Dr. Strangelove

or "How a Movie about Pilled Patriots Defined a Genre."

“...You’re gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.”

I first saw this film in one of my favorite high school classes, United States History, 1945-Present, taught by the brilliant Eric Lombari and Carl Thiermann. (Side note: this class also introduced me to The Graduate.) And I’ll say: I liked the film immediately, but I don’t know that I loved it; and I certainly didn’t get it.

Every successive time I saw it—and that number is over a dozen by now—my appreciation for the film grew; I got it more. And then I saw Don’t Look Up.

At the risk of incurring the ire of Don’t Look Up enthusiasts, seeing that film put into clear relief what an accomplishment Dr. Strangelove is. I won’t belabor it here—and please don’t unsubscribe because of this take—but I found the whole Don’t Look Up enterprise smug, heavy-handed, and (most damning of all) not that funny.

It reminded me of Dr. Strangelove’s high degree of difficulty. Like Don’t Look Up, Dr. Strangelove is a political satire that addresses the existential threat of its time head-on. But it handles its assignment far more deftly than Don’t Look Up does; its understated and dry gallows humor comes from flawed, well-meaning patriots who are doing their best in an absurdly precarious and dangerous situation.

“I want you to remember one thing: the folks back home is a-countin’ on you, and by golly, we ain’t about to let ‘em down.”

I can imagine myself opening a class discussion by asking the following: “Why does Kubrick start the film the way he does, with the seemingly hand-written credits playing over footage of a B-52 refueling mid-air, set to melodious music? What does the fact that the song is titled ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ change?”

It’d be fun to see where that discussion would go. At the very least, the opening lets us know that something is amiss; we are in for a journey into the fog of war, one that features ironic juxtaposition and incongruities.

The scenes aboard the anonymous B-52 are what give the film its gravitas, its emotional weight. To be sure, Kong’s exit is slapstick; and the rations distribution features at least a few jokes. And yes, Kong (played by an actor with an all-time Hollywood name, Slim Pickens) is just naturally funny. 

But the men aboard the bomber aren’t kidding around. They work diligently, set to the Civil War-era tune “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” They take their jobs, their mission, seriously, and they’re good at what they do. (In fact, they are a little too good.) That matters. Kubrick respects and needs us to respect this crew.

To that end, we see a lot of close-ups on them as they work, which add immediacy and urgency. And think about the missile attack sequence. It’s intense and thrilling, and would, I submit, fit well in a straight-forward war movie. These men are serious patriots, willing to sacrifice everything in the belief that they are saving the world. It’s their arc, then, that adds sadness and tragedy to the story.

“Ice cream, Mandrake? Children’s ice cream?”

Jack Ripper is my favorite character, because he is by turns chilling and hilarious. (Indeed, one of the more endearing scenes is when he appears to get Peter Sellers to break character and crack up.) Like the B-52 crew, he considers himself a patriot, committed to doing the right thing and saving his country. And, to be fair, if you polled the B-52 crew, at least a few of them might agree that the only way to defeat a nuclear Russia would be “total commitment.” Unfortunately, he’s far too deep down the “post-war commie conspiracy” rabbit hole.

In that light, he also eerily prefigures QAnon. Now, this is not the arena to break down all the components of the QAnon conspiracy theories. (Note: if you’re interested, I recommend The Storm Is Upon Us, by Mike Rothschild; and the “QAnon Anonymous” podcast, hosted by Travis View, Julian Feeld, and Jake Rockatansky.) But I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that there’s a not-insignificant portion of the QAnon community that, like Ripper, is obsessed with protecting the purity of “our precious bodily fluids.”

As can be the case with QAnon adherents, it takes a while to unspool Ripper, and see how unraveled he is, how—to use QAnon parlance—red-pilled he is. At the outset, we see him as a war-thirsty soldier who believes that “war cannot be trusted to the politicians.” It’s only as we spend time with him, as Mandrake tries to avert disaster, that we find out the depths of his fear about the “monstrous commie plot” involving fluoridation, and who knows what else. Yes, he is war-thirsty; and he also has done his own research (as evidenced by his cringe-worthy explanation of the origin of his beliefs), and is willing to die for his conspiracy theory.

Like QAnon adherents, Ripper lives with a mindset that is insulated and impenetrable, and guarantees violence. Consider his instructions to his men as they prepare to defend the base. His warnings that the enemy might come “in the uniform of our own troops”; his insistence that his men not trust anyone “unless known to you personally”; his command to fire upon anyone coming within 200 yards of the perimeter; they all have a tactical and tortured logic behind them. And, taken together, they allow for no course correction. There will, as they say, be blood.

The resulting firefight is not funny—at least, that is, until Ripper joins the fray. We feel bad for the men involved, in a sequence that, once again, would fit well in a standard war movie. And, like the B-52 arc, this storyline ends on a slapstick beat: Colonel “Bat” Guano, himself red-pilled about a “mutiny of preverts,” (sic) gets sprayed in the face. The next sequence provides a moment of relief; the transnational rescue plan has worked, and Mandrake will not, after all, have to “answer to the Coca-Cola company.”

One last note on Ripper, one that makes him even scarier and more prescient: as I’ve learned from more than a few “QAnon Anonymous” episodes, there are people in the United States military, today, who believe fervently in conspiracy theories even more deranged than Ripper’s. 

“It’s great to be fine.”

The War Room scenes, anchored in historical elements, illustrate the film’s courage and ambition. I mean, it takes guts to satirize such an existential threat contemporaneously and hew so close to reality. For example: is Strangelove himself a ludicrous figure? Yes. Did the United States military enlist the help of Nazi scientists after World War II? Also yes. (I encourage you to—dare I say it?—do your own research about “Project Paperclip,” another topic for another arena.)

Was there ever a “Plan R”? No. Were we safe from a similar scenario? Also no. (If I ever teach this film in a course, I’ll make this article, detailing the horrifying state of international nuclear security during the Cold War, required reading.)

Most of the film’s iconic lines come from these scenes, and that makes sense; they are the scenes that take on most directly the deadly absurd nature of the arms race. They are the scenes that highlight that it took a lot of people and a lot of decisions, to get to this point. They are the scenes that most explicitly remind us of Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, who chides John Hammond’s scientists for  being “so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Buck Turgidson, displaying the full range of George C. Scott’s face talents, embodies this mindset. Though he calmly concedes that “the human element seems to have failed us here,” he defends Plan R. Though he admits that a nuclear strike might leave the United States with “our hair mussed,” he stands firm that there would be “modest and acceptable casualties.” He consistently has what are, to him, wholly reasonable responses to President Muffley’s objections. Indeed, he is so committed to the logic of war that he misreads the War Room, gleefully proclaiming that “Hell yeah” the pilot can evade counter-measures, realizing only too late the implications of his analysis.

And that’s the thing. The men in this room are myopic and ill-prepared to handle this emergency, and were never worthy of being trusted with world-killing responsibilities. But it doesn’t take much for the viewer to see that there is a logic to every decision they make, and every decision that got them into this mess. Put another way: everything made sense, until none of it does.

“They’re trained to do it, you know. . . . It’s initiative.”

The final images inspire a range of emotions. One one hand, they are, from at least one perspective, beautiful and awe-inspiring. They also, though, are stark, and make my stomach turn. Most of all, I get sad. Part of that, of course, is regret for the fictional world of the film, in which one properly placed and deranged pilled patriot causes international superpowers to destroy themselves and each other. 

The other part, though, is knowing that the footage of the nuclear explosions is real.

See you on April 5th, when we discuss Little Miss Sunshine (2006).