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An essay exploring the dark potential of the Atomic Apocalypse in Dr. Strangelove

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The glorious detail that trails most apocalyptic texts is, as it is put in Daniel, the “reward at the end of days.” In Ezekiel, the enemies of Israel are slain en masse and its people are allowed to return and live unafraid. The apocalyptic reward seems at its greatest in Revelation, which promises a “new heaven and a new earth” and an end to darkness for the chosen survivors of the end of the world. Even many modern scientific apocalypses cannot resist the urge to deliver this kind of happy ending, but there are other writers that have suggested that the fabled apocalyptic survival scenario cannot possibly result in moral good. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove provides a vision of apocalypse that rests on uncomfortable ground. Though humanity is promised a method of survival by the titular Nazi scientist, it is apparent that this new millennium will be dominated by fascist ideals and regressive ideology. Even the war itself, run by generals obsessed with death, seems somehow undivine. Dr. Strangelove criticizes the premillennial fascination with building a new world from catastrophe by highlighting the Darwinian tendencies and moral hypocrisy of the strain of humanity likely to actually survive into the new millennium, and Kubrick succeeds in this satire by maintaining a non-secular vision of the Cold War charged by revelations and a biblical adherence to massive death and procedural exactitude.

            In satirizing the biblical apocalyptic model, Kubrick questions the notion that good triumphs in the face of calamity. The conclusion to the film sees the inhabitants of the war room discussing the possibility of living underground in mineshafts to escape the wrath of the bombs—a situation that is evocative of the final imagery of Revelation six. The bible passage in question tells of an earthquake brought about by the opening of the sixth seal, an event that sends the “kings of the earth and the magnates and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free” to seek refuge within “the caves and among the rocks of the mountains” in order to escape the wrath of the lamb. In the biblical narrative, cataclysm is an equalizing power that brings kings and slaves alike back to the earth. It is unsurprising that an atomic cataclysm would send humanity underground as well, but there is nothing egalitarian about Kubrick’s vision of the descent of mankind. The idea is broached by none other than Dr. Strangelove himself, who rapidly concludes that a computer, programmed to seek eugenic traits like “health, sexual fertility” and “intelligence,” could decide who is allowed subterranean shelter and survive the doom. Of course, the president and his entourage of generals get a free pass in order to preserve “leadership and tradition,” and “females” will be reduced to breeding mares ten to a single man. These ideas send the scientist into an excited Nazi tizzy. In the absence of God, cataclysm offers an opportunity for selection.

            Apocalyptic fascist ideation is not new to Dr. Strangelove—older works of scientific apocalypse like H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds also play with the suggestion that an underground or fleeing humanity is likely to indulge in selective processes against its own perceived weaknesses. The artilleryman that Wells’s protagonist reunites with in the final segment of the novel declares that he means to live underground and form a society in which “life is real again” (Wells, 256). In his proposed configuration, “the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die” (Wells, 256). This potential reality is conveniently and optimistically avoided; the Martians have already succumbed to Earth’s bacteria. American authors appear more willing to explore the ramifications of humanity surviving a doomed Earth. Lisa Vox’s essay on “Race, Technology, and The Apocalypse” notes a particular work by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, When Worlds Collide, in which the earth is destroyed and “a small remnant of humanity” flees to another planet, the “new earth” of revelation made literal. This flight is ideologically charged, with one survivor noting, “I cannot regret that the world which was afflicted by us is flying in fragments, utterly incapable of rehabilitation.” The questions that go unasked: who is privileged to survive, and what is the perspective of this new, supposedly better civilization? Kubrick’s work answers this question with startling pessimism: the strong and ideologically ruthless will sculpt a world even more fit for their exploitation than the old one.

            The suggestion that the post-apocalypse world might not be a utopia seems to affront the basic scheme of the Christian apocalypse. Central to biblical apocalypse is the notion of the millennium: the peaceful epoch either directly following (premillennialism) or preceding (postmillennialism) the second coming of Christ. Vox argues that a premillennialist “belief in a final judgment and destruction of the world followed by a millennium of peace” ruled among Christian writers after the civil war. Like the characters in Wylie and Balmer’s story, social change without cataclysm is seen as an impossibility in a world overly corrupted by sin (and the context she provides of a post-reconstruction south all but assumes racial tensions as a major catalyst of these feelings). Purging the world in preparation for the millennium necessarily assumes that specific groups of people must be left for dead, and this is how apocalypses like Ezekiel and Revelation play out. Goodness is assumed in the survivors in these narratives because they are chosen by God, but this dichotomy is muddied by the context of the Cold War. Ideology supplants Christian morality. The satanic barbarians, the Gog, of the latter twentieth century becomes the Russians, and MIT scholar Norbert Weiner noted in 1950 that the American “probability of annihilation would remain high” because of “rigid propaganda which makes the destruction of Russia appear more important than our own survival.” Justice can only be derived from this conflict if America is morally good and the Soviets inherently bad, and Dr. Strangelove toys with this assumption without conceding to propaganda.

