In Ripper’s office, Kubrick allows the audience to see and consider everything within the frame through long camera takes and a depth of field. From a distance, the wide-angle lens pulls this enclosure into sharp focus and exaggerates its low ceiling and horizontal geometry. It reveals all the details that make up Ripper’s world and, as a parallel to Mandrake’s role within this setting, challenges the audience to decode its meaning. While almost everything we see has a vivid but surreal clarity, what we hear transforms that imagery into the logic of a nightmare. In the early scenes, Kubrick alternates between medium shots that place Ripper within the symmetry of balanced compositions and low-angle close-ups that blur out surrounding space and visually reinforce the madman’s verbal muddle. Later, spatial order is demolished by both the machine-gun fire from outside and Ripper’s rapid mental disintegration from inside. In each case, Kubrick uses the arrangements of setting and object in both literal and expressive ways. He constantly reminds us of the existence of a material world, that it is concrete or organized, and in the process removed from a place in contingent space, it can assume the properties of a dream or nightmare. All the things that envelop and define Ripper—ie, the “Peace Is Our Profession” slogan behind his desk, a tool/weapon for clipping cigars, his guns and model airplanes—in another film might play only a functional role in a credible visual landscape. But here and elsewhere, Kubrick reaffirms his talent for taking everyday minutiae and, through context, charging it with a conceptual and surrealist energy; he leaves the audience no choice but to explore the imagery of Dr. Strangelove by undermining their faith in the inviolability of surface reality. As a result, the viewer’s position in relation to this film is like that of those soldiers who are defending Burpleson and Ripper’s madness from an advancing “enemy” (American troops). The defenders, who are themselves part of the film’s most documentarylike sequence (shot in the grainy telephoto realism of Orthocrome), like the viewer, temporarily question the evidence of their senses: “You sure gotta hand it to those Commies, those trucks sure look like the real thing.”
Throughout the film, Kubrick characterizes the War Room as a place where civilization appears to make a last stand against an encroaching barbarism, only to reveal that the attention given in the War Room to verbal and formal aesthetics springs from a source not far from the deadly logic of Plan R and Dr. Strangelove’s devotion to the perfection of the Doomsday Machine. Everywhere one looks there is a visual geometry: The room itself is triangular, with the Big Board and its square displays titling above a world of circles (the large conference table with its ring of lights overhead) on a metallic black floor. Kubrick brings the visual style of Burpleson into this more formal realm when he blends incredibly sharp and deep wide-angle imagery with close-ups in which the edges of the frame lose resolution and adumbrate an ever-present mental disorder. From a high angle, the camera reveals a world encircled by darkness but internally organized, suggesting from the beginning that it already inhabits a mine shaft. Strangelove, in particular, is isolated in close-up and medium shots, enveloped by darkness and patterns of light from the Big Board; at first, he is separated from the rational processes of the table, only to be sought out like an alter ego once madness breaks through the illusions of formal order. When he cuts to shots around the table, Kubrick shows another kind of paradox, both in the collapse of language as tool and in the tangible objects that exist within the formal patterns admired from a distance. We see the lettering on Turgidson’s top-secret notebooks, which coexist with his gum wrappers: one says “World Targets in Megadeaths” and the other “War Alert Actions Book.” We notice the careful place settings on the table (pitchers of water, recessed phones) which are duplicated in a circle like reflections in a trick mirror; and finally, we notice how ordinary human distinctions become blurred through either a sense of uniformity (the characters wear suits or military uniforms, and with few exceptions maintain placid expressions) or the exaggerated and dehumanized postures of a Turgidson or Strangelove. In such ways does Kubrick visually link the surrealism of the War Room with both the B-52’s steady course toward death and Ripper’s mad asylum.
