2 thoughts on “Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe”

1. Julia, I think I say this to you every week; this was another project that I would have loved to have sunk my teeth into. I love both of these movies because what makes them so interesting is that, while they share a common message, they deliver it in very different ways.
   Dr. Strangelove is a satirical comedy by Stanley Kubrick and features the genius of the multi-talented Peter Sellers and George C. Scott. Humanity’s impending doom is depicted comically throughout, with such famous lines like, “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room.” Alternatively, Fail-Safe features a distinctly different cast of dramatic actors and is gripping, powerful, and foreboding. However, what really drew me to your post was your assessment of the power struggle between both movies civilian and military leaders. Because, basically, you are right. There was a catastrophic breakdown, not only in communications, but also within the chain of command. A chain of command that every officer and senior NCO serving today readily acknowledges and swears to obey, as this is an issue that can be traced back to our founding fathers. (I pledge, 189)

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   June 8, 2016 at 11:30 am

2. (Ryan — I adjusted your tense a bit and took out some unnecessary and disruptive commas.)

   Ultimately, both films have a similar message to The Day the Earth Stood Still: humanity had a powerful weapon, one more powerful than it likely had the ability to handle. (A gun is not dangerous in the hands of an adult who knows how to put the safety on . . . but in the hands of a four year old??) How does a country create a “fail safe” system that prevents ANY slip-up that mistakenly leads to a war. The president in Dr. Strangelove thought that the US had such a system, but a crazy anti-communist officer found a way; the premier of the Soviet Union in Dr. Strangelove thought that the threat of global destruction would be such a system, but it was not either (as no one knew about it).

   Also, numerous films and novels and television shows in the 1950s and 1960s (and after) focused on mistakes. One of the most famous novels is On the Beach (which was made into a movie in 1959 starring Fred Astaire). Someone bombed someone; the culprit was misidentified, and the wrong (innocent) country was bombed in retaliation; that country then defended itself by bombing its attacker. In other words–a mistake with nuclear weapons was impossible to “correct.” The damage and threats were too great to ignore (a major problem central to the movie Fail Safe). {“Oh, I’m sorry; we just mistakenly bombed your capital and killed five million of your people; it was a mistake–just ignore it”: this is what the president in Dr. Strangelove is trying to avoid saying, and this is what the president in Fail Safe is saying, minus “just ignore it.” How to convince a country which you have just attacked to “ignore it”?? Let them bomb your country in return??} In On the Beach, the fallout from the war spread by air currents around the world. In Australia, the scene of the novel, a country that had NOTHING to do with the war waits for the air to bring death to everyone. This is the kind of scenario that Klaatu is trying to warn humanity about in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

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   June 9, 2016 at 1:09 am