I think about the Soviets gaining control of our "precious bodily fluids" all the time. One of the best comedies ever made.
I also remember hearing that Kurbrick very intentionally put in a ton of sexual metaphors throughout the entire movie - a lot of the scenes and lines (especially the opening one refueling the bomber) change when you view it from that perspective!
"Based on the findings of the report, my conclusion was that this idea was not a practical deterrent for reasons which at this moment must be all too obvious."
Dr Strangelove himself seems to be the perfect prototype for a modern tech entrepreneur: The type of mad techno bro who relishes the opportunity to apply his hair-brained schemes to fix real world problems. The worse things get the more he bubbles with excitement and throws out outlandish solutions.
Probably the greatest satire put to film. It's hard not to rank this among Kubrick's best, although, honestly, that's due in part to the intense subject. Great retrospective in the OP - I've always loved that transformation in production, where Stanley realized that the thriller could only ever be filmed as perfect pitch-black comedy. Maybe a little telling on Kubrick's character, but what a fantastic decision.
Every war creates in its climax the perfect weapon for the fighting of that war just past. In World War II, the denouement of the western colonialist systems, exploitation was so perfected that victory became genocide. So, with brutal logic, the war created the perfect weapon for eliminating whole peoples, along with their land, their water, their pets[1], etc. In the 1960s, America had this perfected weapon of WW2, but had not experienced directly the circumstances of total war that had brought it about, and not gained the painful wisdom accumulated[2]. Strangelove is in part a story of medieval generals jousting with dynamite strapped to the tips of their lances. And, as it turns out, that's pretty funny.
[1] Hat tip to Oliver Reed's shambling Vulcan in Gilliam's Munchausen here.
[2] And had gained a cancerous homunculus in the form of Strangelove himself, the last vestige of colonialism's final form.
"A guy could have a good time in ~~Dallas~~Vegas with all that stuff." (Had to be ADR'd to "Vegas" since the Kennedy assassination was too recent to stick with Kong's preferred "Dallas".)
Some observations I've made about the film and haven't seen anyone else make:
* "Strangelove" = "Strangle" + "Glove"
* In many war room scenes, if you squint, the table looks like a mushroom cloud. The circular light above the table is the "halo" of the mushroom cloud.
* When Mandrake first learns what General Ripper is up to, at one point the camera angle makes it look like Mandrake is a tiny doll of a man standing on General Ripper's desk.
* The film features many nested levels of self-destruct systems interfering with each other. The Doomsday Device, the decision to help the USSR shoot down the bombers, even the bomber's own self-destruct system (which ironically blows itself up, not the plane, and in the process destroys the decoder system so the crew can't receive the recall code). For example, if the president hadn't helped the USSR attack the bombers, then said decoder wouldn't have been destroyed, and Armageddon would've been avoided.
* The closing scenes feature real atomic blast footage, some with ships nearby. Some analysts incorrectly think this is a continuity error, as the Doomsday Device was landlocked. But in fact it's perfectly consistent with the last lines of dialog: even post-Doomsday Device, mankind cannot even get along to escape into the mineshafts peacefully, instead entering a full-scale nuclear conflict despite the futility of it all.
Something I learned recently is that the film was not exactly singular:
Failsafe - a different movie about a Nuclear Incident was being developed at the same time. Stanley Kubrick and Columbia sued them reached a settlement to delay the release of the more serious movie starting Henry Fonda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail_Safe_(1964_film)#Lawsuit
For the "Dr Strangelove" fans that haven't seen "Failsafe" I recommend watching it and "Seven Days in May". IMHO Larry Hagman provides a compelling performance as Henry Fonda's translator trying to get the translation and nuances of emotion from the Soviet premier.
All three were released in 1964 and provide different takes on the anxieties of the era. We used to joke a lot about having to hide under our desks (lived in the DC suburbs) during the air raid drills, lot of good that would do when the nukes dropped!
I can recommend The War Game[0] in the same genre/time but involving the UK:
"The War Game is a 1966 British pseudo-documentary film that depicts a nuclear war and its aftermath. Written, directed and produced by Peter Watkins for the BBC, it caused dismay within the BBC and also within government, and was subsequently withdrawn before the provisional screening date of 6 October 1965. The corporation said that "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting. It will, however, be shown to invited audiences..."
