by David Mikics
The opinion of approximately 1000 people who have seen the film is that your performance is one of the most brilliant, penetrating and hilarious they have ever seen. This includes directors, producers, writers, actors, critics, editors, publishers, disc jokeys [sic], secretaries, executives, lawyers, housewives, hairdressers and psychiatrists.22
Columbia Pictures appears to have insisted that Peter Sellers star in Dr. Strangelove, convinced that his comic zest as Quilty had made Lolita a success. According to Terry Southern, Kubrick groused about this decree.23 But Sellers was crucial to the movie, as Kubrick must have quickly realized. In a tour de force, Sellers played three characters: the nuclear theorist Strangelove, the American President Merkin Muffley, and British officer Lieutenant Mandrake. Mandrake, stiff upper lip and oh-so-British, and Muffley, a liberal egghead modeled on Adlai Stevenson, are the movie’s straight men. At first Sellers played Muffley with a bad cold, blowing his nose and sniffling incessantly, but Kubrick reined him in. Muffley blandly embodies humanist normality, his plainness spectacularly overshadowed by the loonies crowding around him.
Dr. Strangelove is probably Sellers’s most memorable film role. It’s certainly his most frightening. Strangelove speaks in a herky-jerky rhythm that shifts between serpentlike cooing and impulsive shouts forced out through gritted teeth. His hand itches to make the Heil Hitler salute, so he twists and pounds it into submission, struggling furiously. Strangelove’s rogue hand is a stupendous repurposing of Rotwang’s aggressively gloved fist in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and his wheelchaired body, first seen in ominous shadow, shows how the leather-and-steel glint of fascism has migrated into the American military think tank.
Despite Kubrick’s repeated denials, Strangelove seems clearly modeled on Henry Kissinger, author of a best seller about “limited” nuclear war, as well as on Kahn and nuclear physicist Edward Teller. These men were all Jewish, but Strangelove is a Nazi through and through, one-man proof that Hitler’s excited devotion to mass slaughter as a cleansing force lives on. “It’s a German name, Merkwürdigliebe,” someone tells Turgidson (a goofy literal-minded translation: the actual German title for Dr. Strangelove was the less bizarre-sounding Dr. Seltsam).
Kubrick’s Strangelove has a peculiar love for death on a vast scale, an old Nazi’s ecstasy over being the master who remains exempt from destruction. Facing the endless spectacle of the dead, he feels immortal. Who can watch the exhilarated Strangelove crowing “Mein Führer, I can walk” without feeling chills down the spine at this macabre rebirth? It could be the most penetrating moment in any movie, ever, summing up as it does our twentieth century’s heartless excitement at the mass death of other people.
Along with Strangelove, Muffley, and Mandrake, Sellers was supposed to play Major King Kong, commander of the B-52 bomber. Sellers was having trouble with Kong’s Texas accent, but he was in the role for a day. It would have been his fourth in the movie, but he sprained his ankle (or claimed that he had), and so could not climb the plane’s ladders. Kubrick turned to Slim Pickens, a former rodeo clown and stunt rider who had appeared in a number of westerns, including Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks. Pickens arrived in London in his Stetson hat and cowboy boots. When Southern asked him how he liked his hotel, Pickens replied, “It’s like this ole friend of mine from Oklahoma says: jest gimme a pair of loose-fittin’ shoes, some tight pussy, and a warm place to shit, an’ ah’ll be all right.”24
As Kong, Pickens relishes the prospect of “nucular combat, toe to toe with the Russkies.” Dogged and ingenious, he gets his bomber to swoop through to its destination, and so singlehandedly destroys the world. The killer ape rides again.
Kubrick came up with the genius idea of having Pickens ride a nuclear missile to world annihilation. Bronco-busting his bomb as it plummets, Major Kong feels the biggest thrill on earth, a wargasm to end all wargasms. (A Herman Kahn coinage: he once joked that people don’t have war plans but war-gasms.) Here Dr. Strangelove is again close to real history. One of the Enola Gay’s bombs had a picture of Rita Hayworth on it: mass destruction as the ultimate fuck.
