The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Stanley Kubrick · a film · 1964 · about 95 minutes · written with Terry Southern and Peter George, from George’s novel Red Alert
Mode
Nightmare comedy played inside the procedures of a thriller; satire of the state, the military and the strategists in one structure
Mythos
The doom that every effort to avert brings nearer; fate made into a machine; the hero’s last labour as the world’s death; the mad scientist who rises from his chair as the end comes
Phase
A few hours of one day, close to continuous, from an order given at an Air Force base to the end of the world, framed by a refuelling in flight and a song of parting
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, about 95 minutes, made at Shepperton Studios in England; three sealed settings intercut; Gilbert Taylor’s photography, Ken Adam’s design, Anthony Harvey’s cutting, Laurie Johnson’s music; Peter Sellers in three parts
Register
From newsreel combat and technical checklists to a telephone call to a drunk and an arm that will not stay down; straight procedure and absurd men
Scale
One general’s order, one bomber, one council of state, and the world
Governing Proposition
An American general who talks of his “precious bodily fluids” orders a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, seals his base and keeps the recall code in his head. In the War Room the President, his generals, the Soviet ambassador and a German scientist try to stop it, and learn that the Soviets have built a Doomsday Machine that no one can now revoke; one bomber, its radio wrecked, flies on. The wager of the film is that the end of the world can be played as farce while its procedures are filmed as fact, so that the procedures are seen to be sound and the men insane, and deterrence, followed to its last term, is seen to be madness spoken calmly.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with an official disclaimer card, and then with an act of love between machines. A tanker aircraft refuels a B-52 in mid-air, the two joined in slow motion over cloud, to “Try a Little Tenderness”. It is beautiful, and it is a joke, and it is the film’s first statement of what it will say all the way to the end: that the machinery of nuclear war is a sexual machinery, built and flown by men, and that the coupling it performs is a coupling with death.
At Burpelson Air Force Base, General Jack D. Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden, orders a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, seals the base and impounds the radios. Only he knows the code that would recall the attack. Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, a British officer, played by Peter Sellers, finds himself sealed in the general’s office with the man who has started a war. On board the B-52 Leper Colony, Major T. J. “King” Kong, played by Slim Pickens, receives the order and checks it, and his crew begin their work.
Kubrick directed and produced the film for Columbia Pictures and made it in England, at Shepperton Studios, in black and white. The screenplay is his, Terry Southern’s and Peter George’s, from George’s novel Red Alert (1958; published in Britain as Two Hours to Doom under the name Peter Bryant), a straight thriller. Gilbert Taylor photographed it, Ken Adam designed it, Anthony Harvey cut it, and Laurie Johnson wrote the music. Sellers plays three parts. The film runs about ninety-five minutes, over a few hours of one day, nearly continuous, and it was released in the United States on 29 January 1964, fifteen months after the Cuban crisis.
Movement II
The film is built in three sealed settings, and no character passes from one to another except by telephone and radio: the base, the bomber and the War Room. The cutting moves between them and keeps their three clocks running together, so that every scene in one place is watched against the time passing in the other two. The base is the cause, the bomber the agent, and the War Room the attempt at recall. The structure is the subject: a system built so that, once begun, it cannot be called back, and a film in which the people who might call it back cannot reach each other.
In his office Ripper explains himself to Mandrake, deadpan under a cigar. His theory concerns his “precious bodily fluids”, and Hayden says it as a man stating the plain truth to a slow listener. The theory is mad, and its logic is impeccable; the general has followed it to its last term, as the system he serves follows its own. When the Army arrives to take the base, Ripper produces a machine gun from his golf bag. Outside, the assault is filmed handheld and grainy like newsreel: American soldiers killing American soldiers, each side obeying orders that are perfectly correct.
The base falls, and Ripper dies. Mandrake, alone with the general’s doodles, works out the recall code from two phrases among them, “Purity of Essence” and “Peace on Earth”. He must telephone the President, and he has no change. Colonel “Bat” Guano, played by Keenan Wynn, arrives with the troops, and is persuaded only with difficulty to shoot open a Coke machine for the coins, with a solemn regard for the property of the Coca-Cola Company. The last chance of the world depends on a soldier’s respect for private property, and it is taken.
