Never Seen It, #52 of 200: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I made a list of 200 films and now I'm watching them in alphabetical order, and then somehow finding the will to write something—anything—about them. Puke on Your Birthday is mutually assured destruction.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

1964

I don't really have a whole lot to write about this movie, and at the risk of getting too convoluted, I think we can find something interest in that idea. The idea being that there could be a movie that I don't find much interest in writing about. I feel that way about a lot of these movies (because I'm lazy and/or a bad writer), but with Dr. Strangelove, there was a particularly strong malaise. Why?

Because it definitely wasn't a bad movie. Sure, Pam and I made it about 20 minutes into the film before we were both falling asleep on a Friday night, but I think you can blame that more on a grueling Friday and a general lack of a sleep than the quality of the movie. I watched it by myself at work a few days later, and ended up quite liking it.

One thing I can definitely say was that, had I watched this in high school, I would not have liked it, and mostly wouldn't have "gotten" it. To flesh out last entry's postscript: yes, I remember very clearly a weekend night in high school, at my dear old friend M.S.'s house in Abington, when Dr. Strangelove was queued up on the TV. It was black and white, starts incredibly slowly, and it was decided very shortly thereafter that our night would be better spent sneaking out and meeting some friends. Teenage Joe thought life was too short to waste watching '60s b/w films. 32-year-old Joe thinks differently (though, let's be real, if I still had the option of sneaking out and meeting M.S. at the Abington IHOP at one in the morning instead of watching this movie, I probably would make the same decision).

I also remember at least two specific conversations among my high school friends about Dr. Strangelove. There were some Strangelove fans in the crew I palled around with at La Salle College High School. You should know that I hung out with some smart motherfuckers. I lost track of most of them over the years, but I have no doubt that they are spread out all over the country, moving and shaking and getting shit done in their chosen fields. 

So one theory is that I'm just not as smart, and this is a "smart comedy." You might be required to be on a certain brain wavelength to truly appreciate Dr. Strangelove while you're watching it. I didn't hate this movie—again, I liked it a lot. But it was not the gut-buster that I was made to assume it was by my buddies from back in the day. Dr. Strangelove was funny, but very, very dry.

Along those same lines: maybe you need to be at least partially knowledgeable about the subject that this movie is satirizing. This reminds me that I should probably explain at this point what Dr. Strangelove is actually about. Basically, it's a black comedy about the Cold War, made during the Cold War. Basically, a nutso U.S. general spouts a bunch of proto-QAnon shit and orders the bombers to nuke Russia, while the U.S. President tries in vain to stop them and prevent humanity's total destruction. Hilarity ensues.

It's very possible that a lot of the Cold War era-specific language that Dr. Strangelove was satirizing went over my head. How much do I actually know about the Cold War? Well, let's just say that the first link on the Dr. Strangelove Wikipedia page that I clicked on was the hyperlink for "Cold War." I had to read that first. I know close to nothing now, so imagine how much I knew in high school. As it has been made abundantly clear all over this blog: as a teenager, I knew less than nothing.

So maybe I just didn't want to write about Dr. Strangelove because it would expose some pretty glaring blind spots in my world history education, I dunno. Another possibility is that I was reluctant to write about the idea of "comedy" again. Y'all know how uncomfortable that subject makes me feel. And yet, it might be unavoidable here. Dr. Strangelove is not the first comedy that I've watched for this project, but it was absolutely the only of its specific type of comedy so far. That's pretty interesting, so let's spend a paragraph talking about it—but feel free to skip if you'd rather not hear Joe's thoughts about "comedy" ever again.

Compare Dr. Strangelove to something like Airplane!, or Ace Ventura, or Coneheads. Airplane! mined humor from layering ridiculous punchlines on top of a very serious story (a plane crash disaster), and layering them so thickly that the comedy completely overshadows the ostensible plot. Ace Ventura had a serious story too—I forget, honestly, and I don't have the desire to revisit this movie again, but trust me, it was serious, it had to do with crime or something—but inserted this absurd character into the proceedings. Coneheads actually went the opposite way than Ace—here are absurd characters living in the normal world, but unlike with Ace Ventura, the supporting characters are just going to accept these absurdities and pretend that they are normal. Not that I particularly thought all of these movies were funny—Airplane! was pretty funny, Ace Ventura and Coneheads are mostly trash—but you can see how they are all different styles of comedy.

Dr. Strangelove does something completely different, and presents most of its plot and characters as completely serious. There are some punchlines for sure ("Gentlemen, no fighting! This is a war room!"), but generally, the various characters are acting like real-life Army generals and politicians and pilots would typically act. It is up to the audience to find the absurdity in the realness. When General Buck Turgidson is arguing with the President that they should allow "only" two to three million Americans die in this conflict, it's presented as serious, and I have no doubt that a real Army General has at one point made that argument... and then you step back and you just have to laugh. Is this dude fucking serious?! It's too absurd not to laugh, ya know?

The fact that this film is an adaptation of a book is pretty fascinating too, seeing as how the book—Red Alert—is a very serious thriller about Cold War Theory. To me, that says that the line between comedy and drama is razor-thin, and Dr. Strangelove's ability to play jump rope with that line is pretty admirable. But that requires the audience to be aware of the line at least.

