According to Saffron Burrows, the key to true understanding of the bizarre relationship between George W Bush and Tony Blair can be found in the new, thoroughly de-Greeced film account of the siege of Troy. I mean, no gods, no gays: how Greek is that?
Burrows' assertion may be correct, but after recently viewing Stanley Kubrick's anti-war classic Dr Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb for the first time in many years, I was struck by the relationship between bonkers US General Jack D Ripper (Sterling Hayden) and his sensible but diffident British deputy, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers). It is the same rapport that Blair's diminishing band of true believers still claim he has with George W Bush.
Kubrick's movie is an archetypal artefact of the cold war. Billed as "the hotline suspense comedy", it was conceived and filmed in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis and released in January 1964. The characters may be demented caricatures with comedy names, but the film's message is deadly serious: if our enemies do not destroy us, extremes of hatred and fear may well drive us to destroy ourselves.
Kubrick's scenario kicks off when, against Mandrake's blathering protests, General Ripper goes postal on a thermonuclear scale and dispatches his base's bomber squadron to hit targets in Russia. US President Merkin Muffley (also Sellers) is horrified but helpless, and America is (almost) saved from the consequences of its folly by the intervention of a posh, inhibited but ultimately courageous and resourceful Brit.
Mandrake was unable to avert the catastrophe but was nevertheless, after all, able to save the day through his quick thinking and the RAF authoritativeness with which he is able to bully a slow-witted American soldier. Like a maladroit, inhibited 007, Mandrake keeps his head and pulls most of America's chestnuts out of the fire. Unfortunately for Britain, Blair seems to have rejected Group Captain Mandrake as his role model in favour of George C Scott's trigger-happy General Buck Turgidson.
The other main difference between Kubrick's movie and the situation in Iraq is that in Dr Strangelove, the contrast is drawn between the paranoid belligerence of Ripper and his fellow general, Turgidson, and the cool rationality of Mandrake and Muffley, whereas in our reality it's the politicians who are nuts and the senior military relatively sane.
Now godless communism has been replaced as our all-powerful ever-menacing nemesis by something called Turr - or is America fighting a War Against Tourism? - it's no consolation to learn that the gibbering apocalypsophiles of Kubrick's day have moved from the Pentagon to the White House. It is a strange thing to say about a movie which ends with a nuclear cataclysm, but it was made in more optimistic times.
Charles Shaar Murray