Movement III
The War Room is Ken Adam’s great dark triangle under a ring of lamps, with a round table at its centre, and Gilbert Taylor lights it almost from those lamps alone, faces hard over the dark. Here President Merkin Muffley, Sellers’s second part, sits with his generals. General Buck Turgidson, played by George C. Scott, chewing gum, breaking off to talk to his girlfriend on the telephone, offers the arithmetic of the dead with an actuary’s calm: “twenty million killed, tops”. The Soviet ambassador, de Sadesky, played by Peter Bull, is brought into the room, and Turgidson wrestles with him.
Muffley calls the Soviet Premier, Dmitri Kissoff, on the hotline. Only Muffley’s side is heard. “Hello, Dmitri”: the President is a decent man speaking slowly and kindly to a drunk while the world is at stake, and Sellers plays it with restraint at its finest. The fourth space of the story is a voice that cannot be heard, at the other end of a wire, and the fate of the world is carried on half a conversation.
Then the War Room learns that the Soviets have built a Doomsday Machine: a device that answers any attack by covering the earth with fallout, and that no one can now revoke. It had been kept secret, to be announced at a party conference. Dr. Strangelove, Sellers’s third part, a German scientist in a wheelchair whose arm will not obey him, explains why this is a disaster. The whole point of the machine, he says, is lost if you “keep it a secret”. It is deterrence theory delivered as farce, and it is correct. Fate has been made into hardware.
Movement IV
The bomber is the one setting played wholly straight. Kong’s crew go through their checklists with technical care, among them Lieutenant Lothar Zogg, played by James Earl Jones in his first film. Kong reads out the contents of the survival kit, which would do, he says, for a weekend in Vegas. Over their passages the score plays “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”, and the B-52 skims the Arctic and then Soviet ground in a grim forward drive. These men are competent, brave and loyal. They are the film’s heroes, and they are the agents of the end.
The recall code goes out, and the Leper Colony cannot hear it. A missile has missed it, and in missing it has wrecked the CRM-114, the radio that would have heard the code, and jammed the bomb doors. Every obstacle in the film is paid for in this way: each disaster the crew survive by courage and skill brings the world a step nearer its death, and the plot is the oldest plot of doom, in which every effort to avert the end brings it about.
Over the target the doors will not open. Kong climbs down into the bomb bay and works on the doors by hand. The doors open, and the bomb falls with Kong astride it, whooping and waving his hat like a rodeo rider, all the way down. It is the summit of the film: the cowboy’s ride as the end of everything, the hero’s last labour turned to the world’s death. Pickens plays it exactly as he has played every moment before it, without a wink, and the image has stood for its decade ever since.
Movement V
In the War Room the end is now certain, and Strangelove proposes a way to survive it. Chosen people might live in deep mine shafts while the fallout covers the earth, for ninety-three years, with ten women to every man. The talk turns at once to the danger of “a mine shaft gap”, and the ambassador photographs the room with his camera. Strangelove’s arm throttles him and snaps into a salute. The strategists have heard the end of the world announced and have begun planning the next arms race.
Strangelove rises from his wheelchair: “I can walk”. The Nazi inside the American government stands at the moment the world ends, a resurrection of the wrong god. The film cuts to the explosions. Mushroom clouds blossom one after another while Vera Lynn sings “We’ll Meet Again”, the song of parting from the last world war, and the film ends there, with no rescue. Terror and tenderness are given in one register, and the joke that began with two aircraft joined to a love song ends with the world destroyed to another.
