Purity of essence in the Cold War: Dr. Strangelove, paranoia, and bodily boundaries. Issue 5 (28th May 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Higgins, Scarlett
• Is Part Of: Textual practice. Volume 32:Issue 5(2018)
• Page Start: 799
• Page End: 820
• Publication Date: 2018-05-28
• Subjects: Paranoia -- body -- purity -- Dr. Strangelove -- communism -- gender -- The Manchurian Candidate -- My Son John; Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals; Semiotics -- Periodicals; 801.95
• DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2016.1277549
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0950-236X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In Stanley Kubrick's 1963 black comedy, Dr. Strangelove, General Ripper narrativises his move towards nuclear apocalypse through an understanding of the (male) body – physical and national – as penetrated and fragmented by the substance most necessary to its survival, water. The film's satiric description of the water fluoridation controversy, whereby water fluoridation is figured as a Communist plot to transform America's citizen-soldiers into soft, weak-willed dupes, easy converts to the Red Menace, could have been lifted from many popular periodicals of the time. This article produces a new understanding of 'Cold War paranoia' via a psychoanalytic reading of these texts (alongside earlier Cold War films My Son John and The Manchurian Candidate ) through which paranoia becomes a peculiarly bodily mental disturbance. The paranoid subject perceives the national and/or physical body as constantly under threat of penetration by dangerous foreign forces and objects. Once these boundaries have been breached, the body in question is feminised – and these feminised bodies (whether of actual women or not) must disappear to make way for newly shored up male bodily boundaries. Dr. Strangelove 's use of satire sets it apart from the earlier films in its diagnosis of the deathly body politics at stake in the Cold War.