With Basic Training, we discussed some of the ways it looked like Stanley Kubrick was paying close attention on his way to making Full Metal Jacket. We can start on Missile by going in the other direction, this is Dr. Strangelove (1964) a couple of decades later and for real. The similarities are scary, and I’d say Wiseman’s sense of humor while exploring how prepared these trainees and their instructors are to pull the nuclear trigger provides the same unsettling feeling, without Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, and Sterling Hayden around to offer their caricatures of military and political figures. That twisted motto on a sign of the Strategic Air Command - Peace is our Profession - makes its appearance in both films, and if you thought the launch codes of Strangelove were invented, you get an almost identical lesson in Missile of how to send nuclear armaments on their way. That a madman could trigger the whole thing seems entirely plausible in Missile, and maybe even suggests some possibilities that still seem quite plausible today, or even more so. We’re told right at the start that the trainees will have to sign a paper that says “if the President of the United States deems that our way of life is threatened and that it's about to be over, that you have no hesitation once that you have authenticated the message, you know that it's the president talking, that you'll insert those launch keys and launch your missiles." I think we can easily see some problems with that logic. And while we don’t see nuts on the level of those in Kubrick’s film, the people we get in Missile may be scarier for their skewed logic and their determination to be ready to turn those launch keys. I’ll give some examples and then we’ll take a look at some Wiseman editing strategies and other things.
The ratio of “let’s consider if this is a bad thing we’re involved in” to “how do we learn to do the bad thing” is quite low, that is, how much time goes into morality and ethics seems scant in comparison to training time to assist in nuclear annihilation. I think we saw it too in Basic Training and Manoeuvre, but when military people give their versions of history, it can sound more than a little skewed. (And obviously, Wiseman is back looking at the military again, with extremely good reason.) We can pick and choose among the craziness, but my vote goes to a talk on the first day by the base commander, who gives a capsule summary of war, starting with “early warfare”, which he says was pretty simple because you knew clearly who the enemy was, although he amazingly qualifies this: "I don't mean to imply that warfare was ever pleasant or nice, because, you know, after the combatants were out there fighting, then there was rape and pillage and what not after that." He wants to contrast those bright early days with the tougher ones he claims are now how it happens. When he asks the trainess if they know about Nuremberg and also the My Lai Massacre, he gets quite accurate answers from the group, but his own versions are worse than the fluoridation theory in Strangelove. Accordieg to him, what happened in Viet Nam is that you could no longer tell who the enemy was as in previous wars, and that they included “women and very young men who might be classified as children”, so that explains why Calley and company destroyed the entire village. Incredible! “Very young men who might be classified as children.” The language games are amazing. He’s implying that classification was debatable, so kill ‘em all. General Ripper would go right along with him. The language gets shockingly worse when he argues that Nuremberg’s “following orders” is no longer the same as in World War II. (Somehow, by the way, they never discuss Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which would seem more germane to their present training.) The trainees are on the right side of this one again, but quite shockingly, he’s ready to ignore them and give his view that ”the President of the United States is not going to ask you to insert those launch keys until, you know, there's just no other option, it's the final solution.” It’s jaw-droppingly shocking that he would use the phrase “final solution” as if it’s acceptable, given its use by the Nazis in exterminating Jews. He stays perfectly In Strangelove territory when he says "you're not going to get a spurious order or some kook isn't going to be sending the order down”, as if to dismiss any of those scenarios. It’s scarily like “you can’t fight in here, it’s the war room” when he braggingly says “You have the power to launch the world into nuclear darkness” but makes it sound like all is ok because they’ve now talked this through, so “the American people, they trust us, they trust us to protect them, they trust us to make good judgements. . . .This is a professional responsibility seminar.” To Wiseman’s credit, this discussion lasts over fifteen minutes, and when it’s over the scene even feels too short, given the insanity level of these kinds of statements. Similarly nutty and scary remarks are sprinkled throughout the film and are easy to notice on your own, I’ll just mention one more quickly before trying to discuss just how out there these people can sound. (Though I hate to ignore the officer who smiles at his happy memories of dropping live bombs on his first day in Viet Nam.)
