Stanley Kubrick

by David Mikics

  What New York did have was a circle of friends including the madcap satirist Terry Southern and jazz clarinetist Artie Shaw, who had given up music to produce movies and write short stories. Kubrick would develop his next two films, Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey, among the freewheeling writers and artists of 1960s New York.

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  Total Final Annihilating Artistic Control:

  Dr. Strangelove

  “I WAS INTERESTED in whether or not I was going to get blown up by an H Bomb prior to Lolita,” Kubrick told Jeremy Bernstein.1 His interest got more intense during Lolita’s shooting in the summer of 1961. The Cold War was heating up, with JFK and Khrushchev in a nerve-racking standoff over Berlin, and the threat of a war between superpowers gripped the world. After his return to New York, the now-obsessed Kubrick read a long list of books about nuclear apocalypse. Among them was the Welsh author Peter George’s Red Alert (1958), a novel about a rogue air force general who orders a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. In 1961, Kubrick decided that Red Alert would be his next movie. He started work on the project with Jimmy Harris, but soon Harris was on his way to Hollywood to become a director himself.

  Kubrick thought that nuclear war was a horrible absurdity, so he wanted make Red Alert a comedy. He and Harris had come up with some broad comic touches during their story conferences, imagining, for example, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ordering from a deli during the atomic crisis. But now Harris was getting worried. A feature-length comedy about the Bomb just wasn’t feasible, he thought: the subject was simply too dreadful. Harris remembers thinking, “ ‘I leave him alone for ten minutes and he’s going to blow his whole career.’ ”

  Harris was wrong. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, turned out to be Kubrick’s best work so far: his first truly pathbreaking film, ghastly and hilarious at once in a way never seen before in Hollywood. After watching it for the first time, Kubrick’s high school friend Alex Singer wrote to him, “I laughed so hard and so often that I thought I’d be asked to leave the theatre.”2 Along with many Strangelove fans, I’ve had the same thought.

  Harris’s split with Kubrick during the Strangelove scriptwriting was an amicable one. Kubrick had been feeding Harris’s filmmaking ambitions, telling him, “You’ll never know complete satisfaction until you’ve tried your hand at directing.” “Kubrick invited enormous input from me on Lolita,” Harris remembered. “Stanley had a very open mind,” he added. “He admired anybody who thought enough about something to have an idea.”3

  On Lolita, Harris had been inspired by Kubrick’s assured manner. “You’ve got to supervise everybody, and answer all the questions,” Harris told an interviewer. “It seemed so easy for Stanley.” But Kubrick confessed to Harris that the hardest time for a director was “the moment when you arrive on the set each morning.” As Harris put it,

  You’ve got a city block filled with equipment, trucks, extras in costume, honeywagons. There you are pulling up, and dozens if not hundreds of people are looking straight at you. They’ve all got questions, and they need them answered right away. Everybody likes the idea of being a director—of being that guy that everybody looks to—but the reality is a whole other ballgame. You’ve got to be ready to answer, but you’ve got to keep your nerve and not answer too fast.4

  When Harris went off to LA, he remembered, Kubrick “wrote down things for me like I was a kid he was sending to school. ‘Don’t get bullied into making a shot-list’ was key advice. He said, ‘A lot of magic happens on the set; it’s no disgrace to not know what you want to do.’ . . . If you’re not careful, people will bully you into thinking there’s something wrong with you if you don’t have a clear image of where every shot is, and where you’re going to put the camera. Stanley said, ‘It’s much better to discover your strategy with dialogue scenes. You want the actors to make a contribution. Don’t put them in a position where they’re told what to do.’ ”5

  Harris went on to direct a series of odd, intriguing movies, including a Cold War thriller that ends with an atomic blast, The Bedford Incident (1965), the unclassifiable erotic fairy tale Some Call It Loving (1973), and Cop (1988), a white-knuckle James Ellroy adaptation starring James Woods.

