WAS 1964 “THE LAST INNOCENT YEAR,” AS ONE WRITER CLAIMED, EVEN though he admits, “there never was an innocent year”? A nation’s loss of innocence, if it ever occurred, is not like the biblical fall of man, which, according to Genesis, was the result of a specific act of disobedience. Each generation has its own date for its first glimpse into what, in Lord of the Flies, William Golding calls “the darkness of the heart,” the moment when innocence yields to experience, and the world no longer seems the same. For the children of the Great Depression, it was the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. For the baby boomers, it was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963. And for the millennials, it was the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.
Whether or not 1964 was the last innocent year, it was certainly an erratic one, alternately vibrant and somber. Technically, America was at peace; in reality, it was engaged in an undeclared war in Vietnam that was destined to escalate to the point that, by fall 1966, men between twenty-six and thirty-five could be drafted if the number of eligible males in the eighteen to twenty-five age category was exhausted. But war was far from Flushing Meadow, Corona Park, in the borough of Queens, the site of the 1964 World’s Fair. Major companies like General Motors, Dupont, and General Electric exhibited their newest creations intended to improve quality of life. There was something for everyone: the world’s largest cheese at the Wisconsin Pavilion; Michelangelo’s Pietà, blue-lit, at the Vatican Pavilion; cities of the future, some with moving sidewalks, and others underwater with submarines instead of cars. Films, live entertainment, simulations—everything pointed to a future of limitless possibilities.
Nineteen sixty-four was also notable for the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the surgeon general’s warning that cigarettes pose a health hazard, and the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on 9 February, which attracted seventy-three million viewers. Summer 1964 was declared “Freedom Summer.” Andrew Goldman, Mickey Schwerner, and James Chaney became freedom riders, traveling to Mississippi to inform blacks about their constitutional rights and the importance of registering to vote. Their idealism ended in death at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. Black America was still, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described it in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, “a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” Freedom summer saw little freedom. There were race riots in New York, Jersey City, and Philadelphia.
In August 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized the bombing of North Vietnam, which signaled the escalation of the war, affecting the 23,310 members of the armed services deployed there. By 1966, the death roll had reached six thousand. It would continue to rise. Nineteen sixty-four was also a presidential election year, with Johnson running against Barry Goldwater. Johnson’s team devised a potent television ad, “Daisy,” in which a little girl counts as she pulls petals from a daisy. She has not quite mastered sequential order: “One, two, three, four, five, seven, six, six, eight, nine.” Next, a voice that has mastered sequential order is heard in a different form of countdown: “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero,” followed by a nuclear explosion. Then Johnson’s voice is heard issuing a warning: “These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God’s children can live or go into the dark. We must either love each other or we must die.” Then came the kicker: “Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.” Johnson was elected, but the nuclear threat did not abate.
It was not a great year for movies. The best were The Pink Panther, Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, The Americanization of Emily, The Pawnbroker, and two that were in a class by themselves: Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, both of which ended with a nuclear holocaust. The former, directed by Sidney Lumet, was the more harrowing; the latter, directed by Stanley Kubrick, was more popular, although one film scholar found it rather broad and “sophomoric.” The essential difference lay in the films’ approach to the inexorable. In Fail-Safe, brilliantly adapted by Walter Bernstein from Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s novel of the same name, events mount to a fatalistic climax, like a Greek tragedy. The infernal machine is wound up, needing just a push, a press of a button, or a computer glitch to set it in motion. And once that happens, there is no stopping it. In Dr. Strangelove, nuclear disaster could have been averted if the means of preventing it were not in the hands of a lunatic. “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more,” as Pozzo observes in Samuel Beckett‘s Waiting for Godot. Kubrick would agree—but add that we should at least have some laughs before that perpetual night.
Fail-Safe does not begin conventionally. After the Columbia logo of the lady with the torch appears, a title bursts on the screen: “New York City, 5:30 A.M.” The first image is not of New York, but of a bullring, where a victorious matador is slaying a bull. A white-haired man in the stands looks petrified, as if he identifies with the slowly dying animal. As yet the connection between the opening scene and the New York setting is unclear—although it will become horrifyingly evident at the end. Then “Fail-Safe” appears in bold lettering, followed by the rest of the credits that blast onto the screen like projectiles, suggesting a crisis growing incrementally into a catastrophe. The New York episode is the first in a multipart sequence of events occurring simultaneously in various locations at 5:30 am. The ritual slaying of the bull is a recurring dream of General Black (Dan O’Herlihy), who must rise early to fly to Washington, DC, for an important meeting in the war room, a location that foreshadows darker things to come.
