This theme has been expounded on quite well in many places. I would suggest Kubrick: Inside A Filmmakers Maze (Thomas Allen Nelson), Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis (Falsetto) and the recent Stanley Kubrick’s Archives just released in a very reasonably priced edition for starters. Also wonderful articles are availabe online at http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/
Happy hunting : ) I can read analysis of Kubrick’s films all day!
Much obliged!
WO: Great and hilarious observations – bravo! It is one of my favourite films, a film I go back to again and again. I have always wondered what that “purity of bodily essence” thing that Ripper goes on obsessively was all about – so maybe you have nailed it. I will look up those other references, too JS. This film never ceases to amaze me and I can’t get enough of talk about it either. Maybe the whole bravado performance by George C. Scott as Buck Turgidson (his surname proves your point WO) just emphasizes the whole stupid male power that is really powerless theme. Love the scene where Scott is descrbing how the B-52s (still being used to bomb targets in Afghanistan today!) can avoid detection sweeping low over the vista, and then realizing with a shock that this might doom the whole fail-safe system. Every scene is golden. Where is this level of critical satire today when the world is in just as deep of a mess – thanks in part to the very things Kubrick/Southern bring out and you have alluded to above? We never seem to learn.
damn, you said a mouthful and you said it well. i always noticed the mascuiline/military absurdities of the arms race, and although i always saw the sex in the film and heard the references, i never quite put the two together as a singular notion. good call!
As with all good satire, the horrible truth is so nearby. (Sterling Hayden’s Gen. Jack E. Ripper was actually an understated portrayal of the cigar smoking Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, the fire-bomber of Tokyo and serious advocate of taking out the Soviet Union in a massive first strike, who was, only a few years before the movie went into production, still commanding our nuclear armed B-52s as they flew up to the Russian border on a daily basis.) And the comic acting of George C. Scott of course — a surprising physical performance that no one could have expected from him.
But then Strangelove simply won’t go away, keeps reappearing before us, most recently sighted on Obama’s inauguration day in the guise of Dick Cheney, darting about in that wheelchair, lifting an arm into the air as if involuntarily, stranger than fiction.
Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.
-Vladimir Nabokov’s dismissal of Freud and his theories.
Strangelove, among other things, is to me a similar expression – to show the limits of those theories by drawing them out to absurd extremes, in a very specific setting. I guess we just substitute “military” for “mental” and we have the cold war, in a nutshell.
It is my absolute favorite film.
I forgot one more SK book that is a Must Read. Its just called Kubrick and its written by Michael Ciment. Wonderful! Simply Wonderful!
Some of the procedures on the B-52 seem to be following what they might have done in actuality . Does anyone know about the B-52 procedures from then ?
How would anyone throw Dick Cheney into the conversation ? Get over it MMOORE !
I have talked to B-52 pilots who have told me that before rocket warheads replaced this that they had at any one time 300 B-52’s circling the Northern artic regions locked and loaded with nukes ready to roll .
Walt Ostrander
On this my seventh or eighth viewing of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, I took note of a particular phrase that’s always lent itself to both satirical humor and painful seriousness: “All’s fair in Love and War.” From the first shot of a massive aeronautical phallic symbol making mile-high love to another plane via refueling apparatus, to the absurd ramblings of “precious bodily fluids” from General Ripper, the paradox of love and war is ripe throughout the film. Falling back to a foundation based on Freud’s libido and Schopenhauer’s Will, the paradox of the Cold War has never been so hilariously and rightly put to celluloid. The ardent, masculine military officials refuse to budge on superfluous matters, constantly concerned with the imaginary boundaries of one-upmanship. Mine shaft gaps! Apology gaps! Doomsday gaps! This satirical portrait of the arms race is so frightening in its ridiculous perpetuity that Kubrick’s only method of ending the film was to detonate the damn thing in a sweaty, sexual rodeo of a climax. In one particular scene, General Ripper mentions that immediately following the act of sex he felt a “loss of essence,” or a profound emptiness. This phrase came back to the front of my mind immediately during the final scenes of bombs detonating to the tune of “We’ll Meet Again.” There are undoubtedly strong themes of masculine sexuality, the paradox of the will in man’s desire to both survive and have sex, and a hint of the dogma behind Nazi doctrines regarding “purity” in the obviously impure race of humanity. Did Kubrick intentionally mean to link this era of one-upmanship between the US and Russia to the masculine will? If so, did he mean to do so in such a way that suggests love and war are undoubtedly linked in their absurd reality?
Most likely.