Dr. Strangelove

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When watching Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, it’s easy to assume that it is just a silly comedy about nuclear annihilation, and for many years, that’s how I interpreted it. This stance confused me, especially considering that of the rest of Kubrick’s body of work, I was only particularly familiar with A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Upon viewing Dr. Strangelovewith a critical eye to technique, however, I feel that it belongs in the upper echelon of Kubrick’s work.

The lighting of the film was the first thing that really struck me this time around. The very first time we see General Ripper (Jack D. Ripper, one of the many joke names in the film), he is in his office, enveloped by darkness, and he is on the phone with Mandrake, who is in what appears to be the brightest room in the whole base. Mandrake is called into Ripper’s office while the base is locked down, and he turns off the lights in that room to move to Ripper’s lair. While there, Mandrake is still lit by an overhead light while Ripper is not, until the gunfire outside destroys the only light left in the room.

The score particularly intrigued me as well. During most of the film, the score seems to move very organically from moment to moment, not particularly anything special, but not bad. Whenever “’Pappy’ Kong’s Flying Circus” (Stillman 491) is onscreen, the music is an orchestrated version of what I have only heard as a children’s song: “The Ants Go Marching” (Not to be confused with Dave Matthew’s song “Ants Marching”). The use of “The Ants Go Marching” implies the blind following of orders that is present in this plane as the crew marches on deliberately toward the beginning of a “Mutual Assured Destruction” (Stillman 492).

The other element that stuck out to me on this viewing was the cinematography of the film. Kubrick often employs long takes in which the camera does not move at all. It sticks with two or three characters in a medium shot and lets the humor of the dialogue carry the scene. For instance, when Gen. Ripper sits almost obscenely close to Mandrake and goes over the Communist plot to poison our essential “fluids” with fluoridation, the camera stays put for at least a minute.

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Alternately, whenever the men in the war room are talking, the camera often cuts to a high angle shot of the entire table, giving the sense of a massive, echo-y room full of men who are almost entirely disconnected with the matter at hand. I also didn’t notice that apparently the war room table is covered with the green felt to suggest a casino table, with the designer suggesting “‘It should be like a poker table: there’s the president, the generals and the Russian ambassador playing a game of poker for the fate of the world’” (Stillman 494).

The only part of the film that still wildly dissatisfies me is the very end of the film when Strangelove stands up, proclaiming “Mein Führer! I can walk!” (Kubrick). I just don’t really know what Kubrick is trying to say with Strangelove being able to stand up suddenly.

Works Cited

Kubrick, Stanley, dir. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. 1964. Columbia Pictures, 2009.

Stillman, Grant, “Two of the MADdest Scientists.” Film History. 20 (2008): 487-500. Web. 24 Aug 2009.