In the Stanley Kubrick classic Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, George C. Scott's Gen. Buck Turgidson pounces on Peter Bull's Soviet ambassador, whom he suspects of secretly photographing "The Big Board." President Merkin Muffley, one of Peter Sellers' three roles in the film, rushes over to referee: "Gentlemen! You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"
It is one of filmdom's all-time great lines. That a boyish brawl would be banned in the solemn temple of global nuclear war pointed up just how alienated from its root passions the business of modern warfare had become.
Dr. Strangelove turns 40 this year, a curious relic in black-and-white, which makes it seem even older. It might represent a high-water mark for irony, too. We used to enjoy teasing life's inconvenient discrepancies, but now it seems we prefer them neatly flattened.
It might also exemplify another vanished species of cultural variety, the military satire. After Robert Altman's M*A*S*H and Mike Nichols' adaptation of Catch-22, little comes to mind. (Stripes? Naaaah.) Few producers are of a mind to plumb the complexities of military experience these days. Australian director Gregor Jordan's Buffalo Soldiers might have joined the ranks. It stars Joaquin Phoenix as a corrupt Army specialist stationed in Germany just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, with Scott Glenn and Ed Harris as his superiors. Disney's Miramax snatched it after its debut at the Toronto Film Festival—on September 9, 2001.
Buffalo Soldiers saw limited release, finally, last summer. Some reviewers considered it a withering critique of a volunteer army at a loss for a raison d'être in the waning days of the Cold War; others called it funny but hardly a satire. Nonetheless, the current military is plenty occupied, and few moviegoers were in a mood to indulge a laugh seemingly at its expense. At last year's Sundance Film Festival, a post-screening discussion turned ugly when an irate viewer flung a water bottle that hit co-star Anna Paquin.
It always has been the business of the unctuously patriotic to conflate any criticism of military policy with an affront to the troops carrying out the policy. All those "Support Our Troops" bumper stickers do not constitute a broad, nationwide anti-troop sentiment; they mean: "Support the War." Just as those who question the need to go to war do not question the valor or sacrifice of the men and women who serve, military satires do not necessarily censure military service.
Consider Dr. Strangelove. Certain officers appear silly—down to Keenan Wynn's Col. "Bat" Guano calling Capt. Mandrake (Sellers) "a deviated prevert" and Slim Pickens' Maj. "King" Kong bronc-ridin' the bomb—but the target is a mind-set, not the military itself. In 1964, people were every bit as worried about nuclear war as we are today about international terrorism, and communism was as much the bête noire as radical Islam. But it was possible to satirize what we used to call "the military-industrial complex" (a term coined by President Eisenhower, who knew it well) without condemning the military itself. Or, for that matter, advocating a communist takeover, as the red-meat types asserted of "peaceniks" back then.
In a way, little has changed but the face of the enemy. On the Internet Movie Data Base page for Dr. Strangelove (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/), one discussion thread starts with this comment: "They may as well [have] burnt an American flag and rolled the credits."
In our contest with communism, as in that with radical Islam, we mostly fought by proxy, moving pieces on the realpolitik chessboard. Until, that is, we chose to fight in person. Much has been made of the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, and we may yet acknowledge a latter-day Gulf of Tonkin in those missing WMDs. As sentiment turned against the Vietnam War, film satires seized on ironies drawn from earlier wars—Catch-22, for instance, from World War II, and M*A*S*H from Korea.
In several books, starting with The Great War and Modern Memory, English professor and World War II combat veteran Paul Fussell mines the ironies perceived by soldiers. World War I revealed the gap between chivalric ideals and newly mechanized horrors. In World War II, soldiers deplored the disparity between propaganda about liberty and its utter absence in the military, but most had no choice but to join.
That choice was absent through the Vietnam War, too. If the draft accomplished anything, it spread both military duty, and the license to grumble about it, throughout society. And that might explain why an earlier generation suffered no qualms about satirizing the military, whereas we are loath to do so. We hear calls again for the draft—some say the better to broadcast the burden of the Iraq war. Some hope to distribute more widely the grounds for disputing military policy, thinking our leaders less apt to pick fights if a broad swath of the population is affected.
But we don't need a draft to confer the privilege to pick at ironies, the greatest of which might be that we confront a shadowy, stateless enemy with a conventional military invasion. And we do no disservice to those in uniform to wonder if we might be better served by a combination of special forces, focused espionage and a foreign policy that wins friends instead of creating enemies.
Maybe we need a new Stanley Kubrick to tell us as much.
Chuck Twardy has written about art and architecture for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.