It’s easy to feel apocalyptic these days. The world is on fire, often literally. Wars abroad have killed tens of thousands of civilians. In the States,we’re staring down the possibility of an election season with the same two adversaries as the last one, which many of us feel we barely survived. And yet it’s worth remembering that this feeling isn’t unique to our time. Take, for example, what was happening in the months leading up to the January 1964 release of Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War masterpiece Dr. Strangelove. Tensions between the U.S. and Russia were still running high following the Cuban Missile Crisis. A CIA-backed coup in South Vietnam escalated a conflict that would soon explode into war. And then the president was assassinated. Two days later, the suspect was shot on live television. Everything old is new again. Or maybe vice versa.
If you don’t remember when the Berlin Wall fell, you might take for granted how pervasive the fear of nuclear annihilation was during the Cold War, and what a risk Kubrick was taking when he embarked on the project. But Kubrick enjoyed taking risks – his most recent film at the time was an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s notoriously unfilmable novel Lolita. Still, he originally set out to make a thriller from the material he found in Peter George’s book Red Alert and the two of them began collaborating on a screenplay. It wasn’t long into the process, however, that Kubrick recognized the absurdity underlying the concept of “mutually assured destruction” (or MAD, if you will) and began to change course. Satirical novelist Terry Southern was brought in to punch up the comedy and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was born.
While rightly remembered for its brutal takedown of Cold War rationale and retaliation, it’s also a pitiless portrait of the small men who make such big decisions. Even before we get to Brigadier General Jack T. Ripper (a spectacularly gone-to-seed Sterling Hayden) and his suggestive cigar, Kubrick is visually punning on the connection between war machines and men’s genitalia from the opening credits, which unfold over shots of two planes in the act of intromission midair while romantic music plays. And of course it all ends with Major Kong (the amiably cornpone Slim Pickens) riding the big bomb to the ultimate orgasmic release.
Before that, though, it’s Ripper – a paranoiac of operatic proportions – who puts the plot in motion by ordering a code R be sent to the Airborne Alert Force, an act that once undertaken, through an extremely convoluted series of safeguards, cannot easily be recalled. While Ripper barricades himself and Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers in the first of three roles) in his office, it’s up to General Buck Turgidson (rubber-faced scene stealer George C. Scott), the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and President Merkin Muffley (Sellers again) to call off the planes from the War Room.
Kubrick cuts deftly between the three settings – Ripper’s base, the War Room, and Kong’s plane – mimicking the rhythms of a thriller while interrogating the tastefulness of indulging such thrills in the first place. Stories of militant heroism have long been the domain of spy movies and war dramas, but here there are no good guys, and no limit to what government representatives Kubrick and company were willing to mercilessly skewer. The characters are a medley of unchecked neuroses: Ripper spends most of his screen time ranting about the Communist conspiracy to infiltrate our water system and denying women his “essence” like a proto-incel. Turgidson is a dispassionate hawk, with all the inner life and hot air of a whoopee cushion. “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed,” he quips at a potentially astronomic death toll. President Muffley is diplomatic to a fault. In the film’s best scene, he gets Soviet Premier Kissov on the line and has the most painfully polite conversation about nuclear holocaust in history. “I’m just as capable of being sorry as you are,” Muffley scolds him about the ordeal. And then there’s the titular Dr. Strangelove (Sellers, again), the President’s scientific advisor and an ex-Nazi, whose plan for an underground living space for survivors has the distinct whiff of eugenics to it.
Given how caustic the finished product is, it’s amazing that Kubrick was able to get Dr. Strangelove made at all. That’s not to say it didn’t require a bit of subterfuge on his part, particularly with some of the actors. In a 2004 interview, co-star James Earl Jones claimed that Kubrick often tricked George C. Scott into doing over-the-top “practice” takes that eventually ended up in the film. Scott swore he’d never work with the director again. Pickens, who was not an actor by trade but a stuntman, was apparently never told he was working on a black comedy. The only script pages he received were for scenes he was in so he could play the role of Kong “straight.” Originally the film was supposed to end with a pie fight, but the plan was scrapped after Kubrick deemed the footage a “disaster of Homeric proportions.”
Columbia Pictures was understandably wary of its tone, too. As Terry Southern put it in the 1994 article “Notes on the War Room”: “Was it anti-American? Or just anti-military? And the jackpot question: Was it, in fact, anti-American to whatever extent it was anti-military?” It’s a sticky conundrum that vexes filmmakers, and governments deciding budgets, to this day. While the all-encompassing Doomsday Machine that Kubrick imagined hasn’t come to pass (yet, anyway), it would take quite a bit of intellectual twisting to find much optimism in the ending he eventually came up with. Still, there is a clear humanist message in it, if you squint at the mushroom clouds hard enough: we become inured to the idea of apocalypse at our own peril. And if we’re going to insist on having triggers, we better make sure we have the right fingers on them.
“Dr. Strangelove” is streaming on Max.
