Children’s ice cream Mandrake

Noah Berlatsky has some thoughts on the continuing relevance of Stanley Kubrick’s cold war satirical black comedy Dr. Strangelove, 60 years after its release.

Strangelove’s terrors aren’t precisely our terrors. But the nightmare still has a lot of familiar contours. For example, per far right John Birch conspiracy theories of the era, Ripper believes that fluoridation of drinking water to prevent tooth decay is “the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face.”

Ripper thinks public health campaigns are a threat to his moral, physical and sexual autonomy—that somehow fluoride makes him vulnerable to Communist control and, implicitly, makes him sexually impotent. Similarly, far-right extremists today have embraced Covid anti-vax conspiracy theories, claiming (falsely) that Covid vaccines cause large numbers of deaths or that they lead to infertility or change people’s DNA. You can easily see Ripper today donning a yellow star while claiming that vaccine mandates are the equivalent of the Holocaust, as many on the right have done.

The appropriation of Jewish suffering in the antivax protests also resonates with Kubrick’s morbidly funny skewering of ongoing fascist influence post-World War II. In his book, “The Anatomy of Fascism,” Robert O. Paxton defines fascism in part as “political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity.” Ripper’s violent fear of his bodily fluids becoming corrupted and Trump’s ranting insistence that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of our country both fit with standard fascist rhetoric of purity. Whether it’s immigrants or Communists coming over the border, the far-right frames it as a breach of bodily integrity which must be answered with violence.

I think this is a bit of a strained analogy, as the right wing paranoia of the 1960s wasn’t really connected to any kind of recognizably fascist politics in this country at the time, as opposed to old-fashioned conservative authoritarianism. But the points about how the right wing obsessions with bodily purity, emasculation, and invasion — all connected ultimately to an underlying fear of the loss of patriarchal white supremacy — have remained a constant in American politics are good ones.

Thinking back on the film itself, I’m struck in this context by the realization that there are almost literally no women in it — IIRC the only woman who appears on screen is Gen. Turgidson’s mistress for all of 30 seconds — and women aren’t even mentioned except as literal sex objects:

The disturbing part about Strangelove isn’t that he’s a Nazi; it’s that he fits so well into the American milieu. US generals mumble a couple disparaging remarks about “Krauts” but when Strangelove suggests that they escape fall-out radiation by moving all the most important and valuable people into mine shafts, they listen with breathless enthusiasm. They’re especially taken with Strangelove’s idea for creating a breeding program with 10 women for each man. “The women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature,” he hisses.

The film’s sole non-white face belongs to a very young James Earl Jones, who is part of Major Kong’s B-52 bomber crew.

I would be very surprised if anyone noted at the time that 99% of the cast was made up of white men — a classic example of the power of the unmarked category.

Nevertheless it’s a great film that everyone should see, and Berlatsky is right to point to its continuing and indeed increasing relevance to American politics, 60 years down the road.