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Reconstructing Strangelove: Inside Stanley Kubrick's “Nightmare Comedy.”

2018; Penn State University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/studamerhumor.4.1.0123

2333-9934

Calista McRae,

Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis

In five brief, consistently intriguing chapters, Reconstructing Strangelove lays out much of what Stanley Kubrick transformed—or in some cases, practically transcribed—when he was writing, directing, and producing the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove. I read this book while preparing to teach Strangelove in a seminar on comedy and drew on its pages of often unbelievable trouvailles about the Cold War era. (One example: the mathematical analyzer, numerical integrator, and computer—a MANIAC—that performed thermonuclear calculations at Los Alamos in the 1950s.) Excavating legal documents and personal cables, Broderick assembles a vivid collage of the literary, popular, and military worlds in the decades after World War II. The book's collection of archival material, which displays the intertextual origins of Dr. Strangelove so clearly, is especially apt for a film so luminous as to seem as if it sprang, fully formed, out of Kubrick's head. In fact, as Broderick shows, Kubrick depended on a range of popular, literary, academic, and militaristic sources, beginning with the serious novel he made semilaughable.As Broderick writes at the outset, his study is “premised upon the assumption that anyone reading it will have already viewed Dr. Strangelove, or have a working knowledge of the film. This book is not devoted to a close textual reading of the film, or a cineaste's analysis of the aesthetics of the movie” (1). While some of its most rewarding moments are comments of the kind Broderick explicitly does not promise, Reconstructing Strangelove is for the most part grounded in historical documentation. Broderick opens with an overview of Kubrick's “atomic antecedents,” ranging from midcentury nuclear fiction to the director's own fears. Previous scholarship has attested to Kubrick's terror about the prospect of nuclear war, but Broderick adds to documentation of this fear through fascinating extracts from interviews with the director's wife and his daughter. Most of the chapters that follow offer a wealth of quotes from recent interviews and memoirs as well as glances into Kubrick's drafts. For instance, we encounter a photo of a notebook page where potential titles for the movie are written all over in all caps: “HOW TO START WW III,” “THE ATOMIC BLONDE,” “HOW TO STOP LIVING AND START WORRYING,” and so forth (48). Broderick also curates insights from earlier secondary sources, such as Ed Sikov's biography of Peter Sellers. Sikov records the moment when Sellers first tried on what would become the doctor's iconic black glove: “I suddenly thought, ‘Hey, that's a storm trooper's arm.’” The Sikov anecdote, which Broderick quotes at length, offers an understanding into how the actor himself changed the character and into the arm's origin story: “That arm hated the body for having made a compromise,” Sellers declared (quoted in Broderick, 87).Chapter 1, “The Road to Strangelove: From Red Alert to The Delicate Balance of Terror and Beyond,” tracks the long undertaking of the script—which involves going still further back to its origins in former Royal Air Force pilot Peter George's novel Red Alert, which Kubrick, George, and Terry Southern eventually adapted. Broderick also quotes a number of Kubrick's private notes, among which one finds his views on what he calls the “comic spirit”: “The serious writers of the 20th century have taken themselves too seriously. The comic spirit has been lacking…. If the modern world could be summed up in a single word it would be absurd. The only truly creative response to this is the comic vision of life” (23).Chapter 2, “Doctors Strangelove—A Character Evolution,” begins with one of the book's many fantastic images, this one of the mad scientist Rotwang waving his black-gloved right hand in Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis. After surveying the array of scientists and mathematicians that Kubrick amalgamated into his doctor, Broderick introduces the strategist Albert Wohlstetter as another figure significant to Kubrick and “as yet unrecognized in the Strangelove literature” (62). While Wohlstetter has been mentioned by other Strangelove critics, at least in passing, it is uncanny to read Wohlstetter's 1959 warning about “aberrations of individuals, perhaps, quite low in the echelon of command,” and about how a “single bomber or handful of bombers that did not receive the message to return to base might … go forward by themselves to start the war,” as occurs in the film (quoted, 62).After chapter 3's account of the legal feud between the producers of Dr. Strangelove and those of the Fail-Safe film, the book enters its final and most stimulating chapters. Chapter 4, “Authentically Strange: Presidential Predelegation, Fail-safes and Doomsday Machines,” offers a startling array of facts about actual postwar fail-safes, grim accidents (the H-bomb that nearly detonated over North Carolina in a 1961 accident), mentally unstable personnel—in general, material that confirms Kubrick's unease. For example, we meet Dead Hand, a murkily understood nuclear deterrent that automatically launches missiles when triggered. While it seems unlikely that Kubrick could have known about the name of this Soviet doomsday device, Dead Hand overlaps strikingly with Dr. Strangelove's sporadically aggressive and insubordinate arm.Chapter 5, “Reconstructing Strangelove: Outtakes from the Cutting Room Floor,” introduces strips of excised dialogue, mostly elaborations and extensions of now-canonical jokes. For example, in one excised exchange, Captain Mandrake tries to make a drink for General Ripper, who drinks only rain water and grain alcohol so as to protect his “precious bodily fluids.” Mandrake says, “Apparently you're right out of rainwater…. Will distilled be alright?” (165). In another deleted exchange, the Soviet ambassador turns down a drink, saying “You would put anything in it? … I cannot be too cautious” (171). As Broderick points out, the ambassador's caution “confirms General Ripper's later (seemingly paranoid) assertion that ‘under no circumstance will a commie drink water’” (172). Kubrick and his cowriters omitted some brilliantly suggestive conversations, such as the secretary's side of her late-night phone conversation with Buck Turgidson (the final version has only what one can overhear Turgidson whispering in the war room). On the other hand, they also cut what must have been an excruciatingly long scene of the general singing some fifteen or twenty lines of “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow” in Strangelove's honor, near the film's conclusion.These tantalizing glimpses of another Strangelove sometimes leave one wishing for more analysis: why did Kubrick tone down the satire where he did, or how did he settle on this particular ratio of absurdity and realism? Aside from a few case-by-case suggestions, Broderick remains hands off; more analysis, however, might help encourage discussion in a course that touches on the film. In general, chapters from the book could be ideal for students: although the writing occasionally suffers from moments of disjointedness (as if tugged between chronological and topical organizations), it is free of jargon and highly readable. And Broderick has his own understated sense of humor, heard in his hope that his writing isn't too “turgid” (9) and in his allusive description of the refueling plane in the opening scene that is “seemingly spent from the deposit of its aviation ‘essence’” (116).Broderick concludes by sketching late twentieth-century parodies and homages to Strangelove. Here he suggests that the film helped “a generation … recognise the inherent, grotesque foundation of nuclear deterrence and, perhaps, to learn not to love the bomb…. Satire and black humour enabled unconscious and instantaneous recognition of the paradoxes of the nuclear mindset, stripped bare and revealed for all its absurdity” (196). His book helps us see the extent of the absurdity all the more chillingly.