Strangelove, more than anything else, demonstrates Kubrick’s genius for translating ideas into temporal and visual film structures. And because the film defines character satirically, thereby subordinating psychology to concept, Kubrick is free to play with the forms of his medium in ways that earlier scripts made impossible. Even the humor relies almost as much upon the use of narrative and visual contexts as it does language, contexts that, according to Kubrick, place everyday human behavior within nightmarish situations: “…like the Russian premier on the hot line who forgets the telephone number of the general staff headquarters and suggest the American President try Omsk information, or the reluctance of a U.S. officer to let a British officer smash open a Coca-Cola machine for change to phone the President about a crisis on the SAC base because of his conditioning about the sanctity of private property.” Such strategy recalls the way Lolita reveals a surreality and absurdity beneath the bland surfaces of normality, only here the stakes are higher (the ultimate endgame) and the cinematic contexts more expressive. In one reflexive moment, for instance, Kubrick seemingly parodies the sexual fantasies and bathrooms of Lolita: Buck Turgidson is introduced through his “private secretary” and aging nymphet Miss Scott, wearing a bikini and sunglasses, whom we first see sunbathing, not in a garden, but under a heat lamp on a hotel bed in her best centerfold pose; Buck, in the bathroom off-camera, grunts and complains as she simultaneously talks to him and another general on the telephone. Besides being an indication that the film’s libido, as well as Buck’s, has escaped from the closet of Lolita, this scene illustrates Kubrick’s definition of Dr. Strangelove’s comic method: “Confront a man in his office with a nuclear alarm, and you have a documentary. If the news reaches him in his living room, you have a drama. If it catches him in the lavatory, the result is comedy.”
The sexual content of Dr. Strangelove, what Anthony Macklin labels “sexual allegory” and George Linden calls an example of “erotic displacement,” represents the most discernible and widely discussed mythopoeic element of the film. The progress of the film from “foreplay to explosion,” to quote Macklin, is clearly and almost too patly connected with the satiric characterizations. Consider the following:
1. General Jack D. Ripper is named after history’s most notorious sex offender. He disguises his loss of potency by raving about fluoridation as a Communist plot to poison our vital bodily fluids; he launches a phallic retaliation against the Russians (in the shapes of B-52 bombers, a jutting cigar, which, before his death, has burned down to a stub, and the machine-gun that he fires at his own countrymen); and finally, defeated and spent, he takes a pearl-handled pistol into the bathroom and kills himself rather than endure the “torture” his madness envisions as his fate. Later, Colonel “Bat” Guano will look at Mandrake’s “suit” and peg him as a “prevert” (suggesting that he confuses transvestism with foreign military service) rather than a man trying to save the world.
2. Aboard the B-52 bomber, Major “King” Kong is introduced reading Playboy and admiring the film’s parodic Fay Wray, namely Miss Scott, who is Playmate of the Month. Her pose in the centerfold photo is identical to her pose in Buck’s hotel suite, only here a magazine (Foreign Affairs) rather than a bikini covers her backside. Inside the door of the safe where packets outlining the procedures for Plan R are stored, we see girlie pictures; we then discover that the name of the primary bombing target is “Laputa” (Spanish for “whore”) and hear Kong detail over the intercom the contents of a survival kit, which includes silk stockings, lipsticks, and prophylactics (“shoot, a fellah could have a pretty good time in Vegas with all this stuff”). Later, Kong goes into the bomb bay, where sexually suggestive salutations adorn the tail-end of two H-bombs—“Hi there” and “Dear John.” He straddles one as he would a bronco, becoming an extension of a gargantuan phallus moving toward the ultimate score, a doomsday orgasm.
3. When we first meet General “Buck” Turgidson, whose name decodes as “swollen male animal who is the son of a swollen male animal,” he is on the toilet and in the company of his playmate of the month, and as he goes off to either save or help destroy the world, he tells her in the language of the occasion to start her “countdown” and be ready to “blast-off” when he returns; and in the War Room, just before the final explosions, Turgidson’s jaw hangs open in stupefaction as he envisions the demise of monogamy in Strangelove’s brave new world of mine-shaft cohabitation.
4. In the War Room, the presiding figure is President Merkin Muffley (whose name Anthony Macklin has identified as a reference to the vulva, and even though both “merkin” and “muffley” suggest a “covering,” he is bald, which makes his head look like a phallus.) His prissy and effeminate manner stands between Turgidson’s overly erect postures and Strangelove’s crippled impotence. Muffley talks on the hotline to the Russian Premier, named “Kissoff,” who is both drunk and with his mistress.
