A New Home for Dr. Strangelove

One of my lasting memories of years of cinema going is the image of Slim Pickens yehawing and slapping a hydrogen bomb with his cowboy hat as it plunges to earth. Seems a bit, well, insane, doesn't it? This is, of course, a scene from Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."

His film is a parody and he, like Jonathan Swift, chooses to not be subtle with it. An uber-rational voice does a documentary shtick like those we have so often seen telling us how great technology can be. The clouds part on an artic wasteland to a big band crooning "Try a Little Tenderness." In the mist, two warplanes are coupling for refueling. This is the first of several images suggesting the connectedness of sex, war, and cool technology. Divine technology is everywhere in the first few minutes of the film. It spins, flys, computes and clicks.

On to General Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden) at Burpelson Air Force Base: he of the staccato military voice and granite chiseled features. Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) is a sort of British exchange person. He appears to be the only one who notices anything wrong with General Ripper. The General will only drink grain alcohol and rainwater because he is convinced that fluorination is a Commie plot and thinks there is a vast conspiracy to "sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids." Of women he says "women sense my power and they seek the life essence" adding he refuses to give them his bodily essence. The General appears to be saving all his essence for war. He has initiated what he calls Operation Dropkick: he launched a squadron of planes with hydrogen bombs at Russia. Only he has the code which can call them back. He feels that President Merkin will have no choice but to hurl the rest of the bombs to prevent massive Russian retaliation. Ripper thinks that war is too important to be left to politicians who have "neither time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought."

Only the outsider noticed Ripper's paranoia. Kubrick seems to be implying that there is an institutional and cultural paranoia inherent in the subculture of the military that masks Ripper's obvious insanity. Here a culture's values can make the actions of a single insane individual seem less absurd.

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