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Kubrick’s Armies Strategy, Hierarchy, and Motive in the War Films of Stanley Kubrick  g l e n n p e r u s e k 77 Stanley Kubrick strove not to repeat himself and worked in many diVerent genres, but he returned again and again in his career to the theme of war. Here I will examine three aspects of Kubrick’s worldview as expressed in his war Wlms Fear and Desire (1953), Paths of Glory (1957), Dr. Strangelove (1964), the screenplay for the unmade Napoleon (1969), and Full Metal Jacket (1987)—and, in passing, in two other early Wlms of strategic interaction , Killer’s Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956): Kubrick’s carefully nuanced treatment of strategic thinking; his appreciation for the implications of hierarchical organization; and his changing views on meaning and the motivation of human social/political actors. Kubrick’s war Wlms emphasize the importance of careful assessments of situations and enemy strength in carrying out strategic plans. They treat overextension of forces as a tragic Xaw of leadership, whether stemming from misassessments based on overconWdence or personal ambition. Kubrick’s concern with the iterated quality of decision making and the interrelationship between strategy and the mood of collectivities underline the sophistication of his treatment of strategic thinking. The implications of hierarchical organization, present in all of the war Wlms, are perhaps most compellingly treated in Paths of Glory. A Rousseauian perspective on the transformation of human selves under civil society is oVered as one useful way to understand this work. Kubrick’s war Wlms consistently looked away from political explanations. Instead of providing explanations for world-historic events, Kubrick’s Wlms on Napoleon, the Great War, the Cold War, and Vietnam each put the trauma of war into a story. The Rousseauian fatalism of Paths of Glory gives way in the other war Wlms to a portrait of man as fundamentally corrupted in his very nature. A Weberian perspective on bureaucratic rationality is oVered as a way to view the war Wlms after Paths of Glory.1 Strategic Assessments in Kubrick’s War Films Kubrick, the chess player, was fascinated with strategic interaction. Dr. Strangelove descends into a fantasy extension of nuclear strategic interaction in the early cold war, as an American general, Jack D. Ripper, goes mad from conspiracy thinking and orders a bomber wing to strike Russian targets with nuclear weapons. We discover that the Russians, meanwhile , had built a “doomsday device” that cannot be knocked out by a Wrst strike. Irrationally, they fail to inform the other side of the existence of this ultimate deterrent weapon, whereas the whole point of such a weapon is to publicize its existence so the enemy will not be tempted to strike Wrst. What interested Kubrick in the Strangelove project was the paradox at the heart of all thinking about nuclear deterrence. As he told Jeremy Bernstein , “When you start reading the analyses of nuclear strategy, they seem so thoughtful that you’re lulled into a temporary sense of reassurance. But as you go deeper into it, and become more involved, you begin to realize that every one of these lines of thought leads to a paradox.” The idea at the core of Strangelove was “the intellectual notion” of “the inevitable paradox posed by following any of the nuclear strategies to their extreme limits.”2 In the Napoleon screenplay, Kubrick traces the rise and decline of the supremely capable military strategist.3 An indispensable scene portrays the negotiations at Tilset in 1807 between Napoleon and the Russian tsar Alexander. Napoleon convinces Alexander to abandon his alliance with England . While Alexander thought he would be treated “as a fallen enemy,” instead he Wnds that “to be defeated by Napoleon seemed equivalent to winning a great victory.” Gracious and friendly, Napoleon makes no demands for territory or reparations, “only an intoxicating proposal to divide the world between them.” And so, Napoleon and Alexander spend two weeks together, becoming friends, talking “of everything together, as two brothers—philosophy, women, politics, war, science.” Each man is taken with the other. In the most telling scene in the whole screenplay, the two emperors sit together in a sauna. Napoleon displays his talent for estimations on the battleWeld. 78 glenn perusek napoleon: You can always tell at a glance whether retreating infantry are being pursued by cavalry, because they hurry along and keep turning around and looking back. When they are retreating before infantry, they merely trudge along, head down. alexander: Fascinating...

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