Kubism, Part 7: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964)

We're roughly half way through our nursery school-level investigation of the films of Stanley Kubrick, and it's been a bumpy ride so far. We've seen the good (The Killing, Paths Of Glory, Lolita), the bad (Fear And Desire, Spartacus, oh God The Seafarers) and the middling (Killer's Kiss), and so it seems appropriate that this time round we're faced with The Kube's most divisive film. Which is to say that there's a dividing line between most of the world, who love it, and me. It is a cause of some personal concern, but even after multiple viewings I have yet to learn to stop worrying and love Dr. Strangelove; for me it is not quite the bomb.

Troubled by an early '60s political landscape that boasted such anxiety-inducing events as the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, increasing tensions in Vietnam, the Berlin Wall, the Bay Of Pigs and everything else from that verse of We Didn't Start The Fire, Stanley Kubrick decided to make a nuclear war drama based on the thriller novel Red Alert. Finding everything about the situation inherently ridiculous, he transformed the book's serious tone into a comedy that would define cinematic satire for a generation and successfully piss off every stars-and-stripes-waving believer in the might of the US military who saw it. Using his beloved war genre as a stick to poke the hornets' nest of political hubris, Kubrick predicted every fatal decision made in the world's war rooms for the next half-century and beyond, and he did it on his own terms and in his own, inimitable style. But Kubrick's style is inimitable because it's so damn hard to pin down, and in my worthless and unsolicited opinion, even he struggled to nail the tone this time.

With the mandatory Kubrickian introductory voiceover (and my equally compulsory mention of it) out of the way, Dr. Strangelove launches its attack on conservative morality with its opening titles. Airborne sexy time between large phallic objects is graphically depicted, as long tubes penetrate openings and release essential fluids in order to ensure continued survival: strange love indeed. I mean it's just some planes refuelling mid-air, but read into it what you like you dirty old perv. This kind of innuendo runs the length of the film like a thick dorsal vein, and film scholars point to it as an example of Kubrick's sophisticated humour. Fair enough. If you ask me it's just a bunch of knob jokes that don't bear any relation to the plot; at least North By Northwest's hilariously crass train-fucking-a-tunnel visual gag came at the climax of a film that was vaguely sexy.

Things get going with the trademark efficiency of early Kubrick, as Sterling Hayden's paranoid loon Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper of Burpelson Air Force Base (you be the judge as to the comedy value of names in this film) authorises a wave of nuclear attacks on Russian targets because he thinks Commies are sabotaging his spunk. Trying to talk sense into Ripper is Peter Sellers' RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, a genuinely excellent take on stereotypical British reserve whose stiff upper lip is adorned with the most splendid moustache in the Kubrick canon.

In the skies above Russia, one of Ripper's nuke-laden B-52 bombers - piloted by an apparent Texan hayseed whose patois is amusing in and of itself but otherwise of little narrative value - receives the order to unleash nuclear hell. Its crew (including a young Darth Vader who looks nothing like Hayden Christensen) go about the business of prepping armageddon and reading Playboy, but serve no other useful function until their final moments.

And then there's the third of Dr. Strangelove's trio of locations to which Kubrick experimentally limits his story. The War Room at the Pentagon is a glorious Ken Adam creation built to house the best and worst of the film's scenes, which scuffle with each other for supremacy despite the strict No Fighting In The War Room rule. An orgy of geometry, the War Room is impossible to view as anything other than a lair of lunatics once you've seen Adam's similar work on the crackpots' cribs of the Bond films. Of course that only retrospectively enhances the madness that takes place within the confines of Kubrick's film, as President Merkin Muffley (lol) argues with General Buck Turgidson (haha) and tries to placate Russian premier Dimitri Kissoff (good one) over the impending accidental annihilation of the human race.

It's here that the highlights of Dr. Strangelove - Muffley's excruciatingly polite phone calls to his Soviet counterpart - are beautifully executed. Sellers is on gold standard form as the Pres, awkwardly explaining the actions of his unhinged military leaders while literally and figuratively isolated in a pool of light from that ironic halo of illumination slung above the table. We never hear Kissoff's replies, leaving Sellers to carry the scene by himself with effortless comedy genius. Which makes it all the more disappointing when the third of his characters in the film emerges from a gloomy corner: the titular Dr. S, a grating creation who seems to have fallen out of a bad Monty Python sketch and landed badly enough to render himself comedically disabled.