The film eventually premiered at the National Film Theatre in London, on 13 April 1966, where it ran until 3 May. It was then shown abroad at several film festivals, including the Venice one where it won the Special Prize. It also won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1967.
The film was eventually televised in Great Britain on 31 July 1985, during the week before the fortieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the day before a repeat screening of Threads."
To me, "Don't Look Up" is a sequel to "Dr Strangelove" (obviously, not nearly as iconic, but still).
The core parts are the same: the looming existential danger of the time and the irresponsibility of the most influential people, making things from bad to worse.
Big difference is that the character of the President is very competent and does everything right as the situtation develops. He is the only character with common sense, alongside the British officer. The failures of the system are beyond his control.
The text implies that the elected officials act in the people's interests, and that they are actually good at their jobs -- but that it isn't enough to go against the military. Don't Look Up presents an even bleaker perspective IMO.
One of the strange things is that the Soviets had eventually developed something similar as described in the movie. It was as automated as in the movie but the general idea is the same
There is an interesting point in the movie that the idea was to always inform the opponent about it, so they don't even dare strike first. But the system was kept secret, at least officially, for many years. One of the designers explained that the other purpose of the system was to protect against hot-headed generals who, on short notice or from a faulty warning signal, may panic and launch an attack. In that case it wasn't necessary to advertise the system.
My idea is that the opponent (US) also knew about it from intelligence channels, and the Soviet knew that US knew, and that was enough. There was no point in officially making it public.
The US invested in an airborne command center so that even in the event of a catastrophic sneak attack someone would still be alive to order a retaliation strike.
It is possible to combine the substance of one character with the flavor of another. Edward Teller was a kind of "rationally mad" guy, and political, while von Braun was more of an ethically flexible engineer ("just let me build rockets") and, of course, German.
Edward Teller wasn't 'rationally mad', it was von Neumann who was very eager to drop atomic bombs on the Soviet Union. Besides picturing Edward Teller who actually came from a Jewish family and fled Germany when the Nazis came to power as a devout Nazi is not funny and doesn't even make any sense.
By coincidence, I just watched this again last week and it still holds up.
I think it's interesting that Mutually Assured Destruction--which Kubrick thought "insane"--turned out to be a stable state in a game-theory sense. In fact, when Reagan tried to move away from MAD by building anti-missile defense, most analysts thought it would be MORE dangerous: If the US were to make Russian missiles "impotent and obsolete" then the Soviets would be tempted to use them or lose them. Good thing it failed.
And if anti-nuclear activists had succeeded in ridding the world of nuclear weapons, we'd probably be sending US Marines to Ukraine, sparking another world war.
Maybe it's only the continuation of MAD that kept the world safe. That's surely the kind of absurd irony that Kubrick would have approved of.
I think most people consider it apocryphal - as is so often the way with these things. Its rhetorical force certainly doesn’t depend on intimate historical knowledge of competing political ideologies.
I could not disagree more, and there are a great many experts and practitioners in this space that would agree with me. The history of the cold war is terrifying. MAD is incredibly flawed, but it stuck around because nobody could come up with a better option that could actually get adopted. A system that relies on near-perfect alert systems and requires leaders to always make calm rational decisions about the fate of the world with limited information and only minutes to decide is not a stable system.
SDI wasn't an isolated case, there were a number of times when either the US or Soviets grew concerned about the other sides progress and seriously considered a preemptive nuclear strike. There will be more of these debates in the future and it only takes one misstep to blow up the world.
If nukes had somehow been eliminated before 2022 Putin would almost certainly have not invaded Ukraine. NATO's conventional forces absolutely dwarf Russia's, but the threat of nuclear escalation has kept western support much more limited than it might otherwise have been. Putin is a lot of things, but he's not suicidal about risk.
We're currently heading towards a world even less stable than the cold war. Back then there were only two major players. China is currently ramping up their nuclear forces, nuclear cooperation is breaking down with Russia, and our relations are becoming increasingly antagonistic with both countries. On top of that we have rogue actors like North Korea and possibly Iran in the near future.