  Strangelove grew out of Kubrick’s deep research about nuclear war. His favorite prophet of radioactive Armageddon, and the chief model for Dr. Strangelove himself, was Herman Kahn, a theorist at the RAND Corporation, the think tank where scientists loosened their ties and lolled on the floor as they pondered the unthinkable. Kahn, who spoke frequently to military and civilian groups, warned that “nuclear war is an immediate peril,” and he added, “prepare to be struck, fight back, and survive.” On Thermonuclear War (1960), which Kubrick read at least three times, featured spookily calm postapocalyptic summaries like “Table 3, Tragic but Distinguishable Postwar States”: “2 million dead=economic recuperation 1 year; 10 million=5 years; 20 million=10 years; 80 million=fifty years; 160 million=100 years.” Even if the fifty major cities in the United States were struck by Soviet bombs, Kahn stressed, the country could rebuild them in ten years, “complete with slums, and some extra ones,” he joshed.6 The cheeriness was deceptive, since Kahn failed to mention the devastating long-term effects of radiation.

  Kahn was, by any standard, a true character. Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, his biographer, says he was “buoyant and ingratiating. He was appealingly eccentric: grossly fat, a stammerer and a wheezer, nearly narcoleptic at times, but, when awake, insatiably chatty.” Kahn, who would talk to anybody, wanted to figure out what made the peace movement tick. He said to a reporter in 1968, “I like the hippies. I’ve been to Esalen. I’ve had LSD a couple of times. In some ways I’d like to join them.”7

  He also wasn’t afraid to sound crazy. “At the Hudson Institute” (another think tank where Kahn worked) “we’re proud to say we stand halfway between chutzpah and megalomania,” he jested. Kahn thought “frivolity [was] a permissible approach to intolerably catastrophic ideas,” writes Ghamari-Tabrizi8—and so did Kubrick. The Kubricks had dinner with Kahn a few times, and they were highly impressed by the rotund, wisecracking theorist.

  After Kubrick’s movie came out, the Daily Mail called Kahn “the real Dr. Strangelove,” and they weren’t far wrong. Strangelove, like Kahn, plays around with the line between passionate idiocy and shrewd strategic gamesmanship. And Strangelove echoes Kahn nearly word for word when he asks, “Will the survivors envy the dead?” after the Doomsday Machine goes kaboom. Kahn, for his part, when he heard that Strangelove was based on him, badgered the director for royalties. (“It doesn’t work that way,” Kubrick told him.)9

  Kahn spoke to one of Kubrick’s key obsessions, the blurry line between mastery and insanity. Without meaning to, Kahn illustrates a key theme of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, that reason can run amok. He sounds like a character in Swift whose dream of rational control starts to look like madness. Yet he was on to something, since his thinking mirrored the paranoid Cold War reality. The Soviets might feel compelled to attack us, Kahn said, out of fear that our strategic vulnerability would tempt us to strike them first. But if we said that we were considering a first strike, and thought we could survive a nuclear war, we would look strong rather than weak, so war would be less likely. Such were the labyrinthine twists of Kahn’s logic. The Kennedy administration did in fact draw up plans for a first strike, and Strategic Air Command chief General Tommy Powers glowered, “If a general atomic war is inevitable, the US should strike first.”10

  Kahn’s daredevil paradoxical thinking both entranced and scared Kubrick. Life is not a war game, he knew. “The people who make up these war scenarios are not really as inventive as a great writer, or as reality,” Kubrick told Bernstein. “Herman Kahn is a genius, but the scenarios don’t read like the work of a master novelist.”11

  In On Thermonuclear War, Kahn argued against a Doomsday Machine, which was supposed to deter a nuclear first strike by ensuring worldwide destruction. (That’s
right, the Doomsday Machine was a serious idea, not merely a Kubrickian fantasy: in February 1950 nuclear physicist Leo Szilard publicly warned that Soviet or American scientists might build a cobalt-coated H-bomb that could destroy all life on earth.)12 But Kahn did not see the special danger of the Doomsday Machine highlighted in Dr. Strangelove, that craziness combined with human error might bring about the end of the world.

  Here Kubrick was a better theorist than Kahn. Dr. Strangelove’s plot is not nearly so absurd as it might seem: in a New Yorker article from 2014, Eric Schlosser argued that such nuclear mishaps had come close to happening.13 And in 1983, the Soviet general Stanislav Petrov saved the world by disobeying orders and disregarding a satellite warning that American nuclear missiles were heading for Russia. Terrifyingly, a technical glitch had made the satellite malfunction.

