Kubrick: Dr. Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Act II

One thing I neglected to mention the other day regarding Kubrick’s screenplays is his propensity for long scenes. This wonderfully cinematic director has, paradoxically, a yen for long scenes, very long in some cases, another preference he shares with Tarantino. Generally in Kubrick movies, he’ll present a long scene, and then there will be a big leap forward in time where a bunch of stuff happens we don’t see, and then there be another long scene. The most famous of these cuts is in 2001, where we jump cut a few million years from an ape using a bone as a tool to satellites orbiting in space, but they occur in most of Kubrick’s work. Act I of Dr. Strangelove has a total of eight scenes, eight (a typical screenplay would have at least twenty, and probably more) and Act II has even fewer. There are seven actual scenes, but the bulk of the act is actually two scenes broken up into six sections.

First, we check in with Major Kong’s bomber crew, as Kong reads a long list of items to be found in the crew members’ survival kits. Items include walking-around money, nylon stockings and chocolates. There are two jokes being played here: one is that, after delivering their nuclear payload, the Air Force has provided the crew of the bomber with the supplies for a sexy party, and the other is that the survival kits have been concocted by an outmoded mind-set. The supplies have been designed for a bomber crew shot down perhaps in WWII Germany — there will be no opportunity for survival for the crew of Major Kong’s plane. And yet all his crew members peruse their survival kits eagerly, impressed with the contents and thankful for an Air Force that has taken their needs into consideration.

That’s all we get from Dr. Strangelove‘s third protagonist in Act II, the rest of the act cuts between Ripper’s air base and the War Room, where Turgidson is mostly sidelined. Act II belongs to General Ripper and his efforts to defend his office from President Muffley’s attempts to smoke him out.

We begin with the appearance of the Russian Ambassador in the War Room, an event that Turgidson sees as traitorous and a personal threat. That the President is working with the Russians to prevent the world from being destroyed is emasculating to him, and he does his best to salve his nerves by chewing copious amounts of gum. (I suppose Ripper has taken up the movies’ supply of cigars for this movie about orally-fixate men.) Turgidson catches the ambassador taking pictures of "thebig board," or says he does anyway. The ambassador insists that Turgidson has planted the camera on him. I tend to believe Turgidson in this instance, since the camera is disguised as a box of Russian matches, and I find it hard to believe that Turgidson would be carrying an item like that around on his person.

We then move to the attack on Ripper’s air base. These scenes are brilliantly shot at soldier’s-eye level in a documentary style, and many of the individual shots were later yoinked by Spielberg for Saving Private Ryan. (And by Kubrick himself in Full Metal Jacket.) But there is one interesting, curious thing Kubrick does here: the first part of the attack on the base is shown exclusively from the defenders’ point of view, then, mid-way through the act, it switches to the attackers’ point-of view. We cut briefly into General Ripper’s office during this scene and find that Mandrake sits on the couch, pensive, while the bullets fly outside. What’s he holding? It’s a stick of gum, the same gum Turgidson is chewing in the War Room. Mandrake, we see, is not orally fixated — he can hold his gum and not give in to chewing it.

Next we have a long scene at the War Room, the phone conversation between Muffley and Premier Kissov. They’re discussing the end of the world, but their conversation is as inane as it could possibly be. And I thought about this scene and why it’s written this way, and I linked it back to Turgidson’s earlier conversation with his secretary/lover: Muffley is talking to Kissov exactly in the manner of a man caught cheating, or at least a husband who is forced to reveal an embarrassing faux-pas to his long-suffering wife. And at first Muffley is fumfering and overly polite, but when Kissov doesn’t match his tone, he reminds Kissov of his military superiority: "if this phone call hadn’t been friendly you probably wouldn’t have gotten a call at all." That is, in the language of the marriage, "Look, I’m telling you I slept with the girl in the steno pool, I’m being honest with you, and if you can’t be grateful to me for that don’t forget I could knock you across the room." Ripper, Turgidson and Kong are "real men," who are seeking to destroy the world, the ultimate rape of the mother figure, while Muffley is a "modern man," a civilized rationalist who’s pussy-whipped and who needs some prodding before he asserts his male prerogative. And so, Muffley sorts out with Kissov about how to destroy American planes while Turgidson is shocked and disgusted — the president is figuratively castrating him. (It’s also worth noting that Muffley catches Kissov in the middle of a sex party, and while the notion is played for laughs, it’s nice to know that there’s at least one guy in the movie who’s having sex with women instead of with bombs and guns.)

