In the wake of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Stanley Kubrick highlights the insanity of ‘M.A.D.’ (mutually assured destruction) with the satirical Dr Strangelove (1964). Kubrick frames this madness from the opening shot of a desolate Arctic ‘landscape’ that previews the environment of a ‘post-nuclear war’ world, the world that would follow this film’s conclusion. The authoritative quality of the narration over this scene, and the use of black-and-white film, gives this text the feel and authenticity of a newsreel. This impression continues in the next sequence with the titles laid over a mid-air refuelling. But the seriousness of the newsreel is pushed aside by a romantic melody that turns this aerial union into a sexual tryst in self-destruction that will end with the film’s final shots of mushroom-clouds dancing to the contradictory optimism of “We’ll Meet Again”. Kubrick has quickly set the scene in the opening and continues a tight control over the mise-en-scene throughout the film that securely binds this tale of military mayhem.

When the psychotic, obsessed General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) delivers his notice to order the planes to drop their bombs, he does so by phone, symbolic, perhaps, of his tenuous grasp on reality, to the rational, methodical Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers). Ripper is in his dimly-lit office, the frontal lighting highlighting the determined madness conveyed by his facial expression. Mandrake is in a well-lit room of computers, desks – an environment of clarity and efficiency. Lighting is certainly an important, and consistently employed, component of the film’s mise-en-scene, but a more powerful aspect of this text is the stylised performances of Sellers, not just as Mandrake, “the well-bred British air attaché”, but also as “the mild-mannered President Markin Mutfley…and the eponymous Dr Strangelove, the wheelchair-bound ex-Nazi, now a top nuclear scientist” (Boyer 2004). If an actor’s performance, as Bordwell and Thompson (2004 p. 199) claim, “consists of visual elements (appearance, gestures, facial expressions) and sound (voice, effects)”, then Sellers, under Kubrick’s direction, employs all of these elements with a brilliant distinction and precision.

These characters have their opposites: the clear-thinking Mandrake versus the irrational Ripper; the timid Mutfley versus the bombastic General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott); and, the most complicated, Strangelove, who is not only in opposition to both of Seller’s other characters, Mandrake and Mutfley, but also has an internal conflict between his newly-found position of influence in the ‘War Room’ of a ‘democracy’ and his autocratic past, personified by his rebellious right arm. It is these characters, these oppositions, that work, not against each other, but in unison, to produce a powerful parody of the pointless politicking that was, and continues to be, the fuel of ‘Cold War’ paranoia.

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