Doctor Strangelove as a Comedy Based on Dramatic Irony - Essay Example

The secret to the ability of Dr. Strangelove to directly confront many of the most dangerously held beliefs of its American audiences is not only that it does so in a comic manner, but that the form of comedy is muted.  Future generations could well be forgiven for reading the film as a straight drama. 

            Every scene in Dr. Strangelove is filmed and edited and acted with the utmost seriousness.  Despite being one of the funniest movies ever made, actors are not allowed to give in to the temptation either foreshadow the joke or even deliver a “punch line.”  Even though the eminently talented physical comedian Peter Sellers stars in three different roles, he is never allowed to mug for the camera.   In other words, Dr. Strangelove is a comedy, but it is a comedy based on dramatic irony.  One need only watch the far more earnest film that broaches almost the same plot, Fail-Safe, to see how important this approach has been to making Dr. Strangelove a classic while relegating the dramatic interpretation to merely being a great, but little-known movie. It may only have been possible to fully explore the true extent of the nuclear nightmare through the distancing that comedy naturally allows, but Stanley Kubrick wisely chose not to make anyone in the movie act as though they were making a c comedy.  One of the brilliant elements of Dr. Strangelove is that everyone of every possible ideological strain is presented realistically, but eventually, all become objects of utter derision.  The movie’s nuclear bomb is targeted toward the entire contemporary political culture that seemed to honestly believe that stockpiling weaponry that could obliterate the planet.  General Ripper is a satirization of the entire military establishment at large that urged continual funding and deployment of arms and forces against an overblown communist threat.  Major Kong is a satiric portrait of the military chain of command in which the sanctity and value of life are secondary to following orders, no matter how insanely inhumane they may seem.  Even the military-industrial complex takes a hit when the connection between business and the business of war is connected through Col. Bat Guano's initial protection of the Coca-Cola vending machine.  And Dr. Strangelove himself, of course, is the embodiment of the misplaced trust that contemporary society has placed in technological advancements.  It is only the comedic Dr. Strangelove and not the strictly dramatic Fail-Safe that is given the freedom to ultimately make the statement that had it has been made a mere decade or so earlier at the height of the HUAC hearings and blacklisting of Hollywood’s more liberal writers, actors and directors would have resulted in probable jail sentences for Stanley Kubrick and company.  The statement that would have been too dangerous to have made earlier, and that could only get through the courtesy of being made in a comedy, is that both America and the Soviet Union had essentially forfeited any claim to ethical or moral superiority precisely because both continued to produce ever more powerful weapons of destruction in the name of ensuring peace.