George C. Scott as Gen. Buck Turgidson in Kubrick's 1964 nuclear satire, "Dr. Strangelove.'' Urging an all-out pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union, he exclaims, "I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10-20 million killed, tops!"
Dr.
Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is
a movie that I was forced to watch in an American Cinema class. It was released
in 1964 shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, an event that most people would
agree could have ended life on Earth, I now kind chuckle at.
For every history class that I
have taken, including the one I’m in now, reviews the events that lead up to
the crisis itself. The Stone/Kuznick book The
Untold History of the United States continues with that “tradition” when
they try to examine a little bit of the behind the scenes negotiations. The
book states that the crisis was over when “Robert Kennedy met with Ambassador
Anatoly Dobryinn on Saturday, October 27 and told him the United States was
about to attack unless it received immediate Soviet commitment to remove its
bases from Cuba. He promised to withdraw the Jupiter missiles from Turkey
within four to five months but only if Soviet Leaders never publicly disclosed
this secret arrangement”.[1] Though
the book I feel only scrapes the surface of the closed-door discussions that US
and Soviet leaders had in private discussing the options they had before them
and how they could live with those outcomes.
Fred Kaplan for the New York
Times did a story on this movie in 2004 and discussed how eerily accurate the
movie actually is. Kaplan writes how Stanley Kubrick, the director, sets out to
make an accurate movie based on the novel “Red Alert” but after much research
finds the entire thing to be crazy and makes a dark comedy instead.
Kaplan writes, “what few people knew, at the time and since, was just how
accurate this film was. Its premise, plotline, some of the dialogue, even its
wildest characters eerily resembled the policies, debates and military leaders
of the day.”[2] (Kaplan 2004) Kaplan goes
onto say “Those in the know watched
"Dr. Strangelove" amused, like everyone else, but also stunned.
Daniel Ellsberg, who later leaked the Pentagon Papers, was a RAND analyst and a
consultant at the Defense Department when he and a mid-level official took off
work one afternoon in 1964 to see the film. Mr. Ellsberg recently recalled that
as they left the theater, he turned to his colleague and said, "That was a
documentary!"[3] (Kaplan 2004)
While Dr. Strangleove is a fictional movie, it does give some insight
into the minds of the people who were running our government and those who had
their finger on the trigger. It also paints a grim reality for the future if
nuclear weapons are to be used on a large scale. I feel if you haven’t seen
this movie I suggest you should.
Bibliography
Kaplan, Fred. Truth
Stanger than "Stranglelove". october 2004.
www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/movies/10kapl.
Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold
History of the United States, 1st Gallery Books hardcover ed. (New York:
Gallery Books, 2012)
No comments:
Post a Comment