For my final post of the semester I want to take a moment to discuss a film that in our current political climate seems as relevant as when it was first released during the Cold War. Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is a potent indictment of the ever-growing power of the military industrial complex in America, and a dark assessment of where this may lead us.
When watching this film, I was first struck by the fact that it is shot entirely in black and white. This directoral decision creates a sense of detachment from reality, just by virtue of its color palate. The separation between the world of the film, and our world itself, is misleading, and perhaps intentionally so. By deliberately creating a dimension of fictionality for this black comedy the viewer is freed to enjoy the humor of the piece without being entirely browbeaten by its political themes. In turn, the comic relief creates space for its harder hitting elements, such as the turn to fascism at the film’s conclusion, to resonate with viewers. In so doing, the audience has not been desensitized by the rest of the movie, and the comedy’s juxtaposition with heavier aspects of the plot and subject matter, makes the film as a whole more easily digestible for a wider audience, thereby increasing its chances of disseminating its message.
The next thing to grip me was the decision to cast Peter Sellers in three very different roles. While it is obviously an incredible task for a performer to delve fully into the minds of multiple, competing characters in the same film, I thought that thematically it suggested the blurring of lines between different groups in society, ultimately proposing that the characters might not be so inseparable as they initially seem. The three characters Sellers plays are a British ranking officer, who is utterly ineffectual and does nothing substantial to undo Ripper’s belicosity. Next there is the American president, an effeminate buffoon who can’t control his country’s nuclear arsenal. And finally, Dr. Strangelove himself, a Nazi nuclear scientist who defected to the United States following World War II. While their significance might not be immediately apparent, I thought the decision to cast these three characters with the same actor creates a link between them and suggests a sense of shared complicity in the events that unfold. If all three of these men are ultimately the same actor underneath the makeup and accents, then perhaps the characters themselves might are also not so different from one another. It might not take much for their differences to melt fully away, exposing the single, scared human, who lies beneath.
This connection between characters heightens the film’s disconcerting ending. When all seems lost and the atomic bomb has dropped, triggering the Soviet “doomsday device,” everybody in the Situation Room turns to Dr. Strangelove for guidance. This moment is chilling, for all it takes to make the government of the United States gravitate towards fascism, is fear of death and losing military supremacy. I thought this spoke to the true, insidious nature of fascist ideology. Furthermore, it struck me as an indictment of human behavior as a whole. In the film, these are the people who have been elected to represent the interests of the American public, but when their own lives are imperiled they flock to an unabashed Nazi for comfort and advice, even while he is frantically and uncontrollably saluting Hitler, and leap at the chance to save themselves. When Dr. Strangelove suggests a plan for living underground in mineshafts, they agree. In fact, their cowardly and enthusiastic abandonment of American ideals for the comfort of fascism is so empowering to the wheel-chair-bound Dr. Strangelove, that his legs are healed, prompting him to stand and exclaim the final words of the film, “Mein Führer, I can walk.”
Part of what makes this ending so jarring is the sense of inevitability in the prior events. Once things are set in motion there is little chance of stopping the attack, which smoothly transitions to a grateful acceptance of fascist policies. Here it just takes the relatively small push of a single general acting alone, to shift the entire course of human history. While it may seem a ridiculous possibility to the optimistic inhabitants of our modern world, this no longer feels so far-fetched. At the risk of betraying my own political biases, it is worth noting that this film made me seriously consider the checks and balances we have in place for taking unilateral military action, and how, when considered against the reality of a nuclear war’s consequences, they are a very small comfort. This is where, for me, the film finds its greatest success. Years after its creation, Dr. Strangelove provokes sober thought about our current political environment and way of seeing our place in the world. In my opinion, this should be among the goals of filmmakers everywhere: to show the world as they see it, so that others can join them in societal self-examination. Perhaps in so doing we can improve our country and the world at large, but sixty-three years after its creation, this film has not lost a bit of resonance, and I don’t know whether to find that comforting or profoundly alarming.
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