Comedic dread
#25: 'Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb'
Of course I laughed.
To watch Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb for the first time is to bask in what is clearly the greatest satire ever placed on celluloid. It is to revel in the absurd names - Gen. ‘Buck’ Turgidson, Col. ‘Bat’ Guano, President Merkin Muffley - and in the rubbery expressions of George C. Scott and in simply glimpsing a very young James Earl Jones.
To watch it for the first time in 2020, though, is also to be filled with a kind of dread that it is hard to imagine being fully present in years past.
Dr. Strangelove is ostensibly about the atom bomb. The confidence and certainty with which Stanley Kubrick approaches that subject is remarkable given its release date of 1964. This was only two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, a very real, very frightening variation on this story in which the world very narrowly stepped back from the brink of nuclear war. It’s hard to imagine most people at the time of its release being primed for a grand old laugh about the world nearly ending. Yet here is Kubrick, lampooning the very notion that humanity should have the power to destroy itself, and doing it by mocking turgid nationalism and unleashing a relentless stream of dick jokes.
The searing wit of Dr. Strangelove is not just material for a time capsule, though. This is not simply a curio to sum up the anxiety and absurdity of the Cold War era - to wheel out for an AP U.S. History class and go, “see.” And that is because while nuclear weaponry is no longer as new as it was when the film was released, the questionable credentials of the people in charge is a much more timeless thing to behold.
Both the style in which the film is shot and the sexual nature of one of its main jokes - that modern geopolitics is a bit of a dick-measuring contest - make Dr. Strangelove seem ahead of its time. But that’s quite a bit different than being timeless. And it is the timelessness of its mockery of people in power that screams out now.
To bring it back to the present day, the events of Dr. Strangelove are precisely what have made the Trump years so terrifying. Kubrick, Scott, Peter Sellers, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens and Peter Bull covered this all for us, didn’t they?
This film covers the unwelcome consequences of what happens when a true believer who can’t tell when political speech is hyperbole applies that speech in an administrative capacity. You might say that Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper’s fatal flaw is not knowing when to take someone figuratively rather than literally.
It covers the ineptitude and inaction of governmental bureaucracy in the face of a crisis largely of its own making. There are rules and norms in Dr. Strangelove, and, much like our present situation, they seem exactly and perfectly misaligned to the needs of moment. When the titular character himself points out that a doomsday device that no one knows about has no value as a deterrent, it feels a bit like learning, as we all have these past few years, that Congressional subpoena power isn’t very potent when the person you are seeking records from is a belligerent with no regard for the rules.
Dr. Strangelove’s very presence in the War Room seems like a version of the Faustian bargain we have seen play out since 2016, one where a party in power has allowed its standard bearer to debase the country over and over again just to appoint a bunch of judges.
And finally, Dr. Strangelove’s proposed solution as the world outside the War Room is annihilated - that the powerful descend in to a mine shaft with a coterie of attractive, fertile women to repopulate the world - feels only a bit more absurd than what passes for Republican orthodoxy in the middle of a pandemic - that the scourge all around us normal folk doesn’t really apply if you have enough power and privilege.
Dr. Strangelove is a masterwork of satire. Its silly names and its dry, sarcastic dialogue - “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room” - are what your mind drifts to immediately. But, to me, it is the unfunny parts that give it staying power and make it feel profound.
This is a film that reminds us just how undemocratic it can be to live in a powerful democracy and just how fragile our collective fate can be when put in the hands of people with questionable competency. After the last four years, no one needs a reminder of this fact. It is, I suppose, comforting to know that we aren’t the first people to have felt this kind of dread, and we won’t be the last.