RFI: Dr. Strangelove

from '66 SK profile in The New Yorker

“By now, the bomb has almost no reality and has become a complete abstraction, represented by a few newsreel shots of mushroom clouds,” Kubrick has said. “People react primarily to direct experience and not to abstractions; it is very rare to find anyone who can become emotionally involved with an abstraction. The longer the bomb is around without anything happening, the better the job that people do in psychologically denying its existence. It has become as abstract as the fact that we are all going to die someday, which we usually do an excellent job of denying. For this reason, most people have very little interest in nuclear war. It has become even less interesting as a problem than, say, city government, and the longer a nuclear event is postponed, the greater becomes the illusion that we are constantly building up security, like interest at the bank. As time goes on, the danger increases, I believe, because the thing becomes more and more remote in people’s minds. No one can predict the panic that suddenly arises when all the lights go out—that indefinable something that can make a leader abandon his carefully laid plans. A lot of effort has gone into trying to imagine possible nuclear accidents and to protect against them. But whether the human imagination is really capable of encompassing all the subtle permutations and psychological variants of these possibilities, I doubt. The nuclear strategists who make up all those war scenarios are never as inventive as reality, and political and military leaders are never as sophisticated as they think they are.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S6uGe7p280

My strongest reaction to that clip is that Gene Shalit was a very bad interviewer and Peter Sellers would have been much happier to be somewhere else instead of pretending to be engaged in conversation with that clown. Seems like it would be very hard work not to call him an idiot.

Saw it at a rep theatre tonight--I partied like it was 2019. Fifth or sixth time, probably.

I think my appreciation peaked last time; took a step back tonight. It's perfectly executed, but the truth is, I really only laugh (i.e., audibly) twice: Sellers' brilliant last couple of scenes as Strangelove (the kind of over-the-top humour I generally don't respond to), and some of Scott's mugging in the war room (especially when the president chastises him the one time). Hayden, Pickens, Wynn, I smile, I get it, I just don't laugh.

Sellers seems to portray--in the most common stereotype of the day--Muffley/Stevenson as gay, as least on the phone with Kissoff. Am I misreading that? I know the perception of Stevenson was that of an effete egghead--is that what Sellers is trying to convey?

Slim Pickens born on this day in 1919.

To parents who did not use the prophylactics they'd been issued in their Survival Kit.