City of Angels Film Festival
Directors Guild of America
November 5-7, 1999

 Embracing Apocalypse: Visions of Faith and Fear
Theme of the 1999 City of Angels Film Festival

"Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Bomb"

This source paper was prepared by Rose Pacatte, fsp, for her comments following a screening of the film at the City of Angels Film Festival, November 5-7. Robert Banks, Ph.D. and Reverend Scott Young founded the City of Angels Film Festival in 1993 to invite collaboration between spiritually sensitive filmmakers and cinematically informed theologians. Sister Rose represented the Catholic organization "Cine & Media" on the panel, which also included screenwriter and producer Coleman Luck and Reverend Frank Desiderio, vice-president of Paulist Pictures as moderator.

Rose Pacatte, fsp, is the Director of the Pauline Center for Media Studies, a project of the Daughters of St. Paul, US/Toronto Province.

Pauline Center for Media Studies
50 Saint Pauls Avenue
Boston, MA 02130-3491
Tel 617-522-8911 Fax 617-524-8648
mediastudies@pauline.org
www.pauline.org

In St. Augustine's City of God, he saw "that the images and numbers in which the Bible speaks of history's final conflicts and hopes were meant to reveal deeper truths about humanity and its relation to God than a scenario of the last days.. Augustine expresses throughout his works . a tension between anxiety and confidence, between the Good News of Salvation and the prospect of inevitable judgement"(1).

Augustine told his readers that because of this tension it is no easy thing to embrace the concept of apocalypse. Yet a clarification can now be made. Augustine says: the task of Christians is to bear witness to the Resurrection, not the Second Coming.(2) On the other hand, not all apocalyptic literature and film have developed into necessarily traditional expressions of the ultimate religious experience. Rather, as Dr. Strangelove and other end-of-times movies(3) have done as well, we are presented with films about the End, not necessarily about the Second Coming. (Never mind an explicit witness to the Resurrection. Few commercial films go that far, though some have, such as Ben Hur(4)). And with the End, comes "inevitable judgment" because there may be nothing left, not even the afterlife.

I am a relative newcomer to Stanley Kubrick's(5) works. After watching The Shining(6) a few years ago I was wary of him. I say "him" because I always want to know why a filmmaker does what he does and Kubrick's films beg for answers. The more I see (so far I have also seen Paths of Glory(7), Spartacus(8), 2001: A Space Odyssey(9), Clockwork Orange(10), Full Metal Jacket(11)) the more I want to know what motivated him, what was his worldview? Why make a certain film or create a body of work that emanates more or less the same image, if not message?

In preparing for this panel presentation I searched high and low for the source of his darkness, because for better or worse, Kubrick's films are dark. Vincent LoBrutto says in his biography(12), at times quoting other sources(13), that Kubrick believed that there was something inherently wrong with the human personality, that he did not think mankind was basically good, that war spoke directly to Kubrick, that he was a pessimist and had a misanthropic view of the world: "Personally, beneath a quiet and polite demeanor, Kubrick was deeply cycnical and pessimistic in his world view."(14)

In a recent interview with Sight and Sound(15) Kubrick's wife and two of his daughters, unhappy with LoBrutto's characterizations of Kubrick (and Frederick Raphael's(16) as well), say that Kubrick was not a pessimist but that he was an optimist, at least in terms of his daily life and work. But this is not enough to explain Kubrick's fascination with war and violence, his Sartre-like existentialism. One must ask: does Kubrick believe in an afterlife? Last judgment and lasting justice? Or does he dispense with these considerations and focus on being a dark prophet of the end of the world brought on by human stupidity? In Raphael's memoir and again in the Sight and Sound interview, we are told that Kubrick was not a religious man. This, too, seeks a broader discussion. Yet, even if he was not religious, it does not mean that what he had to "say" through some of his films was not important to the betterment of the human community.