Next we are in Washington, DC, where Professor Groeteschele (Walter Matthau), a political scientist, is still pontificating after an all-night discussion on nuclear war, whose casualties he has estimated at one hundred million. By 5:30 am, he had lowered the number to sixty million, as if the new figure were cause for joy. Groeteschele is the worst type of academic, self-important and supercilious, not so much hating communism as considering it intellectually beneath him. He even believes that after a nuclear war, “culture” may never mean what it once did, yet whatever remains of American culture would be preferable to the Russian variety.
On to Omaha, Nebraska, where Colonel Cascio (Fritz Weaver) enters the plot He is a neurotic who has transcended his lower-middle class background, but not the sense of inferiority that has made him eager to offer proposals that are as irrational as they are dangerous. The last stop is Anchorage, Alaska, where Colonel Grady (Edward Binns) is introduced. Grady will pilot the plane that bombs Moscow after a nuclear alert has been accidentally triggered. The Soviets have jammed the fail-safe boxes in the bombers, making radio reception impossible. Once the bombers have passed fail-safe and are out of United States jurisdiction, nothing can deter them from accomplishing their mission, which, because of a computer error, is the bombing of Moscow. When reception has been restored, and the president orders the bombers to turn back, Colonel Grady refuses; he has been instructed to ignore verbal commands even from the president, since someone could be imitating the voice of the commander-in-chief. Even the pleas of Grady’s wife are in vain. The president (Henry Fonda) then orders fighter planes to shoot down the bombers before they reach Moscow, even if it means running out of fuel and plunging into the ocean. This is precisely what happens, and the bombers continue on to their destination.
At this point, the cold irrationality of war becomes transparent. A system has been created, which to succeed requires sacrificial victims who are not even aware they have been designated as such. Operating on the assumption that Russia will be the aggressor in a nuclear war, the United States established a system of preparedness that is really preemptive retaliation: in short, we’ll bomb you before you bomb us. And if the system goes into red alert when an unidentified plane invades American air space, we shoot it down. Of course, there was no such system, which is why the Defense Department would not cooperate in the making of the film. Fail-Safe is a reductio ad absurdum of Cold War paranoia, which is inevitable in a country conditioned to expect war. The rules of engagement alone matter: If we bomb Moscow by mistake, we will do a quid pro quo and bomb New York. And so a gentleman’s agreement will leave two great cities in ruins. But what does it matter if the protocols were observed?
The most unnerving sequence in Fail-Safe is the phone conversation between the president and the Soviet premier. In the bunker are the president and Buck, his young translator (Larry Hagman, in the film’s most demanding performance). One never hears the Soviet leader, only Buck’s translation, delivered haltingly and with a slight hint of an accent, as if he were doing his best to reproduce the premier’s inflections and tone. It is chillingly formal, Mr. President speaking to Mr. Chairman. Curiously, there is no bellowing at the other end when the Soviet premier is told that his capital will be bombed. “We’re paying for our mutual suspicions,” the president ruefully comments. As to the question, “What do we say to the dead?” the answer is a limp, “It must not happen again.”
Early in the film, General Black wonders if he will ever know the identity of the matador in his dream. When the president decides to atone for the mechanical failure that triggered the bombing of Moscow by ordering a similar bombing of New York, he assigns the task to Black, even though he knows that Black’s family lives there. But he also knows that the first lady is visiting there. Each man will suffer a loss; each will make the supreme sacrifice. But for what? An infernal machine that has acquired a mind of its own, impervious to human considerations? Black was the matador; the slain bull was the dead of New York, which includes his wife and sons. It was an act of patriotic homicide. Just following orders.
