[This transcript is automatically generated and may contain errors.]

Robert Carson: The Cold War, the Bomb, and American Manhood. This is the Virtual Jewel Box, the podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah.

In this episode, University of Utah scholars Matt Basso and Megan Weiss discuss Dr. Strangelove and the Cold War psyche. Their conversation is in anticipation of a screening of the London National Theatre’s production of Dr. Strangelove, starring Steve Coogan, in Salt Lake City. You can find out more about the Tanner Humanities Center’s screenings of National Theatre productions on our website, tanner.utah.edu.

Here are Matt and Megan.

Matt Basso: So this is Matt Basso. I'm a historian with the University of Utah History Department, but I'm also jointly appointed in Gender Studies, and I am super excited to talk to Megan Weiss. Megan, do you want to introduce yourself?

Megan Weiss: Yes. Hello, my name is Megan. I am a PhD candidate here at the University of Utah. I'm getting my degree in U.S. history. My research focuses mostly on 20th-century gender, Mormonism, public memory, and public history. So I'm super excited to be here to talk about the Cold War in Utah.

Matt Basso: I am so excited. Megan knows, and now the rest of you will too, that I love Dr. Strangelove, and I'm going to say why here in a second. But the exciting thing is, when I asked Megan if she wanted to join me on this podcast, she said yes, absolutely—because you love Dr. Strangelove too.

Megan Weiss: I do.

Matt Basso: What is your connection to it?

Megan Weiss: So, for those at home listening: Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombis based on a 1958 novel by Peter George called Red Alert. In the movie, the basic premise is that a rogue general decides to enact Plan R, which tricks his Air Force flight buddies into dropping atomic bombs on the Soviet Union without the authority of the president. This comes as a huge surprise to the president. Meanwhile, the general shuts off his own army base and tries to carry out the plan. Shenanigans ensue as the U.S. finds itself trying to stop atomic warfare.

Back when I was an undergrad student—also in history—I was kind of like a teaching assistant for one of my committee members. Shout out to Fenton Hoey at Franklin University. Fenton taught this class on the atomic bomb for first-year students. So it was a way to orient freshmen, but it was also a deep dive into all things atomic bomb.

We watched a really amazing anime called Barefoot Gen—a depiction of Hiroshima, which was incredible. But the other movie we watched was Dr. Strangelove, and it is truly iconic. I mean, people say it's one of the greatest American films of all time, especially in terms of comedy and satire. It's kind of a work of genius.

But something I didn’t realize before preparing to come on this podcast is—I didn’t realize it was made in the sixties. I thought for sure it was the seventies.

Matt Basso: Oh really? That’s interesting.

Megan Weiss: Let me give you the exact year. It’s a movie from 1964.

Matt Basso: Yeah.

Megan Weiss: So I’m sure we’ll get into this, but it really is a primary source from the Cold War about the Cold War.

Matt Basso: I completely agree.

Megan Weiss: I’m just super excited to talk about it. I find the Cold War very interesting. I find the impact of the atomic bomb on American culture and the American psyche fascinating.

Matt Basso: Yeah.

Megan Weiss: Our world has not been the same since.

Matt Basso: This is exciting. So I will say that we're going to talk about all of that stuff—

Megan Weiss: Yeah, that was a good intro.

Matt Basso: —which I’m super thrilled to do. We can talk about the peculiar ways—the detailed ways—that this film sheds light on American culture and society in the sixties, which is, I think, a pretty surprising space when you think of this film as coming from within it.

I fell in love with Dr. Strangelove for a very specific reason. And this is my shout-out: my dad loved this film. He absolutely loved Peter Sellers. He loved Slim Pickens. He just loved the vibe of this film. He thought it was very, very funny.

Most folks listening to this podcast will know a little bit about the context of this film. We're going to talk more deeply about it, but as noted, it's really intriguing that this is a pretty in-your-face condemnation of—really—the military-industrial complex and a governmental culture that...

Megan Weiss: The Red Scare. Yeah.

Matt Basso: It felt real to people still in 1964, which we can talk about in more detail. For those that don't know, the Cold War really emerges almost immediately after World War II. As Megan already noted, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are kind of a spark point for this

already emerging contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. The bomb escalates that. And then various other tensions escalated even further until by 1947, 1948, we’re fully into a Cold War. And when Russia gets the bomb themselves, then all things are off.

The Cold War ends in 1989 with the falling of the wall, so to speak.