For folks interested in a this topic I highly recommend the Arms Control Wonk podcast. For anyone who needs more existential dread in their life, the book Command and Control by Schlosser has a great history of nuclear weapons and strategy.
The point about stable systems, from a game-theory perspective, is that they are hard to change. Any change ends up being worse. That's why MAD has lasted so long and why I called it "stable". I think you agree with me on that.
I went too far in a counterfactual Ukraine war without MAD. If we had eliminated nuclear weapons, history would be so different that there's no way a similar Ukraine war would have happened. I agree with you about that.
But I don't think it's too controversial to say that MAD prevented one or more conventional wars.
Would a world without nukes be a safer world? Maybe. If nuclear weapons get used again and kill millions, then clearly it was a bad bet. But if we get to 2045--100 years after Hiroshima--without a nuclear exchange, then maybe MAD was the worst idea except for all the others.
We're not "safe". There are still hundreds of warheads on 'launch on warning' alert. Trillions are being spent to create a new generation of nuclear weapons & delivery systems.
74 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadFor anyone that hasn't seen it, it really is a fantastic dark comedy.
I also remember hearing that Kurbrick very intentionally put in a ton of sexual metaphors throughout the entire movie - a lot of the scenes and lines (especially the opening one refueling the bomber) change when you view it from that perspective!
-President Merkin Muffley; a merkin is a pubic wig, and muff is a synonym for pubic hair.
-General Buck Turgidson; Buck is a name for a male deer/horned animal, and turgid means ‘erect’.
-Russian Ambassador Alexei de Sadeski; de Sadeski is referencing the Marquis de Sade.
Obviously the only valid response is to build the humanity murdering robots first. We must not allow the gap to form.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygon_(film)
https://slate.com/culture/2017/12/the-doomsday-machine-danie...
A classic film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K10pdj5YOy0
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eggcorn
Every war creates in its climax the perfect weapon for the fighting of that war just past. In World War II, the denouement of the western colonialist systems, exploitation was so perfected that victory became genocide. So, with brutal logic, the war created the perfect weapon for eliminating whole peoples, along with their land, their water, their pets[1], etc. In the 1960s, America had this perfected weapon of WW2, but had not experienced directly the circumstances of total war that had brought it about, and not gained the painful wisdom accumulated[2]. Strangelove is in part a story of medieval generals jousting with dynamite strapped to the tips of their lances. And, as it turns out, that's pretty funny.
[1] Hat tip to Oliver Reed's shambling Vulcan in Gilliam's Munchausen here.
[2] And had gained a cancerous homunculus in the form of Strangelove himself, the last vestige of colonialism's final form.
* "Strangelove" = "Strangle" + "Glove"
* In many war room scenes, if you squint, the table looks like a mushroom cloud. The circular light above the table is the "halo" of the mushroom cloud.
* When Mandrake first learns what General Ripper is up to, at one point the camera angle makes it look like Mandrake is a tiny doll of a man standing on General Ripper's desk.
* The film features many nested levels of self-destruct systems interfering with each other. The Doomsday Device, the decision to help the USSR shoot down the bombers, even the bomber's own self-destruct system (which ironically blows itself up, not the plane, and in the process destroys the decoder system so the crew can't receive the recall code). For example, if the president hadn't helped the USSR attack the bombers, then said decoder wouldn't have been destroyed, and Armageddon would've been avoided.
* The closing scenes feature real atomic blast footage, some with ships nearby. Some analysts incorrectly think this is a continuity error, as the Doomsday Device was landlocked. But in fact it's perfectly consistent with the last lines of dialog: even post-Doomsday Device, mankind cannot even get along to escape into the mineshafts peacefully, instead entering a full-scale nuclear conflict despite the futility of it all.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRM114_(program)
[1] https://crm114.sourceforge.net/
All three were released in 1964 and provide different takes on the anxieties of the era. We used to joke a lot about having to hide under our desks (lived in the DC suburbs) during the air raid drills, lot of good that would do when the nukes dropped!
