All right, it’s about time to write about this movie. It’s one of my favorites of all time, I’ll just say that right out. So it was directed by Stanley Kubrick, who is kind of a strange, dark, genius type of guy. And it was released in January of 1964, which was just 15 months after the Cuban Missile Crisis. So that’s right in the era of the height of nuclear tensions. There was serious concern about the possibility of nuclear war. There’s some posturing now about how we might, this time, engage in a nuclear war. That would be, in a word, bad. That’s my opinion, anyway. That would be bad.
Anyway, let’s get to the movie. Great opening credits, showing planes flying in the sky. These giant metal objects flying around. Really crazy, I mean, civilizations have been around for thousands and thousands of years. For that whole time, and even earlier, we’ve wanted to fly. We look at birds, and we want to do what they’re doing. And yeah, we can’t do it on a personal, physical level, but we’ve been able to build these big metal rooms in which we can fly. We wanted to do that the whole time, but it took our species like 200,000 years to figure out how, but then think how significantly it advanced from the Wright brothers to the time that this movie was released. It’s an insane advancement in 60 years. Then we went to the moon 5 years after that. Insane. Technology is just advancing at incredible speeds without any brakes, completely out of control, and will probably lead to our ultimate demise.
Anyway anyway, General Buck Turgidson gets a phone call informing him that some Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper [get it?] initiated Plan R, a nuclear attack against Russia. So there were bombers flying around, he ordered the attack, then they start flying towards their different targets in Russia. The idea is that the Russians could just kill the President and wipe out the U.S.A.’s ability to order nuclear attacks. So certain generals were given the ability to order nuclear attacks. In the movie, they trusted no one to simply go fucking crazy and order genocide. Foolish! Eventually someone’s gonna do that.
The bombers can be recalled, but only by sending a message with a three-letter prefix, so that the Russians can’t send phony recall messages. Only Ripper knows the code. So the movie basically follows three groups. First, the war room, where the President, Turgidson, and other generals try to figure out what to do. Second, Ripper at his Air Force base. Third, the crew of one of the bombers.
Peter Sellers gives an amazing performance as three characters in this film. My favorite acting performance of all time. First, we have the British guy, Mandrake, who is trying to get the code prefix from Gen. Ripper. And there’s a moment early one where Mandrake realizes that Ripper has gone crazy. And Mandrake just says, “Oh…” and the way he says it, so fuckin funny. I imitate that moment all the time.
Then we have the guys in the plane, captained by Slim Pickens [a hilarious stage name]. He’s a good ol’ southern boy, and he even wears a cowboy hat. Great character. And he says stuff like “Russkies,” or however you spell it. I’ve heard this character was also supposed to be played by Sellers, but I’m glad that it went to Pickens. He’s the perfect. These scenes are often scored with humming Johnny Comes Marching Home, with an ominous drum. It really creates a sense of marching towards your ultimate fate, if that even exists.
Ripper embodies the most extreme form of McCarthyist paranoia. The commies! The international communist conspiracy! It’s largely that fear that resulted in millions of death in places like Vietnam and, well, much of South America. History is really quite tragic. I remember a quote from former Vice President Henry Wallace, a hopeful quote about how the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. would gradually become more alike, with each taking the good parts from the other. But, you know, didn’t really happen that way.
Anyway, Sterling Hayden and Peter Sellers are kind of a duo, and they’re so good in their dialogue. Sellers as the flustered Englishman, and Hayden as the crazy war hawk. His entire life is war, so his only solution to the world is war, and he aims to be better at it.
The other incredible duo is Sellers as President Muffley and George C. Scott as Turgidson. The President interrogates Turgidson about the situation and realizes that they’re basically fucked, and the attack is ongoing. So the President is like “This whole nuclear plan is fucked up, and it’s totally fucking up!” And Turgidson replies “I don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn the whole program because of a single slip-up.” A single slip-up! A hilariously reductionist explanation of nuclear holocaust. It was just a slip-up. It’s like when people say “everyone makes mistakes,” like, yeah, no one can really dispute that, but what’s the mistake in question?