Megan Weiss: Go Gorbachev.

Matt Basso: Gorbachev, exactly.

Megan Weiss: Shout out to Gorbachev.

Matt Basso: Yeah. And this guy named Ronald Reagan.

Megan Weiss: Yeah.

Matt Basso: Right. But the—

Megan Weiss: Culture of it is still with us today.

Matt Basso: Yes.

Megan Weiss: I mean, Cold War culture is bleeding into everything—even contemporary Utah politics. And I’m going to start to say something spicy.

Something that's really interesting about contemporary Utah is just last week, the Utah State Board of Education talked about this policy change around DEI, and they talked about DEI as Bolshevism. They talked about the Bolshevik agenda and the Soviet agenda infiltrating American schools.

All these fears of things like fluoride are very reflective of Jack Ripper’s fears of fluoride in the movie. So the culture of the Red Scare period was really defining of the new right of contemporary Utah, in my eyes. It's very much still with us. Even though, you know, 1989—the wall fell—we're still kind of seeped in the impact of it.

Matt Basso: I think that’s right. And at even a larger scale, I think for folks of my age and older—and maybe you’ll say the same thing for your generation—it is striking and challenging to see Russia as anything other than our Cold War enemy.

So this massive geopolitical shift that we’re in the midst of right now—it’s hard to not experience it with the Cold War frame in mind.

Megan Weiss: Yeah.

Matt Basso: Incredible. And yet, the emergence of the Cold War was not a given. Right?

So we can go back and talk a little bit of history here, and then we can talk about why this film is such a striking satire—and how we got to that point.

The Cold War emerges, as we’ve already noted, just after World War II. But the Soviet Union—Russia—they’re allies of ours during World War II, right?

There’s always this long-running Red Scare and that anti-communist—almost religion—while kind of a little bit under the surface during World War II. It emerges again incredibly powerfully with the beginning of the Red Scare and the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Do you remember reading about the response by Americans to the dropping of these bombs?

Megan Weiss: Yeah. One of the most formative books about this, in my opinion, is actually Watchmen—the comic. It talks pretty extensively about the debate at the time around whether we should have done it or not.

It was controversial at the time. America was pretty—correct me if I’m wrong—pretty 50/50 split on if it was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do. But a lot of people argued that it was kind of inevitable. Obviously, nothing in history is inevitable.

Matt Basso: Right. And so the argument goes that we dropped the bomb to end the war more quickly.

Megan Weiss: Right.

Matt Basso: Folks say it’s a sacrifice—but a necessary sacrifice. And it’s going to save our soldiers.

Megan Weiss: Right.

Matt Basso: Other folks disagree and say it was a way of flexing this new technology that we had—this world-changing technology, these bombs—and making sure that we were set up to be the dominant power during the early Cold War.

But you’re exactly right—the response to the bomb itself on the home front is kind of astonishing.

Megan Weiss: Yeah.

Matt Basso: So Truman famously tells a ship full of Navy folks about this, and they all applaud because of that sense that this might end the war sooner.

Megan Weiss: A symbol of peace.

Matt Basso: Yeah, in theory, right? And then of course, there’s really a pretty strong anti-Japanese sentiment because of the Pacific War being so much more painful, so much more violent and egregious in many ways.

Supposedly, now, if you look at actual newspapers from just after the bomb was dropped, you see exactly what you’re saying, which is a mix of opinions. Some folks celebrated this across the country. Other communities were deeply, deeply worried. This felt like the genie was out of the bottle. It felt like we could end the world.

Religious figures were especially almost struck silent by this sense of dread—that perhaps we had finally started the process of doing ourselves in, as humans and as humanity.

And yet, just a couple years later, we've started the process of domesticating the bomb—of making it feel like we can live with the bomb.

Megan Weiss: Yeah. There’s all those science kits that kids would buy, like “make your own radium.”

Matt Basso: This is it.

Megan Weiss: They put radium in plates and cups.

Matt Basso: Yeah. And there’s a sense that maybe this can bring good things. So there’s advertising—atomic medicine, for example. There’s the idea that we might be able to use it in agriculture, and of course energy, and so on and so forth. To where this sense of dread and foreboding that you really see in 1945, 1946—

Megan Weiss: Mm-hmm.

Matt Basso: —which is, I think, perfectly encapsulated in the subtitle of this movie—

Megan Weiss: How I Learned to Love the Bomb.

