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Dr. Strangelove – O to the M to the G

I really should not have watched Dr. Strangelove immediately before going to sleep. Due to the extreme oddness of the characters and plot, I was left with strange dreams all night long. I cannot explain how much I loved/hated this movie. My bipolar feelings towards the film stem due its weird nature and not from personal inconsistency.
Why I liked it? It was hysterical!!! Excuse me, but the President of the U.S. talking to Dmitry scenes were so entertaining. Of course, Dmitry was depicted as drunk and mildly insane and the U.S. president was calm and collected. Dr. Strangelove was funny as well. I especially love the parts where his run away hand tried to strangle him and when he referred to the president as “Mein Fuehrer.” I enjoyed the Russian ambassador’s absolutely remarkable comment that Russia’s source for thinking America had built a doomsday device was the NY Times. I didn’t even know that joke was relevant to the time period but I guess some things never change.
Why I did not like it? Well, I really don’t get why Peter Sellers had to play three characters. Was this a budget related issue? Was it for comedic purposes? Either way, I didn’t appreciate it. It was annoying to see the same face in nearly every scene. Also, I especially hated the end. So civilization is essentially destroyed, only several thousand will survive, life will need to move underground, but it’s all good because monogamy is no more. I feel like this had nothing to do with the plot of the movie and was such a foolish way to end a good film. This scene managed to kill most of the movie’s allure for me.
Overall, Dr. Strangelove is a good movie. It has a nice message for humanity and is still relevant today. It managed to merge humor and seriousness well. However, certain techniques seemed unsuitable for the movie.

8 thoughts on “Dr. Strangelove – O to the M to the G”

        • The true ending fit well with the movie, I think. You’ve got this banal conversation about ten to one ratios of women to men plus Dr. Strangelove rising to his feet and claiming that he can walk which is punctuated by a montage of nuclear explosions. The over-saturation of these bomb clips at the end really speak to the alternate title of the movie: “How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.”

          So the reality of nuclear annihilation is treated rather lightly by the men in the war room to set a non-serious mood, and then the audience is hit with these explosions. The gravity of the doomsday device in the movie is completely destroyed by explosion after explosion after explosion built on a foundation of “Mein fuhrer, I can walk!!” Who is going to take the threat of nuclear annihilation seriously after that?

          Heck, Fail-Safe probably did so poorly because Dr. Strangelove used enough explosion clips for twenty bomb-related films!

          As for the pie fight, I originally tried scouring the web for the footage– and found out that only stills survived of the 11 minute(!!) alternate ending. There were two sites that linked to a GeoCities webpage with a lot more pictures and history, but Yahoo dropped its support for GeoCities a while back. archive.org didn’t help me so I had to settle for the four varying-quality pics I commented with earlier. Well, it turns out archive.org has a separate site dedicated to its GeoCities archive, so I ran the webpage through there, and voila: http://web.archive.org/web/20071209080213/http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Underground/9798/piefight.htm That’s a really in depth look at how the ending came to be, what happened in the ending, and it has a ton of big stills from it.

          According to the site, the fight ends with the President and the Russian Ambassadors building pie-castles out of the custard cream on the floor with Buck declaring that the future of America lies in the hands of men like Dr. Strangelove, who is treated to cheers. Terry Southern writes a really interesting take on the fight:

          “The pie fight, at its most contentious and prolonged, was not between the Russian ambassador and the United States military but between the rival branches of the U.S. military, and it represented a bitter and unrelenting struggle for congressional appropriations. This continuing jealousy between service branches, which causes each one to exaggerate its needs, precludes any chance of reducing our absurdly high defense budget. The style and mood of the sequence should have reflected these grim circumstances. Kubrick’s major goof was his failure to communicate that idea to the sixty or so pie-throwing admirals and generals, so that the prevailing atmosphere, as it came across on the film, might best be described as bacchanalian-with everyone gaily tossing pies, obviously in the highest of spirits. A disaster of, as Kubrick said, ‘Homeric proportions.’ Needless to say, the scene was cut.”

          I don’t know if Southern is getting his interpretation from Kubrick himself, or if its his own interpretation, but it’s a really striking way to look at it. The entire movie conveys a sense that the military bureaucracy and the leaders in charge of it are really impotent when it comes to averting nuclear annihilation. A pie fight over something as petty as budget appropriations would’ve really driven that point home, and would’ve spoken to the futility of worrying about nuclear annihilation in the first place. I mean, what can a bunch of morons in a stylish room really do to prevent the total extermination of the human race by nuclear annihilation?– they’re all more worried about how much they’re getting paid than the potential onset of armageddon. I don’t know if all of that subtext would be clear, though, unless there was a line that alluded to budget disagreements (and looking over that website, I don’t think it mentions a line like that).

          The original ending really conveys that particular sort of futility much better, silly conversations and all. It’s the montage that does it for me.

          • “We must not allow a mine shaft gap!!!”

            By “true” ending, you mean the one that made the final cut?

            I am pretty fond of that montage. How better to represent the end of the world via doomsday device than by a sequence of nuclear explosions set to whimsical, seemingly unrelated music. It works perfectly in my opinion.

  3. I have to say that I loved that ending. What a way to make a point. The nuclear predicament is one without hope — all is lost. Very cynical but fitting, I think.

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