Folks born since the end of the 1980’s have no idea (thank God!) what it was like living under the Cold War. Unfortunately, not too many who were there understood what was happening either, because they didn’t know any better, and because after a while it’s all just background noise. As for the children born during those years, who were subjected to “duck and cover for safety,” “air raid drills,” “nuclear bomb drills,” “america is the only great nation,” the mysterious “enemy” mentioned on TV shows but rarely identified any more precisely, and other such milito-social programming, it was an awful way to grow up — constant fear of attack at any moment, by any one at all. But again, only if you noticed, because what would a child in those years have had to compare it against?(1)
The movie Dr Strangelove or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) was a marvelous piece of work. (Stanley Kubrick, so of course it was! Lots of Big Stars in it, too.) Not much known now among younger folks. I’m not sure how much of it would even translate to a modern understanding without a bit of explanation here and there.
It was satire, meant mainly to point out that no amount of safety systems, or complex interlocking safeties even, could completely prevent serious accidents where ever Humans are involved. It was a spoof version, perhaps, of the far more serious movie Failsafe (also 1964, lots of Big Stars in it, too), with much the same message. Maybe Dr Strangelove was meant to pick up those folks with a more comic bent of mind who may have found Failsafe to serious to absorb. Maybe it was coincidence.
Regardless… come we now to the movie Dr Strange (2016), 52 years later. Dr Strange is a fantasy, very well done, lots of Big Stars running around in there, also, though not the same ones, as you might guess. Oddly enough it’s also about the end of the world, but in this case the world is saved by the Mastery of some Esoteric Arts, much like in Dr Stangelove the world was ended by the failure to master some equally esoteric, though quite different, arts.
Dr Strange is more violent than Dr Strangelove, by any measure. Massively violent movie. That is to say, it’s rated PG-13 by today’s sarcastically low standards. Yet Dr Strangelove destroys the world, and Dr Strange saves it, to live on another day.
How’s that?
There’s a complicated thing going on here… Did the violence of “duck and cover for safety” that was perpetrated on an entire generation get replaced with unremitting violence on the movie screen? Was duck and cover any more violent or less than is most any action-adventure “family” movie these days?
What passes among the movie standards as PG-13 is serious violence, sometimes with other objectionable qualities as well. This measure may be too lenient. For example: you take your 5 year old to see Dr Strange because he’s been seeing the “really cool ads on TV” and it’s PG-13, so it’s safe for kids as long as I’m with him, right? He sees a pompous jerk involved in a serious, crippling car accident, mania, death, slaughter, adult level innuendo of various sorts, a world about to end, people popping in and out of portals in the air, implying — especially to a five year old’s mentality — that someone might pop right out of the air any where, any time…
Duck and cover for safety.
We do love our violence, in one form or another.
Why is that?(2)
(1) If you fail to notice a constant and repetitive message it becomes subconscious programming. Or even if you notice but never really examine it. I have to wonder how many of America’s troubles and turmoil today are a result, direct or indirect, of all those years of “imminent attack and destruction unless we all do precisely as told.” (Hmm… not too different from another situation going on just now, though the wording’s changed.) PTSD comes in many forms, you know? Entire societies can acquire it, same as individuals. Take a look at America: PTSD as a nation at least since 1929 (stock market crash) [more likely since 1861], with many reinforcing moments such as 1942, the whole McCarthy era thing, 1962, 2001, lots of other traumatic moments. Result: there are now more guns in this country than there are people, more guns per capita than any other nation, yet the panic over a mere rumor of gun control causes gun sales to spike, and more gun shops to open up, while all the news channels continuously report more and more violence and death, even if they have to make it up. This is neurotic behavior exhibited on a social level. No, I won’t explain that any further, not in this article at least. 🙂
(2) And don’t give me one of the tired old standards, such as “it’s just human nature.” No it isn’t. It’s this society, the “modern western world.” Don’t mistake social culture with basic human nature. Basic human nature is unbelievably flexible, adaptable to a wide range of social patterns, even rational ones, believe it or not.