Dr. Strangelove v. Jihadi John

Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz (1969) was based on a Leon Uris novel about the Cuban missile crisis. There’s a famous scene in the Hotel Theresa an iconic Harlem waterhole and home to legends like Sugar Ray Robinson and Castro himself even makes a cameo appearance, by way of newsreel footage from a Havana demonstration. It’s all water under the bridge, with the Cold War, the Bay of Pigs invasion and Russia’s bold act of trying to place armaments 90 miles from the US shores all consigned to history. Now the action is in a totally different part of the world where Japan, China and South Korea wait to see what horrors the petulant North Korean leader Disney enthusiast and some time film critic (who threated retaliation for The Interview, 2014), Kim Jong-un, will unleash next. It’s true that Kim Jong-un has established a new gold standard for critics, who like politicians are always being accused of doing nothing (at the very least his actions as an auteur  challenge the notion  that “those who do, do and those who can’t do criticize”). But the real question is, are we more afraid today than we were during the Cold War? Kim Jong-un’s threats of producing an ICBM with a nuclear warhead that could hit the US shores seem about as dangerous as the drawings of the vacuum cleaner qua atomic reactor that Alec Guinness furnished in the film adaptation of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana (1959 and Donald Trump has even offered to sit down with him for a tete a tete. Jihad is the hottest act under the big top and with 9/11, it proved itself to be more than just posturing of the kind that Mr. Kim specializes in. But remember On the Beach (1959) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), two films made from books about the Cold War era? And remember Dr. Strangelove (1964) and the uneasy laugher it produced, in particular since Kubrick’s central comic figure was such a neat cross-breeding of Hitler and Henry Kissinger? And remember fallout shelters? Now with snipers taking fire in Cineplex’s and Paris becoming the city of the wrong kind of light (that produced by explosives), we may think the world has become a dangerous place, but is it more threatening than the Cold War when we all lived in constant fear of oblivion?

The Exorcists

Remember fallout shelters and hiding under a desk in elementary school during an air raid drill? There’s always a cloud hanging over human life. In the 50’s it was the specter of the Bomb that surfaced in Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach (1957) and even more famously in the Kubrick masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove (1964). Then there was AIDS which spawned its own literature and filmography. Today it’s ISIS whose message spreads virally on the internet and also whose ideas are planted like sexuality in latency and then bloom in troubled adolescents with the onset of puberty. If an atom bomb is the igniter on a fusion explosion, the hormones are what finally sets off the explosion of fundamentalist fervor that turns a quiet young Tunisian into a mass murderer of innocent tourists. The forces that have created this virulent mutation of Al-Qaeda have taken years to coalesce, but the full-blown epidemic is fairly recent. The infamous video taped beheading of James Foley featuring the masked executioner with the faintly cockney accent occurred less than a year ago. How will this affect the imagination say of Stephen King, who wrote a novel which is a virtual treatise on the plague, The Stand (1978)? Will this nameless threat that takes on a name as it enters a proxy become the basis for remakes of  Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) or George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968)? Indeed, robotic humans whose emotions have been erased or zombies seem to be good descriptions of the effect of  extreme zealotry on the human consciousness. John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) should be studied by intelligence services who are seeking to ferret out human time bombs planted by ISIS and other terrorist organizations--and also by novelists and screenplay writers who attempt to exorcize our current devils through art.

EMP or Not to Be

Remember Dr. Strangelove. United States Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) sets off nuclear Armageddon to ward off the Russians who are responsible for  the fluoridation that is attacking “precious bodily fluids.” The Kubrick classic was based on a book by Peter George called Red Alert or Two Hours to Doom. Now according to an article in the Times ("Amongt Gingrich's Passions, A Doomsday Vision," NYT, 12/11/11)New Gingrich is warning about EMP, electromagnetic pulse. The Times piece reports that Gingrich has worked with William Forstchen on historical novels and has written the forward to his doomsday thriller One Second After. “Millions would die in the first week alone,” the Times quotes Gingrich as writing in his forward. The idea is that a nuclear weapon hefted into the atmosphere “would set off a huge and crippling shockwave of electricity.” Like Jack D. Ripper Mr. Gingrich favors preemptive action. “We are on the verge of catastrophic problems,” the Times quotes him as saying. “I favor taking out Iranian and North Korean missiles on their sites.” When you think of it, doesn’t Gingrich look like a character out of a Kubrick film? He has the brilliance of  the professorial Strangelove (Peter Sellers), suffers the delusion of Ripper and demonstrates the xenophobia of General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott). Gingrich is really a throwback to another era in which people named their children Newt and future cold warriors showed off their latest trophy wives to their congressional colleagues. Weapons of Mass Destruction? Fiddlesticks . Newt has bigger fish to fry.