5. Finally, through the title character, Dr. Strangelove, whose real name is “Merkwuerdigichliebe” (which decodes as “cherished fate”), the film directs this sexual satire into thematic implications that go beyond the lighter antics of Turgidson and Kong; Dr. Strangelove brings Ripper’s madness into the deliberations of the War Room and links it to man’s intercourse with the machine and a sinister love affair with death.
But while the narrative logic of Dr. Strangelove may indicate that the world goes up in mushroom clouds because of one general’s madness or as a result of sexual malfunctions and transference, its aesthetic and thematic texture says that there is much more, that, in fact, its “sexual allegory” is only one of several conceptual levels that are interconnected and hold this fictional world together. Everywhere you look in the film, for instance, there are hints of primal and infantile regression, of a symbolic descent in time, from Kong’s Neanderthal Man to Turgidson’s primitivism (he slaps his hairy belly while standing over his mistress, and in the War Room he repeatedly assumes apelike stances) and Ripper’s crawling on all fours as his mind degenerates to the same level as those juvenile scrawls on the notepad that contain the recall code. The opening images of the film, a B-52 bomber being refueled in midair, suggest both copulation and a mother giving suck, while on the soundtrack we hear “Try a Little Tenderness” and on the screen read pencil-line credits that resemble a child’s graffiti. Kong’s bomber assumes the characteristics of a womb (once he tries to sleep and let the plane fly itself) from which he is dropped screaming and bellowing into a cataclysmic world. Ripper’s base is called Burpleson and houses a character who yearns for a world of neoplatonic “purity” and “essence” where ice cream cannot be contaminated and who is humored by a nervously smiling Mandrake. In the War Room, Turgidson, who is forever chewing gum like a masturbatory adolescent, clutches his top-secret notebooks to his chest and whines about security when informed that the Russian Ambassador Desadeski (the name alludes to the Marquis de Sade) will be allowed to see the “Big Board.” In every setting, language breaks down and characters revert to either the antiquated cliches of a primitive value system (Ripper’s “the Redcoats are coming,” Kong’s “nuculur combat, toe to toe with the Rooskies,” and Turgidson’s “prayer” of deliverance before the Big Board) or the conversation of children (Muffley’s baby talk with Kissoff and Turigdson’s with Miss Scott). And in the end, Dr. Strangelove become becomes both sexually erect and child-like as learns to walk in preparation for a descent into the mine shafts.
Kubrick gives food and eating a primal importance almost equal to sex. The first scene in the B-52 shows several members of the crew eating, and when Lieutenant Goldberg, the radio operator, reports to Kong that he received the code for Wing Attack Plan R, his words mingle with a sandwich he is stuffing into his mouth. At Burpleson, Ripper never eats, no doubt so as to maintain the purity of his bodily fluids, and he drinks only branch water and grain alcohol; but when Mandrake is collecting a transistor radio from inside a computer printout machine, we see that someone has left behind an uneaten sandwich and two pieces of fruit (an apple for the Garden, a banana for the jungle, and the Machine). In Turgidson’s hotel suite, through a mirror reflection behind Miss Scott, a table of dirty dishes is prominent, as this long camera take visually decodes as the recurring cycle of food, sex, a lavatory purgation, and sleep. And in the War Room there is a large buffet of gourmet food and pastries displaying the ritualization of a primal function and an absurd attention to pre-apocalypse formality. At the very end, when all is lost, the President sits next to the buffet, drink in hand, and calmly considers Strangelove’s mine-shaft computations, which include, among other things, greenhouses for plant life (food and oxygen) and breeding places for animals to be slaughtered (with particular emphasis on that last word.) As civilization descends into a new Dark Age, another survival kit provides the nourishment of the body as well as the libido.
