“Gentlemen – you can’t fight in here. This is the war room!”
Well, I wish I had written that! It is a line from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove. A darkly satirical work, shot in black and white, about nuclear conflict between the USSR and USA. It is both a comical and serious look at the cold war and an acknowledged classic by a highly respected director having an impressive cast, including three roles played by Peter Sellars and, in my opinion, some brilliant lines. It is worth noting the date as the cold war was at its height and the Cuban missile crisis had occurred only two years previously. World tensions were high. Briefly, and I have to put in a spoiler alert if you have not seen it, the film depicts events triggered by a paranoid US air force base commander who bypasses protocol and launches a nuclear attack on Russia by American B52 bombers. It does not end well; as despite efforts to stop the attack one plane gets through. I should add that for the majority of the world it does not end well, but it is implied that for the men at the top (and it is all men apart from Miss Scott, General Turgidson’s “secretary”) it does end well, as they do actually survive.
I first heard these words when I was 12. My friend’s older sister had gone up to Edinburgh to read history and we overheard her discussing the film, and this line in particular, during the Christmas vacation. 12 year-olds aren’t of much interest to undergraduates so we didn’t glean much more but the words fascinated me then as they do now. I eventually saw the film several year later when I was also at university and was able to understand the interest and fascination shown by my friend’s sister. Now almost 50 year later, I feel I can comment on it from a psychoanalytic perspective, albeit briefly, as I am not setting out to write a paper, but more to reflect on how something that happened over 50 years age can be so well remembered now.
I have found that one of the unexpected joys of training as a psychotherapist in mid-life is that my past experiences and memories can be viewed in a different light. Through a different lens in fact. As my training progressed and developed I discovered many different analytic lenses that I could look through. Psychoanalysis is a broad church so, more specifically, I will focus on a Kleinian view. It is to Melanie Klein that I will now turn when looking at Dr Strangelove or to be more precise, and to give it its full title, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” The full title gives some sense of the savage irony of the film and as a work of cinema it is acknowledged to be one of the best – a view to which I fully concur as I believe it cannot fail to impress. Even the names of the protagonists are amusing and clever. The paranoid base commander Brigadier General Jack D Ripper, the odd presidential advisor Dr Strangelove – a former National Socialist rocket scientist and possible war criminal who is now valuable to the US military, and whose right arm autonomously and occasionally rises to give the Hitler salute. He also mistakenly twice calls the president “Mein Führer”. The US President Merkin (do look up its meaning!) Muffley and Major T. J. “King” Kong the commander of the plane that drops the bomb. The Hydrogen bomb has the jolly message “Hi there!” painted on it as well as the official wording “Nuclear warhead handle with care.” Thank heaven health and safety were on the ball!.
The line occurs towards the end of the film when the Russian ambassador, who has been summoned to try and avoid the conflict, clashes with the US chief of staff in the War Room. As well as its merits as a film I find it fascinating from a psychoanalytic perspective. Indeed, there are several themes and schools of thought that would be both interesting and valid if applied to the film and its protagonists.
At the end, the pilot of the airplane has to release the weapon manually. He actually sits on it, the bomb between his legs as it falls to its target whilst whooping and waving his cowboy hat. This rather phallic bomb drop (the Freudians will love it!) ends in a massive explosion and mushroom cloud. I have read somewhere and my apologies that I can’t give an exact source of it being described as a “wargasam”. Despite being a great contender for a Freudian interpretation, and indeed I discovered that there has been a great deal written, researched and presented about Kubrick and Freud it is to Klein’s ‘46 paper “Notes on some Schizoid mechanisms” that I return. The characters in the war room certainly experience “anxieties characteristic of psychosis” (pg. 1 Envy and Gratitude) and then split the object into good and bad – gratifying and frustrating. The USA and USSR are split and either idealised or feared depending on which side you are on. This splitting results in a severance of love and hate. As Klein writes, “The frustrating and persecuting object is kept widely apart from the idealised object” (pg. 7 Envy and Gratitude) Ironically, the one thing that unites the protagonists is their paranoid -schizoid position. The splitting of the world into good and bad with little room for compromise; the protagonists themselves all split as individuals. Ironically, the ending of the film implies that some type of more realistic depressive state is reached at least between that of the leaders, both American and Russian, who survive, and who have a mutual interest in ensuring their needs are met. Unfortunately, that does not apply to their respective populations who are, in effect, annihilated. Whilst writing this short piece, I had the paper to hand and I have to acknowledge that there were so many lines and paragraphs that I could use as quotes to underline the psychological process that occur in the film. I was spoiled for choice and a longer, more researched article beckons. I did mention that there were some brilliant lines. There is another wonderfully written one that occurs when Group Captain Mandrake, an RAF officer also played by Peter Sellars, tries to prize some small change out of a drinks vending machine to make a call that could save the world. He is challenged by an American Sargent who reprimands him “Do you realise that is the property of the Coca Cola company?”
I will however leave you with a rather chilling line. It is delivered by Major Kong the B52 pilot – “Well, this is it – nuclear combat toe-to-toe with the Russkies!”
Alex Dalziel
Ref: Klein, M 1946 Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. In Envy and Gratitude Vintage London.