A battle of custard pies in the War Room was shot and cut before release; it was never part of the film. The year of release also brought Fail-Safe, from the same studio, the same premise played as tragedy: it shows the danger and cannot show the absurdity of reason itself. The film has been continuously present since, in repertory, on television and in every home format, and was named in the first list of the National Film Registry in 1989. The crisis it mocked has passed. The arsenals and the doctrines it mocked have not, and the film has outlived its headlines without losing its point: a system that trusts any one man with the end of the world, a War Room in which reason serves madness, and a cowboy riding the bomb.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test and the three lines resist it, because each is one stage of a single mechanism: the base is the cause, the bomber the agent, the War Room the attempt at recall. Every obstacle is paid for: Ripper seals the base and impounds the radios, so the recall code lives only in his head; Mandrake must read it from his doodles; the Army must take the base so that Ripper dies; Guano must shoot open a Coke machine for the coins to call the President; the missile that misses the Leper Colony must wreck the CRM-114 and jam the bomb doors, so that Kong rides the bomb down. The Doomsday Machine closes every exit. What gives: some War Room business runs past its point, Turgidson’s telephone girlfriend and his wrestling with de Sadesky, and Strangelove’s arm is turned once or twice more than the joke needs.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A system built to remove human error from nuclear war puts the end of the world in the hands of any one man it trusts; deterrence followed to its last term cannot be told from madness; and the language of strategy is an obscenity spoken calmly, from “twenty million killed, tops” to “a mine shaft gap”. Strangelove’s objection that the Doomsday Machine’s point is lost if you “keep it a secret” is deterrence theory delivered as farce, and it is correct. A second disclosure comes by image as much as by word: the war machine runs on male sexual vanity, from the coupling of aircraft that opens the film to Ripper’s bodily fluids. Held below the top by caricature: no one is shown deciding under real pressure, and the Soviet side is a voice on a telephone and a spy with a camera.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Elevation is not the usual mode of farce, and when it comes here it is dreadful or exultant. The refuelling under a love song, two aircraft joined in slow motion over cloud, is a cold beauty that is also a joke. The B-52 skimming the Arctic and then Soviet ground to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” builds a grim forward drive. Kong astride the falling bomb, whooping and waving his hat, is the summit of the film and one of the great images of its decade: the cowboy’s ride as the end of everything. The epilogue, explosions blossoming to “We’ll Meet Again”, is a second summit, terror and tenderness in one register, and Adam’s War Room gives a standing grandeur to every scene set in it. What holds the axis is frequency: long stretches are talk, brilliant and level, and the War Room’s comedy works against height by design.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The myth is built, and it is the oldest plot of doom: every effort to avert the end brings it nearer. The bomber’s crew overcome each disaster by courage and skill, and their heroism is the agent of the catastrophe; Kong freeing the jammed doors by hand is the hero’s last labour turned to the world’s death. Without that structure there is no film. The Doomsday Machine is fate made into hardware, a necessity no one can revoke. Strangelove, the Nazi inside the American government, is the mad scientist and the revenant, rising from his wheelchair as the world ends. The round table under its ring of light is a council in parody, and the particular stays particular: a Coke machine, a survival kit, an ambassador’s camera. What holds it from the top is the naming: Ripper, Turgidson, Kissoff and Kong are labels before they are types.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the Cold War suspense thriller, the source novel itself among it, Peter George’s sober tale of an accidental nuclear attack; beside it the service comedy and the satire of the early 1960s, Sellers from British radio farce, Southern from the American comic novel. The turn: Kubrick began a serious adaptation and made it a nightmare comedy, straight in its procedures and absurd in its men, with the world destroyed at the end and no rescue. The stake was large. The Cuban crisis of October 1962 was recent, and a studio picture mocked the President’s council, the Air Force and the strategists by type. Held below the top by precedent: the black comedy of murder had been made in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Kubrick’s own Lolita (1962) had already set Sellers loose in it, and Swift had shown the way centuries before.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The three sealed settings, joined only by wires and radio, are the knowledge that the system cannot be recalled once begun: no character can cross between them, and the cutting enacts the failure of communication the film is about. The documentary manner is the second instrument: the assault on Burpelson is filmed handheld like newsreel and the bomber’s checklists are performed with technical care, so that the farce sits inside real procedure and the viewer learns that the procedures are sound and the men insane. Sellers in three parts, a British officer, an American president and a German scientist, makes the alliance one actor’s repertoire. Fail-Safe, the same premise told as tragedy in the same year, shows the danger and cannot show the absurdity of reason itself. Held from the top because the War Room’s comic scenes use the ordinary grammar of filmed theatre.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Sixty-two years of return are evidence. The film is read as nuclear satire, as a comedy of military masculinity and sexual anxiety, as the central statement of Kubrick’s theme of systems that outrun their makers, and as a document of strategic thought; critics have traced its figures to Herman Kahn, Edward Teller, Wernher von Braun and others, an identification that remains contested. The formal yield holds on return, in the rhymes of sex and weapons and in the cutting between three clocks kept running together. What holds the axis: a satire’s meaning is largely fixed once grasped, much of the pleasure of return is the pleasure of known jokes, and the readings converge more than they open.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Released in 1964, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film made the nuclear end of the world sayable as comedy inside a studio picture, and showed that black farce could take state policy as its subject while the policy was in force. It reorganised tone and subject more than the grammar of film, and in the decade of Psycho, L’Avventura, 8½, Persona and 2001 that keeps it below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is wide, and it began at release, running through the American black comedy and military satire of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H (both 1970) to the political satire of In the Loop (2009) and Don’t Look Up (2021), which takes its structure openly, with the War Room become a common reference. Beyond film, “doomsday machine” in the language of strategy and journalism is noted as breadth, not weighed.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over sixty-two years. The form survives whole, in the one version released. The presence has been continuous and wide: repertory, television, every home format, teaching, the first list of the National Film Registry in 1989, and lines passed into common speech; the film has not fallen from attention in any decade. The surface is the kind the axis charges, a topical satire of a named crisis, a hotline and a Soviet premier. The charge is small because the condition has not passed: the arsenals and the doctrines of retaliation remain, and Kissoff and the Coke machine now read as history rather than headline. The image as seen is sound. Held at the figure usual for its span, not the widest, for the topical surface.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, and the making bears weight in most departments. Gilbert Taylor lights the War Room almost from its ring of lamps alone, faces hard over a dark table, and shoots the battle at Burpelson grainy and handheld. Ken Adam’s War Room and bomber interior are among the most exact designs in the cinema. Anthony Harvey’s cutting keeps three settings in one tempo. Sellers’s Muffley, a decent man on the telephone to a drunk, is restraint at its finest; Scott’s Turgidson is all appetite and teeth; Hayden’s Ripper is deadpan under a cigar; Pickens plays Kong straight. The costs hold the figure: the effects shots of the bomber in flight are visibly composited and fall below the rest, and Strangelove himself is broad, with some of Sellers’s invention there running slack.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the assault on Burpelson, filmed as war, American soldiers killing American soldiers in newsreel grain; and Strangelove’s arm throttling its owner and snapping into a salute. One law governs both: procedure obeyed to its last term by men ruled by appetite and fear, with reason serving madness. The soldiers follow orders that are perfectly correct; the arm is the body following a rule older than the mind. The same law governs Kong’s survival kit, Guano’s respect for the property of the Coca-Cola Company and Turgidson’s actuarial calm, and sex runs through all three settings as the hidden motor. The range is wide, from documentary violence to slapstick, and the law holds across it. The strain: Strangelove’s last scene presses to the edge of revue, and the bomber, played wholly straight, sometimes seems to belong to another film until the bomb.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on what a comedy of about ninety-five minutes holds, and it holds more than its length suggests. The state, in the presidency, the joint chiefs, the hotline and diplomacy; war, in a bomber crew, a base and its assault; technology and science, in codes, radar, a discriminator and a Doomsday Machine; history, in the Nazi past alive in the War Room and the songs of the Second World War over the end; sexuality as a political force; the natural order, in the planet itself and the fallout that will cover it for ninety-three years. The plot integrates them: one order from one man runs through all. What holds the axis lowest is what is missing: consciousness is caricature by design, the family is absent, labour is military procedure, the sacred appears only as parody, and the people of the world the film destroys are never seen.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment at 8.9, then The Archetypal Deep, The Swerve, The Living Form and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8. A disclosure that can be stated and holds, that deterrence followed to its last term cannot be told from madness; the oldest plot of doom built as the plot, with the crew’s heroism as its agent; a nightmare comedy made of a straight thriller within two years of the Cuban crisis; three sealed settings that are the knowledge the film carries; and a reach wide from the day of release.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: the state, war, technology, history, sexuality and the natural order are held and integrated by one order from one man, but consciousness is caricature by design, the family is absent, the sacred is parody, and the people of the world the film destroys are never seen. Above it, The Sublime at 8.4, two summits of the first rank among long stretches of level talk, and The Bottomless Well at 8.5, a satire whose meaning is largely fixed once grasped.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8, The Swerve at 8.8, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Imperishable at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, the closest by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.4, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.7 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb as released by Columbia Pictures in 1964, in its one version, black and white, about ninety-five minutes, from the disclaimer card and the refuelling to the explosions under “We’ll Meet Again”: directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick from a screenplay by Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George after George’s novel Red Alert (1958), photographed by Gilbert Taylor, designed by Ken Adam, edited by Anthony Harvey, with music by Laurie Johnson. The battle of custard pies shot for the War Room and cut before release was never part of the film and is not judged. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. The novel is a source, not part of the work, and enters only where the turn from it is weighed. Dialogue is quoted only where the words are firmly known, in short fragments, and songs are named by their titles alone. Figures and particulars that could not be verified are not given: among them the exact running time, the scene and shot counts and the share of the dialogue in each setting, a line said to have been redubbed before release, the aspect ratio of the home editions, the state of the original negative, how the bomber’s cockpit was designed, the dates by which the release was put back, and later history said to have sent viewers back to the film.