ABSTRACT
The wildly evocative image at the conclusion of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove, of Slim Pickens riding the “Bomb” downward through the sky, as if he were trying to tame a raging bull, points out, in perhaps the most perverse way, the irony of a society living in fear of the very weapon it sees as its salvation from fear. As we know from the film, an insanely paranoid US Air Force General (Sterling Hayden) has sent a flight of bombers on a pre-emptive nuclear airstrike against the Soviet Union. By the final scene of the movie, with the threat of Soviet retaliation looming over them, the US authorities have succeeded in their frantic attempts to recall the bombers or have them shot down. All of the planes and their crews have been neutralized except one: Leper Colony, the renegade B-52 Stratofortress piloted by Pickens’ character, Major T. J. “King” Kong. Over the drop site Leper Colony’s bomb-bay doors jam, and when they do open, a new complication arises. The bomb will not deploy. Without a second thought, Pickens throws himself atop its steely back, and with a bump and a yelp, he releases the “bull” from its pen. Both rider and beast plummet earthward: mission accomplished. The message of Dr. Strangelove’s comically dark conclusion seems clear
enough: a society can no more safely hold the destructive power contained in a nuclear warhead than it can control the unbridled spirit of a wild and willful beast. In fact, this beast has a way of controlling those who think themselves its master. Tragically, modern society’s predicament becomes an inescapable dilemma: our future is as much in our hands as it is out of our hands. Once it is been unleashed by human science, the destructive power of nuclear weapons is no longer ours to control. The bomb becomes as much a demon as it is a god. In the end, the only logical response to this Damoclesian dilemma, as Dr. Strangelove’s subtitle wryly puts it, is to learn “to stop worrying and love the bomb.” The twisted humor of the closing scene-the Soviets’ swift and devastating
nuclear retaliation that destroys the world, with the final burlesque of A-bomb explosions mushrooming high into the Earth’s atmosphere-is not meant to frighten the moviegoer as much as it is to accustom the viewer to
the sight, the sound, and the grand drama and pageantry of the end of humankind. There is, as it were, an exaggerated Vaudevillean quality that takes away the sting even as it stings: actors and audience laugh at the absurdity of each other and at the senseless circumstance into which they have together fallen. That is, actors and audience see themselves and their situation in the reflection of the other. Both are doomed. The unfortunate fact about the bomb that stays with the audience even after the house lights have gone up is the realization that the images on the screen and the precarious circumstances of modern life are really no laughing matter.
