January 30, 1994
'Dr. Strangelove' Turns 30. Can It Still Be Trusted?By ERIC LEFCOWITZ
he iconography of fallout shelters and air-raid drills may be a fast-fading memory of the cold war, but the image of nuclear holocaust -- just a button and a madman away -- still haunts us. Thanks, in part, to Stanley Kubrick's apocalyptic "Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," this image is now an indelible part of cold war mythology.
Kubrick's masterpiece of cold war satire, which turned 30 yesterday, has become something of an icon itself. The self-described nuclear comedy has influenced film makers as diverse as Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone and attracted fans as improbable as Elvis Presley, who reportedly screened a private copy for friends at Graceland.
Three decades after its debut, "Dr. Strangelove" has entered the pop vernacular, a metaphor for the deadly consequences of science -- and government -- gone awry. It is a theme that, most recently, left its imprint on both Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" and Stone's "J.F.K."
" 'Jurassic Park' had a lot of forefathers, and I'm sure 'Dr. Strangelove' was among them," confirms Spielberg, an unabashed fan. "It is one of my favorite movies of all time, without a doubt." Spielberg can even recite bits of dialogue from memory.
The impact on Stone seems no less profound, providing an early lesson in distrust of government that informed "J.F.K." "It was one of the first films that I saw as a young man that pointed to the government as indifferent to needs of people, government as an enemy to the people," Stone explains. "I suppose many of our fears of big government are rooted in that theme, in Kubrick's paranoia."
Kubrick himself once described "Dr. Strangelove" as "a fantasy which tries to stay within the realm of believable behavior." And to this day, the reclusive film maker says he believes it remains valid. To achieve the counterbalance between exaggeration and reality, he brought together two wildly disparate writers to collaborate with him on the screenplay -- Peter George, a former Royal Air Force officer whose novel "Red Alert" served as a technical foundation and the satirist Terry Southern, the insouciant creator of the mordant novel "Candy."
The story, a compact, exquisitely wrought piece of black comedy, begins when an Air Force general, Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) launches an unauthorized military strike guaranteed to start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union because he fears the Communists are plotting to sap and impurify his "precious bodily fluids."
This scenario -- minus the "precious bodily fluids" -- is not nearly as farfetched as it seems, says Bruce G. Blair, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and the author of "The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War." "The assumptions of the movie," he says, "were very valid in that it was quite possible for lower-level officer in the strategic command to start World War III."
With tragicomic illogic, the plot moves onward. The President, Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers), calls Russian Premier Kissoff to apologize and warn of the impending attack. Eventually, all the planes are either recalled or shot down except for one, piloted by the gung-ho Maj. King Kong (Slim Pickens), which triggers the secret Russian doomsday machine.
Remarkably, the existence of this scenario, too, proved prescient when, several years later, the Soviet Union deployed a doomsday system similar to the one depicted in the film. "It still exists," says Blair. "They've centralized these doomsday devices into their system to circumvent the problems they perceive in the military chain of command."
Enter Dr. Strangelove (Sellers again), the sinister German scientist whose involuntary Nazi salutes interrupt his rambling war-room lecture on survival in underground mineshafts. Just as Strangelove rises from his wheelchair to announce, "I can walk!" the film comes to an abrupt and devastating climax of detonating atomic bombs and mushroom clouds.
This scenario, of course, has not yet come to fruition, although Stone, for one, believes it is inevitable. Blair's less alarmist opinion of the film's conclusion -- "extremely funny, but on another level extremely sobering and serious" -- was, predictably, not shared by the military establishment, which totally discounted the premise of "Dr. Strangelove."
Surprisingly, a slew of film reviewers and cultural observers joined in the chorus. Bosley Crowther, reviewing in The New York Times, called the movie "the most shattering sick joke I've come across." He worried about it being "defeatist and destructive to morale."
Others, like the social philosopher Lewis Mumford, rose to the film's defense. "This film is the first break in the catatonic cold war trance that has so long held our country in its rigid grip," Mumford wrote in a letter to The Times.
Although nuclear politics was the subject of several films in 1964, including Sidney Lumet's "Fail-Safe" and John Frankenheimer's "Seven Days in May," Kubrick's treatment has probably had a more lasting impact.
What strikes contemporary audiences is Kubrick's masterly manipulation of the film's premise. By taking audiences into the war room and the cockpit of a B-52 and inviting them to watch -- and laugh nervously -- as the horrifying events unfold, the film simulates the helplessness many felt, and still feel, about nuclear confrontation.
No scene demonstrates this effect more unforgettably than the one in which Major Kong mounts a bomb in the hatch of the B-52 and rides it to its target -- with whoops and hollers -- like a cowboy on a bucking bronco (one critic later deemed it "the most inventive phallic symbol in film history"). For that brief moment, Kubrick subverts the audience's expectations by asking them to root for the apocalypse as if they were at a football game.
Moments like these make "Dr. Strangelove" the kind of movie that people can remember seeing for the first time. Spielberg recalls: "I was standing in line in San Jose, the first weekend of the film's release, and my sister pulled up with my father and ran out with the Selective Service envelope, which converted me to 1-A for the first time, eligible for draft. I was so consumed with possibility of going to Vietnam that I had to see it a second time to really appreciate it, and that's when I realized what a piece of classic, bizarre theater it was."
Stone, too, can pinpoint the memory: "I saw it with my father in New York City. I was 18 years old, and it seemed so silly and ridiculous; and yet there was something undeniably powerful about it. It was probably my first experience, having grown up on Danny Kaye movies, of seeing a serious subject treated that way."
Thirty years later, "Dr. Strangelove" is still a forceful reminder that somewhere in the human spirit lurks the mad impulse -- and the means -- to blow up the world. It captures a moment in American history when fear and suspicion informed both government policy and popular beliefs. Above all, it is a cautionary tale of an ideological war from which there is no return, a message still relevant today.
"The psychology still continues to function in the same way as in 'Dr. Strangelove's' time," observes Blair. "There's still this huge arsenal out there being managed in the same way as it always has. In some ways the nuclear danger may be greater today than it was in the cold war."
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