Dr. Strangelove and Chinatown

I love how Dr. Strangelove plays on these hilarious stereotypes. The American general is an untrusting war-mongering militarist; the American president is a weak individual who tries/pretends to act strong; the British officer is polite but dry; the rogue American officer is just plain scary; the German scientist is a Nazi; the Russian prime minister is drunk.

The American pilots flying the bomber struck me as extremely dutiful and patriotic. I think Kubrick doesn't want to incriminate the men who actually fly the plane, push the button, and drop the bomb. They are likable, almost heroic. On the other end, Jack Ripper is the obvious villain, going Kurtz-like and taking matters into his own hands about the "bodily fluids" conspiracy. But is the true villain really that obvious and simple? It seems like the real villain is actually more intangible: it's the system, it's the paranoia, the mistrust that truly lead to this catastrophe. It's the way the system was designed so that lower level officers could actually drop bombs - a provision added for paranoid reasons. The way things could never be reversed once set in motion - another paranoid move. The way the Russian Doomsday device is automatically triggered and not overridable, supposedly the ultimate deterrent, but insanely dangerous nonetheless. The bickering and mistrust in the war room that delays any possible action.

The eponymous Dr. Strangelove is perplexing. He clearly struggles to suppress his adoration for "Mein Fuhrer," perhaps a poke at the way America is wont to short-sightedly change sides so quickly even if our new allies aren't exactly the greatest people, a perfectly relevent criticism today. Osama bin Laden was C.I.A. trained, after all. Saddam Hussein was also backed by America at one point. So clearly when Strangelove gets all excited about his plan for repopulating the earth, he is supposed to sound like a new Hitler designing a master race. But why is he so important to be the actual title of the film? What could it mean?

I have seen Chinatown before, in a class in which we studied a lot of film noirs. The second time around, the pure nihilism of the film is really striking. Jake has a past in Chinatown that he clearly has been trying to escape by employing himself as a private investigator. Yet, the more he tries to do the right thing, the more he tries to uncover the truth, the closer his plotline devolves and regresses back to Chinatown, at the final scene, which is one of the greatest final scenes I've ever seen. The dialogue is so full of futility and hopelessness. "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." He can not help but relive and recreate his past, and so the film suggest an ultimate kind of impotence. Truly nihilistic. In fact, when he gets his nose sliced in the middle of the film, it is like a moment of near-castration - thinking of the nose as a phallic symbol. Jake's snooping around becomes so dangerous for him that the harshness of the world comes up to him and takes a piece of his manhood, his power, threatening to cut the whole thing off next time. Castration. Impotence. Powerlessness. Meaninglessness. Nihilism.

It's very dark.