The film ends with a montage of New York street life just before the bombing. People in motion freeze into stills, as a three-dimensional world is drained of depth. But Fail-Safe does not end with the photomontage. Columbia insisted on a disclaimer to calm anxious moviegoers: “The producers of this film wish to stress that it is the stated position of the Department of Defense and the United States Air Force that a rigidly enforced system of safeguards and controls insure that occurrences such as those depicted in this story cannot happen.” Fail-Safe, then, is a hybrid: science fiction that spills over into existential horror.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is black comedy that blurs into absurdism. Both Strangelove and Fail-Safe were Columbia releases, similar in theme, but not in treatment. Peter George’s Red Alert (1958), which he published earlier in Britain as Two Hours to Doom under the pseudonym Peter Bryant, left a deep impression on Stanley Kubrick, who had long harbored the desire to make a movie about nuclear war. Originally, Kubrick and George had intended to film a fairly close adaptation of the novel, in which nuclear devastation is narrowly averted, despite a rogue—and probably insane—air force general’s order of a massive air strike against the Soviet Union. But as the screenplay progressed, Kubrick felt that the lunacy of war required a lunatic plot, a “nightmare comedy.” Although originally Columbia Pictures had no intention of releasing both Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove, it ended up doing so in the same year. One film was stark and somber (Fail-Safe); the other, antic and gleefully misanthropic (Dr. Strangelove).
In 1961, Eugene Burdick, knowing of Kubrick’s interest in a nuclear war film, sent him a rough draft of Fail-Safe, thinking it was the kind of material Kubrick was seeking. Since Kubrick’s production company, Harris-Kubrick Pictures, had already purchased the rights to Red Alert, the director immediately sensed the similarities between his project and Fail-Safe. Kubrick, George, and Columbia sued Burdick and co-author Harvey Wheeler for plagiarism, along with the Entertainment Corp. of America (ECA), a new production company that planned to release Fail-Safe. The case was settled out of court. Columbia took over Fail Safe from ECA so it could control the release dates of both films to keep them from competing with each other.
It is hard to imagine that Burdick and Wheeler had not read George’s novel. For example, in Red Alert, the president proposes to the Soviet premier that if the B-52s get through to their destination, the Soviets can retaliate by bombing an American city, preferably Atlantic City. Ultimately, neither Moscow nor Atlantic City is destroyed. In Fail- Safe, Moscow is bombed, and as atonement, the president sacrifices New York. Kubrick persuaded Columbia to take advantage of the publicity generated by the lawsuit and release Dr. Strangelove first. He preferred mid-August 1963, even though the film was not ready. The date kept changing; first it was October, then December. With the assassination of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963, Columbia finally decided on 29 January 1964. Fail-Safe’s opening was delayed until October of that year, dooming it at the box office, despite impressive notices. After laughing at a global holocaust, few wanted to don the mask of tragedy that was regulation attire for Fail-Safe. Dr. Strangelove continues to find admirers. It ranks third in the American Film Institute’s list of the one hundred best comedies, preceded by Some Like It Hot and Tootsie in first and second place, respectively.
Compared to the meticulously structured Fail-Safe, with its opening sequence of events occurring simultaneously, Dr. Strangelove is more of a series of burlesque skits, one more outrageous than the other. Rather than place the “It’s only a movie” disclaimer at the end of the film, as Columbia had done with Fail-Safe (as if that would have made audiences sleep more easily), the studio inserted it at the beginning of Dr. Strangelove: “It is the stated position of the United States Air Force that their safeguards would prevent the occurrence of such events as are depicted in this film. Furthermore, it should be noted that none of the characters portrayed in this film are meant to represent any real persons, living or dead.”
The “events” triggered by a deranged mind take on their own form of derangement, as if it was not Stanley Kubrick who was behind the camera, but Victor Frankenstein or Dr. Caligari. General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) has sealed off Burpelson Air Base (“Burpelson,” a sound-alike for Burleson, Texas, and one of many emblematic names in the film), placing it on condition red. Rabidly anti-communist and pathetically delusional, Ripper has convinced himself of the imminence of a Soviet attack, requiring the implementation of Wing Attack, Plan R, a retaliatory measure against the Soviet Union. Such a weirdly realistic beginning requires a filmmaker to keep upping the ante, making each sequence more bizarre—or nightmarish—than the last. When the message is relayed to the B-52 pilot, Major Kong (Slim Pickens), a Texas Redneck who acts as if he had been a bronco buster in his salad days, there is no turning back. Actually, there cannot be; General Ripper alone knows the recall code, which he is sharing with no one.
