The End of the Old Frontier

Sixty years later, Dr. Strangelove has much to say to us

“Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here; this is the War Room!”

– President Merkin Muffley in Dr. Strangelove (1964)

NOTE: This is the third in a series of essays, “The Long 1964 at Sixty,” I plan to write on what was happening in 1964, “The Year ‘The Sixties’ Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn,” as I put it in the subtitle of my most recent book, The Times They Were a-Changin’. Portions of them will be taken straight from the book, but other parts of the essays will be new commentary.

Sixty years ago, my all-time favorite film was a startling box-office hit. It has much to say to us in 2024.

Among the many things put on hold in the weeks following President Ken­nedy’s assassination was the release of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It had been filmed at the Shepperton Studios in England and was slated to hit theaters in the United States on December 12, 1963, with a first test screening scheduled for the evening of November 22. It turned out that viewers were otherwise occupied that evening. The release of the movie was delayed for seven weeks in the immediate wake of John F. Kennedy’s death.

When it was released on January 29, 1964, the film was greeted with attacks from established critics caught up in the Cold War mentality. In a New York Times review, Bosley Crowther classified the movie as a “sick joke” and “dangerous.” He said he was “troubled by the feeling, which runs all through the film, of discredit and even contempt for our whole defense establishment, up to and even including the hypothet­ical Commander in Chief.” “No Communist could dream of a more effective anti-American film to spread abroad than this,” a Washington Post political writer warned. He called on top government officials to “take a look at this one to see its effects on the national interest.” New Yorker critic Dwight Macdonald said he was amazed that Columbia Pictures had allowed it to be made and predicted that theaters showing it would have picket lines protesting it.

Instead, Dr. Strangelove was an immediate and huge hit, taking the top box-office rating for three weeks, another clear sign that, as Dylan’s Columbia Records release sixteen days before had said, the times were a-changin’. Challenges to Cold War orthodoxy had suddenly become acceptable to significant numbers of Americans. Dr. Strangelove took the top movie position from Disney at precisely the same time that the Beatles took the top record position from Bobby Vinton. “Strangelovemania” gripped Americans simultane­ously with Beatlemania.

Unlike the Beatles’ music, there was nothing that could be prop­erly classified as “feel good” about the film. It was a satirical comedy, but its subject was the destruction of the earth by nuclear weapons. Beyond what is often called “black comedy,” Dr. Strangelove is, in the words of Kubrick, “a nightmare comedy.” Perhaps the best way to describe the film is to say that it is insanely serious. While its main point is usually taken to be Kubrick’s concern (particularly evident in his 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey) that humans have turned over control of our destiny to machines and technology, the film’s other major theme—that war is often about insecure men trying to affirm their masculinity—is of considerably more importance.

That point is particularly relevant in 2024, as a pathetically self-doubting man seeks to retake the presidency by appealing to the apprehensions of millions of others.

Dr. Strangelove was made after the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962) and Kubrick was making a statement about the absurdity of nuclear war and how war in general is connected to the manhood fears of some national leaders.

November 22, 1963, Minus 13 Months: The Cuban Missile Crisis

In its early stages, the Cuban Missile Crisis was in part the sort of situ­ation satirized by Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove: a means of comparatively measuring the male missiles of John Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

The Bay of Pigs and Berlin crises in 1961 had exacerbated the inse­curities of both Kennedy and Khrushchev. “Both men soon behaved as if their personal manhood was at stake,” historian James T. Patterson has rightly written. “A sort of mano a mano emotionality” infused rela­tions between the superpowers in 1961 and ’62.

JFK’s first instinct was to bomb first and ask questions later—an approach forcefully pushed by Air Force Chief Curtis LeMay (sometimes called “A-Bomb LeMay”). Kennedy considered LeMay to be a madman and, understanding that the stakes were higher than they had ever before been in human history and that that fact made traditional, even natural, human responses inappropriate, the President reined in his own need to display “manliness” and kept trying to avoid taking what he termed “one hell of a gamble” by initiating an attack.

This is not the place to go into the details of the missile crisis, but once Khrushchev had “blinked,” President Kennedy reverted immediately to the image of sexual contest, from which most of those around him had never moved away. “I cut off his balls,” John Kennedy triumphantly boasted in private after Khrushchev accepted his proposal that the Soviets remove the missiles in Cuba in exchange for an American pledge not to invade the island and later to remove American missiles from Turkey. An enraged Fidel Castro concluded that Khrushchev’s backing down showed that the Soviet chairman was a man with “no cojones.” Castro also called Khrushchev a maricón (a word similar to “faggot”).

“It’s the greatest defeat in our history, Mr. President,” a typically crazed LeMay screamed when Kennedy told the top brass of Khrush­chev’s agreement to his proposal. “We should invade today.” LeMay saw Kennedy as Castro did Khrushchev: lacking balls.

LeMay’s attitude was nicely captured in a line from Gen. Buck Tur­gidson, a character based loosely on him, in Dr. Strangelove. Suggesting that the United States launch a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, Turgidson says, “Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed; but I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops, uh, depending on the breaks.”

Kubrick’s seemingly outlandish depiction of the attitudes of some of the military leaders turns out not to be that far from the truth, even though he had no way of knowing at the time what was being discussed in ExComm (the group of advisers JFK brought together to deal with the crisis) in October 1962. During the missile crisis, the Joint Chiefs talked of an airborne invasion, which would “mop up Cuba in seventy-two hours with a loss of only 10,000 Americans more or less.”