"The War Game is a 1966 British pseudo-documentary film that depicts a nuclear war and its aftermath. Written, directed and produced by Peter Watkins for the BBC, it caused dismay within the BBC and also within government, and was subsequently withdrawn before the provisional screening date of 6 October 1965. The corporation said that "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting. It will, however, be shown to invited audiences..."
The film eventually premiered at the National Film Theatre in London, on 13 April 1966, where it ran until 3 May. It was then shown abroad at several film festivals, including the Venice one where it won the Special Prize. It also won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1967.
The film was eventually televised in Great Britain on 31 July 1985, during the week before the fortieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the day before a repeat screening of Threads."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game
The core parts are the same: the looming existential danger of the time and the irresponsibility of the most influential people, making things from bad to worse.
The text implies that the elected officials act in the people's interests, and that they are actually good at their jobs -- but that it isn't enough to go against the military. Don't Look Up presents an even bleaker perspective IMO.
https://www.criterion.com/films/28822-dr-strangelove-or-how-...
https://criterion-production.s3.amazonaws.com/carousel-files...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand also called Perimeter (Периметр).
There is an interesting point in the movie that the idea was to always inform the opponent about it, so they don't even dare strike first. But the system was kept secret, at least officially, for many years. One of the designers explained that the other purpose of the system was to protect against hot-headed generals who, on short notice or from a faulty warning signal, may panic and launch an attack. In that case it wasn't necessary to advertise the system.
My idea is that the opponent (US) also knew about it from intelligence channels, and the Soviet knew that US knew, and that was enough. There was no point in officially making it public.
A program for a replacement is in-progress:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivable_Airborne_Operations...
Russia also has an airborne command plane:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilyushin_Il-80
Once ze rockets are up, who cares where zey come down…
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wernher-von-braun/
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/29/dr-strangelove-...
I think it's interesting that Mutually Assured Destruction--which Kubrick thought "insane"--turned out to be a stable state in a game-theory sense. In fact, when Reagan tried to move away from MAD by building anti-missile defense, most analysts thought it would be MORE dangerous: If the US were to make Russian missiles "impotent and obsolete" then the Soviets would be tempted to use them or lose them. Good thing it failed.
And if anti-nuclear activists had succeeded in ridding the world of nuclear weapons, we'd probably be sending US Marines to Ukraine, sparking another world war.
Maybe it's only the continuation of MAD that kept the world safe. That's surely the kind of absurd irony that Kubrick would have approved of.
It did, however, remind me of Zhou Enlai’s quip when asked about the impact of the French Revolution: “Too early to say.”
SDI wasn't an isolated case, there were a number of times when either the US or Soviets grew concerned about the other sides progress and seriously considered a preemptive nuclear strike. There will be more of these debates in the future and it only takes one misstep to blow up the world.
If nukes had somehow been eliminated before 2022 Putin would almost certainly have not invaded Ukraine. NATO's conventional forces absolutely dwarf Russia's, but the threat of nuclear escalation has kept western support much more limited than it might otherwise have been. Putin is a lot of things, but he's not suicidal about risk.
We're currently heading towards a world even less stable than the cold war. Back then there were only two major players. China is currently ramping up their nuclear forces, nuclear cooperation is breaking down with Russia, and our relations are becoming increasingly antagonistic with both countries. On top of that we have rogue actors like North Korea and possibly Iran in the near future.
For folks interested in a this topic I highly recommend the Arms Control Wonk podcast. For anyone who needs more existential dread in their life, the book Command and Control by Schlosser has a great history of nuclear weapons and strategy.
I went too far in a counterfactual Ukraine war without MAD. If we had eliminated nuclear weapons, history would be so different that there's no way a similar Ukraine war would have happened. I agree with you about that.
But I don't think it's too controversial to say that MAD prevented one or more conventional wars.
Would a world without nukes be a safer world? Maybe. If nuclear weapons get used again and kill millions, then clearly it was a bad bet. But if we get to 2045--100 years after Hiroshima--without a nuclear exchange, then maybe MAD was the worst idea except for all the others.
We're not "safe". There are still hundreds of warheads on 'launch on warning' alert. Trillions are being spent to create a new generation of nuclear weapons & delivery systems.