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How to watch Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

1964 · Stanley Kubrick · Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb on Sightlines

5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.

On a first viewing

  1. Look at the War Room: round table, ring of light, huge maps. (staging)

    Ken Adam built a circular chamber with a raised gallery and translucent status boards. Taylor shoots it in deep focus so the men come out small against their own architecture.

    Payoff: The set makes an argument the script cannot. Power here is a building that dwarfs the people running it. In the reading: cinema of the brain. The reading calls this a cinema of the brain: the room is laid out like a thinking organ, and the architecture does the reasoning.

  2. Track the cuts between the base, the bomber and the War Room. (cutting)

    Harvey does not cut for thriller momentum. He cuts to show three sealed rooms that cannot reach each other. Each works from partial information and each looks nearly rational from inside.

    Payoff: The disaster is assembled from three sane-looking processes running in isolation. Nobody in any room holds the whole picture. In the reading: dispersive situation. The reading calls this a dispersive situation with weak links: many people loosely connected, and the connections keep failing.

  3. Notice each location is shot in a different style. (camera)

    Taylor films Burpelson like a newsreel with a mobile camera, the B-52 in tight cramped close-ups, and the War Room in wide theatrical deep focus. Black and white keeps all three grave.

    Payoff: You never settle into one satirical register. The shifts in style keep knocking you slightly off balance.

  4. Watch Sellers play three different men. (performance)

    Mandrake is British deference under pressure, Muffley is reasonableness delivered in a flat nasal calm, Strangelove is a body that cannot govern itself. Kubrick kept the camera running to catch improvisation.

    Payoff: Three men in one film, each a different variety of uselessness at the same emergency.

  5. Listen for 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home' over the bomber. (sound)

    Kubrick scores the B-52 scenes with a Civil War marching song arranged in variations. The music is patriotic, martial and entirely sincere, running under a crew preparing a nuclear delivery.

    Payoff: Nothing in the arrangement winks at you. The gap between what you hear and what you see does the whole job.

Once you have seen it

  1. Watch Sterling Hayden play Ripper completely straight. (performance)

    Hayden gives no sign that he knows the lines are absurd. The talk about fluoridation and precious bodily fluids arrives as sincere conviction, framed in close, trapping mid-shots inside his office.

    Payoff: Playing it straight is what makes it frightening. The comedy comes from the system around him, not from the performance.

  2. Count the attempts to stop it and how each one fails. (structure)

    Ripper sets the strike moving and every effort to recall it exposes another fault: the code, the payphone, the radio, the fail-safe itself. The machine only runs in one direction.

    Payoff: This is a comedy with no reversal in it. The structure is built so that nothing anyone does can turn it around.

  3. Watch Strangelove's gloved hand fight his own body. (performance)

    The arm jerks into a salute he did not order. The glove goes for his throat. Sellers builds the character out of a body that keeps admitting what the suits in the room are denying.

    Payoff: His flesh says the war never ended. It changed management and moved into a different building. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls this a gest: a posture that exposes a relation nobody in the room will put into words.

  4. Listen to Vera Lynn over the last images. (sound)

    Kubrick closes on a 1939 sentimental ballad about meeting again, laid over mushroom clouds blooming one after another. The song was recorded for people saying goodbye at the start of a real war.

    Payoff: The collision drops the film's whole strategic vocabulary and leaves you with the thing those words were describing.

Carry this in: Watch for the second in each room when acting stops being possible and only talk is left.

A Deleuzian reading of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb →

How Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was received →