Present Laughter

In Laughter; An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Henri Bergson finds the roots of the comic impulse in inelasticity, proposing that comedy germinates in rigid responses to crisis that avoid the nature of the reality. Thus, the innocent, Chaplinesque figure, the neophyte, the idiot savant, the rube, the Babbitt, the W.C. Fields blusterer are all frequently both objects and detonators of comedy. Jack D. Ripper’s unchanging use of the terms “precious bodily fluids” and “Russkies” in Dr. Strangelove fuels the syntactic parody of this seminal piece of latter twentieth century comedy. If one were to take a portrait of social satire in the fecund era of the ‘60s and ‘70s the way one takes a group shot a high school football squad, Strangelove would be the coach with his arms around MASH on the film side, with Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five representing the books. But where is the humor today? There are no Russkies. The real threat lies in kidnapped children in the Congo getting conscripted by self-appointed generalissimos who don the regalia of fallen empire. Where is the comedy in volcanic ash shutting down air travel, in a latter day version of the Icarus myth, in which the Polish president flies too low rather than too high in his over-eagerness to accept penance from an ancient enemy, in a man-made disaster (the BP oil spill) that outdoes anything nature could choreograph?  The job of the comedian is harder today because we have entered a post-absurdist age in which a creature named Survival rears its ugly head amidst the intellectual incongruities and pretensions of the age. Restoration playwrights like Wycherley, who named their characters for their foibles, would have had a party with the crazies captaining this Ship of Fools that we now call spaceship Earth—Mr.  Clueless and Miss  Loveless await their cues.  But laughter is short lived when you’re looking down the barrel of a gun, or in this case a car bomb sitting in Times Square.

The Namesake

Anyone with a name like Vercingetorix is born to be a conquerer. It’s like Douglas MacArthur or Erwin Rommel, aka the Desert Fox. Beowulf is a name that connotes the war-like spirit, as does General McChrystal, whose name evokes something tangible yet precious. Ataturk is another name that produces a martial effect, as does Bismarck, though Clausewitz, who argued that war is a form of diplomacy, is a name that sounds incongruously effete for someone who advocated Genghis Khan-like pillage. On the other hand, Alexander Haig, Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, doesn’t sound like the name of a general, even though he was one. Alexander Haig is more like the name of an expensive Madison Avenue optometrist. On the other hand, Nixon’s secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, may not have been a general, but he sure looked like one. Laird scared you, just like Sterling Hayden’s Jack D. Ripper did in Dr. Strangelove. The My Lai Massacre needed Calley, just as the Iran-Contra affair needed Oliver North, but those names are lacking the teeth of the hyena, Esau’s furry arms, or the mane of the Lion King. Circumstances made those military men, but they were not warriors like General Patton or David Petraeus, whose calm is mirrored by his title—Head of the U.S. Military’s Central Command. You can almost imagine his stationary, which has got to be an eye-stopper. Colin Powell seems to be cut from similar cloth. If he’d been a surgeon, his procedures would have been done laparoscopically, unlike the marauding Taras Bulba. And even when Ulysses Grant was a little boy, it was obvious there was always going to be a tomb named after him. Sherman and Lee opposed each other, but they both had tanks named in their honor, such was their parity. Their names come to a natural standoff, like the Monitor and the Miramax. Hannibal rhymes with cannibal (say no more), and Dwight D. Eisenhower was nicknamed “Ike,” which rhymes with pike, a reassuringly quaint implement of war. He married Mamie, but turned out be be as much of a swordsman off the battlefield as he was when he was Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe.