THEATER, ETC.
291
and insulting to its subject, so may the display of negative thinking
of
Doctor Strangelove
soon (if it does not already) seem equally facile.
But this does not explain its appeal now. Liberal intellectuals who saw
Doctor StrangelDve
during its many preview showings last October
and November marvelled at its political daring, and feared that the
film would' run into terrible difficulties (mobs of American Legion types
storming the theaters, etc.). As it turned out, everybody, from the
New Yorker
to the
Dlaily N ews,
has had kind words for
Doctor Strange–
love;
there are no pickets; and the film is breaking records at the box–
office. Intellectuals and adolescents both love it. But the 16-year-olds
who are lining up to see it understand the film, and its real virtues,
better than the intellectuals, who vastly overpraise it. For
Doctor
Strangelove
is not, in fact, a political film at all. It uses the OK targets of
left-liberals (the defense establishment, Texas, chewing
gum,
mechaniza–
tion, American vulgarity) and treats them from an entirely p.ost-political,
Mad Magazine
point of view.
Doctor StrangelDve
is really a very cheer–
ful film. Certainly, its fullbloodedness contrasts favorably with what is
(in retrospect) the effeteness of Chaplin's film. The end of
Doctor
Strangelove,
with its matter-of-fact image of ap.ocalypse and flip sound–
track ("Till We Meet Again") reassures in a curious way, for nihilism
is
our
contemporary form of moral uplift. As
The Great Dictator
was
Popular Front optimism for the masses, so
Doctor Strangelove
is
nihilism for the masses, a philistine nihilism.
What is good in
The Great Dictator
are the solitary autistic acts
of grace, like Hynkel playing with the balloon-globe; and the "little
man" .humor, as in the sequence where the Jews draw lots for a suicidal
mission ,out of slices of a pie, and' Chaplin ends up with all the tokens in
his slice. These are the perennial elements of comedy, as developed
by Chaplin, over which has been pasted this unsatisfactory political
cartoon. Similarly, what is good in
Doctor Strangelave
has to do with
another perennial source of comedy, mental aberration. The best things
in the film are the fantasies of contamination expounded by the psychotic
Gen. Jack D. Ripper (played with excruciating brilliance by Sterling
Hayden), the super-American cliches and body movementi of Gen.
Buck Turgidson, that wonderful American businessman-military
typeI
put together by George C. Scott, and the euphoric satanism of Doctor
Sltrangelove himself, the Nazi scientist with the alienated' right hand
(Peter Sellers). The specialty of silent film comedy (and
The Great
Dictator
is still, essentially, a silent film) is the purely visual crossing
of grace, folly, and pathos.
Doctor Strangelove
works another classic
vein of comedy, as much verbal as visual- the idea of humors. (Hence
