"Doctor Strange Love" directed by Stanley Kubrick is about this fear and its consequences. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States were worried that the other side would be the first to use nuclear weapons, so they each devised corresponding retaliatory measures. U.S. Plan R: As long as Soviet missiles attack Washington, American middle-level generals have the right to bypass the President’s order and directly initiate Plan R. Dozens of bombers deployed outside the United States will be loaded with nuclear bombs to destroy the Soviet Union’s main military. Target. Soviet doomsday device: As long as the United States takes the lead in using nuclear weapons, this computer-controlled automatic device will be activated, and its power will destroy all living things on the earth. U.S. Air Force General Jack Ripen inferred from the Soviets who only drank vodka that all the water on the earth had been "fluorinated" and his precious "body fluids" were being poisoned, so he decided to take the first step: he did not invade in the Soviet Union. In this case, the R plan was directly started, and at the same time, he called the President of the United States to start a full-scale war, because only he knew the password to recall the bomber, and he had already sealed his base...
The invention of the nuclear bomb made war extremely simple: it was just a game between the heads of two superpowers. The only restrictive force is a kind of fragile humanitarianism. What makes people afraid is: who can guarantee that this kind of humanitarianism will always be effective, who can guarantee that there will be no paranoia like Jack Ripen. Although Jack is half paranoid and lunatic, his behavior is not out of fear. The fear of nuclear is very different from the fear of the classical era: it is no longer a certain fantasy or derived from a certain natural force and uncontrollable irrational factors. It itself is a product of rational technology, and at the same time it acts on rationality. thinking. People try to use rational thinking to control the fear that is a product of scientific and technological rationality, such as letting the power of a nuclear bomb be controlled by a computer-controlled device, but this kind of thinking is in turn captured by fear, and fear has become this kind of thinking. It is this kind of fearful thinking that permeates the Cold War consciousness. Fear has become something ontological. In the end, the only thing that makes people feel frightened is actually this fear itself.
What "Dr. Strange Love" focuses on is not the individual psychological fear of nuclear bombs, but the rational thinking itself captured by fear. The space of the film is mainly concentrated in three places: Jack Ripen's office in the military base, the president's combat command room, and the bomber interior. It is no longer the vast battlefield that determines the destiny of the earth and mankind, but these three internal spaces. The issuance and transmission of orders is invisible. Human peace depends on the rationalization of these three places. As long as a certain link is captured by irrational fear, it will bring devastating consequences. The film tirelessly narrates all the details of the R plan from the release to the execution: Jack Ripen broadcasts to inform the base soldiers that the Soviet Union has invaded, and he has launched the R plan to launch a retaliatory attack on the Soviet Union. All soldiers hand in all communication equipment and strictly guard their job preparations. Combat: The enemy may attack the base wearing any clothes at any time. These commands are completely rationalized combat responses within the military group, except that their premise is based on a person's irrational fantasy. Inside the bomber, the process from receiving the order to the final execution is reproduced in great detail by the camera: accepting the order, obtaining confirmation from the base, taking out the letter of the R plan, the specific content of the plan, the assignment of tasks, and the individual pilots after the war. List of survival supplies, measures to cut off external signals, measures to lock communication frequencies, flight altitude data, mileage data, calculation of escape routes after bombing...The implementation of the R plan requires pressing countless buttons in the bomber, and each release is issued. For specific commands, you need to press a button, and the camera will give the action a close-up to emphasize it. The fate of mankind is determined on these buttons. The specific implementation procedures of all those commands and all those buttons are completely rationally calculated and designed beforehand. Their operation is almost foolproof. Like nuclear bombs, they are the delicate result of human rationality, but when a certain source is Captive by irrational fear, fear is passed and increased step by step along with this rational chain, and the final result is completely irrational destruction. Therefore, people in turn have huge irrationality on this delicate chain of rationality. Fear.