The tour de force sequence, brilliantly shot, is a validation of Wiseman’s sharp observational skills, as it’s not the result of a classroom training situation or a general’s speech. During a relaxation time, one trainee is showing off to a few others his photos of his World War II souvenirs and vacation trips. Bizarrely, the guy has collected several helmets of German soldiers with both bullet holes in them and their names, which he used to find their graves in Bastogne cemeteries. (Bastogne was a site of a major battle in what’s known as the Battle of the Bulge.) He says he’s got “detailed maps” of the locations where he found their helmets, and then he’s got photos of him smiling next to the graves. (We learn as well that the graves have six people buried in each - “three on one side, three on the other” he tells them) What makes this incredible scene so effective is that Davey/Wiseman manage to maneuver around just enough so that we can actually see the photos too, because otherwise I’d doubt that we’d believe what we’re hearing. The way they get reactions, the photos, and all the people in the group speaking is really a textbook case of the fine art of spontaneous filming. The guy’s vacation photos also include foxhole portraits with his family, including his young child. The fellow says he hopes someday to get a master’s degree which will allow him to do more of this stuff, and he matter-of-factly speaks of the “9,000 people” buried in the vicinity, and how land mines continue to cause deaths to this day. Besides the weirdness of his little hobby, his describing these remnants of World War II sounds too much like the talk in Strangelove about what the world would be like when the survivors arose from the mine shafts. Doomsday scenarios treated like it’s all par for the course can’t help but send terror down your spine.
One way the unthinkable is reduced to the routine that Wiseman has an ear for is the military’s, and other bureaucracy’s, tendency to reduce many processes to labels and acronyms. I already mentioned how that one meeting about Nuremberg and My Lai has a special name. It’s mentioned by the base commander on the first day as "we will talk about nuclear deterrence a lot tomorrow when we have our PRAPS, which is our Professional Responsibility Seminar.” (The acronyms seem often not to fit the actual initials.) Makes it sound so routine, doesn’t it. Talking about following orders to blow up the world is “professional responsibility”. Here are just a few bits of the alphabet jargon that pop up along the wayy:
WSSR”: “Weapon Systems Safety Rules, you'll hear me refer to them as whizzers, W-S-S-R”
PRP: Personnel Reliability Program
DNIA: Duty Not Involving Alert
DNIF: Duty Not Involving Flying
PES Seals - Positive Enabling Systems Seals
ILC: “The Inhibit Switch generates the Inhibit Launch Command, the ILC.”
Two things said at meetings:
"One student placed on QP as a result of academic performance. He's failed five ACO's with an academic average of 87.5 which for ILCS is low." (a bad thing)
"Your checklist discipline was well beyond the IQT level.” (a good thing)
Let’s try to tackle a big topic now, part of one of the really important Wiseman subjects - the structure of all these episodes in the ways so unique to his work. We know we’ve got all these building blocks that he assembles, ignoring for the most part the standard chronologies of other films or the regular following of the same set of people. Before we get to ways they are sequenced, I think Missile is a good place to look at those building blocks just a bit, and I’m sure there will be later films where can try to figure out further how those pieces fit - what the connections between them are. There’s one Wiseman method that Missile has some very good examples of what I would call the “Abrupt End of Scene Line”. These often go well with the “Where are We Beginnings”. That is, one way we’re engaged is that when a sequence gets underway - a meeting, an activity, a casual conversation - our first task is to figure out who are the people involved (as we usually haven’t seen them before) and what activity are they engaged in. These are not efforts we must make in most movies. With Wiseman, we do it all the time. Sometimes it feels like a scene goes on long enough for an important line to be said. Other times, it’s to show enough of something for us to understand its importance. Neither way is this necessarily in service of telling some story or making a single clear assertion, as the episodes don’t require a chronological link or any other kind of continuity, beyond it just looking like something else happening in this same place. We never know if we’re seeing something Wiseman might have shot during his first day at a place or on his last. The logic is the film’s own, constructed out of a lengthy editing process that is not governed by being true to the time he spent there - it’s more true to the ideas he’s interested in, the things people have said and done, and contributions this makes to the world of all his films. So let’s just look at several of these quick endings, and see what they tell us.
