Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb ★★★★★

I rewatched Dr. Strangelove for a sociology assignment I'm doing where I'm examining a movie through Emile Durkheim's paradigm of structural functionalism, so I looked at the interactions within different groups in this film, social solidarity of those groups, and the social facts of this film's world, and ultimately how a lack of cohesion and agreed upon social solidarity leads to social dysfunction at its most catastrophic. I'm going to use this review as a 'rough draft' of sorts, just a place to get out some of my related ideas that I will explore in my paper.

Some of the most important social facts (from Wikipedia: "social facts are values, cultural norms, and social structures that transcend the individual and can exercise social control") in Dr. Strangelove are the power invested in the government, the power invested in the military, nationalism, religion, mutually assured destruction, and anti-communism. All of these social facts are integral to either United States society in general or to governmental/military groups in the film. Unfortunately, these same social facts that have been keeping the Cold War 'cold' also influence an ideological group in Dr. Strangelove: the fatalist right-wing military extremists so blinded by patriotism and the supposed evil of the communist enemy that they are suicidal. Ripper, Buck, and Major King are all a part of this group, and this group has a different social solidarity than other powerful political figures (President Muffley, Mandrake) and this lack of cohesion leads to social dysfunction and ultimately a nuclear holocaust.

I feel like I am getting ahead of myself so let me define social solidarity: from Wikipedia, social solidarity is "social cohesion based upon the dependence which individuals have on each other in more advanced societies". Social dysfunction is what happens when individuals do not have a common motivation for cohesion and thus are not dependent on each other. Society will not function if there is no collective social solidarity. In Durkheim's assessment a modern and industrialized society would have organic solidarity in which labor has become more specialized, meaning each specialization relies on one another in order to function properly. Ironically in the modern and industrialized government of Dr. Strangelove specialization leads to a complete lack of communication between departments and a festering of distrust, along with in-group and out-group think as two groups form different social solidarities.

So, the U.S. society of Dr. Strangelove does not have organic solidarity nor social solidarity, since it has two dueling groups with significant power: one whose social solidarity is to keep the peace and reduce death as much as possible and the other whose social solidarity is to defeat the evil of communism by any means necessary including the sacrifice of millions of lives including their own. These solidarities are in direct conflict with each other, and this conflict itself between peace and war is essentially a characterization of the Cold War on the whole. "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the war room!" is an iconic and funny line but also reflects the tonal dissonance of a Cold War where there's technically no war, only decades of continued escalated tension and nuclear anxiety. It also reflects the dysfunction between a group clamoring for war at any cost and a group trying to keep the peace at any cost, and that dysfunction has dire consequences for the entire planet. A lack of social solidarity literally kills everyone on earth!

As a bit of a non sequitur I did find it really interesting that the social solidarity of the war room shifts after the triggering of the Doomsday Device becomes all but certain, when Dr. Strangelove suggests an underground bunker for select people to go and live in while everyone else dies. Strangelove stresses that important government and military figures would obviously need to be saved because of their importance, all but saying that every person in the war room would be saved (and given a bevy of sexy women to procreate with). Solidarity shifts from saving the entire world to simply saving themselves (and the current power structures).

Long story short this film slaps and I am doing my very best to understand Durkheim.

Block or Report

Zoë 🐝 liked these reviews