Whatever unity Dr. Strangelove possesses derives from the inspired casting of Peter Sellers in three pivotal roles as RAF Captain Mandrake, an officer in the exchange program, who plays straight man to Hayden’s mad man, the voice of reason vs. the voice of lunacy; Merkin Muffley, president of the United States, a buffoon compared to Henry Fonda’s model leader in Fail-Safe; and the title character (who does not appear in the novel), a former Nazi scientist recruited to ensure America’s superiority in the arms race. Although Sellers was also slated to play Major Kong and worked hard at perfecting a Texas accent, he suffered a leg injury that led to the Texas-born Slim Pickens taking over the part. The film also profited from the addition of Terry Southern to the writing team. Although Southern only worked about six weeks on the script, he imbued it with the darkly comic quality that Kubrick wanted. The screenplay acquired an antic disposition, so that the action seemed frighteningly plausible and at the same time hilariously surreal. Southern, who had both an edgy sense of humor and a disdain for sexual propriety, produced the equivalent of a cartoon for adults, as if he were telling audiences, “It’s all right to laugh when the bombs start falling”—particularly when they fall as Vera Lynn is heard singing the World War II classic, “We’ll Meet Again,” with it’s refrain, “some sunny day.” This juxtaposition of images of nuclear devastation with an optimistic pop song is bound to evoke a laugh, or at least a smile, because of its utter incongruity. And yet the incongruous is at the heart of comedy, in which there is a disconnect between what should be and what is. The future of civilization should not be in the hands of a wacko, but it is. War should not be a substitute for sex, but it is.
Dr. Strangelove is a specialized kind of comedy. Kubrick called it “nightmare comedy”—but one that is charged with sexuality. War is sex with planes and bombs in lieu of partners, with detonations as the ultimate orgasm. The opening, an ironic fusion of image and music, shows the boom of a tanker jutting into the screen like a steel phallus, as it refuels a B-52 bomber in what looks like mechanical copulation. Yet there is something poetically graceful about the mid-air coupling, which is particularly suited to the soundtrack: an instrumental version of “Try a Little Tenderness.”
Southern did not originate the character of Dr. Strangelove, who was the joint creation of Kubrick and Peter George. At first, Dr. Strangelove had a given name, Otto. At one point, the film was even entitled The Rise of Dr. Strangelove. Then, the first name was dropped, and the title changed. But the surname remained, as transparent a name as that of any of the characters. “Strangelove” may not have been Southern’s idea, but it seems highly probable that he was responsible for some, or maybe even all, of the transparent names in the film. Like many satirists, Southern had a penchant for such names (Candy Christian, Dr. Krankheit, Prof. Mephisto [Candy]; Guy Grand, the multi-millionaire, Youngman Grand in The Magic Christian).
The transparent (telltale, emblematic) name should say something about its bearer. The telltale name was one of the glories of Restoration Comedy, which featured the likes of Dr. Quack, Margery Pinchwife, Sir Jaspar Fidget, Mrs. Squeamish in Wycherly’s The Country Wife; and Lady Sneerwell, Mrs. Candour, Sir Benjamin Backbite, Snake, Careless in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. Tom Dirks, whose painstakingly detailed analyses can be found on his website, “The Greatest Films,” has shown that the characters’ names in Dr. Strangelove are in some way associated with sex. Jack D. Ripper suggests the Victorian murderer of prostitutes. One suspects that Southern would have wanted the name pronounced as if it were Jack “de” (“de” for “the”) Ripper, a hipster version of the formal middle initial. But the name is not a perfect fit for the character, unless one assumes that the general would like to emulate his namesake, perhaps even mutilating his victims sexually, as the Ripper occasionally did. The general is not only maniacally anti-communist, he also believes that fluoridation is a communist attempt to “sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids,” including semen. He first came to that conclusion “during the physical act of love,” and thus withholds his “essence” from women, meaning either onanism or, more likely, total abstinence—perhaps because the imagined sapping of his bodily fluids has left him impotent. Digging for meaning is not characteristic of the emblematic name, whose associations should be immediate. When a character in Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem is named Mrs. Sullen or Lady Bountiful, we know immediately that one must be withdrawn and the other benevolent. Not so in Dr. Strangelove, where the names make sense only in retrospect.