Dr. Strangelove: vision of faith or fear?
No one comes to a film, or a book, or any kind of media product, completely objective and without a lens with which to make meaning and sense. Alas, I am no different.  I grew up in San Diego and my father was in the Navy. Our family was very aware of the military environment in which we lived. I was 10 years old when the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred and I remember going shopping for canned foods with the streets crowded with so much traffic that what normally took an hour took a half a day. I remember storing water in plastic bleach bottles, and my dad beginning to dig a bomb shelter in the back yard. I grew up being taught how to crouch under my school desk in case of a bomb attack, watching civil defense tests on television, and for years listening to the sirens being tested on Mondays at noon. I can never forget lying in bed at night with the sound of planes flying over and wondering if the bombs would come. if we would die. I was terrified of communists, those bad people who did not believe in God or freedom and who were out to get us.

Newly come to this film (though I have now seen it three times), I found little to laugh at the first time around. It brought back too many memories. Jesting with the threat of nuclear war in a movie did not appeal to me, and knowing that the governments of Pakistan and India today are not exactly playing parlor games out there on their borders only served to make me see this film as a vision of prevailing fear.

This doesn't mean it isn't wickedly funny and absurd. And later on, in subsequent viewings, I could laugh, but it was not in happiness, nor did I feel any lightness of being - ever. (One of our senior sisters couldn't sit through it, though, and she put it this way: "This is silly. nonsense; I'm going to bed.")

The human condition in Dr. Strangelove 

I invited a small group of sisters from my community to view this film to get some other input, and we all agreed that we kept looking for a hero, for nobility, for at least some common sense. This was probably because we have been conditioned to watching film for its entertainment value, our Western need for closure and our human need for hope. Mandrake's character, of course, provided the most sanity (even when distracted by the meaning of his name), but in general humanity is presented as a most sorry lot in this film.

We could discuss Kubrick's view of woman, his recurring theme of "modest and acceptable human casualties"(17), politics, racism, the prevailing masculine point of view that only men have power, his magnificence as a filmmaker, his art and frequent re-use of cinematic devises. We could talk about that fact that as for Aristotle so for Kubrick: "war and sex share the same vocabulary".  We could go on at length about the role of technology in our own destruction.. But the answer to this question is clear in Dr. Strangelove: the human element has failed, despite religion (for example, "Buck" Turgidson's pitiful reference to saying prayers and his presumptuous prayer of thanks, the miniature Bibles in the survival kits), politics, military action and technology. Safety is an illusion because the ultimate absurdity is that we are killing ourselves and we don't even know it.

Kubrick's view of the human person in Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb would seem to be very dark because there is no hero or heroine; we barely see common sense or nobility, which our experience teaches us are indeed present in the human condition.  Still, if Kubrick could make a film that demanded that its viewers look at what we are doing as members of the community of nations, then there is hope in that, because it means we can think and reflect and, hopefully, change.

Dr. Strangelove: A benevolent or malevolent universe?
In this film, we never get a chance to see a good world, though in a kind of Gestalt, each filmgoer can fill in the blank as the film begins. If one goes to see this film with the idea that the world, the universe, is a good place, that there is order in the universe, that there is One who gave and maintains a relationship with what has been created, then the horror of Kubrick's scenario, despite the cynicism and dark humor, is perhaps less marked because in our heart of hearts we hold out for hope. If one goes to see this film with dark glasses, then perhaps they are the ones who can laugh more easily, however briefly.

There is a "what was" and a "what will be" in this film. The status quo at the beginning of the film is not exactly good, however. A semblance of peace is being maintained, hopefully in a world worth saving. How can something good turn into something so evil? Through stupidity and the folly of men. We can also say, with a 90's reading of Dr. Strangelove, by looking at what's not in the film, namely, a wholesome representation of women, that men rule this universe and they are making a mess of it.

My belief that the universe is benevolent prevails during this film because this is the baseline for my examination of the movie. The universe in the film, however, is dark. The consequences of human actions are what constitute malevolence. For this reason, Dr. Strangelove is a sobering call to action, a dark prophecy, if you will.

Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick and our future
At the end of the 1959 Stanley Kramer film On the Beach(18), in which the entire world and all humanity is obliterated by radioactive fallout because of human error, the banners that had recently been flown for a religious revival fill the final scene: "There is still time.. brother". The ending is pedantic and obvious (why the two points between the phrase and the word "brother"), the film horrifying because we come to know the characters, we can identify with their normalcy, their fear, their unwillingness to face certain doom and their final reach for hope. But we are told: There is still time and we are all one human family.