Matt Basso: Incredible, right?

Megan Weiss: It’s genius.

Matt Basso: It’s genius. It’s so interesting. And it helps folks remember just how worried their ancestors were—fellow Americans in 1946—about what this meant. On all sorts of different levels, but certainly for the future of humanity.

Megan Weiss: Yeah.

Matt Basso: We learned to love the bomb.

Megan Weiss: Absolutely.

Matt Basso: Right.

Megan Weiss: What’s really interesting about this period too is, obviously, a mixture of factors—like the New Deal creation of this very robust administrative state, a really strong Social Security safety net. But also things like the GI Bill, that empowered returning soldiers to go to college, get degrees, buy homes very easily.

The explosion of the car, the explosion of the suburbs—it created this very affluent, well-educated American society that was falling into this very rigid family structure. One of the best books about this is Homeward Bound by Elaine Tyler May. Love that book. She talks about how the baby boom was such an anomaly.

There’s this assumption that the 1950s nuclear family, living in the suburbs, with the man who works—Mad Men style—and the housewife who stays home, that’s kind of remembered in the American consciousness today as “the good old days,” like that’s how it’s always been.

But if you look at family structures from the 1910s, 1920s, during the Great Depression, family structures did not look like that. They were not isolated into single homes with one moneymaker and one domestic worker. Family structures were much more sprawling, kind of like multi-generational and very mixed.

It was during the post–World War II era that there was this massive movement among young Americans to get married and have kids. That’s why it was a baby boom—it was an anomaly. But it was empowered by this very unique social situation, socioeconomic system, at the federal level that was allowing people to do this.

But something that’s really great about that book Homeward Bound is the way that that historian connects what was going on domestically—in the culture of housewife culture—to the way that it was actually directly tied to this international policy: war, atomic war, space war.

There’s this really great scene where Khrushchev and—what was it—Nixon, I think? They had the kitchen debate.

Matt Basso: Yeah. Khrushchev and Nixon in the kitchen.

Megan Weiss: Exactly. It was this expo where we were showing off different types of washing machines and dishwashers from our countries. And there was a debate over whether the Russian or the American washing machine was better.

That really encapsulates the Cold War. It was about the atomic bomb. It was about communism versus capitalism. But it was also about, at home in America, the nuclear family as the ultimate proof that America is superior.

This is something I’ve definitely seen in my research, as you know, but I think it does kind of come up in Dr. Strangelovea little bit. Something that is fascinating to me about this movie is that anytime we see a woman, she is in a bikini—or naked.

There are women in a locker, pictures of women in bikinis, the secretary who’s smoking a cigarette in the hotel room in her bikini and heels. And even just the word “bikini” is a relic from this period, where women were starting to wear smaller swimsuits—and they were referred to as the bikini as a reference to atomic testing in the Bikini Islands.

So it’s all connected. What was going on with gender, with women’s sexuality and women’s appearance—it was very tied into these anxieties around: Is America going to survive these existential threats of atomic warfare, communism, a changing world order?

And there was a real reliance on the security and stability that a nuclear, patriarchal family represented.

Matt Basso: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, I love that book too.

Megan Weiss: Yeah.

Matt Basso: Elaine was actually one of my advisors in grad school.

Megan Weiss: I did not know that! That’s so cool.

Matt Basso: Shout out. A wonderful scholar. And as you're noting—and you put it so perfectly—one of the things that she argues is that the nuclear family is all about containment, right?

So this is containing all the things you just mentioned: the fear of the bomb, the containment of communism, the containment of women’s sexuality, which is shifting dramatically during the World War II years and into the post-war.

This again domesticates, takes power away from women in many ways—scholars have argued. But there are other factors at play. Again, your perfectly chosen example: the kitchen debate.

Megan Weiss: Yeah.

Matt Basso: So funny. It’s capitalism. Right? You're seeing—as we’re talking—all these C’s. I tend to teach this era using C’s: communism, containment, capitalism.

But another one is consumerism. You see that in the kitchen debate. You see this sense that what makes the American ideology—capitalism by that point is what the American ideology is—what makes it superior is the ability to have stuff.

Now what’s intriguing is that this film brushes up against the edges of that, as you just noted. It doesn’t fully center a family, but we know that’s what’s being protected—in theory.

So for instance, there’s wonderful new scholarship on gun capitalism. This is a book by Andrew McKevitt, Gun Country,and what he argues is that not only are we buying tons of refrigerators and cars and moving into suburbs and new homes—but we’re also buying a ton of guns.

