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December 9, 2008
HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND STEAL THAT LINE FROM DR. STRANGELOVE
For those of you that didn't hear (I don't know how; it was the front headline of USA TODAY, you uncultured philistine slime), I gave a five minute lecture on DR. STRANGELOVE. Since this blog is the type of venue for such announcements, I thought I'd publish them here. About five people were there to hear this lecture, for which I got paid 100 dollars (twenty bucks a person) to participate on a panel of other graduate students. The kids, however, were cool, and asked good questions, and I got to pontificate endlessly about Kubrick.
So find below my comments - the unedited directors cut (I edited it for time because, as you can see, it's too long). Lest you think I forgot, hear are some upcoming posts:
1. A review of CHINESE DEMOCRACY (here is a word I will be unsarcastically using a lot: awesome)
2. My top ten albums of the year (here are two words I will be using at some point:
CHINESE DEMOCRACY)
---- we'll meet again
When I say rhetoric, I'm, as pretty much all rhetoricians do, both reducing and broadening. Rhetoric is, as Aristotle noted, the fine art of persuasion, but it's also to some degree Barack Obama's upcoming inauguration speech and an eight year old's attempt to get his parents to buy him a Wii. But as a student of rhetoric, I reserve the right to create my own definitions, even when you disagree with them.
To boil down the big ideas of rhetoric into two strands of thought is exactly what rhetoricians have been warning we should avoid, but it is exactly what I'm going to do now. If we were to sum up the history of the study of language as a persuasive act that allow for various levels of meaning in both the speaker and the audience, we would basically end up with two competing strands:
One, beginning with high-minded types in the middle of high-minded government projects, forwarded by Aristotle and Cicero, is that Rhetoric is a force that creates meaning, that unifies, that brings together, that identifies conflicts and resolves. As Kenneth Burke, perhaps the most high-minded of modern idealistic rhetoricians, writes, "Rhetoric is concerned with the state of Babel after the fall." Remember that story from the first few chapters of Genesis? Idiots build tower to God, God complicates idiots' language. Burke's comment suggests resolution from chaos, a way of finding order in the midst of voices who are inclined to disagree, to speak different languages; as John Stuart Mill writes "All good things which exist are the fruits of originality."
The other strand is one common to anyone who picked up a newspaper chronicling William Ayres' weekly terrorist-planning meetings with Barack Obama or Sarah Palin and the most popular illegitimate child since William the Conqueror. This is simply that rhetoric is a force that, in its indeterminacy, only further corrupts, confuses, complicates, and muddles even the best of objectives. If Burke wanted to redeem Babel, this conceptualization only highlights the Babel-ness of Babel. Words in and of themselves, in their abstract form, mean nothing. If I say "cat," and you have never seen a cat, that word is meaningless unless I point at a cat. As John Locke noted, words have no standard in nature, yet they're given an authority they don't deserve. Which is why political debates often go nowhere even though they certainly have no shortage of the very words that Cicero thought could build a society. Every time I open my mouth, I only screw things up further. Or as Buck Turgidson might say, "the spaghetti hits the fan."
These are the two major competing strands in rhetoric. Now let's turn our attention to Stanley Kubrick, one of my favorite portrayers of the latter idea in the last fifty years. Whether it's the selfish military jingoism of PATHS OF GLORY, the aristocratic double-talk of SPARTACUS, the innuendo of LOLITA, the futuristic cold war language of concealment in 2001, the indecipherable Nadsat slang of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, the propagandist journalism of FULL METAL JACKET . . . I could go on - In Kubrick movies, language hides, rather than reveals, motives. For his characters, it's either a necessary evil or a manipulative means to an end. Kubrick films are full of liars, smooth-talkers, bureaucratic voiceboxes, and, in DR. STRANGELOVE, stifled attempts to send messages that will save the world.
Let's look at a few key lines:
"Well, I'm afraid we're unable to communicate with any of the aircraft."
"We are plowing through every possible three letter combination of the code. But since there are seventeen thousand permutations it's going to take us about two and a half days to transmit them all."
After Jack the Ripper explains, via a phone message, that he is saving the world's "essences": We're still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir.
"Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy... the fear to attack. And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision making process which rules out human meddling, the doomsday machine is terrifying. It's simple to understand. And completely credible, and convincing."