Dr. Strangelove recalls The Killing in the way its plot and settings are geared to the clock. The narrator’s soothing, documentary voice in a prologue alert us to the possibility of time’s end in his comment that “ominous rumors” continue to circulate about the “ultimate weapon, a Doomsday device”; a few minutes later (in his final intrusion), he tells us that SAC bombers are “two hours from their targets in Russia”; the “fail-safe” system itself—defined by manuals, decoding books, and attack profiles—represents the human obsession with the mechanics of time and the hope of anticipating both the designs of a known enemy and the unseen courses of fate; once triggered, the causal logic of the fail-safe systems meshes with the doomsday machine to complete a timetable as inexorable as a mathematical formula. In the War Room, attempts are made to cancel out this clockwork doom through the improvisation of counterplans that, ironically, try to circle back and frustrate what was originally envisioned as the ultimate contingency plan (Plan R was invented in case all other nuclear safeguards failed). While Muffley conspires with the Russian premier to foil both the Doomsday Machine and a plan devised to destroy Russia, Mandrake decodes Ripper’s mad doodles; however, a third factor, chance, intervenes and not only knocks out Kong’s receiver, but, even worse, causes a fuel loss that directs the B-52 to the “nearest target of opportunity,” where there are no Soviet missiles waiting to intercept and destroy. Meanwhile, in the War Room, where the comic inertia of “rational” deliberation makes a contrast with the B-52’s mechanical and efficient pace, Kubrick shows a world that has reduced the vastness of space to the smaller dimensions of human time: A circular table and halo of fluorescent light visually embody the processes of reason, while overhead the Big Board arranges space into finite expressions of time (its lights and geometric shapes outline the “fail-safe” system on a “map” of the world); and below, in patterns of circularity, we see a human world moving toward the temporal mockery in the final scene, in which we hear Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again” while the doomsday shroud forms a halo around the film’s last image: the billowing cloud of the hydrogen bomb and the extinction of life.
Within the involutions of this temporal/spatial paradox—of plans and counterplans, a cinematic world encircling back on itself in both time and space—Kubrick employs straight cuts to go back and forth between settings and to intensify a narrative pace that confers an omnipotence on the rule of time. The film shows that once the exercise of free will and choice becomes overly formalized in the machinery of “fail-safe” systems and “human reliability” tests, options and possibilities shrink as characters fall victim to the ceaseless creative and unpredictable intervention of either psychology or chance. Ripper’s telephonic communication to the War Room, the one read aloud by Turgidson, not only captures his comic madness (“This man is obviously a psychotic,” says the President) but verbalizes a temporal condition that leaves little room for human choice. Ripper dictates a doomsday morality when he institutes Plan R and tell them that “my boys will give you the best kind of start, 1400 megatons worth, and you sure as hell won’t stop them now.” Turgidson then talks about the “moment of truth” and the necessity of choosing “between two admittedly regrettable but nevertheless distinguishable post-war environments; one, where you got 20 million killed and the other, where you got 100 million people killed.” The President, who always believes “there are still alternatives,” eventually faces both the logic of Buck’s argument and a world caught between a Doomsday Auschwitz and Mine Shaft Dachau.
Consider, finally, these examples of simultaneity and juxtaposition, which link the film’s temporal rhetoric to the ethics of endgame:
1. While Kong is reassuring his men that he shares their “strong personal feelings about nuculur combat” and promising them “promotions and citations” once their mission is over, Turgidson is likewise assuming the existence of a future of “normal” human activity when he tells Miss Scott to keep her sexual clock ticking until he returns.
2. As Kong is reading the lock-step procedures for Plan R aloud to his men, Mandrake becomes a prisoner in Ripper’s office and listens to a recitation of how that plan will determine life and death on a global scale (“while we are chatting so enjoyably,” says Ripper).
3. As Desadeski and Strangelove explain the purpose of the Doomsday Machine as the ultimate deterrent, one designed as an “irrevocable decision-making process that rules out human meddling,” Ripper details for Mandrake his paranoid delusion that fluoridation represents an insidious and invisible evil (“on no account will a Commie drink water”).
4. Once Kong’s CRM 114 is destroyed, he and his crew have no choice but to drop the bomb, which they do at the same moment that Dr. Strangelove is reassuring the President that computers are better equipped than mere mortals to make the difficult decision of who goes into the mine shafts and who stays behind to breathe the deadly Cobalt Thorium G.
