Dr. Strangelove is a fantastic movie, one of Kubrick’s innumerable masterpieces, famous for its witty appraisal of nuclear era paranoia, and gallows humor take on the Cold War going hot. Today, the film goes over most people’s heads, as the historical context is no longer as relevant, appealing only to the older generation. The film is great, despite the somewhat jarring tonal shifts when it goes from a straight-laced hot-line thriller to a rambunctious comedy. However, the relative seriousness of the movie adds to the hilarity of the light-hearted moments. Lighthearted does not fit it though. Despite its satiric tone, it remains a nihilistic film with the satire thinly veiling the bleak reality, as reflected in the austere ending set to Vera Lynn’s lilting rendition of “We’ll Meet Again” where all of humanity is annihilated, leaving the audience to brood over the futility of nuclear war and Mutually Assured Destruction. Kubrick ruminates over the fate of humanity and questions the audience: What is the point of war when there is no side left to collect the spoils?
The titular character of Dr. Strangelove is unrelated, as he is a caricature of many of the German scientists brought to America during Operation Paper Clip to help with the Manhattan Project. He is wildly over the top, played magnificently well by Peter Sellers doing a Weegee impression (deftly switch-hitting back and forth between his three roles) and delivers some of the funniest lines in the movie, as well as the fantastic send-off speech which is when the snappy and bleak humor of the film is at its best. It is a fitting crescendo, packed with all the cynicism of the rest of the film and leaving you with little hope for humanity.
The film is very much like a book by Kurt Vonnegut, as its humor is as black as Turkish coffee and is filled with zany characters with double entendre names. However, looking deeper into it, you can notice an entire layer of meaning, particularly the machismo and sexual undertones. For example the opening shot, where a B-52 bomber is refueled, has obvious sexual connotation as the scene is juxtaposed with a brassy song called “Try a Little Tenderness” which all fits together into an uncanny fetishization of gigantic killing machines. Furthermore, General Jack D. Ripper, the man who is trying to touch off a nuclear holocaust, is threatening the annihilation of humanity because he is impotent. He blames this, as he explains in a hare-brained rant to a petrified Peter Sellers, on the fluoridation of water that he in turn blames on the pinkos, thus his justification for razing the Earth. This shows certain Freudian elements, such as the emasculated man going to extreme lengths to prove himself to be the most macho. Also, everything is a phallic object in the movie, the B-52 bombers, their nuclear payload, the cigars the generals are always gnawing on, and the guns the soldiers tote. All this relates to the comparison of nuclear war to penis envy, generals one-upping each other in how many missiles they can stockpile and how theirs are bigger and better than anybody else’s, which all goes back to how every conflict, or more universally speaking, the meaning for human existence, is to procreate. This becomes especially obvious in the end, Dr. Strangelove proposes that the world hunker into mineshafts to wait out the nuclear fallout from a doomsday machine made by the Russians (again, penis envy gone to ridiculous extremes.) Dr. Strangelove postulates that there would be a ratio of 10 women to each man. General Turgidson (George C. Scott playing himself, a misogynistic scumbag, with bravado) salivates as he does when he hears anything involving war or sex (since they’re one and the same) saying that they would need to copulate more than the Reds, so that the Commies wouldn’t beat them into submission when everybody emerged onto the new, sterilized Earth. Also, there is a throwaway reference in the B-52 sequence where Slim Pickens goes ahead in dropping a bomb on Russia. Unbeknownst to him, the world leaders are trying desperately to stop him. However, keen-listeners may have noticed that the mission’s original target was called Laputa. Laputa is by no means a place existing in Russia, but rather is from Gulliver’s Travels where it is described as a place where useless boondoggles are pursued and rational ventures ignored. This may also be a poke at the military, as it pours endless amounts of money into impractical applications with little turnout. Also Laputa phonetically breaks down into “La Puta” which is Spanish for “the whore.” Aboard this same plane is a Playboy magazine with a cover featuring the only female character in the film, General Turgidson’s mistress who has slept her way to the top of the political ladder as hinted at in one of the opening scenes when she expresses a familiarity with a random colonel speaking on the phone. Furthermore, Dr. Strangelove, a character who is completely unphased by the destruction of the world, is wheelchair bound until the end of the film and trying to wrangle an uncooperative hand into his control that constantly makes a Nazi salute and attempts to strangle him. Dr. Strangelove suddenly gets up and walks in the height of his excitement over the atomic annihilation of the human race, exclaiming, “Mein führer, I can walk!” which is without a doubt one of the greatest kernels of comic genius in the history of film. It also reflects Strangelove’s bizarre and almost sexual obsession with complete, wanton destruction (much like Turgidson) hence his name, and the movie being titled after him. There is no other reason since Dr. Strangelove is an ancillary character in the plot. He is simply there to embody the central theme of the film, which is the fixation, and fetishization of massacre and murder, as reflected when he goes from his “limp” ineffectual legs to standing up “erect”, showing his sexual release in the death of millions of innocent people.
Dr. Strangelove is a masterpiece of a movie, one that stands up to the test of time, despite the fact that few can understand its historical background or its hidden sexual context. It is an immensely clever film, in both its wit and its parallels between war and sexuality, all of which is carefully plotted and immensely well done. Kubrick is well known for putting ridiculous amount of detail into things, such as the green baize of the war room table to compare war to a tense game of poker (which has gone unnoticed since the movie as in black in white), the completely recreated B-52 interior (which was classified at the time) or pretty much every other movie in his filmography, like the completely lit by candlelight Barry Lyndon, or the ridiculously accurate vision of the future in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick is a craftsman, a true artist, who in his prolific career made many great films despite being a notoriously awful person to work with. This is the case with many of the great directors, such as Fritz Lang who threw Peter Lorre down a staircase during the making of M, or Akira Kurosawa who shot real arrows at Toshiro Mufine while filming Throne of Blood. Kubrick, despite not being the best person, did get amazing performances out of his actors with his potency, and definitely created some of the best movies of the last century.