Can nuclear annihilation of most if not all life on Earth be funny? That was the central issue with Stanley Kubrick’s satirical take that very topic, loosely based on a thriller novel called Red Alert. Last time I covered Dr. Strangelove, I mostly pondered how a film like this on a subject like this could ever be made funny. It’s satire, so it may not need to be laugh-out-loud funny so much as clever in a way that raises some vital points about society or human nature. However, there is a lot of genuinely funny moments, even one or two of them are somewhat dark punchlines. I like Peter Sellers’s work in general, but let’s face it: he’s not exactly known for his subtle characters, and there’s absolutely nothing subtle about the title character at the very least.
But I’m talking about a film I probably first watched in the 90s and rewatched for projects like this one in 2018 and 2023. What must it have been like in 1964?
Now, I won’t pretend to understand anything about living first-hand through that time period. I’m too young by far, and by the time I did get around to seeing the film, nuclear paranoia was pretty much a thing of the past thanks to thawing relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if people, many of them with power, don’t see the harm in a limited nuclear exchange of some kind. But by 1964, the United States had lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, McCarthyism, the Korean War, and Vietnam was just gettin’ warmed up. Though Sellers’s President Merkin Muffley was based on two time Democratic presidential nominee and UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson, the country had seen a very different president, John F Kennedy, die from an assassin’s bullets the year before, and his successor Lyndon Johnson would oversee the aforementioned escalation in Vietnam. There’s a lot to be said about both of those men, but I don’t think either would come across as the soft-spoken timidity that Muffley displays.
By the by, I just plain did not notice the double-entrendre in Muffley’s name before for some reason until I saw a hyperlink on the Wikipedia entry for the character took me to a page which, well, is not a description of the character. I don’t know why I would have missed that considering many of the character names here aren’t all that subtle. The officer (played by Sterling Hayden) who launches the eventual death of most of the world? General Jack D. Ripper. The Soviet Premier, never seen? Dimitri Kissov. The scuzzbag Chairman of the Joint Chiefs played by George C Scott who cares mostly that the Soviets should never see the “big board” and now he will be given ten women to procreate with? General Buck Turgidson. Slim Pickens’s bomber pilot who causes a lot of destruction? Major T.J. “King” Kong. Keenan Wynn’s thick-headed colonel? Colonel “Bat” Guano. I’m not exactly curious enough to go read the book, but I do wonder what author Peter George named his characters in Red Alert.
Regardless, here’s the film where a former Nazi scientist is sitting in a “war room” that was apparently and unintentionally a lot like a real room the filmmakers didn’t know existed, complete with waiters and a buffet table that might have been set up for a pie fight that didn’t make the final cut, and while the end of the world is quite literally a distinct possibility, there’s still the likes of Turgidson who cares about commie infiltration of America’s mineshafts and tunnels where the lucky few will have to live for nearly a century before the surface radiation dies down enough to go back up there. It’s a ridiculous concern for obvious reasons: if the majority of life on Earth is dead, who cares about ideologies and national prominence when the nations themselves are mostly dead? But it is worth remembering something about the 1960 Presidential Election: JFK ran on, among other things, closing a perceived “missile gap” between the United States and the Soviet Union. History suggests that the US has many times over overestimated how powerful the Soviet military was right up until the country collapsed, and it’s worth noting recent president Donald Trump also made some noise about upgrading our nuclear capabilities since the ability to wipe out all life on Earth isn’t potent enough for some people and we already have that as it is.
So, maybe we should ask a simple question: what are we all afraid of?
I’m not trying to get political here. I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I watched the Berlin Wall come down, the Cold War more or less sputter out (it arguably started up again though I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where). I am familiar with the idea that the United States, partially as a result of a policy that goes back to the end of World War II to always have a strong enough military to if necessary fight the nation’s two most powerful rival nations at the same time, greatly outspends the rest of the world on defense spending. I am not suggesting what we should or should not do. It’s just a fact. And it’s not like the rest of the world laid down its collective arms and started singing kumbaya or something. Human beings, or at least the ones in positions of power, seem to be incapable of looking at each other and not thinking “What if that person or people means to do me harm? I better have something ready just in case.” Sometimes having that something ready is a good idea–the US had already begun a bit of military build-up before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor–but other times, are we just putting things together to make sure the other guys don’t try something first?
Are human beings incapable of looking at other people and thinking, “They might be up to something?”
I don’t have an answer to that, and I am most assuredly not suggesting spontaneous worldwide disarmament. This is the real world. People commit acts of violence for awful reasons all the time. Getting everyone to give up weapons isn’t going to happen. Besides, arguably the only real argument for having a nuclear arsenal is so it won’t be used. Dr. Strangelove just asks the question, “So what if someone launched the attack that’s never actually supposed to happen?”
That’s what happens here as General Ripper decides he needs to protect his precious bodily fluids from the commies since they only seem to drink vodka, and fluoride in the water supply is awfully suspicious. He’s an man who is clearly off his rocker, with Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Sellers in the most understated role he has in the film) just along for the ride and trying to gently talk the guy down. Ripper doesn’t know about the Soviet doomsday device. Really, no one does aside from a handful of top Soviet officials. Would that have deterred Ripper? Somehow, I doubt it. And if fear of bodily fluid contamination seems pretty crazy, considering what people spouted then about commie infiltration–one of the founders of the John Birch Society thought Eisenhower was a communist because he wasn’t conservative enough–or even today with Q-Anon, is it really that shocking?
So, is Dr. Strangelove funny? Yes, it is, but it isn’t that different from the real world, and that’s what satire is all about: holding up that funhouse mirror so we can see what we might really look like.
NEXT: How about another example of looking at what might be wrong with society? Be back soon for the 2019 critique of class and income inequality with Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite.
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