Kubrick famously (and rightly) excised a prologue featuring bewildered aliens and an epilogue showcasing a titanic custard pie fight from his movie because they didn't belong, and it's a shame he didn't punt Strangelove in the same direction. Turning up nearly an hour into the film and occupying just two scenes and under nine minutes of screen time, the character isn't around long enough to enhance the story but is nevertheless overbearing enough to knock the whole project off-axis from subtle satire to eye-rolling slapstick. It's the most obvious symptom of the film's mixed comedic tone, which on the one hand brings us subtle visual gags like Turgidson's "World Targets In Megadeaths" manual, then on the other forces upon us a soldier called Colonel Bat Guano (my sides!) shooting a Coke machine and getting sprayed in the face in painfully punchline-reinforcing close-up.

But it's not just the comedy that doesn't hit its intended target for me; I just can't engage with Dr. Strangelove on any level beyond admiration of Ken Adam's sets and two-thirds of Peter Seller's work. The film seems to limp from scene to scene without much plot, until it just stops - quite mercifully, frankly - in the middle of one of the bad doctor's teeth-itching routines. None of the characters are developed any further than the point at which we meet them, and there's nothing of any complexity under any of their skins. I appreciate Strangelove's themes and I admire the satire, but I genuinely think I would get more enjoyment watching a documentary in which Donald Trump has to phone Vladimir Putin to apologise for not having nuked the whole of North America yet. That's the trouble with satire: once the absurdity of reality overtakes it, it's essentially toothless.

Of course it's still Stanley Kubrick and therefore still of some contextual value. The Kube's powerful but flawed, incompetent men are everywhere, and the destructive power of macho vanity reaches its spectacular apotheosis between the legs of a ten-gallon-hat-waving, yee-hawing cowboy as he finally achieves wargasm. While men are shown to be dangerous idiots though, women are still being sidelined altogether, despite Lolita successfully wrapping every man she encountered round her little finger. Like Paths Of Glory, Dr. Strangelove manages just one female character, and she's a secretary lounging around in a bikini waiting to be fucked because she's got nothing else to do.

Perhaps the most interesting concept within Dr. Strangelove is the advent of mechanisation and automation in Kubrick's cinema. The trust placed by mankind in the technology he's developed proves tragically misplaced when it experiences the most simplistic failure, and the implications of that would form the basis of his next and arguably greatest film. That human/mechanical dichotomy would also surface in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the long-gestating project he eventually handed over to Steven Spielberg, who took it down a considerably more emotional route than Kubrick might have done. Keen-eyed audiences will also note that neither 2001 nor A.I. feature Peter Sellers shouting in an OTT German accent, so I suppose we should thank Dr. Strangelove for helping Stanley Kubrick get that out of his system.

Join me again soon(ish) for 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film set so far in the future that none of us will ever be qualified to remark on its accuracy.

← Part 6: Lolita

Part 8: 2001: A Space Odyssey →

Kubism, Part 6: Lolita (1962)

With the grand folly of Spartacus mercifully over, Stanley Kubrick turned his back on epic melodrama and sweaty blokes in their underpants. For his next project all the conflict would be internalised in the tortured soul of just one sweaty bloke, and this time it would be a fourteen-year-old girl in the skimpies. Undeterred by the possibility that a quinquagenarian lusting after a teenager might just be a little controversial, The Kube went ahead and knocked out a morally ambiguous, surprisingly touching and often downright hilarious film that walks a tightrope of taste while further muddying the waters of exactly what "A Stanley Kubrick film" is.

Lolita defies easy categorisation. By this point Stan had had a go at psychological thriller, film noir, heist flick, anti-war polemic and swords 'n' sandals epic, and would later dabble in satire, sci-fi, costume drama, horror and more war. But here's a comedy-drama about a charming, discombobulated paedophile and his amusingly desperate attempts to stick his dick in a child. And even if you count the as-yet-unmade Woody Allen biopic, that's a pretty narrow genre.

Opening in the faded glamour of a ruined mansion that serves as a psychological metaphor for both men inside it, Lolita blends tragedy and comedy from the off. James Mason's Humbert Humbert, already displaying all the signs of one of Kubrick's spectacularly flawed males, grumbles angry threats at Peter Sellers' shambling wise-ass Clare Quilty, who bats them back as comedy ping-pong balls. Within minutes Quilty will be dead, shot by Humbert over the apparent matter of a girl. What the hell kind of film is this? And how did we get here? It's a Stanley Kubrick film, so it must be time for an expository voiceover!

