Never before have I written about a classic. Never before have I shared my thoughts about any film that has served as a testament to all filmmaking feats eternal in these last one hundred years of the art. I am stunned as to what I should say, as to what further insight I could possibly bring to a film like “Dr. Strangelove.”
My own, I suppose. A movie is made great by the thoughts it pulls from people, and with every one it does as such, it is important. By talking about it, we won’t make it any better than it is now. We’ll just embed it deeper into our memories, and with that, it will become not better, but greater. A movie can be perfect, but only in our eyes, in that channel of ideas exchanged between all of us. One perspective can’t be more or less than all of the rest. If it were to be, then the execution of the film would be for naught.
“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.” Director Stanley Kubrick’s words ring true in the wide span of his innovative works of cinematic beauty. As far as I’m concerned, he revolutionized movies forever to come with 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It isn’t so much a story as much as it is a concept. Have you ever seen a film where the camera seems to break off from reality and assume a mind of its own? That’s “2001” speaking through the culture it has influenced, from the time when it was released to nearly fifty years later.
Kubrick made other great movies, The Shining among those I have seen, Paths of Glory among those I have not. He was one of those “first” artists. People can try to imitate him, and maybe even be successful at it, but never will their actions speak as loud as the ones that spawned them. He was an inventor, a true and important one. Stuff like “2001” was on another plane, the level at which filmmakers weren’t even sure when they were echoing Kubrick’s masterpiece or when they were not. Once he made his mark, we immediately couldn’t imagine a world of film without it.
If “2001” is a film of the abstract, “Dr. Strangelove” is one of the concrete. Each are Kubrick films. Each dip a little into each other’s territories. But while “2001” foresaw the monument that would define our humanity to the day, “Dr. Strangelove” discussed the ever-significant there and then. It captured our world’s present situation as holistically as “2001” did the universe’s. And somehow, as if to argue that history not only repeats itself but lurks in our cycle of consciousness at every stage, “Dr. Strangelove” remains relevant.
It’s a cold war movie. Despite the still raw and complex tension between Russia and the United States at the time of its release, “Dr. Strangelove” was, and is, strikingly minimalistic. It’s not that the discussions in the film are few, but that they revolve around the same event, the same situation, the same threat.
It’s a dark comedy as well, the “dark” referring to nuclear destruction imagined as a reality, the “comedy” completing its own oxymoron that convinces us of its credible existence. U.S. Air Force General Jack D. Ripper (the film is full of nuances like this), played by Sterling Hayden, commands a bombing aircraft to commence an unprovoked attack on Russia, cutting off all further transmissions to those onboard. Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) desperately tries to twist the three-letter code terminating the order out of Ripper, up until his superior locks both of them into American headquarters, refusing to give into the warped Soviets’ plot to pollute water supplies and corrupt the “precious bodily fluids” of American civilians. Ripper has long before fallen into lunacy.
American officers scurry into a frenzied meeting in the top-secret War Room to discuss what can be done to mend the situation, the bomb reaching Russia in as little as an hour. Sellers also plays the president, with George C. Scott playing General Buck Turgidson. Turgidson can keep rattling off his wild ideas, and the president can keep berating him for his incompetence, but it’s clear nobody has taken the time to prepare for when something like this would happen.
Every figure in this dark, grim world brought to the edge of demise appears to be a minor character. They each throw away their control and direction to give us one defensive shrug. I don’t see any other way that the film could have been told. In a situation such as this one, where everybody is only as good as their contribution, shouldn’t there really be no one who we’re attracted to on screen, given that all hope is lost? The actors give something that the characters aren’t giving, insight. Their personas must do the things that they do with confidence, even when, by their definition, their actions are futile. Scott and Sellers don’t play their respective parts pretentiously or in any other unnecessary way. They’re fools, and we look upon them as such.
The story doesn’t go anywhere. We don’t know anything more by the end of the movie than we do within the first ill-fated scenes. And yet, it covers everything it needs to. Every passing minute grinds us further into dread, layering its strained atmosphere on top of the inevitable.
And Kubrick brings us his imagination, as he always does. Today, we’d immediately notice that the color scheme in this movie is composed only of black and white, and somehow, we absorb this and consider it to be the way it should, even with the option of color. The atmosphere is mythical. It seems as if we’re looking through smoke, something you’ll miss if you look too hard.
The laughs, of which there are plenty, are too real. Is it this easy for insanity to spread? A suspicious former Nazi, Dr. Strangelove, is among those present in the War Room (Sellers tackles this role as well). Turgidson is manically opposed to the Russian ambassador interfering with the meeting for fear of him witnessing the arbitrary “big board.”
Maybe it is that easy. All of these government workers, generals, advisors, and aides are people. Why are we certain of their leadership when they, just as human as us, have no more qualifications to lead than we do? There isn’t a foreign policy in the world that can solve man-made error in its wordlessness and spontaneity. Who’s to say that this whole operation isn’t being led by a bunch of mindless nutcases who might as well be mapping out their fight against nuclear catastrophe with crayons? “Dr. Strangelove” may not exaggerate that much.
It’s Judgement Day. If there is such an event, it will happen this way, by complete and unsupervised accident. The people who have pledged to take responsibility will point fingers at each other. But they’ll be there, and so will we.