Kubrick knew that Strangelove needed to have a sleek modern look, fitting for the atomic age. He chose Ken Adam, a German Jew from Berlin who was an RAF pilot during World War II, to design the movie. Kubrick had liked Adam’s futuristic-looking work on the James Bond flick Dr. No (1962). “I think I fell in love with him,” Adam said of Kubrick. “It was like a marriage.”25 Adam was, like Kubrick, Southern, and Sellers, dry, low-key and ironic. The four men, quizzical cynics all, fit well together.
In Dr. Strangelove, Adam created one of the most distinctive sets in movie history, a masterstroke of military modernism: the cavelike, triangular War Room with its vast round table in the middle. The table was covered with green baize, to suggest that the politicians and generals were playing poker with the fate of the world (a detail lost in the film’s exquisitely stark black-and-white photography). The set’s floor was black and shiny, as if to suggest the abyss. In later years Adam loved to tell the story that when Ronald Reagan became president he asked to see the War Room, having confused Dr. Strangelove’s set with reality.26
Dr. Strangelove cost just under two million dollars. The critics’ screening, scheduled for November 22, 1963, was canceled when President Kennedy was shot that day. “A fella could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas” with the flight crew’s emergency kit (condoms, stockings, pep pills), Slim Pickens remarks. After November 22, “Dallas” became “Vegas.”
An exultant George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove (Courtesy of Photofest/Warner Bros)
Kubrick made another, bigger change to Dr. Strangelove before its general release. He had spent two weeks filming a pie fight in the War Room, the intended conclusion of the picture. (The pie fight exists in a set of still photos taken by Weegee, the production’s still photographer, but I don’t know anyone who has seen the actual footage.) Kubrick decided that this was farce rather than satire, and inappropriate for the ending of Strangelove. Instead, after Strangelove rises from his wheelchair, the movie ends with a series of mushroom clouds and Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again,” a World War II era classic for British soldiers heading off to the front.
When Strangelove was first screened at Columbia, Kubrick was consumed with worry that the studio had no idea how to promote the movie and was planning to shrug it off as a wacky novelty flick. “I have the feeling distribution is totally fucked,” he gloomily confided to Southern. But the next day, Southern says, Kubrick was full of cheer, trumpeting, “I have learned . . . that Mo Rothman is a highly serious golfer.” (Rothman was one of the film’s producers.) He had an expensive electric golf cart delivered to Rothman’s Westchester Country Club, but much to Kubrick’s disappointment, Rothman refused to accept the gift. “The son of a bitch . . . said it would be ‘bad form,’ ” Kubrick reported to Southern. “Can you imagine Mo Rothman saying that? His secretary must have taught him that phrase!”27
“I think that the film will be grotesquely successful everywhere,” James Mason wrote to Kubrick from Malibu about Dr. Strangelove. “In the US of course much bile will be secreted & many will die frothing,” Mason added. To an extent this was true. The public relations firm that handled Strangelove remarked, “Among the Hollywood opinion-makers, there are at least three who are like the psychotic Air Force General of the film. They feel the film is a tool of the devil which plays into the hands of the Commies.”28
As Mason predicted, Strangelove was a huge hit, eventually grossing more than nine million dollars. Elvis Presley, who screened Strangelove at Graceland, was a big fan. The movie was nominated for four Academy Awards: best screenplay, best director, best actor (Sellers), and best picture—none of which it won. But Kubrick did pick up an award for best director from the New York Film Critics, the last time he would get such acclaim from New York’s critical establishment. Strangelove was his own favorite among his movies, Kubrick said at the time, followed by Lolita and Paths of Glory, in that ord
er.29
Robert Brustein wrote the best review of Dr. Strangelove, responding to critics who saw it as just a gag, an irresponsible way to treat the end of the world. Brustein said that “Kubrick has managed to explode the right-wing position without making a single left-wing affirmation: the odor of the Thirties, which clung to even the best work of Chaplin, Welles, and Huston, has finally been disinfected here. Disinfected, in fact, is the stink of all ideological thinking. . . . Its only politics is outrage against the malevolence of officialdom.” “Humanitarians will find it inhuman,” Brustein added—but they’re wrong. Dr. Strangelove “releases, through comic poetry, those feelings of impotence and frustration that are consuming us all; and I can’t think of anything more important for an imaginative work to do.” Kubrick himself said that Brustein’s review of Strangelove was “the most perceptive and well-written one I have read.”30
