Dr. Strangelove: MAD Scientist
Brandon Nowalk
The mushroom cloud has become a bit of a shortcut in recent years, an Event-with-a-capital-E used more for action than drama in everything from television series like Heroes, 24, and Lost to movies like Indiana Jones, Terminator, and Watchmen to too many video games to count. But Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, one of the best American films in history and certainly the funniest apocalypse flick gets it right.
When that hydrogen bomb between Slim Pickens’ legs explodes it shatters the comedic fabric of this deadly serious satire of deterrence. Dr. Strangelove is really a workplace comedy; only in this case, social dysfunction has apocalyptic consequences. It all starts on a quiet, uneventful night (even the camera is barely awake) when a squadron of US bombers patrolling the airspace surrounding the Soviet Union receive an emergency order to unleash their 50 megaton payloads across the USSR. It turns out the order was sent by a delusional general who fortifies his air force base and locks down communications, determined to keep anyone from calling off the assault. Meanwhile, the president gathers the joint chiefs, the Russian ambassador, and his ex-Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove to discuss how to thwart (or brace for) MAD (mutual assured destruction).
Stanley Kubrick had already delivered his statement on the inanity of war in his 1957 masterpiece Paths of Glory, but Dr. Strangelove updates his concerns to the Cold War, a period of global Hitchcockian suspense precariously balanced on the idea that one crack in the nuclear standoff means the whole sky’s coming down. Paths of Glory is concerned with the price of human life and Dr. Strangelove’s subject is all of humanity.
In perhaps the funniest phone call ever committed to film, when Premier Dmitri Kissov chastises Peter Sellers’ President Merkin Muffley for never calling, Kubrick cleverly observes that cold war is passive-aggressive, an international version of an estranged coworker coming to another for a favor. Sellers is typically fantastic in his three roles; the others being a British RAF executive officer on the locked down base; and the titular mad scientist whose final scene is a masterpiece in itself. But the entire cast is superb, from George C. Scott’s ugly American to Slim Pickens’ consummate middle manager/atomic cowboy. And Sterling Hayden kills every time he says the phrase “our precious bodily fluids.”
The lessons of Dr. Strangelove resonate today, seven years into an occupation/ground war/peacekeeping effort (you’ll notice “Peace is our Profession” banners decorating every corner of the air force base) and eight years into an ambiguously defined cold war against a vague and nomadic enemy. It’s easy to believe the bureaucratic absurdities of the first act can really lead to war. Even the title card is a monument to poor planning, with the abbreviation “Dr.” taking up the vast majority of the screen and the infamously long subtitle crammed into a column on the side.
The final sly move of Dr. Strangelove is to populate the film with men, not simply for period accuracy but because the film is a finely detailed and convincing Freudian argument. The whole film sees men blather on about inferiority, whether the US-Soviet missile gap or mineshaft gap or what have you–and it turns out the whole fiasco springs from a misguided sexual experience. Doomsday is the result of a bunch of men sitting around worried that they’re not man enough, and the mushroom cloud is both a moment of incomprehensible tragedy and the payoff to one big, bawdy joke.
MSC Aggie Cinema presents Dr. Strangelove at Rudder 302 on April 2 at 8:00pm.