These guns, by the way, were excess weapons produced by the U.S. and other allies, left in Europe during World War II.

Megan Weiss: Mm-hmm.

Matt Basso: Sure, we have our own domestic producers, but millions of units of those World War II guns got shipped back to the U.S. They were inexpensive, they were widely advertised, and they became part of this consumption pattern.

If you look—and if listeners look—at the film, I don’t know if this is going to be in the theater production, but behind Jack Ripper’s desk is a wall display of a huge number of different guns.

Megan Weiss: Mm-hmm.

Matt Basso: And those well could be weapons that he purchased. They could be American weapons, but just as likely, they are foreign weapons that were purchased as part of this massive gun boom that occurs just after World War II, and as part of the militarization of American society.

Megan Weiss: Yep.

Matt Basso: And no place—every level. Right? This has happened to a level everyone thinks maybe the South?

Megan Weiss: Yes.

Matt Basso: But absolutely the West. Right? The West is the absolute cornerstone of a militarization of American society—culture, landscapes. And we see that with the airbase, which I think is beautifully named—

Megan Weiss: I know. The names in this story are so funny.

Matt Basso: Yeah, it's just incredible. But we are in fact—we are the launching pad for all sorts of defensive atomic—or what we think are defensive, we hope defensive—atomic weapons. This movie puts that into question, right?

It puts the idea of America only using these weapons as a defensive measure—it puts that into question. And they launch, we think, or so it looks, from someplace in the Northern Great Plains, where a lot of these bases were—Montana, the Dakotas, etc.

Did you see in your own research about Utah signs of that kind of militarization? The militarization of American society and culture?

Megan Weiss: Yeah, I mean definitely. Definitely. I think what’s really unique about Utah—and our colleague John Flynn researches this a lot in his work on Dugway—is that Utah is part of the Great Basin ecosystem, which is where water pools and collects and dissolves into the ground and makes things like salt lakes that aren’t very useful, because they’re so salty you can’t irrigate with them.

So there’s this idea that Utah—like the Nevada desert, where they did so much atomic testing—is kind of a wasteland, where you can just kind of do whatever you want to the land.

And, you know, we have Air Force bases out here, but we also do crazy tests out at Dugway, even today, because of this idea that the Great Basin is fundamentally unusable. It’s not farmland. So what can we do there? It’s kind of a militarization of the landscape itself. Which is crazy.

My research is more into the world of heritage archives and public memory. My dissertation is about this really incredible women’s heritage organization called the Daughters of Utah Pioneers. During the 1950s and 60s, there was a very strong desire within the DUP—but also within places like the Historical Society and the LDS Church Archives—to protect and preserve history physically.

So the LDS Church built a vault up Little Cottonwood Canyon, in the side of a mountain. It’s still there today. I don’t know if you can go visit it anymore, but you used to be able to. And this vault has thousands of archival records inside of it, but it’s also built with this arched, corrugated steel design—so it’s very much like a fallout shelter.

That was kind of the thinking at the time: we need to put our records into this vault to protect them in case of an atomic air raid.

Same for the Daughters of Utah Pioneers. They famously built their Pioneer Memorial Museum—which is kind of like Utah’s de facto state museum—in 1950. And it was thought of as kind of this vault for pioneer relics.

At the dedication, there was this prayer by Ezra Taft Benson, who was a really interesting Cold War Utah history figure, and he talked about protecting what’s in these walls from the evil forces of the world. Evil forces, in this case, are certainly atomic warfare, but also existential evil forces like communism.

So this is peak Red Scare rhetoric. And with the Red Scare, as well as the Lavender Scare, there’s this idea that there are certain types of people who will take our history and do something bad with it, and we can’t trust them.

So for the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, under the leadership of Kate Carter, who’s a woman historian, they kind of made everything restricted. They didn’t let anybody access their archive unless they were a member of the organization. They didn’t let anybody come to their board meetings or read any of their minutes.

This just shows how widespread this mentality was—of “we need to lock down,” “we need to contain,” “we need to watch our backs.”

Matt Basso: Hmm.

Megan Weiss: It was a real culture of fear. And that’s what makes this movie so remarkable: that it came out in the 1960s and it is just throwing that out the window and satirizing everything.

Matt Basso: Yeah. It’s calling it to task.

Megan Weiss: Definitely.