The group captain’s name, Mandrake, derives from a plant considered to have magical properties, including aphrodisiacal. Yet the captain is the epitome of British reserve and decorum. Perhaps the name was meant to suggest that Mandrake could use an aphrodisiac, since sex seems to play no role in his life. In fact, closeness makes him uncomfortable. In a scene with strong homoerotic overtones, perhaps hinting at another side of General Ripper, the General sits uncomfortably close to Mandrake, putting his arm around him as he explains his theory of fluoridation. It is only after Ripper commits suicide that Mandrake, who has figured out the recall code (it is OPE, a permutation of the first letters of Ripper’s mantra, “Purity of Essence”), takes charge, despite the interference of Colonel “Bat” Guano, who thinks the base has been overrun by communist “preverts”—one of whom is the group captain. Guano is fertilizer made of bat dung, among other substances. “Bat Guano” does not fit the character, especially as played by a deadpan Keenan Wynn.
The president—Peter Sellers again, looking like Phil Silvers as Master Sergeant Bilko on The Phil Silvers Show—is Merkin Muffley. A merkin is a genital covering often made of fur; “Muffley” suggests “muff,” slang for female genitalia. But the president is as sexless as Mandrake. That he is also a bit effeminate (note the way he elongates the first name of the Soviet premier, “Di-mi-tri”) may explain the name—but not satisfactorily. Still, it a clever juxtaposition of two words referring to the same anatomical area. The pilot of the bomber that will execute Plan R (for “Romeo,” which somehow had been changed from the less obvious “Robert”) is Major Kong, named after King Kong, that iconic ape who never behaved like a yokel or sounded like a Texan. King Kong was the embodiment of the ideal male—desirous of the female, protective of her, and willing to die for her. Major Kong is a joker, an anti-communist like everyone else and eager to do his bit to rid the world of Russkies. And sex is present in the bomber, where the survival kit contains lipsticks and nylons as enticements for accommodating Russian females and condoms (called prophylactics) for whatever follows. Even the bombs bear suggestive names, Dear John and Hi There, the latest versions of Fat Man and Little Boy. To end a relationship, a young woman would send a “Dear John” letter to her former sweetheart in the military, informing him that she now has a new beau. “Hi there” is a hooker’s way of making contact, although one writer calls it “a homosexual advance.” Still, it is sexual in one way or another. When Kong manages to open the hatch to detonate Hi There, he sits astride the bomb as it falls toward its target, waving his Stetson as if he were at a rodeo. The detonation is probably the closest Kong ever came to orgasm. Major Kong is as sexless as the other males in the film, with the exception of Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott). Again, the character bears a sexually allusive name: Buck, an adult male animal; Turgidson, from “turgid,” meaning “swollen,” implying sexual arousal. Turgidson is first seen half dressed with his secretary, who is wearing a bikini, after what was obviously an assignation. His sex life has bifurcated into lust for women and lust for war. He envies the Russians their doomsday machine, which forms the film’s climax.
Although the film’s opening disclaimer insists that the characters are fictitious, several of them were suggested by historical figures—or rather, historical figures transmogrified into caricatures, with some traces of the prototypes left behind. However, Dr. Strangelove is not cinema à clef like Citizen Kane, in which the similarities between the fictitious Charles Foster Kane and newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst are obvious. In his impressive ongoing study of Dr. Strangelove, Rob Ager identifies the models for the main characters. To Ager, Buck Turgidson is a stand-in for General Curtis LeMay, a warrior in the literal sense and the bearer of several unflattering nicknames, including “The Demon.” In the last months of World War II, LeMay replaced the standard practice of daylight precision bombing with the relentless nighttime cluster bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities. After the war, he reorganized the Strategic Air Command (SAC), but could not adjust to Cold War America without a battle plan. In this respect, he is more like General Ripper. Le May, like Ripper, advocated a preemptive nuclear attack policy if there was any indication that the Soviet Union was planning a strike against the United States. LeMay also favored big cigars, like General Ripper. Kubrick often used a low shot to photograph Sterling Hayden, so that the cigar in his mouth extended into the frame like a projectile—or, in keeping with the film’s dominant image, a phallus. According to a PBS program about LeMay, after Dr. Strangelove came out, the press referred to him as General Jack D. Ripper.