Like, consider Major Kong, the pilot of the bomber that eventually drops the nuke. Pretty ridiculous character, right? He has the propensity to wear a cowboy hat while giving serious motivational speeches to his crew in a thick cowboy accent. The trick to this being funny is that not a single character—not Kong, not his crew, not the generals on the ground trying to call off his mission—find this at all funny. They don't know it's funny, in other words. And it's that juxtaposition, that fact that everyone except the audience is taking this very seriously, that creates the humor. (It actually reminded me of It's Always Sunny in a few ways, and not just the jaunty classical music that played over the credits—the best part about that show is that these are unequivocally moronic people, but they will NEVER be aware of the fact that they are morons.)

It may not seem particularly revolutionary, this type of humor (especially when it's me writing about it), but I get the sense that Dr. Strangelove truly was revolutionary at the time. From what I hear, the Cold War was scary—recall all the fears that caused, say, children to practice hiding under their classroom desks—and here was a movie, right in the thick of all of it, taking the piss out of it completely and totally.

On the one hand, I feel like I would've felt the magnitude of this film's particular humor if I knew a little more about what it was satirizing. On the other hand: how could I ever possibly attempt to take the subject of the Cold War seriously ever again? Because so thoroughly does Dr. Strangelove dismantle the entire idea of it.

So yes, I am impressed, and yes, I did laugh (or at least chuckle), and yes, I appreciate the existence of this film. But I guess I didn't get anything out of this movie that everyone else hasn't already gotten out of it. I am thankful that it finally clicked for me, having known that it never would've clicked for me in 2007, had I committed to watching it then. I also feel like, because of the fact that it took so long to click for me, I have nothing unique to add.

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I just have a couple of other points that I couldn't fit into the short essay above, but I felt like I needed to include in some way, so here we are.

This is another Stanley Kubrick film! This is both essential and nonessential to know. Essential: Kubrick is one of the most important directors in modern cinematic history. Nonessential: Kubrick's films—or at least the ones I am familiar with so far—are so far-ranging and unique that it might not even be worth discussing any particular one in the context of his filmography. Like, is there anything to mine from a comparison between Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange? Besides a discussion about which you like better (for me: Dr. Strangelove) and an appreciation that Kubrick executes his vision with aplomb no matter which universe he is working in, I don't really think there is. Like, I very rarely hear the term "Kubrickian," because, like what could you possibly lump under that umbrella that applies to more than one of his films?

But we'll see about that—Eyes Wide Shut and Full Metal Jacket are just around the corner (and, much later, we'll get to Spartacus and 2001). For now, let's spend just a few words talking about Kubrick's 1957 film Paths of Glory. I feel like, thematically at least, there is at least one thought to be wrung out of its comparison to Dr. Strangelove. I felt a similarity in the way Paths of Glory, to use the phrase again, "takes the piss out of" its subject matter. How can you watch Paths of Glory and still support the war effort? Similarly, how can you watch Dr. Strangelove and still feel like the Cold War was an effort worth making? But Paths of Glory is supremely serious, while Dr. Strangelove is ultimately silly. And I just want to take a moment to appreciate how both films pretty much achieved the same goal through wildly different means.

Moving on. I mentioned Major T.J. "King" Kong already, played by the (wonderfully named) actor Slim Pickens, but here's an interesting tidbit. You know how I said that the humor is derived from the characters not knowing that they are in a comedy? Apparently, Slim Pickens also was not made aware that he was acting in a comedy. Kubrick allegedly told him that this was a serious Cold War drama film. This is kind of genius, actually. Major Kong was funny because he had no fucking clue how funny he was. Any self-awareness that might've peaked through Pickens' performance would've ruined the whole bit.

Pickens is sixth-billed. Top-billed, and rightly so, is Peter Sellers, the only actor to get an Oscar nom for this film. In what is a testament to how skilled of an actor Sellers was or to how much of an ignoramus I am, I had no idea Peter Sellers was playing three roles in this film until after it was over. He played the President, the British exchange officer, and the titular Dr. Strangelove. And I had no fucking clue! I suppose it was easier for this fact to slip by me due to the fact that I am not familiar with Peter Sellers at all (though we will see him again in The Pink Panther, which I'm told is his most famous role). I guess it would be like, I dunno, Jack Black playing three different roles in a 2021 comedy film. I would recognize his mannerisms, regardless of makeup and costuming. Even still... man, I am dumb.

There were plenty of other good performances—George C. Scott almost stole the show just by chewing gum as Buck Turgidson; Keenan Wynn nailed the best punchline of the film; Tracy Reed was very attractive; James Earl Jones' involvement will be very helpful in future games of Six Degrees—but I've probably written enough for one day.

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GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

NEXT TIME: This will be the third time I explain this (and I have no idea if I'm finally gonna get into it in the essay proper next time), but the only reason Dr. Zhivago, Brief Encounter, and The Bridge on the River Kwai are on this list is because of a poorly-aged viral YouTube video I was obsessed with back in 2007. As it turns out, all three are directed by the same guy—David Lean. And as it turns out, the latter two movies were two of the very best films I've seen in this project so far, with Brief Encounter most likely one of my favorite movies ever at this point. So when I say that I'm watching Dr. Zhivago because of a stupid-ass YouTube video from the mid-aughts, I don't mean to undercut the impossibly high expectations I now have for it. Will David Lean ever let me down? Let's find out next time.

(P.S.—oh my god, I just rewatched the video for the first time in a while. The full quote is "She said 'Whatchyu bring?' Dr. Zhivago, Brief Encounter, and The Bridge on the River Kwai. A LEAN NIGHT!" And for the past fourteen years, I've always read that as "lean" as in the opposite of full, i.e. the humor being that these movies were long and artsy and would not, by any means, make for a "lean" night when watched all together. But no... he's referring to the goddamn director. David Lean. Jesus christ I'm an idiot.)