What’s with all the sex in this movie? With a little help from Wikipedia and IMDB, I’ve compiled this list of sexual innuendo:
--The opening scene of the mid-air refueling set to the song “Try a little tenderness”
--Jack Ripper and his “precious bodily fluids” and his “essence” that he denies to women
--Lionel Mandrake’s name (the Mandrake plant is thought to be an aphrodisiac)
--Buck Turgidson’s name
--Buck Turgidson’s secretary (who happens to be the centerfold that T.J. Kong looks at) and her relationship with Buck
--President Merkin Muffley’s name (a merkin is a pubic wig, and muff is slang for pubic hair, of course)
--Soviet Ambassador Alexei de Sadesky’s name (a reference to the Marquis de Sade)
--Dr. Strangelove’s name
--Dr. Strangelove’s apparent arousal at the thought of nuclear war
--Dr. Strangelove’s alien hand masturbating
--Dr. Strangelove’s suggestion of a polygynous society underground
--T.J. Kong straddling the phallic bomb
And I’m sure more could be found. Is this just supposed to be funny, or is there some statement being made about war and sex?
9 comments:
And the fact that there was only one actual woman in the whole frickin' movie, and she was a bimbo secretary ... I mean, it makes sense for the time and place, but it's rather tedious to watch now ...
Clearly there's a lot of satire of powerful men and their personal lusts and how personal sexist agendas become national policy, etc. (that's the story of conservative America).
And you have to remember that sexual innuendo and the like was much more powerful (anti-establishment) in the early 1960s — just before the sexual revolution really took off — than it is now. Sneaking sexual puns into material was sort of rebellious and clever and a way to defy censors and the "moral" majority; it wasn't merely crudeness for crudeness' sake.
Excellent points, kc. This is the kind of stuff that I find rather tedious now, and it's easy to forget what it was like to people at the time.
The production code was breaking down in the early 60s so more movies pushed beyond what would have been cut a few years earlier. And also the cultural changes that would come to be called the sexual revolution started well before the flower children took off their shoes.
Within the last year I watched Billy Wilder’s 1960 movie, “The Apartment”. It is based on all these corporate suits having one affair after another with the secretaries, elevator operators, and other low status women in the company. The big office party works like a pick-up bar. This perhaps seemed bold and liberating at the time, but today these men would all be seen as sexist cads. It’s a funny movie if you don’t hold the past against itself. That it takes on Ward Cleaver makes it easier to cut it some slack.
I see the men in Dr. Strangelove as sort of like frat boys. Their lives revolve around immediate gratification and one-upmanship.
Have you ever read/seen "The Women's Room"? — lot of women from that era who ironed their husbands shirts so they could go out and cheat on them. It was practically a given that run-of-the-mill men would prey on women in the workplace and avail themselves of any sexual "opportunities" that came their way, and that was even used as an argument in some quarters as to why women shouldn't work! Was it Barbara Ehrenreich who said that the sexual revolution was precipitated more by middle-class playboys trapped in Ward Cleaver mode than by the "lusty demands" of the women's lib movement?
Good analogy with the frat stuff. That's where I was heading with my first comment above it, but didn't put my finger on it.
No, I don’t know “The Women’s Room”. I’ll have a look.
Isn’t the argument in Islamic culture for why women should be covered up basically that men cannot control themselves? You can be sure it wasn’t the women who came up with this “solution”.
I thought it was an idea of animal behavior carried out to the "top" level of the human race... the fighting, fleeing, feeding and fucking.
cl, you left out farting.
Was there farting? I must have missed that.
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