Ager also notes that two of Kubrick’s biographers consider Merkin Muffley a composite of Adlai E. Stevenson, United Nations ambassador under John Kennedy, and former President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Stevenson and Eisenhower were bald like Muffley, and Stevenson had also been governor of Illinois and the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956, losing both times to Eisenhower. Stevenson was also an intellectual, something Muffley is not. As for Muffley as Eisenhower, one could hardly imagine Muffley at Normandy in 1944, much less planning the Normandy invasion, as Eisenhower did. If anything, Muffley is the antithesis of Stevenson and Eisenhower, possessing neither Stevenson’s diplomatic skills nor Eisenhower’s military expertise. Muffley is a twit. His natural habitat would have been a burlesque house, where he could have been a Top Banana like Phil Silvers in the early days of his career. If Muffley is anyone, he is Master Sergeant Ernie Bilko in the White House.
The last character to make an appearance is the eponymous Dr. Strangelove, a onetime Nazi and now an anti-communist and member of the president’s inner council. The screenwriters—Kubrick, Southern, and George—wove aspects of the life and career of rocket scientist Werner von Braun into Strangelove, creating an anti-Von Braun. The historical Werner Von Braun oversaw the production of the V-2 missiles that rained down on England in 1944. Inmates from concentration camps were conscripted to build the rockets and forced to live underground in tunnels, where they were subjected to widespread mistreatment and physical abuse. Von Braun was appalled by the workers’ living conditions but claimed he could do nothing to improve them. Like Strangelove, Von Braun was one of several ex-Nazi scientists brought to the United States as part of the then covert Operation Paperclip. The operation was intended to ensure that America’s nuclear superiority, demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, remain un-challenged. Von Braun could only do so much, yet without him, there might never have been a moon landing in 1969—one of the ironies of Operation Paperclip.
The wheelchair-bound and presumably impotent Strangelove occupies a special place in the war room during the film’s final moments. He advances a plan to preserve what is left of the human race: underground breeding in mineshafts, similar to the tunnels at Mittelwerk, the underground factory where slave laborers built the V-2 rockets. Since the ratio of women to men would be ten to one, monogamy would be discontinued in order to produce a master race. The notion of a polygamous society appeals to the horny Turgidson. Even the Russian ambassador considers it “an astonishingly good idea.” The finale is Peter Sellers’s last attempt to top himself. Having played a proper Brit and a nincompoop president, he now takes on Strangelove. Gleefully decadent and eerily effete, like an androgynous cabaret performer in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin, Strangelove is also part machine. He has a mechanized arm that he must pull down when it springs up. Sellers’ Strangelove is the personification of silken villainy and amoral detachment. To him, humankind is the equivalent of the refueling device seen at the beginning of the film. Energized by his dream of a race of super humans, he suddenly rises from his wheelchair, crying, “Mein Führer, I can walk.” Standing upright is the closest he will get to an erection. But it is too late. The doomsday machine goes off, and one wonders who will be alive to populate the world that survives.
The world’s future, if it is to have one, lies in an underground metropolis like the one in Fritz Lang’s 1927 film of the same name, except that everyone would be living below the earth. (In Metropolis, only the workers toil beneath the surface.} But the idea of underground breeding chambers brings the film to the height of nihilism. The strange love that the doctor advocates is sex as work, loveless reproduction. Pushed to the extreme, Strangelove’s metropolis would be like Plato’s ideal state, with its regulated breeding and communal child rearing. Children never know their birth parents, ensuring that their sole allegiance is to the state. Ironically, the anti-communist Strangelove’s plan, if fully implemented, would result in a form of communism that goes beyond the excesses of the Soviet Union. Dr. Strangelove may be a classic comedy, but its implications do not inspire laughter.