  For most of 1962 Kubrick worked with Peter George on what would become the Strangelove screenplay. Kubrick liked George, who had flown night missions for the RAF during World War II, and Christiane found him “a lovely man.”14 George had a dark side, though: depressed and alcoholic, he killed himself a few years later, in 1966.

  Kubrick and George soaked their script in black humor, influenced by MAD magazine and Paul Krassner’s scabrous underground magazine the Realist, a Kubrick favorite. In mid-November 1962 Terry Southern came in as a third screenwriter. Southern had written a wild satire called The Magic Christian (1959) that Peter Sellers liked to give as a birthday present. Southern is not “the writer” of Dr. Strangelove, as he has sometimes been called, but his pitch-perfect black comedy proved essential to the movie.

  Southern would arrive at Kubrick’s house in Knightsbridge, London, at 5 in the morning, and sit down with him in the back seat of Kubrick’s Bentley. While they were driven to Shepperton Studios, Kubrick and Southern wrote side by side on two small tables in the back of the car. Their work on the script continued until the end of 1962.

  At home, too, Kubrick and Southern fixated on the nuclear peril. “Stanley and Terry Southern talked and talked about it and whipped themselves into a frenzy of fears,” Christiane says. “People were really afraid and there were long conversations about ‘when is it going to happen, and don’t think it’s not going to happen.’ ”15

  Kubrick even decided to move to Australia, out of the likely range of the coming nuclear destruction. “Stanley had this fantasy,” Christiane recalls:

  We’d go on a ship to Australia. He said, “The Jews always made jokes, ‘Oh it’s not dangerous, they can’t kill us all,’ we have to learn a lesson and go to Australia.” I said, “Okay, let’s go.” Weeks later he still hadn’t bought the tickets. He said, “Well they don’t have a bathroom, we’d have to share a bathroom.”

  I said “Go, I’m all for it, I’ve got suitcases.” It became a very weird joke—other people teased him and he teased himself. “No, I haven’t done anything yet but next week we have to do something,” [he said]. “Well go ahead, I can go as I am” [I said]. My readiness drove him crazy. If his typewriter was on a different desk he was upset. I said it’s not so bad if we have to go on a ship where we share a sink. “You’re just very destructive now,” he said. “I’m not joking. I don’t appreciate it, it’s not funny. Your not saying anything is another way of being horrible.”

  [We had] the most asinine conversations—“When are you going? Have you booked on the ship? Okay, I’m ready to go, I’m so packed. . . . I can leave everything else behind, can you?” This went on until it became an absolute family joke, everyone pounced on him.16

  Kubrick was too wedded to home to consider taking off for the ends of the earth, even to save himself and his family from the apocalypse.

  All his life Kubrick wanted well-defended stasis, which went along with his wish to exert control and minimize risk. But in a world on the brink of nuclear war such security seemed impossible. War games were the order of the day, and their twisted plots had the earth hanging in the balance. The nuclear planners hinted at a macabre upside-down reality: the most secure state of all was universal annihilation, apocalypse being the surest way to control fate.

  Dr. Strangelove argues that a single crazed individual with access to the Bomb might decide to go out with a bang, taking down the whole of the human race along with him. Exhibit A is the openly wacko General Jack D. Ripper, a cigar-chewing macho monolith muttering darkly about Commie conspiracy. Kubrick matches Ripper with the more strategic minded but equally bananas General Buck Turgidson, jockish, pigheaded, and snorting disdain, who clamors for a first strike against the Russkies.

  Dr. Strangelove’s plot is ignited by Ripper’s mad decision to start a nuclear war with the Russians. The movie cross-cuts between the American War Room, with the president trying to recall Ripper’s bombers, and a B-52 bomber crew headed by Major King Kong. The Soviets, we learn, have a Doomsday device that will detonate a series of world-destroying explosions if even one atomic bomb strikes Russia. Meanwhile, the black-gloved ex-Nazi Strangelove is clearly excited by the prospect of global ruin. The world ends with a bang, or rather lots of them, when Major Kong’s plane makes it through and triggers the Doomsday Machine.

