Still Negative Function

I recently picked up the 45th anniversary blu-ray edition of Dr. Strangelove and watched this film -- for my money, one of Kubrick's two more-or-less perfect efforts, the other being 2001: A Space Odyssey -- for what I suppose is the umpteenth-plus-fifth time.  The blu-ray is a very handsome transfer, with a certain amount of grain but nothing excessive; enough to give it that silvery sheen that DVD resolution is never quite able to capture.  The expressionistic lighting -- particularly in the War Room, Ken Adam's masterpiece of production design -- comes across particularly strongly at 1080p.

Years ago I recall telling a film-school friend that I was unimpressed by the camerawork in Dr. Strangelove -- that it seemed rather tossed-off, by Kubrick's standards.  He was aghast, and rightly so.  Watching the film now I see the usual ferocious precision of shot selection that generally accompanies Kubrick's work.  The overall pace of editing is deliberate, even languid -- each cut is therefore weighted with an impact that might seem unusual to an audience weaned on the indiscriminate coverage and rapid editing of much modern film.  It's rare, in my experience of movies, to see a mere choice of camera angle as a joke capable of eliciting laughter.  But when, just before Sterling Hayden's General Ripper is about to explain his insane scheme to Peter Sellers's straight-as-an-arrow Colonel Mandrake, Kubrick cuts to a looming low-angle close-up, it's one of the funniest effects in one of the funniest movies ever committed to emulsion.  The mere change in camera angle, combined with Hayden's thousand-yard-stare as he chomps on his massive cigar, is enough to assure us in no uncertain terms that General Ripper has gone completely around the bend.  Oh, for a time machine to travel to 1964 and visit every theater that played the film, and count how many laughs were triggered not by the dialogue but by the cut itself.

It may be blasphemy to admit it, but there's one area where my trigger-finger starts to itch and hover nervously over the "2x speed" button: the long sequence in which the crew of the B52 struggles with a technical malfunction as it races toward its target.  The scene seems endless as the crewmen (including, memorably, a young James Earl Jones) flip endless switches in an effort to open the bomb bay doors.  There's no question that, were I editing the film myself, I'd have slashed and burned this sequence, probably reducing it to a half, or even a third, of its current length.  What is Kubrick's game here?  The scene is loaded with very convincing-sounding military jargon that imparts an air of deadpan authenticity to the proceedings; is it mere pride in this dialogue, and the research effort behind it, that motivated the filmmakers to leave it all in?  Or perhaps it's purely for suspense purposes; when the film's climax provides an image that is likely to be the first thing anybody nowadays ever sees of Dr. Strangelove, long before they've actually sat down to watch the movie, it's hard to imagine a time when audiences didn't know that Slim Pickens was about to go leaping out of his B-52 astride a nuclear warhead, waving his ten-gallon hat and whooping his way into cinema history.  Perhaps the length of this sequence was really about drawing out the uncertainty, of allowing Strangelove to play as both thriller and comedy.  The only other explanation I can come up with is that the Slim Pickens shot is so iconic, so dazzling, so unforgettable, so capable of transcending the movie it's in, that Kubrick felt it deserved a nice long buildup, that it couldn't be approached too hastily.  In any case, my admiration for the film is rock-solid, but I'd have been much more liberal with the splicer here.

Dr. Strangelove begins with a title sequence that juxtaposes an in-flight refueling sequence with a lush instrumental rendition of "Try A Little Tenderness."  The effect, obviously, is to convert this military footage into a love scene, and it's an apt summation of everything that's to follow.  In scene after scene, sexuality and militarism are inextricably linked, from the enormous phallus poised between Pickens' legs as he plummets joyfully into oblivion, to the central plot itself: it is, after all, sexual dysfunction that motivates Ripper on his path to nuclear armageddon, all in the service of protecting "our precious bodily fluids."  Kubrick's strategy of playing music against the current of a scene is something he used again and again in his subsequent career, to the point where some less worshipful than myself may even say it became a cliche.  At any rate, the in-flight-refueling sequence that opens Strangelove has always seemed to me a sort of "dry run" for the magnificent shuttle-docking sequence in 2001, which similarly is scored to romantic music -- in this case, of course, Strauss's "Blue Danube" waltz, which would forever afterward be associated with that film.  I find this latter sequence more moving, because it is played for a kind of transcendent, awed delicacy, whereas the Strangelove scene aims more squarely for ironic laughter.  But the Strangelove sequence works well in its own context.

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