upon himself to launch a nuclear attack against Russia. Not even the pleading of one of his key officers, a panic-stricken RAF man named Mandrake (Peter Sellers), can convince Ripper to cough up the radio recall code so the bombers can be retrieved before dropping their deadly payloads (eagle-eyed viewers should look for a spray-painted reference to the recall code in the Coen brothers’ bizarro-comic masterpiece “Raising Arizona.”)


In due course, President Murkin Muffley (Sellers again), Gen. “Buck” Turgidson (George C. Scott), and an assortment of military and political big-shots are gathered around a massive table in the War Room, trying to determine how to either knock the bombers out of the air, or, as Turgidson enthusiastically relates, live in a world where there’s “no more than 10 to 20-million killed. Tops. Depending on the breaks.” All the while, a wheelchair-bound, Nazi-sympathizing genius named Dr. Strangelove (Sellers yet again) waits in the wings, ready to outline the tenets of a brave, new, annihilated world.

Throughout the increasingly insane debate, Kubrick cuts between the War Room and the one bomber that actually breaks into Russian air space. Just so you don’t get too comfortable, the plane’s pilot, Maj. “King” Kong (Pickens), is a gung-ho cowboy whose cretinous devotion to duty might mean that mankind will soon be a thing of the past. And Kubrick actually turns this into a comedy.

“Bonnie and Clyde” is often pegged as the beginning of the modern age in filmmaking, the moment when free-thinkers were finally allowed behind the wheel, and it’s a revolutionary film. But Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn didn’t get their act together until 1967. Certainly, “Dr. Strangelove” must have occasioned millions of “What the fuck?” responses three years before Penn’s foggy mountain breakdown occurred. Put it this way— “Dr. Strangelove” was launched at a time when the Beatles still wanted to hold our hands and shake their mop-tops. “Bonnie and Clyde” was released the same year as “Sgt. Pepper.” Who’s ahead of the curve in that equation?

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“Dr. Strangelove”’s difficult tone never falters, not for a second. Kubrick’s large cast repeatedly hits it out of the park, and the imminently quotable dialogue all but grooves them the pitch. Everyone remembers Muffley’s surreally polite telephone conversation with the Russian Premiere, in which Sellers tries to assure a man whose country is about to be disintegrated that there’s no need to shout. But line after line after line of dialogue is jaw-dropping in its bite and brilliance.

Scott - who should have won an Oscar, but didn’t - has a couple of dim-bulb militaristic conversations with Sellers that put me on the floor every time I hear them. His performance is a gem of comic timing, one of the finest you’ll ever see. Just the way Turgidson (love those names) chomps his gum while being scolded by the President tells you as much about the character as his outlandishly optimistic speeches about the end of the world. Turgidson wears machismo as his fool’s armor. Too bad it can’t even remotely protect him from the ultimate horror he’s endorsing.

This debate between Turgidson and the president ranks with the most brilliant, biting exchanges in cinema history:


There’s no question in my mind that “Dr. Strangelove” is Kubrick’s best movie. I tend to like “2001: A Space Odyssey”’s high-toned acid trip a little more than I should, but there’s no avoiding the fact that stretches of it could drop a caffeinated hyper-active child into Van Winkle-sleep. Outside of “2001” and “Strangelove,” though, Kubrick’s admittedly unique oeuvre is bigger on great shots and obtuse thinking than it is on coherent statements that generate real drama.

I’ve written this before, but, after a while, he just seemed bitchy and isolated, regardless of how long it took him to shoot a movie. You get the feeling he reveled in being called a genius, and never did anything, outside of making some pretty childish pictures (“A Clockwork Orange,” for all its out-there production design and wide-angle lenses, plays like a grotesque tantrum), to dissuade people of the notion.

But if all the evidence we had to go on was “Dr. Strangelove,” I’d be first in line to shake the genius’ hand. There’s never been another movie quite like it, one that’s so potently bizarre while being grounded in the very real horrors of the modern age, and there probably never will be.

Nobody even tries. When you get it this right the first time, what’s the point?

Paul Tatara

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Comments

1

ttrentham:

I love, love, love this film.

I completely agree with you on wanting to have been around when this was released. I think 1962-65 would've been an amazing time to be around both in the arts (film, jazz, etc.) and with everything else that was going on at the time.

Mar 6 2008 - 4:00pm
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