As I said before, what a person brings to a Kubrick film will largely determine how one will interpret it. If one wants to see the image of rebirth in Kubrick's films, he will somehow find it.  In 1982, William Parrill wrote:

"In Kubrick's films, the individual will is subsumed into that of the group. The films represent not a triumph of the individual but a triumph of the mass will represented by a corrupt society or by science. Paradoxically, however, Kubrick is obsessed with the idea of renewal. If his representation of rebirth is still so hedged with qualification that a sense of affirmation is muted, he is too great an artist to have ruled out all possibility for creative rebirth."(19)

One may assume this if he wishes, but there is no unambiguous indication of it in this film. I disagree with Parrill. I do not think Kubrick is obsessed with rebirth, I think he is a man of this world, and this world only. Yet, it's a world he would like to keep around for a while.

LoBrutto says that Kubrick was obsessed with war and truly fearful of a nuclear holocaust and even considered moving to Australia at one point, "a country well out of central nuclear bomb target range(20)."  Much in the same way police deal with horrid crime scenes, so do Kubrick and Terry Southern deal with this fear: through irony. They had to laugh in the face of evil. The alternative was not acceptable.

The superimposition of the singing of "We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when. keep smiling, blue skies send dark clouds away" over the nuclear bomb explosion in the final scene is not about hope, it's the final irony. This ending vision (not dissimilar to the ending of Paths of Glory) and the song cancel each other out: our future is obliterated. This is true, of course, unless we heed the prophecy: do something now. The alternative is not acceptable.

Kubrick does not tell us what to do to change the future. He only shows us what will happen if we continue on this course. Does he trust humankind to do the right thing? I am not sure. I am reluctant to read too much universal optimism into Dr. Strangelove, let alone Kubrick. According to Kubrick, we seem to have little choice. Either we change the way we relate to each other as human beings or we will destroy ourselves. Rather than Augustine's tension between confidence and anxiety, this is the source of tension, the anxiety of Stanley Kubrick's apocalypse. There seems to be very little confidence.

Kubrick's apocalypse and mine 

What is the apocalypse? Is it the end times and the precursor of the Second Coming of Christ or is it just the end time?

Millenarianism and certain interpretations of the Scriptures (such as Augustine was called to deal with in the Fifth Century) would indicate that at the end time cataclysmic events will take place that will herald the Second Coming. For our purposes here, I define the apocalypse as the end of the world as we know it, and, with the final coming of Christ, the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. The apocalypse will be a time of transformation, rebirth, justice and love. There is an individual dimension and a social dimension to this event. I know that I am called to prepare for my personal "end time" and as a follower of Christ and as a citizen of this world to act responsibly in view of eternity.

 Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was not made in a vacuum. It was created and released in a time of great uncertainty and threat to humanity - all of humanity. It focuses on the micro, petty preoccupations, the insignificant, so that we might see the macro, the big picture, the significant. 

St. Ignatius of Loyola teaches that to grow spiritually, to be able to follow Christ in this world, we profit from listening to what is going on around us, seeing the signs of the times, seeking the truth that comes through relationships, art and beauty. Father James Alberione, the Founder of my religious community, the Daughters of St. Paul, always told us to "learn from everything."

Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is not a film about beauty, it is about the absence of beauty. It is not about relationships and individuals, but about the absence of loving relationships that extends to society as a whole. While this film does not present a picture of the truth as a faith perspective would want, the way I might then like it (though in truth, I am not sure how anyone could enjoy a doomsday picture), there is a certain truth here worth listening to. This truth is "back lit" and controlled so to speak, something, according to his biographers, that Kubrick was good at doing (it's safe to deal with war and violence in a film where it cannot harm you physically).

Cynical, absurd, frightening, offensive, brilliant, violent, silly. Sure, Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is all of this and more. Above all, it is a sobering film. While I cannot embrace its vision of the apocalypse as being the same as mine, or even as a Christian one, to me the truth I have seen and heard is: let us use the gifts we have been given as human beings to build a world of peace. It is possible to dislike the film, it is possible to laugh during it, it is not possible to ignore it and we cannot kiss it off.  It is dark indeed, and I do not envy Kubrick's burden of soul. It is too full of angst.

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