Machines Fucking

Dr. Strangelove is obviously a film all about machines fucking. It is about a system of machines: machines at work. “It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. . . . Everywhere it is machines — real ones, not figurative ones” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: p. 1). But of course, in Kubrick, as the prevailing critical discourses on his oeuvre go, people are machines as well — they are either always already machinic, or become-machine through evolving within the existential universe depicted in all of his films. In order to run smoothly, machines need energy, fluids; and this is a film obsessed with fluids. From the opening shot of a B-52 bomber being refueled in mid-air with a markedly phallic fuel pump (sometimes a retractable, fluid-ejecting appendage is not just a retractable, fluid-ejecting appendage), to the conversation between General Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden) and his British aide, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers), in which Ripper, the catalyst that sets the whole machinery of the plot in motion, explains the reasoning behind his plan to attack the Soviet Union, the dominion of fluidity in the world of this film is asserted. In this conversation — one of the most important scenes in the film — Ripper discusses what was a common theme among far rightwing, John Birch Society-types in the post-war era: the belief that water fluoridation was a communist plot to brainwash the American population. Here is the key section of dialogue:

Ripper: Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children's ice cream.

Mandrake: Lord, Jack.

Ripper: You know when fluoridation first began?

Mandrake: No, I don’t Jack.

Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.

Mandrake: Uh, Jack, Jack, listen. Tell me, Jack. When did you first become, well, develop this theory?

Ripper: Well, I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love. Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.

Mandrake: Hmm.

Ripper: I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake.

Mandrake: No.

Ripper: But I do deny them my essence.

Here, Ripper seems to be describing a kind of phenomenology of the post-coital: a “profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness.” This is what the French call “la petite mort.” It is an aspect of sensuality that obviously disturbs Ripper, and his “lack of essence,” the expenditure of libido, is (mis)interpreted as a commie infiltration of the public water system. In Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, Georges Bataille describes well the anxious affects that can attend the vitality, the “life essence,” necessary for the exchange of bodily fluids, an exchange that Ripper now withholds:

[S]ome aspects of sensuality put us on guard from the start. The orgasm is popularly termed ‘the little death.’ The reactions of women are comparable in principle with those of females trying to escape from the fatality of love; though different from those of the religious assailed by temptation, these reactions do reveal the existence of a feeling of dread or fright generally bound up with the idea of sexual contact. These aspects have a theoretical confirmation. The expenditure of energy necessary for the sexual act is everywhere enormous. (Eroticism, p. 239)

The moment of expenditure is what disturbs Ripper. To avoid this feeling of emptiness he denies women his essence, in other words, he doesn’t cum; he keeps his essence in reserve. What is really interesting, and what connects Dr. Strangelove to my discussion of Three Days of the Condor below, is Ripper’s use of the word “essence.” Here I must turn to Bernard Stiegler’s discussion of the epiphylogentic evolution of homo sapien in the first volume of his Technics and Time series, The Fault of Epimetheus. Stiegler writes:

Only the animal is present at the origin of humanity. There is no difference between man (in his essence) and animal, no essential difference between man and animal, unless it be an inactual possibility. When there is a difference, man is no longer, and this is his denaturalization, that is, the naturalization of the animal. Man is his disappearance in the denaturalization of his essence. Appearing, he disappears: his essence defaults [son essence se fait défault]. By accident. During the conquest of mobility. Man is the accident of automobility caused by a default of essence. (Technics and Time 1, 121)

There is much to unpack in this dense passage, but for our purposes here, I want to focus on the last sentence (while keeping in mind Stiegler’s broader play with “essence/essential” throughout). In the original, it reads: “L’homme est cet accident d’automobilité que provoque une panne d’essence” (La technique et le temps 1, 132). “Essence” carries a double-meaning in French: its English cognate, as well as “gasoline” (the distillation of petroleum: petroleum’s essence). Une panne d’essence rendered into English loses the sense of an “empty tank,” a “lack of fuel.” Ripper experiences this empty tank when he ejaculates, the B-52 in the very first shot of the film is refueling its empty tank, and it is the empty tank of the only plane that doesn’t get the message to abort the bombing run — the crew that we have been following all along — that compels it to drop its nuclear payload on a secondary target because it is quickly running out of gas, and as Major Kong (Slim Pickens) says, “We didn’t come all this way just to ditch this thing in the drink.” In the sexual economy of Strangelove, the fluids of war and the fluids of copulation are two sides of the same coin. Bataille’s fundamental belief in the knotting of death and sensuality is no more clearly on display than in the climactic scene (pun intended) of Kong riding the giant warhead to his death. It is this experience of transgression, of life at the threshold, that ravels war and with the libido in Dr. Strangelove. Another passage from Bataille might be illustrative: in the following passage, for “Saint Theresa” read “Colonel Kong”:

The desire to go keeling helplessly over, that assails the innermost depths of every human being is nevertheless different from the desire to die in that it is ambiguous. It may well be a desire to die, but it is at the same time a desire to live to the limits of the possible and the impossible with ever-increasing intensity. It is the desire to live while ceasing to live, or to die without ceasing to live, the desire of an extreme state that Saint Theresa has perhaps been the only one to depict strongly enough in words. “I die because I cannot die.” But the death of not dying is precisely not death; it is the ultimate stage of life; if I die because I cannot die it is on condition that I live on; because of the death I feel though still alive and still live on. St. Theresa’s being reeled, but did not actually die of her desire actually to experience that sensation. She lost her footing but all she did was to live more violently, so violently that she could say she was on the threshold of dying, but such a death as tried to the utmost thought it did not make her cease to live. (Eroticism 239-40)

The world of Dr. Strangelove is a “closed world” par excellence, to use Paul Edward’s terminology, and Kubrick may be the great auteur of cinematic closed worlds. In The Time-Image, the second volume of his Cinema books, Gilles Deleuze classifies filmmakers as creators of either “cinema of the body” or “cinema of the brain.” For Deleuze, Kubrick is the acme of the cinema of the brain, while Cassevetes (and somewhat counter-intuitively, Godard) epitomizes the cinema of the body. (It is a fun parlor game to update his taxonomy with modern day examples: I would propose that someone like Olivier Assayas falls squarely into the body category, with Asia Argento’s hyper-corporeal performance in Boarding Gate being its most palpable instantiation, while the mind-fuck cinema of Richard Kelly [e.g. Donnie Darko, The Box] is located in the synaptic circuits of the brain.) As Deleuze puts it:

If we look at Kubrick’s work, we see the degree to which it is the brain which is mis en scène. Attitudes of body achieve a maximum level of violence, but they depend on the brain. For Kubrick, the world itself is a brain, there is identity of brain and world, as in the great circular and luminous table in Dr. Strangelove, the giant computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the Overlook hotel in The Shining. (Time-Image, p. 205)

The closed world of a world-made-information thus comes to be identical to the architectures that dominate and prevail in them. The brain trust assembled at the round table in Strangelove — the military-industrial-complex-incarnate — has created this brain-like world and now are beholden to it. It is when this cerebral architectonics begins to malfunction that the dangers of an enclosed world become evident:

[I]f the calculation fails, if the computer breaks down, it is because the brain is no more reasonable a system than the world is a rational one. The identity of world and brain, the automaton, does not form a whole, but rather a limit, a membrane which puts an outside and an inside in contact, makes them present to each other, confronts them or makes them clash. The inside is psychology, the past, involution, a whole psychology of depths which excavate the brain. The outside is the cosmology of galaxies, the future, evolution, a whole supernatural which makes the world explode. The two forces are forces of death which embrace, are ultimately exchanged and become ultimately indiscernible. (Time-Image, p. 206)

If and when the computer — the brain — breaks down, the consequences will be dire, as we see in Strangelove. This will always be a danger when the brain is connected to the war machine. The fleet of B-52s depicted in the film is a literal depiction of what Deleuze and Guattari, in “1227: Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine,” chapter 12 of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, call the “nomad war machine.” The advantage of keeping bombers in the air around the Soviet Union 24/7 is total operational mobility; the nomad can move and strike at a moment’s notice. And as we see in the film, the war machine wants war. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, “Speaking like Aristotle, we would say that war is neither the condition nor the object of the war machine, but necessarily accompanies or completes it; speaking like Derrida, we would say that war is the ‘supplement’ of the war machine” (Thousand Plateaus, p. 417). Kubrick’s interest in the war machine, as well as war as supplement to the war machine, would continue, manifesting itself again in his penultimate film, Full Metal Jacket (1987). As the drill sergeant (R. Lee Ermey) tells the new recruits: “If you ladies leave my island, if you survive recruit training, you will be a weapon. You will be a minster of death praying for war. But until that day you are pukes. You are the lowest form of life on Earth.” In is through the crucible of training they are individuated, in something like Gilbert Simondon’s sense (see Steven Shaviro’s discussion here), but also transindividuated into the war machine itself.