So Ripper’s idea is that he’ll execute plan R, then the President and top generals will realize that it can’t be stopped, so their only option will be to go even further with a nuclear attack, destroying as much of Russia as possible to avoid their retaliation. Turgidson falls right into line with that plan. He kind of gives a utilitarian type of argument, saying that they can either have 20 million people killed or 150 million killed. It’s interesting to think about these types of calculations being made during the Cuban Missile Crisis a couple years before. Considering what cities would be most likely to be destroyed in whatever situations, how many millions of people would be killed if we do this or that. Meanwhile most of those people are just trying to get by, just trying to live their lives.
The President takes a different route. He’s like, “Well, we’re kind of fucked, but let’s try to invade Ripper’s base to get the recall code, and at the same time we’ll just tell the Russians what’s going on so they can shoot down the bomber planes.” That way, [hopefully] no one gets nuked. Just a few hundred people get killed instead of millions.
So he calls the Russian premier, who is drunk [LOL], and tells him what’s going on. It’s such a funny phone call. Sellers is a fuckin genius. He mixes the small talk, friendly phone call etiquette bullshit with the extremely serious issue of nuclear war. It’s so funny. “Of course I like to speak with you! Of course I like to say ‘hello!’” And arguing about who’s more sorry for the situation. The world hangs in the balance! Yet they get into this weird etiquette game. I love it. Then the Russian ambassador learns about their doomsday machine, which is the ultimate nuclear weapon that will destroy all human and animal life if it is triggered. And it’s triggered by an attack.
The Russian doomsday machine is the embodiment of the ‘mutually assured destruction’ argument of nuclear weapons. The idea is that if we [insert nuclear armed country] use nukes, then they [insert enemy] will too, and we’ll all fuckin die, so we better not use nukes. But it requires everyone to play along. Everyone has to agree with it.
Okay, I think that some type of nuclear holocaust is inevitable. If it does happen, it will obviously be very bad, and probably the worst event in human history. Probably shouldn’t be thinking about this, very stressful, not good for having clear skin, which is really important in history, for me to have clear skin. So, we have enough nuclear bombs to commit a kind of species-suicide, a specicide, and homo sapiens will go extinct. But I feel like that would only happen if there was a specific plan to do that. I feel like it’s more likely that great powers would nuke each other, and then maybe, if there was some functionality remaining in our systems, they’d nuke some of each other’s allies and strategic cities or whatever. It would be horrible, like I just said, the worst thing ever, but I just feel like they wouldn’t nuke, like, northern Canada, or Easter Island, or some other remote places. I mean, I don’t know everything about nuclear bombs and their fallout and their effect on the planet as a whole, but I feel like we wouldn’t wipe out every single human unless we only wanted to do that, and I feel like we would only use nuclear weapons against each other in some kind of direct war of nations, not as a suicide mission.
ANYWAY, I paused the movie to think about all of this. And I think about how we sometimes will discuss who the most important people in human history are. It’s people like Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Isaac Newton, and so on. You’ll often see Johannes Gutenberg high up on those lists. Why is that? Well, the production and distribution of texts has been extremely important in history, and it goes back to him inventing the printing press. But we don’t still use his press to make books, and Gutenberg didn’t actually produce and distribute all the texts that came after him. But he’s just the guy who’s kind of the originator, and what came after was super important. Depending on what happens in the next century or two, we may end up with some people from the 20th century being considered a lot more important than how we consider them now. Such as, let’s say, Robert Oppenheimer!
If 90% or 99% of people get killed in a nuclear war, then the people who survive may look back in history and see Oppenheimer as the most important person in history cause he’s kind of the originator, in some ways, of that ultimate destruction.
