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Cinema Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to stop avoiding Stanley Kubrick and love Peter Sellers
Cinema Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to stop avoiding Stanley Kubrick and love Peter Sellers
Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to stop avoiding Stanley Kubrick and love Peter Sellers |
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| Written by April Yorke |
| Monday, 06 April 2009 19:00 |
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It would be an exaggeration to say that I hate Stanley Kubrick’s films. More accurate would be that I just don’t get them. Ever. I don’t get the appeal, don’t get why everyone thinks he’s a genius, don’t get why so many of my fellow high school students used A Clockwork Orange in their English class independent studies. My intensely neutral relationship with Kubrick began in grade six when Mrs. Swanstrom* decided to screen 2001: A Space Odyssey to cap off our space unit. While I’ve come to appreciate certain aspects of the movie (particularly the non-diegetic musical choices Kubrick made after he rejected Alex North’s score), all I really remember about it is how boring I found it. That sequence with monkey-men goes on forever. They learn to use a tool, it leads to murder, who cares? You can get the same thing from The Gods Must be Crazy, and that movie rules. 
© Hawk Films
How did this ambivalence happen? I don’t know exactly. I do know that there’s something wrong with any true fan of cinema avoiding a celebrated director’s entire oeuvre for no good reason, so now, ten years after Kubrick’s death and 45 years after the film’s release, I’m going to do this thing. I am going to get up off my couch and go press play (my remote’s busted again, but that’s another story. Stupid Memorex). We’re going to do this together. The Rough Guide to Cult Movies assures me that the more often I watch Dr. Strangelove, the more I’ll get out of it. For the first time, I’m starting to see how that’s possible. When the movie premiered in January 1964, the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK’s conspiracy-tinged assassination were fresh in viewers’ minds. Cold War paranoia was running high. While the jet black satire has lost some of its bite in the years since the wall fell and the USSR crumbled, there are still days when the world seems on the brink of one catastrophe or another. Being There was my introduction to Peter Sellers (confession: another classic I’m not sure I ‘get’), and, while I still don’t understand exactly why he’s playing three characters in Dr. Strangelove (just because he’s hilarious?), President Merkin Muffley is by far my favourite of his iterations here. The lone voice of reason in an increasingly ridiculous situation, his tendency toward politeness (“Gentleman, I’ve never seen such behaviour! This is the War Room!”) is as ridiculous as it is hilarious. I had my first genuine belly laugh during his initial call with Dmitri, the Russian Premier:
It kills me that he spends more time trying to maintain his cordial relationship with Dmitri than warning him of impending disaster. It’s an exemplary moment that illustrates the exact nexus of the comedy and deep seated fears that must have inspired Peter George’s novel Red Alert and Kubrick’s screenplay. Though at first blush it seems the film’s comedy stems from the fear that one man could set off a cataclysmic chain of events that would lead to nuclear winter (not that General Ripper’s belief that the fluoridation of water is a vast Communist conspiracy responsible for his sexual dysfunction isn’t funny and creepy), the comedy – and the horror – actually arises from the notion that a group of people whose priorities are seriously out of whack are the ones in charge of humanity’s survival. And how did I decide this? “Mr. President, we must not allow a mine shaft gap!” That very line was the laugh out loud moment that inspired my best friend to urge me to see this cocky-eyed wonder, even though she was in the very same class where we first saw 2001. Let’s watch it again, shall we?
Ripper, who set these events in motion, is long gone, the President is taking advice from a Nazi, and ol’ Buck Turgidson is so obsessed with avoiding a mine shaft gap with the Russkies that he misses the very thing he was so initially worried about: the Russian ambassador sneaking off to snap pictures of The Big Board. Kubrick intended for this to lead to a pie fight that would incapacitate the President and leave Strangelove in charge. Perhaps too soon after Kennedy’s assassination, he instead switched to shots of the devastation that the Doomsday machine, and the prevailing attitudes of characters in the movie, could someday wreak. In its own way, the bleak conclusion of Watchmen is a 1980s reflection of the very same fear that drives this movie, the same simple question: is the bomb the only thing that keeps the morons we’ve placed in charge in check? So was it worth getting caught up on this classic? While the movie didn’t do much to change my overall opinion of his oeuvre (I didn’t run right out and rent Full Metal Jacket, after all), I can now say that there is at least one Kubrick movie I will freely sit through. I’ll probably never reach the point where I feel any nostalgia for the director or his work, but it’s a start. Part of what makes any movie a classic is its ability to pick up on the pulse of the people in a particular moment in time and make it universal. The Cold War may be over, but it left a lingering “what if?” that can’t be denied when you sit down with Kubrick’s early masterwork. Perhaps those Rough Guide people didn’t mean that the movie gets funnier every time you watch. Perhaps they meant that it gets more eerie. Other observations while watching:
*I think her first name was Susan if she’s Googling herself. Susan Swanstrom. There you go.
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Comments (2)
I saw Stranglelove and 2001...
...on the big screen the first time I saw them. (Thank you Mayfair!!!) I think the slow pacing, operatic score, and general hypnotic feeling of Kubrick's films really work better in the theatre environment. Even a comedy like Strangelove plays better on the big screen than on some living room TV. |
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