REVIEWS by SULLYDOG
Dr. STRANGELOVE or:
HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB
a film by Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Slim Pickens, Peter Bull Directed by: Stanley Kubrick Produced by: Stanley Kubrick Written by: Terry Southern, Stanley Kubrick, Peter George.
There's a new boxed set of Kubrick's masterpieces and
near-masterpieces on DVD, and That Lucky Dawg found it under the Yule
Pine. Lolita, 2001, Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining
and Full Metal Jacket are all included, but my first
viewing was a no-brainer: Dr. Strangelove, that
deliciously macabre rejoinder to Fail-Safe.
Strangelove is deeply, dangerously funny, of course.
The movie's first image is that of a high-tech phallus, and the
opening credits, on the off chance you've never noticed, are laid
over the image of two warplanes Doing The Nasty. And those whacky,
whacky characters. ..
But are they really that whacky? No. They're really not.
And that's why Strangelove, after forty years, remains
deeply terrifying. What's so scary about Strangelove is
that all the characters--except one--do exactly what they are
supposed to do. Major Kong (Slim Pickens) and his crew are a
case in point. It's easy to dismiss Kong, with his ten-gallon hat and
cheesy speeches and folksy asides, as a clown, a cutup. But watch him
carefully. Kong is intelligent, dazzlingly competent, courageous, and
relentless in his pursuit of the mission objective. He's been told to
nuke them Russkies and, goddamit, that's what he's going to do, come
hell or high water. He carefully authenticates and verifies his
orders. He flies into enemy territory. He speaks openly and honestly
with his men, like a leader, and perhaps he even inspires them
("Heck, I reckon you wouldn't even be human beings if you didn't
have some pretty strong personal feelin's about nook-ee-ler
combat.") He goes through his checklists. In a feat of
steely-nerved aeronautical virtuosity, he gets his plane through a
devastating missile attack. Denied his primary target, he goes for
the secondary, and when that falls through he doggedly identifies and
attacks a target of opportunity. Kong is no clown. He's a
freakin' hero.
And that's what's scary. Kong does exactly what we pay
him to do, with courage and cunning and skill, and that's why the
world goes up in smoke. It's the same with the other characters. The
President (Sellers) does what presidents do--he confronts the crisis
with ineffectual diplomacy and moralistic hand-wringing. Mandrake
(Sellers) does everything in his power to persuade Ripper to back
off, short of shooting him (which would be rude) and in the end makes
the brilliant deductions that uncover the Recall Code. Buck Turgidson
(Scott) is a caricature, but he's true to form as the Cold Warrior
trained to make tough, cold-blooded strategic decisions. The more you
think about his suggestion that, since we're committed anyway, we
should nuke the Soviets and "catch them with their pants
down," the more you realize--to your horror--that it's not an
entirely unreasonable alternative. Given the circumstances. And
Strangelove himself (Sellers), slyly presented by Kubrik as an
Neumannian Angel of Death, doesn't create the crisis--he simply
regards it as another puzzle to be solved, an interesting set of
variables and facts. Yes, he's emblematic of the problem--sterilising
human evil by casting it into cruel equations--but he's not the
problem itself. Everybody does their best. Everybody
does their duty, and they do it well.
And everything still goes to hell, because, as Turgidson says,
"the human element seems to have failed us here." The one
wild card, of course, is General Jack D. Ripper. In a way, he too
does exactly what he has to, but it can hardly be defended as his
duty. So what's scary here is that Ripper's psychotic deployment of
the Wing is the only irrational act in the entire movie--a
stone dropped into a pond, sending out ripples of implacable human
excellence and duty, propelling everybody toward disaster. After all
these decades, it should still send a chill down your spine and keep
you up at night. ..
Except it's so goddam funny.
Fail-Safe meets A Comedy of Errors.
Sullydog Approves.