            Kubrick’s film satirizes atomic apocalypticism by highlighting the Cold War as not only an ideological struggle, but a Christian one against atheistic communists. Despite its emphasis on science and bureaucracy, Kubrick’s film is a parody of non-secularism. General Turgidson reminds his girlfriend to “say your prayers” over the phone, and he blankly calls the Russian ambassador a “degenerate atheist communist” (Kubrick, 31:10 & 37:25). Turgidson’s religious flair is particularly ironic/amusing because he’s an unmarried sexual maniac. While Strangelove describes that every mineshaft man, in order to breed most prodigiously, must be paired with ten women, the shot is fixed on the Turgidson, who turns to face Strangelove inquisitively. His eyebrows slowly lift in delight and his mouth gapes, and he eventually asks with faux concern whether Strangelove’s plan would “necessitate the abandonment of the so called monogamous sexual relationship,” even after he promises his secretary that he was going to marry her at the start of the film (Kubrick, 1:30:00-1:31:20). The survival kit that outfits every pilot on the B-52 conspicuously contains “one miniature combination Russian phrase book and bible,” so that perhaps the soldiers can be both spiritually and physically fortified by the word of God in enemy terrain. If the pilots do not feel like soldiers of God, the generals vying for the war in the first place certainly do.

            It goes without saying that divine revelation itself is a central trait of biblical apocalypse narratives (though it is an element seemingly not noted in many works of scientific apocalypse), but Dr. Strangelove showcases a twisted prophet of its own in General Ripper. Mandrake begs Ripper to explain his strange theory about bodily fluids and communist plots that justify nuclear war, and the general responds that he “first became aware of it” during sex (Kubrick, 57:00). The use of language here is strange—it is as if the knowledge were a cosmic fact that came to Ripper from the mists of his post-coital fugue. He uses the word “interpret” to describe his realization, and though his idea that women “sense his power” and must be rebuked lest they suck out his “life essence” seems absurd, is it not the fornication of the whore of Babylon that tempts the fall of man in Revelation? Sex is the great metaphorical sin of the Revelation narrative, and Ripper is actually the only general to disavow sex in contrast to an entire war room of eager mineshaft-fornicators. There is even the suggestion of final judgement in Kubrick’s apocalypse: “I happen to believe in a life after this one, and I know I’ll have to answer for what I’ve done. And I think I can” (Kubrick, 1:00:00). Ripper is self-assured in his visions and the righteousness of his actions, though his sweaty face betrays intense nerves. Even this anxious, uncertain adherence is reminiscent of the biblical apocalypse.

            Kubrick’s greatest parody is also his most obvious one: the incredible loss of life that the apocalypse entails is not only justifiable, but it is also coldly calculated with a startling precision. The numbers have been worked out in both Revelation and Strangelove. The angels released to slay humanity at the blowing of the sixth trumpet in Revelation cull “a third of mankind,” and the number of those marked by God to stand behind the lamb are “one hundred forty-four thousand.” The number of the millions of angelic warriors, plagues, beasts, and other means of apocalypse are also listed. Kubrick also plays with numbers when Turgidson explains to the president why attacking Russia would result in only “twenty million” dead rather than one hundred fifty million. Foregrounding this scene is an easily missed prop, a binder that reads “WORLD TARGETS IN MEGADEATHS” (Kubrick, 27:45). Even the dropping of the atomic bomb itself is filmed in a rigid, list-like way. A series of hard cuts between various switches flipping and instructions being read, like the cyclic breaking of seals, bring about doom. Apocalypse is a dark but formal calculus.

            Of course, it isn’t especially innovative to note that apocalypse is concerned with human death, but attention ought to be given to the idea that apocalyptic modes of thinking propagated by certain Christian sects provide a genocidal solution to human degradation. Premillennialist writers in particular seem to find solace in the idea that the end of the world might actually be a good thing for the future of mankind. Kubrick shuts this idea down. It cannot be overlooked that the only non-scientific miracle that occurs in Dr. Strangelove is the magical healing of the doctor himself. The very last moment of the film (besides the explosions themselves) sees the miraculous removal of the Nazi’s paralysis. It is as if Kubrick is saying that God ultimately sides with the fascists. I predict oppositions to this idea, of course. Were the premillennialist slaves not justified in craving a rapture that could free them from bondage? It should be noted also that, while religious fervor promotes these ideas, it was also a conglomerate of scientists, Christians and Jews that provided some of the most stalwart oppositions to nuclear apocalypse during that era. Eugene Rabinowitch of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, commenting on the discourse of nuclear attacks against Russia, questions whether this discourse is “asking the American people to acquiesce in advance to the final conversion of war into genocide?” It must not be forgotten that, regardless of divine fantasy, a real apocalyptic calamity would be a ripe ground for the practitioners of genocide. Rapture should not be sought.