Summer 2014 #2: Dr. Strangelove - Stanley Kubrick (1964)

I’m really powering through all these big directors this year! At the beginning of last summer, I had never seen a Kubrick film. Then I saw A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and 2001: A Space Odyssey in a span of six months. Out of the four I have now seen, this is probably the one most name-dropped in film classes, which I credit to its relative obscurity and period-specific themes, making it a target for film majors to pretentiously throw out in conversation.

The full title, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” is long but indicative of what the film is actually about. It’s less about Dr. Strangelove, the character featured in the gif above, and more about the nuclear apocalypse brought on to end the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the USA. 

At the time, these fears of nuclear warfare had penetrated almost every aspect of American society. Kubrick recognized this panic and satirizes it with a simple, dark comedy about a group of US government members who have top-secret knowledge that basically alerts them to the fact that life as they know it has come to an end. 

A US military officer has ordered an extensive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union without the president’s permission, and about 90% of the film takes place in the War Room while the president and his advisors figure out how to stop it from happening. Most of the comedy comes from General Turgidson, who argues with the president on just about everything.

Also interesting to note, the actor who played Dr. Strangelove, Peter Sellers, forced Kubrick to let him play three characters, including the President and Group Captain Lionel Mandrake. He believed that the success of Kubrick’s previous film, Lolita, was due to his portrayal of multiple characters, and the studio backed him, despite Kubrick’s disagreement with that theory. Watching the film, I would never have noticed this, because they all have vastly different accents and costumes.

The film deals a lot with the hysteria of the Cold War, which proves that comedy is a genuine way to deal with some of the more troubling moments of our world’s history. The ironies of the diplomatic relations are exposed, as Kubrick shows the Russian diplomat being unhelpful and generally sneaky when in the US War Room. The president’s selfishness comes to light, and makes the viewer question what would have actually happened if these events took place when they could have.

In the end, the film takes a strange turn, when dark comedy turns to male fantasy, and a hypothetical think-piece turns into an absurdist comedy. I can’t say I disliked the ending, but it’s definitely not the kind of film you see once and say “Oh that made sense." 

I can however, credit the film for being funny. It ranks as #43 on the IMDb Top 250, and 39 on the AFI Top 100. I don’t think it’s as powerful as The Shining, it’s more of the very slow classic film that suddenly becomes really strange and random at the end kind of film, like 2001: A Space Odyssey.