Preserving Our “Precious Bodily Fluids”: Erectile Dysfunction & Earth Destruction

I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love. . . . Loss of essence. . . . Women, er, women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake . . . but I do deny them my essence.

      – Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper, Dr. Strangelove (1964)

It is Dr. Strangelove that best captures the essential underlying sexual ingredient in the missile crisis—and in most military tests of will. “It looks like we’re in a shooting war,” Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper says in the movie, and it soon becomes obvious that he is starting a war because of his own difficulty with “shooting.”

General Ripper is the embodiment of what I have named Acute Masculine Insecurity Disorder (AMID). He starts a nuclear war because he is impotent (a problem he blames on the Communists and women—Reds and Pinks—and the fluoridation of water). As he indicates in the statement quoted above, Ripper has decided that he won’t let women sap him of his “precious bodily fluids.”

Ripper’s impotence is what leads him to use artificial omnipotence to destroy the world. He can’t get it up, so he blows everything up. His erectile dysfunction leads to earth destruction.

In the film’s final scene the former Nazi scientist Strangelove discusses, in the face of worldwide destruction, the prospects of going under­ground with “a ratio of, say, ten females to each male,” the necessity of “the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship . . . as far as men were concerned” and the fact that “the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics, which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature” because “each man will be required to do prodigious service along these lines.” He himself is so stimulated by this prospect that his arm keeps rising to give a Nazi phallic salute and he is able to rise from his wheelchair and shout, “Mein Führer, I can walk!”

The most salient point that comes out of Dr. Strangelove is that men insecure in their masculinity are the source of many of the world’s problems—and that this sort of manhood competition could destroy the world.

That, too, speaks to us at a time when such fake men as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have us in so much danger.

Kubrick indicates that men who have the courage to act sensibly in such circumstances will be thought of as “pussies.” One of the three roles Peter Sellers plays in Dr. Strangelove is the president, who takes the sort of reasonable positions to which Kennedy came as the threat of worldwide catastrophe grew more imminent. Sellers as the president is made to look much like Adlai Stevenson, one of the most dovish of the advisers JFK consulted during the missile crisis. But most telling is his name: Merkin Muffley. Both “Merkin” and “muff ” are British slang terms used to refer to the area of the female genitalia, specifically a woman’s pubic hair, or a pubic hair wig. It could not be clearer, then, that this fictional president is being called a “pussy.” And when the president says he will give the Soviets the flight paths and targets of the American bombers so they can shoot them down, Gen. Turgidson plainly sees President Muffley in the same way that LeMay and others saw Kennedy: as a treasonous “pussy.”

But, in a truly revolutionary stance, Kubrick does not portray being a pussy as something negative. The message is plain. Men need to have the courage to go against the stereotypical male behavior: The truly heroic man—a real man—may be one who is willing to act in ways that will get him called a “pussy.”

Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and such other civil rights activists as Jim Lawson and John Lewis, were that sort of men. Most of the time, Jack Kennedy certainly was not. Yet when it counted the most, all his manhood hang-ups notwithstanding, John F. Kennedy was willing to expose himself to being called a pussy. He summoned the bravery to risk having that sexual imagery reversed at the most critical moment. Kennedy (and Khrushchev) averted a secular Arma­geddon through a willingness to not “act like a man.”

Midnight for High Noon: The Waning of John Wayne’s World

During the missile crisis, Kennedy had come, at least viscerally, to an understanding that in the time of the New Frontier the days of the Old Frontier were over. There could be no more High Noon duels when the guns in the holsters were thermonuclear.

A Texan in Dr. Strangelove, Major Kong (played by Slim Pick­ens), is symbolically the last American cowboy when, near the end of the movie, he rides a hydrogen bomb out of the bomb bay of his plane, gleefully waving his cowboy hat and shouting “YAHOO! YAHOO!” while triggering the destruction of the world. Between his legs, Kong has the dream of every sexually insecure man. No guy in a penis-measuring contest can top the ultimate firepower of this swollen thermonuclear erection. But, Kubrick is telling us, such extreme sexual prowess is self-destructive. The image is a wonderful representation of the impotent omnipotence of the nuclear age.

The New Frontier’s brush with nuclear war was the last gasp of the Old Frontier—or it might have been, had a new president haunted by the cowboy image of manhood not come into office.

It is truly remarkable that this film, set to debut at almost the moment that Lyndon Johnson unexpectedly became president, depicts a Texan in a cowboy hat with the ultimate “ol’ Jumbo” (a term LBJ liked to use to describe his penis) between his legs leaping to his own and the world’s destruction. (Soon after he took office, LBJ told Pierre Salinger to portray him “as a tall tough Texan in the saddle.”) By some strange twist of fate, Dr. Strangelove turned out to be predictive of what was about to happen with Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam when he would metaphorically ride ol’ Jumbo into the destruction of his goals, his remarkable accomplishments, his reputation, Vietnam itself, and to a substantial extent, his own country.

Trump playing dress-up as a “real man” on the USS Ford, March 3, 2017

Sixty years later, the nation and world again face the threat of a wretchedly insecure self-made-up man who brags about the size of his male organ. We must reject him decisively.