Kubrick's doctor strangelove: the logic of spectacle

• Autores: Luis Miguel García Mainar
• Localización: Miscelánea: A journal of english and american studies, ISSN 1137-6368, ISSN-e 2386-4834, Nº 12, 1991, págs. 93-106
• Idioma: español
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• Resumen

  • The essay is an attempt to probe into the nature of cinematographic language and its specific effects on the workings of narrative texts. In "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives" Roland Barthes presented a concept of narrative activity that depended not on its mimetic function but on the inner logic that texts created by opening and closing semantic sequences. Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove is a cinematographic text which activates a great number of signifying structures that defamiliarise stylistic patterns in the attempt to satirise a nightmarish world. These defamiliarising strategies are revealed as essential constituents of a text that shows its main aim to be the production of spectacle. The essay argues that the consistent presence of these spectacular elements creates an inner logic of expectation comparable to the semantic one Barthes discusses in narratives. The text's efforts to produce a certain visual style, and the audience's recognition of it as an essential component of a genre, helps to expect the same tendency until the text's closure. Barthes's conviction that the essence of a literary narrative lies in its capacity to build up an artificial structure, independent of the mimetic side of the text, has to be altered when applied to films, where the inherent mimetic nature of the cinematic medium has to be acknowledged. In the case of films, their contents can create a visual logic parallel to the structural logic that arises from their arrangement, and sometimes this mimetic logic can even relegate the structural quest for meaning to a secondary place.