In fairness, if you're going to have a voiceover you may as well have James Mason deliver it: Mason's mellifluous tones slide out of your speakers like highbrow honey, all intellectual and smooth and ideal for adding to a glass of bourbon. We later find out Humbert is reading from his diary, a narrative device which tethers us to him and his disastrous voyage of poor life choices and eventual self-destruction. Stanley Kubrick there, turning his entire audience into surrogate child molestors.

Suddenly it's four years earlier and, looking for lodgings, Humbert visits the house of Charlotte Haze, played with heartbreakingly aggressive sexual desperation by Shelley Winters. Here he clocks Charlotte's young teenage daughter Lolita, reclining on the lawn in a hat and sunglasses and not a great deal more. Humbert experiences a sudden rush of blood to the penis, and his fate is sealed. What follows is unquestionably Kubrick's most inappropriately funny montage, which sees Humbert gawping at Lolita's gyrating, hula-hooping hips in his distressingly open dressing gown, deploys some flawless physical comedy in an awkward drive-in movie scene, and haemmorhages double entendres all over the shop. The chess game between Charlotte and Humbert, in which she complains "You're going to take my queen", and he replies "That is my intention, certainly", is an excruciating joy.

Yet somehow none of this feels unseemly so much as pathetic: we know that Humbert knows what he's feeling is wrong, and that conflict between desire and rationality is the driving force behind the drama. Here's an uptight divorced English scholar thrust into a world of horny American sex people living behind white picket fences (it's strongly implied that Charlotte's married friends are of the keys-in-the-bowl, pampas-grass-out-front inclination), bamboozled by his own primitive urges while fending off the unwanted advances of his tragically amorous landlady. It's ostensibly objectionable but just too funny to be offensive: Vladimir Nabokov's script, based on his own novel but almost entirely rewritten by Kubrick, uses innuendo and tragi-comic pathos to offset the potential grimness of its subject matter, and the first act sails by on James Mason's rarely-tapped comedy skills to evoke audience sympathy.

The second act is where it all starts to get a bit sinister. Lolita has been packed off to the jaw-droppingly named Camp Climax For Girls, while Humbert and Charlotte have hit rock bottom and got married to prove it. An incredible eighteen-minute, real-time scene starts light ("You just touch me and I go as limp as a noodle," teases Charlotte; "Yes, I know the feeling," Humbert replies with weary resignation) and ends with genuinely unanticipated calamity, signalling that all bets are off for whatever comes next. A conversation between four characters - one of whom is shitfaced in the bath, though barely anyone bats an eyelid - offers some trademark Kubrickian absurdity, the reappearances of the increasingly shady Clare Quilty ping the film off in a new direction, and an extended bit of slapstick with a recalcitrant fold-out bed is the unexpected prologue to a scene that culminates with one of cinema's most loaded fades to black (the significant shift in Humbert's costume design at this point speaks volumes).

Humbert's journey, which began at forbidden lust, inevitably makes a brief stop at possessive paranoia before reaching its final destination: agonisingly unrequited love. Lolita's last act is necessarily downbeat but enormously affecting, and contains the kind of revelations that make you want to watch it again, in a different light, immediately. At the very least we now know the fate of Clare Quilty's spectacles.

Stanley Kubrick would become synonymous with a dispassionate coldness, but that's a mystifying conclusion to come to after watching Lolita. Its three lead characters are complex, flawed humans, and James Mason, Shelley Winters and newcomer Sue Lyon as the titular temptress imbue them with recognisable fears and desires. And then there's Peter Sellers, doing his own thing, improvising comedy routines willy nilly in a film directed by a supposed control freak. The truth is that Kubrick encouraged improvisation, and his experience with Sellers arguably provided the necessary groundwork to allow Jack Nicholson to go full Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

Stan's struggles with the Production Code and the Legion Of Decency while making Lolita are well documented and wholly unsurprising: even now, if you search "lolita kubrick", you can expect an overzealous, finger-wagging child pornography warning from Google that makes you feel guiltier than Humbert Humbert ever did. But those struggles work in the film's favour: the necessary cuts and tweaks lent Lolita an extra ambiguity, widening its appeal and leaving more to the audience's imagination, whether they like it or not. And it's that kind of ambiguity, along with Lolita's refusal to sit in any easily-definable genre box, that would characterise Kubrick's career and make him so endlessly fascinating.

Join me again soon for Dr Strangelove, Kubrick's surprise crossover into the Marvel Cinematic Universe!

← Part 5: Spartacus

Part 7: Dr. Strangelove →