Okay, back to the movie. There’s this scene where Ripper has his arm around Mandrake, talking about fluoridation of water. And Mandrake is panicking. He’s like, ‘what the fuck is happening? The world’s about to end, and I’m here listening to this batshit crazy American. Then Ripper gets up and he’s like, ‘help me fire this machine gun!’ and he says “In the name of her majesty and the continental congress!” and then he says “the red coats are coming!” Great lines cause Mandrake is British, and Ripper’s mind is just like, ‘uh, British… what do I know about Britain?’ and he just jumps to throwing out random words from the American Revolutionary War, which, you know, was fought against Britain! Makes no fucking sense!
Here’s another thing that doesn’t make sense [to me]: eventually Ripper feels defeated that his soldiers surrendered, and he’s scared of being tortured for the code, so he shoots himself to death. Then Mandrake stumbles across a scrap of paper that Ripper has written and drawn on. And it’s these repeating phrases of “Peace on Earth,” and “Purity of Essence.” Both phrases are POE, but the recall code prefix is OPE. So, it’s like, it kind of makes sense, but why not just write the script that the code is POE? Like if he wanted to have the code be related to these phrases, he would do it, he wouldn’t make it slightly off, or he’d just pick random letters. I never really got it. It’d make more sense if it was “Peace on Earth,” and “Of Pure Essence,” so it could be either POE or OPE.
Anyway, since the President told the Russians about the planes and their targets, the Russians attacked. Slim Pickens’ plane gets hit, but it doesn’t go down. However, the hit damaged their CRM 114, the device that allows them to receive the recall code. So they’re the one plane that is neither recalled nor destroyed. They think they’re doing this heroic thing of retaliating against the Russians, when in actuality they’re dooming the whole world. A big problem with war is that soldiers follow orders, even if the orders are horrible.
There’s another funny scene when Mandrake is trying to get the code prefix to the President, but he gets all hung up with the telephone operator. He’s trying to get enough coins, he’s trying to change the type of call to “station-to-station,” which I don’t really understand, but it’s still funny. The etiquette game in the face of nuclear holocaust. I do remember seeing commercials for “collect calls” when I was a kid, though. CALL-ATT, with Carrot Top. And Mandrake yells at the other guy to shoot the Coca-Cola machine for some extra change, which he initially refuses for being private property. Another really funny scene.
So there’s one plane left, and their fuel is dropping rapidly due to the fact that the plane was damaged from a Russian attack. So they have to abandon their primary and secondary targets [that the Russians know about] and go for a new target [that the Russians don’t know about]. As they’re getting close, they realize that the hatch or door or whatever, the thing that opens up to release the bomb, that thing is broken, so slim pickens goes down there to try to open it manually. The Johnny Comes Marching Home music really helps build the tension. Kubrick made some good choices of music in his movies. Oh yeah, Slim Pickens goes down to open the door, and it opens and drops the bomb while he’s sitting on the bomb. He drops a long, long way to his death while waving his cowboy hat and screaming “Yahoo!” again and again like a crazy cowboy. One of the most iconic scenes in movie history. It’s great.
Once that happens, everyone in the war room realizes they’re completely fucked, but Dr. Strangelove is like, ‘hey, why don’t we set up a little society in our really deep mine shafts and ride out the nuclear winter?’ and they’re all like, ‘yeah, that sounds okay, especially cause we’ll have to bring a whole bunch of women to repopulate the Earth.’ Of course Strangelove throws in his eugenicist ideas into the equation, that the women should be selected for certain qualities. Then Turgidson, even in the face of 99.999% of humans about to be killed, still is talking about the fucking Cold War! He’s still a war hawk, talking about a ‘mine shaft gap.’ I guess that’s kind of the main point of the movie, the lunacy of the Cold War. Even the Russian ambassador secretly takes a picture of the big board. Then we get a beautiful montage of nuclear blasts, set to Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again.
It’s one of the best movies ever made, in my opinion. To me, it has the same vibe as a Kurt Vonnegut novel. If Vonnegut was a filmmaker, I think he’d make a movie like this. But he wasn’t, and Kubrick made this movie. It’s funny, it’s dark, it’s a brutally cutting satire. I love it. But I will say this: I did not learn to stop worrying.
Lefty Forrester 