We then go back to the base for the first part of the pivotal scene in the movie, where Ripper explains himself to Mandrake as he defends his office from the advancing (American) troops with a big machine gun he pulls out of a golf bag. He demands Mandrake help him with his gun and Mandrake demurs. Perhaps he’s experiencing a moment of homosexual panic, but the way the screenplay expresses it is that Mandrake is a coward, not a real man, using the excuse of "an old wound" to remove himself from Ripper’s agenda. So Mandrake is wounded, that is, he’s weak, that’s why he cannot kill, whereas Ripper is the "real man" who loves combat and killing.

Back at the War Room, the ambassador has some bad news: the Russians have recently activated the Doomsday Machine, which triggers automatically in the event of nuclear war, destroying all life on earth for 93 years. The device is madness, but its existence is explained easily: it’s cheaper. The Russian people want consumer goods (including the nylons that Kong’s bomber crew are carrying) and the nation is strapped for cash. It’s cheaper for the Russians to build a gigantic device that will wipe out all life on earth, infallibly, than to compete with the US in missile superiority. And so the titular Dr. Strangelove appears to explain this device and how it works. In another director’s hands, this scene would have been tedious exposition, but Kubrick (and his screenwriter) have created this rather incredible character, Dr. Strangelove, to deliver this long explanation, so we spend the scene thinking "Who is this guy" instead of thinking "Why is he talking at such length about this plot device?" Dr. Strangelove, of course, by his very name, ties together the themes of the movie. The protagonists cannot love in the normal way, their ability to love has been estranged and diverted instead into weapons of mass destruction. Turgidson, who so recently had been appalled by Muffley, likes this Strangelove guy, and he likes this doomsday machine too: he wishes that the US had something like that. The purity and finality of the concept appeals to him, he finds himself in a state of penis envy.

(The other thing entering into the narrative here is, again, the theme of humanity’s will being overtaken by powerful, unthinking machines, which will become a major theme of 2001 and, to a lesser extent, A Clockwork Orange.)

Back at the base, the attack is still under way, and Ripper explains the rest of his rationale to Mandrake. He believes that the flouridation of water is an international communist conspiracy, which, given some of the things that Glenn Beck spews out on a daily basis these days, barely sounds like satire any more. But the flouridation of water, shocking and obvious as it is, is not Ripper’s real problem. His real problem is that he became aware of the importance of his bodily fluids while having sex, and as a result, still has sex with women but refuses to ejaculate in them. This is the root, so to speak, of Ripper’s urge to blow up the world — he has a gigantic case of blueballs. He cannot come, so he will blow up the world instead.

The base shortly surrenders, which is Ripper’s big setback, and the traditional "end of Act II low point." Ripper believes that he has failed, and now there is only one way out for him: he must kill himself, sacrifice his life, in order to achieve his goal of blowing up the world. Mandrake tries to cheer him up, talk him down, play "good cop," and an interesting flip is revealed: it’s not Mandrake who is the coward, it’s Ripper. Mandrake has been captured and tortured in the field in WWII, Ripper has never actually seen action. So who is the real man and who is the lily-livered coward?

It’s also worth noting that Ripper goes out the same way Turgidson came in: through the bathroom.  The toilet disposes of Ripper but has produced Turgidson — they are connected, as they are to Kong, through technology.