  Kubrick’s movie makes its terrific impact because instead of just mocking the military industrial complex, it has an awestruck appreciation of the power-mad generals Ripper and Turgidson, as well as the doom-hungry Strangelove. Strangelove is a perverted savior promising rebirth through violence. Ripper and Turgidson are manly colossi, unafraid to welcome the death of millions as the way to victory. They are Achilles, Ahab, all the mad warriors from the canon, made ridiculous, yes, but with their warlike integrity front and center. Kubrick was an enthusiastic reader of Rabelais, and his style in Strangelove is rich and savage Rabelaisian satire, rather than any pinched, humanistic denunciation of militarism.

  “We are simply going to have to be prepared to operate with people who are nuts,” President Eisenhower said in 1956, speaking of nuclear strategy.17 Kubrick’s movie cherishes such madness. Everyone remembers Jack D. Ripper puffing his cigar in an extreme low-angle shot, his forward-jutting jaw looming like Mount Rushmore, as he tells the stiff-upper-lip British Group Captain Mandrake, “I don’t avoid women, Mandrake, I just deny them my precious bodily fluids.”

  Kubrick enlisted Sterling Hayden, the star of The Killing, to play Ripper. For the previous six years Hayden had been living on a houseboat in Paris while the IRS extracted chunks of back taxes from his stateside property. He was jittery. On his first day of shooting Hayden muffed his lines. “I was utterly humiliated,” he remarked, but Kubrick bucked him up, telling him that it could happen to anyone. “He was beautiful,” Hayden said.18

  Ripper was based in part on the former head of SAC, General Curtis LeMay, a spikey, testosterone-fueled troglodyte who had overseen the destruction of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and who later proposed bombing the Vietnamese “back into the Stone Age.” Add a strong whiff of John Birch Society paranoia about Commies fluoridating the water supply, and you get Ripper.

  For his General Turgidson, Kubrick picked George C. Scott, who had most recently appeared in John Huston’s The List of Adrian Messenger (1963). Scott’s Turgidson is the gum-chewing, belly-slapping, whooping male ego, a thirteen-year-old boy grown to monstrous size. He clutches his briefing book to his chest, and we notice the title: “World Targets in Megadeaths.” Scott, like Hayden, was an ex-Marine, and expert at conveying the bluff macho stance that shoos away doubts like pesky flies. For Turgidson war is a matter of breaking some eggs. He predicts that the bombs the Russians drop on America will kill “ten or twenty million tops, depending on the breaks.”

  “Apocalyptic warnings arouse passion and militancy” since “nothing but complete victory will do,” Richard Hofstadter noted in his classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”19 Victory starts to seem a little silly when you think of the mountains of smoking corpses involved, but Turgidson wants us to look on the bright side: winning is what matters. You can deal with m
egadeaths like a fan at a football game, rooting hard for the home team.

  In an early script Kubrick called the Turgidson character General Schmuck, “a gruff, tough, folksy Air Force Chief” who “keeps in top physical shape, and is proud of it.”20 In order to turn Shmuck into Turgidson, Kubrick needed to inflate the character to grandiose size. During shooting Kubrick urged Scott to play Turgidson with broad strokes and make his character larger than life. The coaching worked: sublimely unaware of his idiocy, Turgidson is a giant figure in Kubrick’s satire.

  While directing Scott, Kubrick relied on his usual calm, reassuring manner with his actors. Scott later said that “Kubrick most certainly is in command . . . but he’s so self-effacing. It is impossible to be offended by him. No pomposity, no vanity.” He added that Kubrick “has a brilliant eye; he sees more than the camera [does].”21 Kubrick saw more at the chessboard too, where he invariably beat Scott at their games on the set.

  Kubrick relished Scott’s splashes of buffoonery, however he could get them. At one point Scott trips as he points to “the big board,” which he’s afraid the “Russkies” will see if their ambassador enters the War Room. This was an actual mishap, but Kubrick decided to keep the shot in the movie. Scott recovers acrobatically, laughing a little at himself, and never breaks his stride.

  When the shooting was over Scott was convinced he had given a terrible performance, since Kubrick had coaxed him into big, bold, hyperbolic acting. Kubrick wrote to Scott, “I hope you will at least be somewhat assuaged knowing that if, in fact, this is the worst performance you have ever given, everyone will think it is the best”: