One of the things about approaching the age of fifty is that one is constantly reminded of the fact because everything that occurred during the year one was born is also reaching its 50th anniversary.  In some ways, it is interesting because one is able to see more clearly the culture and Zeitgeist into which one was born. And since we are on the topic of insanity and violence it seems, it is fitting that recently one of the great films of all time Dr. Stangelove had its 50th anniversary.

David Denby in The New Yorker has written an excellent article, "The Half-Century Anniversary of 'Dr. Strangelove',"  regarding Kubick film including the dynamics of its development of the film.

It may be hard to believe now, but Kubrick’s original intention was to do a straight, serious movie.

As he began working on the screenplay with Peter George, however, he gagged on the idea of a straight version of the material. As he said later:

"My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question…. The things you laugh at were really the heart of the paradoxical practices that make a nuclear war possible."

So he stopped leaving out “things which were either absurd or paradoxical.”

As Denby points out:

The strategist Herman Kahn, in a notorious book, “On Thermonuclear War,” published in 1960, insisted that a nuclear war was winnable, and that life would go on despite millions dead and nuclear radiation everywhere. In the movie, George C. Scott’s General Buck Turgidson, the Air Force Chief of Staff, advocates for war as follows: “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say that no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops—depending on the breaks.” And Kahn later proposed a doomsday device as the ultimate deterrent: threatening the extinction of human, animal, and plant life, he believed, would end the dangerous brinkmanship displayed by the Soviet Union and the United States in the Cuban missile crisis. He thought that it was a reasonable idea, even a clever one.

Much of the film takes place in the war room, with, in my opinion, one of the greatest lines in a film: "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room." As Denby writes of it:

Kubrick and Adam wanted to suggest a slightly loony forum, a place where furious debates over the future of existence would take place. An atmosphere of science-fiction irreality would be punctuated by preposterous intrusions of everyday life: the petulance of the President; his wheedling conversations on the telephone with Kissoff, the Soviet Premier; the squabbles, tantrums, and jockeying for position among diplomats and military men; the petty human ego struggling for precedence right up to the moment of apocalypse.

In my previous blog, someone asked me why I used a psychological approach rather than say a philosophical approach to understanding the phenomena of violence and suffering in the world, on how to move forward toward something better.  Dr. Strangelove probably more than any other movie explains why. Again Denby:

“Strangelove” is an enraging struggle between reason and madness, between three-dimensional characters and men devoted, in the old usage, to “humors”—a fixed obsession that limits their responses, a comic device that goes back to Ben Jonson’s plays, or earlier....The movie is a kind of awed testimonial to the power of madness and an expression of contempt for sweet reason, which comes off as hapless.

There are actually some standard heroes in the movie: the crew of the B-52, who fly over the frozen north and head toward a Soviet target. As in an old Second World War adventure picture, like “Air Force” or “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” the bomber crew is ethnically mixed—in this case, a Texan, a black man, a Jew, and so on. They are about to blow up the world, yet they go through the professional routines of any other bomber crew; the discrepancy between their competence and what’s at stake is excruciating.

Dr. Stangelove is one of those films everyone should watch, at different stages of their life. Maybe anyone who is dedicating some of their energies toward improving conditions in their local community or attempting to bring about humane changes in cultures on the other side of the globe.  Humans with their egos and "humors" are pretty much the same no matter where we go.

We all have the power to unleash our "pettiness" in ways that impact more than just themselves, if only those close to us at home or at work or out with our friends. Unfortunately, there are those who have at their disposal the means to do much more harm over a vastly greater range.