Matt Basso: And you know, that sensibility about both fear and security gets manifested in this film in really remarkably interesting ways, to me.

For instance, there’s this sense of technical know-how in this movie that surprises me every time I watch it. I’ll be curious to see if a theater production tries to replicate this.

But for us, maybe as watchers today, it feels like dated technology. But I will say that I was struck again by not just what they satirize in this movie—but what they don’t satirize, which tells us as much about that society as anything else.

And one of the things they don’t satirize, really, is technical know-how.

Megan Weiss: Mm-hmm.

Matt Basso: Sure, it’s not foolproof—

Megan Weiss: Yeah.

Matt Basso: —as we see. There are ways around it. But the ability of these technologies to communicate over great distances, these planes flying all over the world, and being launched all the time—

The inside of the plane—this is the B-52, which is a descendant of World War II bombers. Most Americans have seen World War II bombers in films like Masters of the Air, and they just look rickety.

Megan Weiss: Mm-hmm.

Matt Basso: And those aircrews—you think, wow, I can’t believe they’re doing that.

The B-52 looks like a flying technological lab. It looks almost more like a missile silo than it does anything else. And it’s impressive. This flight crew—their ability to run all of this machinery, what feels like high tech...

And then back at Burpelson, the computer banks and all that sort of stuff—there’s a lot being satirized, but I’m not entirely sure that the technology of the era, which many Americans felt made the U.S. supreme, is being satirized.

It’s really pretty impressive.

Megan Weiss: And it makes the film even more realistic and terrifying and believable.

Matt Basso: Yeah.

Megan Weiss: It’s definitely interesting to be cutting back to those scenes in the cockpit or in the plane—

Matt Basso: Yes.

Megan Weiss: —where they’re just soldiers doing a job. And there’s not really any unpacking or interpretation of the fact that they’re going to kill a bunch of people or maybe trigger a nuclear winter across the globe.

That is not even really on their minds. It’s just like—“My favorite part is when Slim Pickens goes to the vault and gets out his cowboy hat.”

Matt Basso: Yeah.

Megan Weiss: He’s like, “All right. It’s go time.” And that’s really the only thing that changes in the soldiers. Because at the end of the day, they’re just following orders.

Matt Basso: That’s right. They’re technocrats in many ways. And extraordinarily effective. The ideologues are in the War Room—and back at Burpelson with Jack Ripper.

But the soldiers themselves, all the way up to Slim Pickens—they suggest an extraordinarily effective U.S. military.

Something that is going to change, of course, in Americans’ attitudes with the Vietnam War.

Megan Weiss: Yeah.

Matt Basso: There’s a real question about that. But it shows that the dramatic victories of World War II—and even the problems of Korea—don’t dampen the sense that American armed forces, and especially the most technical aspects of the armed forces like the Air Force, are superior.

And that they represent what this nation now stands for—which is kind of a marriage between technology, corporate possibilities, and a government that is on the security and containment footing.

It’s just quite remarkable. And a government, as you noted earlier, that still has some New Deal...

Megan Weiss: Yeah.

Matt Basso: ...aspects to it. Right? This is very robust—1964. I mean, this is just when JFK—In fact, I think one of the problems with the film’s release is that it was scheduled to be released at a very similar moment to when JFK was assassinated.

Megan Weiss: Yeah, I saw that.

Matt Basso: And they had to push it back a little bit and try to take some lines out of the film.

But to give listeners a sense of exactly when this was—this is that moment. And it is both a wartime moment, a militarized moment, but also still a New Deal moment and a social safety net moment. And a moment, as you already alluded to, where ordinary Americans feel the best off they’ve felt—maybe ever.

Megan Weiss: Right.

Matt Basso: This is the place in our history where people feel the most affluent, where the income gap and the wealth gap is the least between the really wealthy and regular folks. It’s something else. It’s kind of this incredible context.

And here comes this film—satirizing a lot of this stuff.

I wanted to ask you who your favorite character is, ’cause I’ve got an answer for myself, but I’m wondering what you’re thinking.

Megan Weiss: I do love everyone that Peter Sellers plays—especially Dr. Strangelove. But I’m trying to remember the name of the British guy... Muff—Muffley or something?

Matt Basso: Oh no, that’s the president. That’s Merkin Muffley.

Megan Weiss: That’s right. I’m thinking of the British guy. I’m thinking of Group Captain Mandrake.

Matt Basso: Mandrake!

