Fifty years after its premier in January 1964, Dr. Strangelove continues to be hailed as perhaps the canonical film of the Cold War era. In particular, critics rightly praise director Stanley Kubrick’s counterintuitive decision to use comedy as a means of showcasing the genocidal potential underlying even the most well-intentioned nuclear policies.
Less discussed is Kubrick’s conscious decision to create the Strangelove character and to title the film after him. Strangelove does not appear in the novel on which the film is based, nor does he drive the film’s action. But, by focusing on this scientist figure, the film conveys what people usually do take away from it: Dr. Strangelove is not about militarism, per se, or about this or that nuclear arms policy, but the peculiar and dangerous logic underlying Cold War strategy.
If Dr. Strangelove is about strategic logic, many viewers perhaps too readily assume Kubrick’s goal was to expose how facile his characters’ logic was. When the film appeared, it was already common to dismiss certain lines of nuclear policy and punditry as the illegitimate product of purportedly scientific theories that were actually deeply naïve. This polemical tactic was used by arms-control activists, a new breed of critical theorists, and even by Britain’s scientific adviser for defence, Solly Zuckerman.
The way this tactic worked was that it cast the details of opponents’ arguments as following from debased assumptions, which were grounded in a suspect science that was fatally detached from reality. Thus, the apparent sophistication of those arguments was portrayed as nothing more than a kind of rationalising sophistry, which could be safely ignored. Meanwhile, the critics using this tactic could privilege their own views by asserting both their superior connection to the realities of human behaviour, and their higher respect for human life.
One can certainly argue that in Dr. Strangelove Kubrick was criticising his characters’ naiveté in this way, but I am not so sure. His ridicule never became outright mockery. He was too sympathetic to his subjects. He took their ideas too seriously.
This is not the usual thing to say about the film, so I will try to elaborate. Kubrick had plenty of opportunities to take easy shots at his characters, yet chose not to. Strangelove had commissioned a “BLAND” (read: RAND) Corporation report on the Doomsday Machine, which found that it was “not a practical deterrent”. BLAND is proven right. In another sequence, the bombastic General Turgidson absurdly claims that it is unfair to criticize the U. S. Air Force’s human reliability screenings “because of a single slipup” that let an insane general have his own bomber wing. Turgidson’s lame acceptance of this fact suggests that his expectations of such tests’ efficacy were not unrealistic.
Moreover, for all of Kubrick’s heroes’ flaws, those flaws do not cause the film’s apocalyptic conclusion. The characters prove capable of transcending them in the ways we hope they would. Turgidson is trigger-happy, and President Muffley is weak, but Muffley does keep Turgidson reigned in, and Turgidson does, in fact, obey orders. Rigid order-follower Colonel “Bat” Guano wants to prevent Group Captain Mandrake from phoning the President, but he ultimately does listen to reason, and Mandrake almost succeeds in saving the day.
If this argument seems thin, compare Peter Sellers’s Strangelove to Walter Matthau’s Prof Groeteschele from a very similar 1964 Cold War film, Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe. Throughout Fail-Safe, Groeteschele routinely ascribes too much rationality to people, argues that nuclear war may be desirable, and displays a callous nihilism about the fate of humanity. Here is a clear instance of a critique of rationalism. Strangelove, by comparison, only shows his fascist colours at the end of Kubrick’s film, once the destruction of civilisation has already become inevitable.
To me, it is Kubrick’s sympathy for his characters that makes Dr. Strangelove so effective as a critique. If they behaved too absurdly, it would seem like all we really need to avoid apocalypse is better policy and better policymakers. If only more enlightened souls were in charge, all would be well.
I think the film’s message was darker, more Kubrickian: there is no escape from strategic logic. We can try to plug the holes in our reasoning, and try to correct others’ errors. But, in the end, our ingenuity only becomes the means by which our failings realize their destructive ends. I would argue that it is this fatalism, and not the buffoonery of the characters, that makes the comedy of Dr. Strangelove seem so a propos.
These observations are not an apologia for, nor a condemnation of, strategic logic. Some have taken the end of the Cold War as vindication of the policies enacted, while others have supposed the Cold War ended without nuclear war in spite of those policies’ lunacies. Many of our nations’ policies were doubtless unjustified and reckless, but whatever policy was followed, we were probably always going to be lucky to escape the twentieth century alive. Kubrick, I think, understood that point, and related it without condescension, sanctimony, or pity.