Jack Ripen is not entirely a paranoid, he is also a person who is completely cold war mental, which can be seen from the fact that he issued an order to implement the R plan while calling the president to demand a full-scale war. Cold War thinking is a completely rational thinking starting from fear. In addition to this Jack, there is another character in the movie who is its main representative: General Barker (an allusion to the famous American General Patton who "loves" war). After he learned that Jack had started the R plan, he first deliberately delayed the report to the president, and later urged General Action to issue a full-scale war. Finally, when it was learned that the Soviet doomsday device would be activated and humanity was facing the fate of destruction, the President of the United States and his government officials discussed how to select some people to enter the underground mines to multiply the offspring of mankind. His suggestion was: if the Soviet Union People smuggled a bomb into the mine. Ninety years later, when people come out of the mine, the Soviet Union’s technology will lead the United States. In this crazy clown-like character, the logic of thinking starting with fear is deduced to the extreme, and at the same time, fear also takes on the color of the law of the jungle: what people fear is that they are weak in a strong contest.
The full name of "Dr. Strange Ai" is "Dr. Strange Ai: Or How We Overcome the Fear of Bombs and Love Nuclear Bombs", which sounds like an instruction manual. In the film, Dr. Qi Ai is an exaggerated cartoon-like character. He has a kind of love for the power of technology. "Strange" love, it is people like him who designed things like "Apocalyptic Device". His prototype is a mad scientist in science fiction, and Kubrick updated this type of character to combine him with Eros. When Dr. Qi Ai explained to the president the construction principles of the "doomsday device" and the method of escaping after a nuclear bomb exploded, there was a crazy look in his eyes. He didn't seem to care about the lives and deaths of billions of people. The only thing he loved was his The "device" and the technological power itself. The irony is that this technology's pride himself was paralyzed in a wheelchair half-length, and when he talked about excitement, one of his hands rushed into the air uncontrollably, and his posture was quite like "Hitler raises his hand." Kubrick seems to want to take this to satirize the root of Nazi totalitarianism in the rationalization of technology. "Love the nuclear bomb", as the title suggests, is a kind of "strange love" in itself. What Kubrick wants to answer is whether Eros can change the irrational power of technology, or whether Eros can make people overcome Irrational fear of technology. "Dr. Strange Love" was released in 1964, more than ten years after Marcuse’s "Eros and Civilization" was published, on the eve of the 68-year revolutionary movement marked by sexual liberation and anti-war. The liberation of natural desire and sexual desire can liberate human beings from the shackles of technology and institutions. Kubrick expressed his views on this trend of thought in this movie: In the face of irrational fear, even eros may be led to deformity. People can love men and women, but they may also love nuclear bombs. Suddenly, people only see the natural and healthy side of sex, but forget the twisted and dark side of sex, and the deformed sexual desire cannot satisfy all kinds of irrational "compensation." In fact, many dramatic scenes and images in "Doctor Strange Love" come from an insatiable "strange love". In addition to the image of Dr. Qi Ai, there are, for example, two military aircraft refueling shots that were turned into "the sexiest pictures in history" by critics at the beginning of the film. When General "Buck" appeared on the stage, his sexy female secretary was sunbathing in a "three-point" swimsuit. Later when the general had a meeting with the president, the secretary called to act coquettishly. Undoubtedly, this war-loving general was also enthusiastic. Make love. When the US President called the Soviet Prime Minister Dmitry, that prime minister was obviously also having fun. Obviously, sex is sometimes only used to alleviate the anxiety caused by the arms race. When Jack Ripen, who started the R project, was asked when he first thought that the water on the earth had been "fluorinated" and his "body fluids" were being poisoned, he replied, "Sex with a woman Time"-sexual incompetence needs war to compensate.
War undoubtedly leads to fear, and people often start wars because of fear. The fear of the twentieth century is the fear of nuclear war, and it is also the fear of rational technology that is captured by irrational fear. In the face of the latter fear, whether it is erotic or rational technology, it seems Nothing can be done, civilization becomes precarious. The montage of the last famous nuclear bomb explosion in "Doctor Strange Love", like a sad prophecy, has been shrouded in the sky above human civilization for a long time.
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