Megan Weiss: Yes. I really like Mandrake. And I think if there’s any evidence of the Lavender Scare in this film, I think I see Mandrake as a little bit... He’s the butt of the joke in a lot of scenes because of his Britishness and his desire to do things the right way and keep Jack Ripper in line—but still be really, really polite and not too macho.

He’s kind of the antithesis of this American gun-holding officer that Jack Ripper is. But I also feel like, in being British and kind of coded as weak and frail, I think he’s a bit of a dandy character, which I find fascinating.

That’s just my interpretation of that character.

Matt Basso: I love that.

Megan Weiss: For those listening, the Lavender Scare was kind of a parallel movement to the Red Scare that was more focused on queer government workers and purging the government—but also film and really any industry—of any gay, lesbian, or queer people.

But yeah, Mandrake is fascinating. I don’t know—it’s hard to pick a favorite character.

Matt Basso: I like that. So I’ve got to say, we share a passion for Mandrake.

Megan Weiss: Okay!

Matt Basso: I’m a big fan too, and I like your Lavender Scare reading. Especially now—there’s new scholarship about the Lavender Scare that really argues that this incredibly important moment was in some ways sequestered to the public sector. That in the private sector, queer folks were still able to kind of figure out ways of maintaining their positions in workplaces—but that they were always kind of on the edge, right? They were precarious.

Which is an interesting vibe for the Cold War in general. Where stability is so important, and where so many people did have stability in work, this precarity feels like it runs just as an undercurrent throughout American society because of the bomb—

Megan Weiss: Absolutely.

Matt Basso: —and because of this Cold War.

The part that I love about Mandrake—and these poor listeners are going to have to hear us talk about Mandrake, who’s one of my favorites—is his exchange with Jack Ripper.

As you noted, Jack Ripper is this macho, gun-wielding, classic American command figure, right?

Megan Weiss: I mean, his name is Jack Ripper.

Matt Basso: Right. It’s pretty on the nose. And he only drinks rainwater.

Megan Weiss: No fluoride.

Matt Basso: No fluoride for him. But he asks Mandrake, basically: “Have you ever seen combat? Have you ever seen action?”

And Mandrake says, “Jack, yes I have.” And it turns out he was tortured.

This is a moment, to me, where you see kind of the reality of a quiet masculinity versus the loud, brash masculinity of someone like Ripper—who seems to be hot air, in part. And seems extraordinarily, ultimately unsure of himself. Certainly, we would say unbalanced.

And then of course we know what happens to Jack Ripper.

And here’s Mandrake, a British figure who’s trying to keep it all together.

It’s a movie that’s filmed in England. It’s a movie that has a lot of British folks in the cast. It makes you wonder about what the global perception was of American Cold Warriors and this kind of brash masculinity that seems to dominate both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

Remember—JFK, Bay of Pigs. This face-off. And then this move into Vietnam and Green Berets initially, which JFK championed. And then LBJ, of course, takes that baton and keeps on building in Vietnam.

There’s reason to suspect that other parts of the globe really wondered about this militarized American presence and what it was going to mean for safety.

Megan Weiss: How stable it is.

Matt Basso: Yeah.

Megan Weiss: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matt Basso: But it turns out that’s part of this satire, right? Part of this plan.

There is a potential solution. Things go wrong. A bomber does get through.

The most famous scene of the entire movie—

Megan Weiss: Yes.

Matt Basso: —is obviously a cowboy riding his...

Megan Weiss: Yeah.

Matt Basso: ...his bomb right down into a Soviet base, a CPM base.

But a lot of folks, I think, who don’t know this movie might believe that it ends at that point. It feels like an ending.

Megan Weiss: Yeah.

Matt Basso: What did you think about what happens afterwards?

Megan Weiss: Well, a couple of things. Apparently, the original ending of the movie was a pie fight in the War Room.

Matt Basso: Yes.

Megan Weiss: Which is fascinating. I do think that would’ve completely changed the tone of the film. So I support the move to take it out.

The ending is nuclear winter—because of the doomsday device that the Soviets have, which activates and makes the entire planet uninhabitable.

So there is this idea, from Dr. Strangelove and all the men in the War Room, to restart humanity by going down into a bunker.

Matt Basso: And in that bunker, we learn that there are details that very much speak to the bikini-clad secretary—

Megan Weiss: Yes.

Matt Basso: —that speak to this kind of sexualization...

