A lot of Stanley Kubrick’s films deal with the concept of war. Whether it’s a real war like the Vietnam War in Full Metal Jacket or an imagined one like the nuclear war in Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Generally, it’s an anti-war approach that shows how insane the concept is.
Each film takes a slightly different point of view, but they all boil down to the same point: war makes no sense. The people involved are propagating something that makes no sense to anyone.
Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
One of Stanley Kubrick’s most popular early films is Dr. Strangelove; the film is about what would happen if an all-out nuclear war occurred. You start out thinking this is going to be a pretty serious film. We are focused on a B-52 bomber that has been ordered to drop a nuclear bomb on Russia. They are all highly skilled and are ready to carry out the ominous mission.
As the story progresses, we realize how inane the entire situation is. A group of soldiers on a military base begins firing on another group of soldiers trying to enter the base. Meanwhile, in the presidential war room, a gathering of important figures debate their war strategies. Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers), a crazed German scientist with a barely hidden loyalty to Adolf Hitler, brings up the idea of repopulating the Earth in a mine far below the nuclear holocaust.
It’s Kubrick’s way of saying, “Isn’t this stupid?” Most of the men in the war room are facing certain death and they are arguing about the concept of monogamy and sex in their future underground world. Back on the military base, General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) is telling group captain Lionel Mandrake (also Sellers) how the Soviets are polluting the “bodily fluids” of Americans. A soldier later tells Mandrake that he’ll have to answer to Coca-Cola for breaking one of their vending machines — a threat that rings hollow with nuclear holocaust approaching. It’s just ridiculous.
Full Metal Jacket
Full Metal Jacket, arguably one of Kubrick’s most famous movies, has the same dark humor that permeates Dr. Strangelove. It views war as something that men participate in, but don’t fully understand. The soldiers clamor for peace while brutally taking away the lives of as many of the enemy as they can. Kill or be killed.
Full Metal Jacket has the same sort of sardonic view that Dr. Strangelove has. One of my favorite parts of Full Metal Jacket is when the Marines are fighting the battle of Hue. As we see a montage of bodies helicoptered out of the area and tanks firing devastating blows, we are treated to The Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird.” The contrast is startling at first but seems to truly fit the situation as it progresses.
Like Dr. Strangelove, the contrast is hard to swallow at first. It seems pretty disrespectful to focus on one horny general in Dr. Strangelove instead of the impending doom of the world, but it makes sense with the ridiculous of the situation. It’s hard to focus on your impending doom and it’s much easier to laugh at a horny general.
Paths of Glory
Like Full Metal Jacket and Dr. Strangelove, Paths of Glory is pretty hard to fathom. When a general orders three soldiers to be court-martialed at random for a failed attack, they have to try and defend themselves from something they never planned. It’s ridiculous to think that three soldiers could take the blame of an entire failed attack. Attacks are not planned by individual soldiers and whether they succeed or fail does not lie on the shoulders of just a few.
It might not have the same goofy dark humor that Dr. Strangelove or Full Metal Jacket does, but Paths of Glory is a very similar view on war. It’s senseless and it makes men lose their minds. What would seem silly in civilian life is just another day in the military at war. Paths of Glory is especially an example of what power does to men.
Dr. Strangelove is a modern-ish look at what the ultimate war could do to men. Like Slim Pickens riding the nuclear bomb down to the target, the leaders of the world know that they are doomed, but they go down acting like nothing is wrong. Maybe they could hide underground and avoid it all. That’s what the general is trying to do in Paths of Glory; if he could blame others for what happened, then he could move on and pretend that it didn’t.
We Are Human to the End
What Dr. Strangelove, Paths of Glory, and Full Metal Jacket all have in common is that they show us that humans will remain humans until the very end. They do things that don’t make sense sometimes. Even large events like the eventual destruction of the Earth don’t seem to affect them as they should. They just keep going on about women and monogamy and money and material things and everything else under the sun. If they can pretend everything is okay, then maybe everything is okay. It seems insane because it really is a crazy view; but, as Kubrick shows us, it’s human nature.
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