One very good one comes in a scene where a student’s academic performance is being reviewed. His current performance is pretty miserable, he’s failed a number of tests, and knows he’s in trouble. The instructors reviewing his file go back to his college record, and see he had low grades while studying “Mechanized Agriculture”. Several of them say he should be dropped from the program, but one defends him repeatedly based on his motivation. It sounds like he’s going to win the day and the poor trainee will stay, and his last defense is "He wants to do it. He just feels a little apprehension for some reason." This was the “Abrupt End of Scene Line”. (We never see a final decision, though this may be the same guy coached in a later scene about how to do well on a test when he has no idea of the answers.) That cutoff is a scary one. It gives us a chance to realize they’re keeping a poor student so that he can someday be in a position to launch nuclear weapons. It’s like rooting towards the end of Strangelove for Colonel Kong to make it. Wiseman lets us realize the implications of what’s been said by letting it hang out there.
A great second example of this comes in a scene of training to actually launch a nuclear missile - a complicated set of command codes to be responded to by reading times off of clocks, figuring out which buttons to push, and what to say in order to move on to the next step. We can see the two trainees have done an awkward and inexperienced job of it. To cheer them up a little, their instructors says they should “Just get the task done and leave it at that. Get a successful launch, and take care of any other problems that happen afterwards." That’s the Abrupt End of Scene Line, and I’d say it’s a stunner. What “happens afterwards” if there’s a “successful launch” would be nuclear war! His advice hangs out there in the air in the brief silence allowed by cutting off the scene right there.
Two more quick ones so you can see I’m not making this up. There’s a class where they’re learning more about the switch they need to pull and the codes they need to set each one off. We hear there is such a thing as an inhibit code, which is some sort of Strangelovian methods to defeat what all the other codes have been trying to accomplish. What’s an inhibit code? Well, the instructor says “The inhibit code is transmitted any time the crew detects an unauthorized enable or launch attempt, any time." End of scene - the next couple of shots are an exterior of a building and then several cars driving by, as we have a chance to process what was just left hanging in the air. Don’t worry that there might be unauthorized attempts to set off nuclear devices. An inhibit code will surely save the day. A last terrific example comes when two female trainees get a whole launch procedure right and show they can not only launch a missile, they can follow up with several more, one of them crossing off several lines of lit buttons with a marking pen, saying as she does it “ok, missile away on eight, nine, ten, four, five, and three. . . . they're all gone. . . . that's it, that's all she wrote." That’s all she wrote indeed, as Wiseman again makes this an Abrupt End of Scene Line. That’s all she wrote for life as we know it, you could say.
And just for a last thing on Missile, we can’t ignore a pretty big sermon scene, another Wiseman favorite we’re finding yet again in maybe a place we wouldn’t have expected it. This one is notable for mixing religion and the military, and also sadly came the Sunday after the terrible Challenger explosion of a few days earlier, an event that might make one think twice about how well all this fail-safe technology is working. I think the sermon here is notable for how badly the minister mangles the story of the poem excerpt he recites, from a poem he never identifies by name called “High Life” which ends with the line "And put out my hand and touched the face of God." I happen to know it because there’s a recording somewhere of Orson Welles reciting it during World War II. The minister says it was written during World War I to his father “by an aviator who flew biplanes in open cockpits. He received this poem shortly after the notification of his son’s death” and the minister also claims “the first public reading of it was at the funeral of his son”. The actual story, if you want to check Wikipedia, is that the poem was written in 1941 and the son was killed several months after the father received the poem, but I guess the minister’s version has more dramatic impact, so why bother to tell the true story. The church service is also notable for having a military guard as part of it, and “Taps” being played there as well. When the last scene of Missile is then (right after this church service) a speech by a general, where after extolling what a great job they’re all doing, is probably not entirely a surprise to see religion and the military intertwined once more. In what clearly qualifies as Missile’s final example of an Abrupt End of Scene Line, the last thing we hear him and the film say is “We are people who are concerned about our God.” It’s something of a non sequitur to bring up God in the context of nuclear deterrence, but the silence left by concluding here is like Wiseman saying “OK audience, what do you make of this?” It’s as strong an ending line as back in High School when the Principal said “It means we’re doing a very good job here at Northeast High.” Wiseman certainly knows how to end a scene, and a movie.