“Dr Strangelove” – the 50th anniversary of this iconic nuclear film

THE HALF-CENTURY ANNIVERSARY OF “DR. STRANGELOVE” New Yorker, BY DAVID DENBY 14 May 14 “Mein Führer, I can walk!” screams Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers), the ex-Nazi nuclear scientist, rising from his wheelchair to salute the American President at the climax of “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” Stanley Kubrick’s satirical masterpiece is now a half century old (Film Forum will be playing a new 35-mm. print starting this Friday), and it remains as outrageously prankish, juvenile, and derisive as ever. Which, given the subject of nuclear annihilation, is exactly right. The movie is an apocalyptic sick joke: the demented general Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden), who thinks the Commies are using fluoridation to destroy his bodily fluids (he withholds his essence from women), dispatches a group of B-52s loaded with H-bombs to destroy Soviet targets. President Merkin Muffley (Sellers again) tries to recall them; he even helps the Soviet Union to destroy some of the planes. But, after all sorts of misadventures, one B-52 gets through, setting off a Soviet-built Doomsday Machine—chained nuclear explosions assembled in a stunningly beautiful montage, accompanied by Vera-Ellen singing the tender ballad “We’ll Meet Again (Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When).”……….

We all knew (perhaps a little vaguely) that Wernher von Braun, an actual Nazi who created the V-2 rocket that terrorized London at the end of the war, had become a leading American rocket scientist. Some of us wondered which was worse, his opportunism or America’s. The satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer, tinkling at the piano, devoted a piece to von Braun, with the following lyric: “Vonce der rockets are up / Who cares vhere dey come down / That’s not my department / Says Wernher von Braun.” The German émigré scientist was a prime source of Sellers’s Strangelove ….…..

The strategist Herman Kahn, in a notorious book, “On Thermonuclear War,” published in 1960, insisted that a nuclear war was winnable, and that life would go on despite millions dead and nuclear radiation everywhere. In the movie, George C. Scott’s General Buck Turgidson, the Air Force Chief of Staff, advocates for war as follows: “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say that no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops—depending on the breaks.” And Kahn later proposed a doomsday device as the ultimate deterrent: threatening the extinction of human, animal, and plant life, he believed, would end the dangerous brinkmanship displayed by the Soviet Union and the United States in the Cuban missile crisis. He thought that it was a reasonable idea, even a clever one.

All of this was, so to speak, in the air…………It may be hard to believe now, but Kubrick’s original intention was to do a straight, serious movie. In the late fifties, he became obsessed with the possibility of an accidental nuclear war (he even thought of leaving New York for the greater safety of Australia)……..

Kubrick did enormous amounts of research. He read forty-six books on nuclear strategy; he conferred with experts, including the dread Herman Kahn; he studied military magazines to get an idea of how the cockpit of a B-52 might look. As he began working on the screenplay with Peter George, however, he gagged on the idea of a straight version of the material. As he said later:

My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question…. The things you laugh at were really the heart of the paradoxical practices that make a nuclear war possible.

So he stopped leaving out “things which were either absurd or paradoxical.” In the movie, the planes can be recalled only with special codes that the mad general will not release; the Doomsday Machine cannot be stopped once it is triggered. And so on. Each element makes some sort of sense in itself as strategy, but, in the aggregate, they produce an insane system of interlocking absolutes. …..

a slightly loony forum, a place where furious debates over the future of existence would take place. An atmosphere of science-fiction irreality would be punctuated by preposterous intrusions of everyday life: the petulance of the President; his wheedling conversations on the telephone with Kissoff, the Soviet Premier; the squabbles, tantrums, and jockeying for position among diplomats and military men; the petty human ego struggling for precedence right up to the moment of apocalypse………

the bomber crew is ethnically mixed—in this case, a Texan, a black man, a Jew, and so on. They are about to blow up the world, yet they go through the professional routines of any other bomber crew; the discrepancy between their competence and what’s at stake is excruciating…….

Slim Pickens, as the pilot, achieved immortality by riding an H-bomb as it fell, yahooing and whipping his cowboy hat back and forth like a rodeo champion………

I don’t see how anyone could miss, under all the buffoonery and juvenile joking, a furious sense of outrage.

Read Eric Schlosser on the surprising accuracy of “Dr. Strangelove” and hisdeconstruction of several clips from the movie.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2014/05/kubrick-dr-strangelove-half-century-anniversary.html

September 3, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA

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