Mandrake: Ah, oh no, I ah... I don't think they wanted me to talk, really. I don't think they wanted me to say anything. It was just their way of having... a bit of fun, the swines. Strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras
I don't have time to fully argue what I kind of want to, which is that in all but one of Kubrick's films his view of language is cynical: it can never produce; it can only destroy. For Kubrick progress is hopeless - every rational step forward we make is only a step to our own destruction, whether the "perfect crime" in his first major film, THE KILLING, or the desire for sexual exploration in his last, EYES WIDE SHUT. Machines shut down. Plans don't work. Or some lunatic general sends his boys out to irradiate Russia and then shoots himself. As Strangelove says, "It's simple to understand. And completely credible, and convincing." Simply, everything that language is not.
Just to give one counter-perspective, consider another nuclear war movie that came out about seven or eight years ago - THIRTEEN DAYS - this one about the triumph of government rather than its failure. This was supposedly the "true story" of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Without going into too much detail, the film memorializes the Kennedys and their cabinet as they save the world through a mix of reasoned rhetoric and international diplomacy. In THIRTEEN DAYS, key scenes include a rousing speech before the UN and defense secretary Robert McNamara berating a hawkish general, saying, "This is not a blockade. This is language. A new vocabulary, the likes of which the world has never seen! This is President Kennedy communicating with Secretary Khrushchev!"
But DR. STRANGELOVE, I'd argue, while it seems to be the lynchpin to my argument, is actually the one point where Kubrick seems to put these notions of rhetoric in conflict, rather than side with one over the other. Because in STRANGELOVE, Rhetoric tries to work, but can't. The "War Room," for all its iconic, constantly ripped-off brilliance on our satirical landscape, is a place where conversations aren't supposed to happen, but in this case they have do. The War Room becomes the ultimate dialectic - nothing shows the need for what Alexander Hamilton defined in the Federalist Papers as "sedate and candid conversation" more than the conflict with which Muffley, Turgidson, Strangelove, DeSadeski, and the other suits have to face. In its failure, we are reminded of the necessity for cooler heads to prevail, for the dialogue to remedy the hawkish ideas of Turgidson. As Muffley notes, in one of the truest statements the film makes, "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the War Room!"
In its Cold War context, Kubrick recognizes the need for "sedate and candid conversation," only to see it stifled in every direction. In fact it is the lack of communication that puts them in this mess in the first place, rather the usual excess of other Kubrick movies. The War Room can't reach Ripper, The War Room can't reach the pilots, the ridiculous six letter code has replaced any actual hope of communicating with the invading planes, and Mandrake can't use the phone because he doesn't have a quarter, which, of course, he can only get if he repays the Coca Cola company. Mandrake almost saves the day, and how? "Communications control."
So - what, if anything, does DR. STRANGELOVE say about the role of rhetoric in its ability to resolve or corrupt? How does this role fit within its contemporary political climate, and what does it have to say about the world we live in today? What is Kubrick saying about the language of war, modernity, politics, international affairs? Could Kubrick have made this movie after 9/11, and if so, would his perspective change, or be exactly the same?
This leads to bigger and broader, more important questions that are nonetheless almost impossible to answer, which is why man has spent centuries struggling over them - in our highest of ambitions and our best of motives, can we do anything good, or do we only build metaphorical doomsday machines that will annihilate as a way of protecting? Yes, I believe these questions emerge from a film which was originally supposed to end with a pie fight.
And in the style of Kubrick, if I can jump off the subject for a second, what the hell is up with the title? Is this wheelchair-bound German a metaphor for a number of things? And, finally, a question I have never been able to get a satisfactory answer for: why Or Why I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb?* That would assume the film is going to be explain "Why I Stopped Worrying" - but why would one stop worrying when the bomb proceeds to obliterate the whole planet outside the lucky politicians and pin-up women who get to live in the mine shafts? Don't worry - unlike Alanis Morrisette, I know the meaning of the word "irony," but why this specific irony in the title? Because of the film's classic status, this never comes to fore - but wouldn't a better title be "The War Room?" Of course not, but what is Kubrick trying to do by featuring the name of this handicapped Nazi lunatic of a scientist so prominently on the Marquee?
But I leave it to you to discuss the role of rhetoric in STRANGELOVE. Your immediate response might be to see the film as an embodiment of the Tower of Babel, when in fact I think like Burke, it is a desire to reconcile it, or as one character might put it, "purify its essence."
* - One of the panelists actually had a really good answer to this question. Its provided by the solution that Strangelove offers, and has to do with the ten to one women to men ratio in the "Mineshaft gap."
| By Andytown | 10:05 PM