Post by erik on Jul 26, 2006 13:30:30 GMT -5
Quote by General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden):
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
What is it about director Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film DOCTOR STRANGELOVE that makes it relevant to this day, long after the real-world conditions that led to it have vanished into history?
For one thing, there's the approach that Kubrick took to a story about the Ultimate War. In adapting Peter George's novel Red Alert, he wanted to make a serious point about the very real danger of such a war. But the more research he did on the subject, the more he kept discarding certain things about it that to him seemed so ludicrous that it would provoke laughter in an audience. He thus stumbled, with the help of co-scenarist Terry Southern, on the idea of making a point about thermonuclear war in the form of an outrageous political black comedy.
Hayden, of course, is both chilling and funny as the deranged general who orders the bombers of his wing to nuke the Soviet Union because he has declared the fluoridation of our water to be an insidious Commie plot (and for a lot of right-wingers in the 1950s, that's exactly what it was). As a result, paranoia abounds in the War Room at the Pentagon amongst the generals and the beleaguered President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers, in one of three stellar turns, here doing an Adlai Stevenson-type characterization). Sellers also essays the role of RAF officer Lionel Mandrake, who desperately tries to come up with the recall code after he realizes that Hayden has taken leave of his senses. And for good measure, Sellers also does the role of Dr. Strangelove, the brilliant ex-Nazi scientist (modeled off of Herman Kahn or Edward Teller--not Kissinger). All of these people try to prevent the bombs from falling on Russia, especially when the Soviet ambassador tells them of a Doomsday device that will destroy the world if even one bomb is dropped.
Of course, you have the wildly optimistic Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott, in a portrait modeled closely on the ultra-controversial Curtis LeMay) telling the president to launch an all-out attack on Russia so that the Rooskies' retaliatory strike would result in "no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops...er, depending on the breaks." And in the lead bomber, you have Slim Pickens, whose bomber doesn't get the recall message because its radio has been knocked out by a Soviet missile. His glorious 12-second ride on his bomb results, of course, in Armageddon.
So why should STRANGELOVE be so relevant even after the Cold War has ended? Well, for one, the nuclear weaponry that existed back then still exists today. For another, there of course still exists in America the same kind of far right-wing mentality that kept America in a paranoid grip for so long (only the enemy has changed; instead of the Communists, it is foreign terrorists). And then you can see too many behavioral parallels between the right-wing nut jobs (Hayden; Scott) of the film, and those that make up the whole of our country's current cabal in the White House.
But there is still another aspect of this film that keeps it relevant today. Its theme of a Doomsday device designed to be a deterrent that once activated cannot be stopped suggests that we as human beings have become dangerously over-reliant on technology. In this case, Kubrick was anticipating a lot of technological sci-fi and suspense films of later years: THE CHINA SYNDROME; WESTWORLD; JURASSIC PARK; and, of course, the film he himself would do next, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (in the guise of the misunderstood computer HAL).
Of course, this blackly comic approach to nuclear war and Cold War politics made DOCTOR STRANGELOVE an extremely controversial film when it was released in January 1964 (its release was delayed by the grief of JFK's assassination in Dallas). But it was a huge hit with young people who had already become disillusioned with government, because it was the first Hollywood film to directly challenge the military/industrial machinery that had gripped America since the end of World War II. And it remains relevant because a lot of its basic issues and problems still exist--the issue of pre-emptive war; the loss of human lives being treated as political propaganda; and the weaponry on display. People can certainly laugh in STRANGELOVE, because it is a hugely hilarious film, but they will also come away with knowing that a serious point has been made in the most subversive way possible, and they will end up thinking of the scenarios the film presents, and how they can still happen here in the 21st century.
