Blind Spot 2016: Dr. Strangelove

For me, Kubrick hits more than he misses. When he misses for me, though, he misses huge. I absolutely despised my experiences with his two films from the 1970s, A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon. Granted, the former I haven't seen since college when I was burnt out by all the college boy praise it got. And the latter I only saw once and simply could not hang with its slow pace and unbearable runtime. It's beautiful, but...just no.

Luckily, Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is right up my alley. A huge Kubrick hit for me. Mr. Kubrick, now on a sort of streak with my recent viewing of his final film, Eyes Wide Shut, the film I honestly believe to be his best, at this point.

Dr. Strangelove is everything I've been led to believe it would be and more. While some of the early build up drags just a tiny bit or my taste, it eventually picked up and never let go. The second and third acts making up most likely the best political satire of all-time. I agree with that sort of hyperbole.

Granted, it's a film I need to see again. I knew that five minutes after I turned it off, even after I went back to re-watch the final scene, a shifty piece of cutting that I'm still not sure I understand. I'll have no problem going back. For one reason. Peter Sellers. His work here is the stuff of legend, and he ended up, as I read, not even playing the fourth character, the Texan fighter pilot played in the final film by Slim Pickens (no complaints there). It is amazing watching him play these characters...

...The terrified RAF Officer Mandrake, essentially kidnapped by Sterling Hayden's delusional paranoid maniac General Jack D. Ripper, who would destroy the world because of water fluoridation. The weakling POTUS Merkin Muffley, ready to give the Russians his first born, much less his own soldiers lives, for the sake of not launching bombs. The Nazi nuclear war advisor, Dr. Strangelove himself, lurking in and out of the shadows, talking out of the side of his mouth, no control of even his limbs.

So, here's Peter Sellers with three of the greatest comedic performances of all-time, and I haven't even gotten to George C. Scott's singly shape-shifting performance as Gen. "Buck" Turgidson. My God! He's so good. Chewing up scenery with his face alone. Then, he speaks. It's just so great.

Kubrick is so on the nose with this movie, it's a wonder it works so well. I mean, the characters' names themselves are so obvious a lesser filmmaker would be burned at the stake for even suggesting making such pointed satire. But what he brings is a confidence. I think that's what people like about Kubrick. He never seems to do anything at any moment but exactly what he wants. In that, we, as movie lovers, get to decide, more easily on our own terms, which ones to love and hate. It doesn't matter that I hate A Clockwork Orange and you love it. It can't be denied that it's a great film. Same for Barry Lyndon. Same for The Shining. Easily the same for 2001. I mean, even the old has-beens who walked out on that one, I'm sure, couldn't argue that it was the work of a free-reigning master.

I would imagine that some people would hate the seeming unevenness, especially on a first viewing, of Dr. Strangelove. I hardly laughed until about half an hour in, unsure if it would even work at all as comedy. Then, as I said, it just did. It always worked visually. The intricacy of the B-52, all the buttons and switches and codes and repeating of buttons and switches and codes and the flipping of buttons and switches and codes. In the detail, I felt the Kubrick touch in Wes Anderson. How the camera zooms in on a detail immediately after a voice describes the detail. I saw shades of what Kubrick would do with the space vessels in 2001 (and how that would inform Nolan's Interstellar) in the early exterior shots of the plane, the way the classical music moves the film along maybe even more so than the editing, which seems almost inconsistent.

Whatever the shortcomings of Dr. Strangelove, if any, it is helped by the fact that we still fully understand the misguided attempts by our politicians to continue fighting wars, even under the guise of NOT wanting that. We understand that there's most likely a Gen. Turgidson out there worried that our series of bunkers may not be bigger than our enemy's. And, even worse, I fear that, in our current reality, there probably isn't enough "fighting in the war room."