Megan Weiss: Ten women for one man.

Matt Basso: Ten women for one man.

Megan Weiss: Yeah.

Matt Basso: This sense that we’ve restored the proper order of things by making women just sexualized beings again.

Megan Weiss: Right.

Matt Basso: Instead of what was happening during World War II, or as equals to men. This film is chock full of really pretty egregious gender politics, which are being satirized—

Megan Weiss: Yes.

Matt Basso: —and yet they also kind of reinforce the sensibility.

Megan Weiss: It can’t quite come up.

Matt Basso: Right.

Megan Weiss: The sensibility.

Dr. Strangelove—the Nazi-turned-war consultant in the War Room—he’s a complicated character. Because I think the portrayal is a little ableist. He’s in this wheelchair, but he gets so excited about this bunker humanity-restart plan that he can walk again.

Matt Basso: Yes.

Megan Weiss: And he is the biggest proponent of it, which makes sense for that kind of ideology.

But yeah, I don’t know. The ending is crazy.

Matt Basso: I’ll say that I struggle a little bit. I was saying that Mandrake is my favorite, but my next favorite is General Buck Turgidson.

Megan Weiss: What a name.

Matt Basso: As you noted—right? George C. Scott, who is just pitch perfect in this film. And in the War Room, he’s hilariously in the middle of—after we initially see him in a motel room with his bikini-clad secretary—he’s in the middle of offering a prayer.

Megan Weiss: Right.

Matt Basso: This kind of critique or commentary about Americans’ sense of religion, and how that mixes with their politics and their Cold War politics.

And then he gets excited about this plan. And they start kind of wargaming it out.

Megan Weiss: Yeah.

Matt Basso: And in one of the other great lines, he’s like, “This is perfect! Now we can bomb the Russians. Let’s do it!”

Megan Weiss: Yeah.

Matt Basso: But they start to worry about—and this is another famous part of the movie—a mineshaft gap.

Megan Weiss: Mm.

Matt Basso: “What if the Soviets get more mineshafts full of a 10-to-1 ratio of women to men?” You know, 10 women to every single man.

Again, it’s this send-up of this mindset. This Cold War mindset. At a moment in 1964 when already there were certainly enough atomic weapons to eliminate the globe. There was...

And this was part of the arms race. Hydrogen bombs at that point. And this constant vigilance.

We know that détente lasts—besides the kind of wars like Vietnam, Latin America, conflicts in Africa—but the big war doesn’t happen.

And yet, in 1964, they don’t know that. Right? There is this kind of profound—

Megan Weiss: They’re in the thick of it.

Matt Basso: They’re in the thick of it. And I think it’s a great reminder of a conformist America, where there still are voices that are speaking up.

There are still—like, we like to say, “America in the early sixties and fifties was just conformist.” No. There were folks that were critiquing the military-industrial complex.

Megan Weiss: People like Stanley Kubrick.

Matt Basso: People like Stanley Kubrick. Right. And incredibly, very public figures—like General Eisenhower. At that point, President Eisenhower—who spoke about the military-industrial complex.

So it’s a much more interesting, complicated age than some people give it credit for. And this film, I think, perfectly encapsulates that complexity.

Megan Weiss: I agree.

Matt Basso: And all the strangeness of atomic America.

Megan Weiss: Mm-hmm. Absolutely agree. Very well said.

Matt Basso: Ha! Thank you, Megan. It’s been a pleasure.

Megan Weiss: Yeah. This was great—chatting with you about the Cold War, and learning more about—

Matt Basso: —your research.

Megan Weiss: Yeah, please. This is great.

Matt Basso: I’m very excited to keep on learning more about the DUP, about Cold War and other Utah history. Because, as always—just like with the Cold War of Dr. Strangelove—you’re finding a much more complicated story.

Megan Weiss: Absolutely right.

Matt Basso: It’s exciting.

Megan Weiss: It’s always more complicated.

Matt Basso: Always more complicated.

Alright—thanks to the Tanner Humanities Center for having us on. And we hope that lots of folks that have listened to the podcast both watch the movie and especially go see the National Theatre Live presentation of Dr. Strangelove.

Robert Carson: This has been the Virtual Jewel Box, named after our seminar room. The Virtual Jewel Box hosts conversations at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah.

You can find out more about the Center’s programming—including film screenings—at tanner.utah.edu.

Thank you for listening, and here’s Jelly Roll Morton’s “Perfect Rag.”