The Breast Blog for Boob News on MyFreeImplants for all your boob news

Recently, I happened to watch (for the half-dozenth time) Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). It came-out only two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis and and is widely said to be one of the best items to come from director Stanley Kubrick, maker of such greats as A Clockwork Orange, 2001 and The Shining.

The humor of this film is dark and a little hard to “get” sometimes. It’s very subtle, low-key, almost like background noise which is easily drowned-out by occasional bouts of over-the-top buffoonery. In fact, this scene contains a brilliant gem which is very easy to miss. In case you haven’t seen it before, here’s a quick intro to the characters:

In the wheelchair is the enigmatic ex-Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers). As you can see, his misbehaving right-arm is constantly trying to do the old “Seig Heil.” He is said to be a compilation of various colorful individuals: the ex-Hitlerite rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, RAND Corporation war strategist Herman Kahn, H-bomb inventor Edward Teller, half-paralyzed nuclear whiz John von Neumann, and the erstwhile Henry Kissinger who later went-on to become one of Nixon’s more talented liars to Congress.

The general sitting to the side of the balding president, Buck Turgidson, (George C. Scott) is a hotheaded Air Force commander who spends much of the film chewing gum and huffing about nuking the hell out of the Russkies. He was probably modeled after longtime US bomber commander and SAC chief Gen. Curtis LeMay. Indeed, LeMay once bragged in a little-known interview about his role in the Korean War that his planes had practically “burned-down every city in North Korea.” It’s also been said that, after seeing LeMay’s secret contingency plans against Russia for the first time, SecDef Robert MacNamara sort of freaked-out about the near-genocidal levels of megadeath and wrested the task of nuclear war-planning away from the topmost brass soon after.

The third main character is the piglike fellow in the coat and hat. He’s is the Soviet ambassador, de Sadesky, who acts like a faceless, humorless Khrushchevian apparatchik throughout the film. Against the advice of Turgidson, the ambassador has been allowed into the command bunker. (There’s a funny bit much earlier where Turgidson physically assaults de Sadesky. The president turns-around: “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”)

Here’s the plot so far: It is the height of the Cold War in the early ’60s. And a rogue US general decides to launch a sneak nuclear attack on the USSR out of a mix of paranoia and sexual frustration. The atom-bomb drops with that cowboy riding it onto its target. But the Soviets had a secret Doomsday Machine which, in the event of such an attack, would be automatically triggered, spreading radioactive contamination across the planet, killing all life in a matter of months. So humanity is truly doomed at this point. The president and his staff are meeting in the War Room and Strangelove recommends that a few select humans could survive if they lived for a hundred years or so at the bottom of “some of our deeper mine shafts.” It wouldn’t be so bad. All they’d need is dwelling space, greenhouses, animals to be “brrrred und schlaughtered!” He gets more and more overjoyed about the thought of breeding a master race, as if this sick plan has been building-up in his head for ages.

Anyway, watch the scene. You can stop it about 5 minutes in.

But here’s the back-and-forth I find most amusing of all:

Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so called “monogamous” sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for ze future of ze human race. I hasten to add that since each man vill be required to do prodigious… service along these lines, ze women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which vill have to be of a highly… stimulating nature.

De Sadeski: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.

Strangelove: Thank you, sir!

So we have three figures in the room representing three of the biggest geopolitical influences of the Twentieth Century: Nazism, Communism, and the most gung-ho element of the American military-industrial complex.

They can’t agree on anything. Each is defined by wanting to crack the skulls of the other two. But they all manage to find common ground: A hundred-year pussy party(!)

Why that can’t be taught in Political Science departments is beyond me.