In the wake of Strangelove’s success Kubrick got many speaking requests, but he nearly always declined. “I can’t do TV or radio without getting tongue-tied,” he told Herbert Mitgang of CBS News. He said to Gilbert Seldes in April 1964, “I never make speeches or write articles. I like to think I do this out of humility, but it is probably a form of the most supreme egotism. Seriously, I always feel there is something not quite right about film makers or writers who decide to become critics or lecturers.” “I am a lousy lecturer, I avoid all speaking engagements, TV shows, etc.,” he wrote to the Actors Studio, turning down an invitation to do a workshop for young film directors.31
Kubrick also slighted the New Left, ignoring a request from Todd Gitlin of SDS to appear at their conference. The antinuclear war organization SANE offered Kubrick its Eleanor Roosevelt Peace Award, which he refused. Kubrick didn’t want Dr. Strangelove to be labeled “a peace group effort,” though he “obviously share[d] most of [SANE’s] views and objectives,” he said. Kubrick did enjoy seeing a Toronto Daily Star cartoon of Barry Goldwater as Dr. Strangelove, and he asked for a copy of Lyndon Johnson’s anti-Goldwater campaign commercial with a child picking daisies.32
Since the beginning of the sixties, Kubrick had been turning down offers to write bylined pieces for the press. In a letter to Thomas Fryer from August 1964, he explained, “It’s really not possible to say what you think about critics, distributors, actors, etc., etc. with any honesty, without sounding far too misanthropic for the sensitive feelings of one’s fellow human beings.”33
A taste of what Kubrick meant is the rough draft of an undated piece called “Focus + Sound,” in which he complains that “the movie industry is still at the mercy of a projectionist” who can’t tell from where he sits that the movie is out of focus. Kubrick describes going to the movies and asking to see the theater manager about a badly out-of-focus projection. The manager, he writes, is normally “locked into an office, which requires a complicated series of buzzers. . . . After a lot of buzzing, phoning and waiting a little door usually opens and a very suspicious looking man looks up from a very small desk covered with papers.” The manager would then tell Kubrick, “It can’t be out of focus, it’s pre-focused,” or “It’s a bad print.”34
Kubrick’s mantra when dealing with theater managers in later years, Warner Bros producer Julian Senior remembered, was “It’s as easy to do it right as it is to do it wrong.” He would have better success in controlling the screening of his films after A Clockwork Orange, when he insisted that European theaters use the correct 1.66 lenses to project the movie. His assistants got used to calling up and visiting movie theaters to make sure that there were no catastrophic glitches when a Kubrick film was shown. Senior recalls that “Stanley would say [to the theaters], ‘Don’t you understand? This is not just for my movie, but for everybody’s movie.’ ”35
In the spring of 1964, basking in Strangelove’s success, the Kubricks moved to a Lexington Avenue double penthouse at East 84th Street. Stanley was enjoying family life. In a letter to Martin Russ from August 1964, he described a talk with his five-year-old daughter Anya, who insisted to her father that she be allowed to go to lunch with a seven-year-old boy at a restaurant across the street. Kubrick had to argue with her for forty-five minutes, he reported to Russ, but he won. These are the rules of the game, he jokingly added: if he didn’t stop her from going to lunch at five she might be dating at nine.36 Like her father, Anya was, it seems, a steady, determined arguer who knew what she wanted.
Looking for a project to follow Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick read voraciously. A list of his books compiled in the early sixties includes The Voice of the Dolphins by Leo Szilard, Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, the Kama Sutra, Kingsley Amis’s New Maps of Hell, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, The Book of Meat Cooking, How to Succeed with Women by Shepherd Mead, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Deterrent or Defense by B. H. Liddell Hart, J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, and Now It Can Be Told by Leslie Groves. There are books by Rabelais, Italo Svevo, Colette, “Philip Wroth” (Letting Go), and, of course, Herman Kahn.37
One oddball book on Kubrick’s reading list was The Prospect of Immortality by Robert Ettinger. In the summer of 1964 Kubrick initiated a lengthy correspondence with Ettinger, writing to him in August that “95% of the people” he told about the book had a “blocked-up” response to Ettinger’s scheme for making humans immortal by freezing and eventually reanimating them. “I suppose that in order to consider immortality [t]he[y] must first admit death,” Kubrick continued, “and this is something which is apparently not often accomplished.” He added, “Incidentally, did you know that John Paul Jones was buried in a lead casket filled with alcohol? I wonder if he had some scheme in mind.”38
Kubrick was intrigued by but skeptical about Ettinger’s immortality plan. “I think you tend to gloss over the banal difficulties. It’s almost impossible to get a sink repaired,” he wrote to Ettinger.39 Kubrick’s interest in immortality would develop into 2001, where a man is finally transfigured into a godlike infant with powers far beyond Strangelove’s.