Paradoxically, in a film that carefully details a 20th century descent of man, the machine, for the first time, plays a prominent role in Kubrick’s work. Strangelove predates 2001 and remains his darkest vision of what an emerging “machinarchy” could mean to humanity and human civilization. The presence of machine technology dominates the visual landscape in each of the film’s three settings and ironically complements a human world which symbolically moves back in time almost as fast as Kong’s B-52 flies through space. In some respects, this machine environment compares with the merger of World War I barbarity and 18th century neoclassicism in Paths of Glory: It provides both a context for evaluating the human madness within the film and a perspective on where that madness comes from and where it may be going. Each setting becomes a dark cave or womb, where characters are surrounded by machines that once served as tools of communication and progress, but now function as weapons of destruction and descent. Ripper cuts off all telephonic communication with the outside world and, closing the venetian blinds in his office, wraps himself in the artificial illumination of fluorescent lights and the psychic darkness of a primitive mentality. The antique guns mounted on the wall, the model airplanes on his desk, an aerial photo of Burpleson, and photographs of bombers frozen in space define his alignment with the technology of death. One of his last contacts with the outside is the cryptic FGB code, which mechanically clicks into the B-52’s CRM 114 and turns an instrument of receiving messages into one that cuts off all communication (except with Ripper’s mad OPE code prefix), directing the plane on a predetermined course toward death. Our first sight of Mandrake is as a figure obscured by a large printout sheet, in a computer room where machines outnumber people; he then sits down at a console and talks with Ripper on the phone (it is the only phone at Burpleson that is still working, except for the pay phone that he will use in the Coca-Cola machine scene), as computer tapes move back and forth in circles behind him. Kong’s B-52 becomes a machine that not only seems capable of flying itself, but in the intricacy and fineness of craftsmanship lends a grossness to the human beings who give it direction. This machine which moves forward through space (horizontally, not vertically) and propels its inhabitants backward in time cannot be recalled because a Russian missile, characterized as a blip on a circular radar scanner, destroys the CRM 114 at almost the same moment that Guano reluctantly shoots off the lock of the Coca-Cola machine so Mandrake can get the chance to use the pay phone to communicate the recall code to the President. Kubrick had a huge triangular set especially built for the War Room. It is both realistic and highly expressive. In it the Big Board with its sophisticated machine language and brightly lit, complex displays towers over the increasingly trivial and primitive verbal intercourse below. Here, too, Kubrick shows a world cut off from reason and outside contacts, both actual and imaginative, cut off, indeed, from everything that might enable it too see the ironic truth of machine logic, which is that the very technology which assists the human dream of order and duration—nuclear deterrents, “fail-safe” systems, and a “contingency” plan like Plan R—is based on a principle of mechanical predictability that must, if it is to have purpose, work itself out: Once committed to their course, and no longer subject to rational intervention, Kong and his plane find a target and not only fulfill their mission but the Doomsday Machine’s as well.
But Kubrick implies that this merger of madness and machine originates as much in a human passion for beauty as it does in the primal darkness of the Id. The first image of the film, from high above the clouds over the Zhukhov Islands, shows us the pure beauty of space from the machine’s (or God’s) vantage point, even though, paradoxically, it is linked to the “ultimate weapon” and the regressions of time both here and in its resemblance to the doomsday imagery of the ending. Throughout, Kubrick uses the machine to embody not only an efficiency (a temporal value) lacking in the psychological and political worlds of the film but a sense of harmony (a spatial value) as well: the imagery behinds the credits of planes mating in midair may prepare for sexual themes to come, but it also literalizes a principle of conjunction that repeatedly eludes the timebound characters. In those opening images, Kubrick reminds us that in space harmony and conjunction are functional requirements, not merely formal adornments of civilization or abstract goals of artistic expression. In Dr. Strangelove, however, the machine assists a descent into time rather than an ascent into space, one where the perfection of its logic and beauty of its form paradoxically objectify a human retreat into fantasy and death. It stimulates Ripper’s desire to play God and turn the clock back to a world of purity and the stasis of death. It creates the illusion in the War Room that mini-universes can be created and insulated from existential truths (ie, death no longer is even real) outside computerized gameboards. And finally, Seller’s performance as Strangelove provides Kubrick with both a human form and marvellous conceit for the futuristic tool-as-primitive weapon: in his love of the Doomsday Machine’s invulnerability to human interference and his perversion of scientific discourse (he refers to future survivors as a “nucleus of human specimens”), in his means of locomotion (wheelchair) and mode of animation (a mechanical arm that turns against him), and in his doomsday “rebirth” as the New Man who will lead the chosen people into darkness.
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