Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is one of the biggest American classics in the movie industry and one of the famous comedies ever made in the USA. It has many profound philosophical ideas and thoughts, which became popular. In this movie, Stanley Kubrick, known for directing the Shining and A Clockwork Orange, criticizes militarism using satire masterfully. The concepts of uncertainty, communication, and risk play an important role and connect all of the work together.
Political and Historical Context
Dr. Strangelove is based on Red Alert, a 1958 novel about nuclear war by Peter George. Kubrick bought the rights to film this book and started to work on the script. Originally the movie was planned as a drama, but then in 1962, the world faced the Cuban missile crisis, an agitated diplomatic, political, and military moment in the relationship between USA and USSR. The background of this oncoming conflict was that the US placed medium-range missiles in Turkey. This way American government was able to attack Moscow. In reply USSR placed its missiles on Cuba, to have the ability to fire back if necessary. The cold war at the time was as relevant as never before, and the world was close to the war. Everything looked and felt exaggerated, that is why Kubrick decided to use satire and portray the Red Alert novel as a farce. As Major “King” Kong said: “Well boys, we’ve got three engines out, we’ve got more holes in us than a horse trader’s mule… But we’ve got one thing on those Ruskies” (1964). Every character glorifies war and military forces. Even when Kong is falling with a bomb and he is going to die, he is glad. Everything in the movie leads the viewer to a moment when drama becomes absolutely absurd.
Doomsday Machine
There are objectively no protagonists in Dr. Strangelove. Everything that’s going on happens only between politics and their subordinates. The director satirically shows the viewer the rooms where everything takes place. The main control room looks especially caricatured; it feels like the characters got together to play games, but not to deal with a global international issue. However, the main character in this movie is Dr. Strangelove himself, an ex-Nazi scientist sitting in a wheelchair. In this film, the concepts of communication, risk and uncertainty are expressed through the main idea – the creation of a doomsday machine.
In this case, the risk is embodied as a red button system, according to which any country can destroy the planet. Communication occurs through humorous techniques such as satire, irony and sarcasm. Finally, uncertainty is based on the idea that there are no winners or doomsday beneficiaries. In other words, there is a feeling of dissatisfaction both from the whole idea, and from the project being developed in particular. One of the characters, General “Buck” Turgidson, said that he wishes they “had one of those Doomsday Machines” (Kubrick, 1964), even though that means total destruction of everything they know. That shows strictly how meaningless and absurd was the cold war mindset.
Uncertainty, Communication, and Risk
The concept of uncertainty takes place in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. There are two ways of nuclear treatment – to tell or not to tell the world and especially an opponent, about the doomsday machine. But deterrence only works if the opponent knows. Even Dr. Strangelove himself said: “The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret” (1964, 00:44:56). The problem of risk is that if one party attacks, another one will respond. All of these problems are closely connected because even just having nuclear missiles is risky. It is uncertain because you never know what to expect from other countries and communication is important to discover. That is why the concepts of uncertainty, communication, and risk are connected in this movie.
Thomas Schelling’s Ideas in Dr. Strangelove
Thomas Crombie Schelling was an American scientist, Nobel Prize Laureate, and a professor of nuclear strategy, national security, and foreign policy. In his works, Schelling argued that the worst danger to the world was not missiles, but the defense systems, which allowed one of the parties to think they could survive an atomic war (Schelling, 1960). He is the author of doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction that was ridiculed in the film by Kubrick. Kubrick even asked Schelling to be his consultant while working on the movie Dr. Strangelove. He helped to prevent World War III using his works. Being engaged in economics in the administration of President Truman, who ruled the country in the postwar years, Schelling became interested in the invented nuclear weapons and their impact on the balance in the world, the complex negotiations between the USA and USSR in particular.
His most famous book, The Strategy of conflict, was written in 1960 and analyzed nuclear diplomacy in terms of game theory. Professor Schelling said in this book that “if our interest is the study of actual behavior, the results we reach may prove to be a good approximation of reality or a caricature” (1960, p. 4). The caricature is something Kubrick did in his movie Dr. Strangelove, portraying cliché but so close to truth characters. The director used Schelling’s ideas a lot in this film.
Conclusion
The movie Dr. Strangelove is much more complicated than it seems. Every character is far from the down-to-earth mindset; they are brutal, cold-hearted, and selfish. In the film, Kubrick S. shows viewers how sarcastic and absurd our world eventually becomes. Using satire, the director demonstrates the global international problem of the Cold war as something funny and farce, even though the conflict was relevant at the time.
References
Kubrick S. (1964). Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb [Film]. Hawk Films.
Schelling T. C. (1960). The Strategy of conflict. Harvard University Press.