In June 1964, Kubrick turned down Columbia Pictures’ offer of a two-film contract. Among the twenty-three pages of notes he took on the contract is this one: “I must have complete total final annihilating artistic control over the picture.” The studio would be allowed sway only over the budget and the choice of the two principal actors. He also wrote, “I do not agree under any circumstances to be required to make any changes or revisions of the script, the picture or my style of combing my hair when ordered by Columbia.”40 His next movie would be Kubrick’s greatest demonstration so far of total artistic control. In Strangelove he blew up the world. In 2001, he would create a cosmos unlike any seen before in film, sublime and exhilarating beyond our moviegoing dreams.
4
The Tower of Babel Was the Start of the Space Age:
2001: A Space Odyssey
IN HAIGHT-ASHBURY it was the Summer of Love, and the new Adams and Eves, barefoot and bedraggled, were spawning cosmic peace. But during the summer of 1967 at Borehamwood Studios, England, Stanley Kubrick’s man-apes ran screaming, jabbering, and fiercely exulting in prehistory’s first act of bloodshed. Kubrick was filming the Dawn of Man, the opening section of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
A few minutes into 2001, a mysterious, matte-black monolith touches down among the apes. This object hums and buzzes with the agitated spiritual strains of György Ligeti’s music. Ready for liftoff: now the apes, on the cusp of humanness, start to kill animals for meat. They kill each other, too. The entire wordless prehistoric sequence lasts sixteen minutes, a dare to the audience and an audacious leap into moviemaking history. Finally one ape, Moonwatcher, flings his bone into the air and lo, as every schoolchild knows, it morphs into a spaceship, serenely gliding through the void. So crude prehistoric violence rockets forward into the space age, subtly infecting 2001’s supermodern, clean, computer-driven rationality. With the Dawn of Man, Kubrick echoed the writer Robert Ardrey, who argued that lethal violence first made us human.1 The “territorial imperative” meant capturing space fo
r one’s tribe and fending off rivals with a rock to the head or, as in 2001, a dead tapir’s bone.
Was the monolith a Mosaic tablet designed by Mies van der Rohe, as one critic suggested? Or a Golden Calf, with the apes dancing and chattering around it? Make of the monolith what you will. (For MAD magazine’s bewildered cartoon apes it was a prehistoric handball court.) This faceless alien god—or is it an idol?—jolts the apes into new knowledge. For the fierce anti-Rousseauian Kubrick, the monolith is the Tablet of our first Law: thou shalt kill.
The Dawn of Man’s monolith was only the first of the film’s many puzzles. The wide-open quality of 2001, the way it demanded that viewers speculate rather than simply being absorbed by what they saw on screen, was something new in Hollywood movies. 2001 contained little dialogue, and much space for imagination.
2001 was one of a kind, and it still looks shockingly new more than five decades later. After the apes we find ourselves beamed into space, where everything turns, slowly and magnificently, to the tune of a Strauss waltz. At the end, more than two hours later, we are left to wander with the astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), everyman and blank slate, through a Louis XVI bedroom, until the Starchild turns his gaze on us—no more innocently, perhaps, than the rapist and murderer Alex does in the first shot of Kubrick’s next movie, A Clockwork Orange, which like Altamont sounded the death knell to a decade’s hopes for peace and love. There is the clarion music of a different Strauss (Richard), a Nietzschean dare for us to brave metamorphosis, and the sublime overload of the avant-garde Stargate sequence, where Bowman sees and feels new thresholds, new anatomies (per Hart Crane), and during which one early audience member—who was tripping of course, like most everyone in the theater—ran through the screen shouting, “It’s God!”