Tools of Characterization
Characterization in Dr. Strangelove
Names
All the characters in Dr. Strangelove have some kind of weird comic book-y name. Sometimes they seem to tell something about the character, and sometimes they just seem to be there because Kubrick and Terry Southern thought they were funny. Here's a list of the character names and what they reference.
President Merkin Muffley: Here's a fun fact: a merkin is actually a wig that people wear over their private parts. They first became popular back in the day when prostitutes shaved their pubic region for health reasons, and then wore merkins to cover their genital baldness. Muffley's last name also references pubic hair since "muff" is slang for the hair of a female's pubic region. Why did the filmmakers decide to name the President after female pubic hair? Probably just because they thought it was funny. Or because anyone who opposed war couldn't possibly be masculine.
General Jack D. Ripper: This one's a no brainer. The General is named after Jack the Ripper the infamous murder and rapist of the late 1800s who was never caught by the British authorities. Gen. Ripper is the guy who sets the plan in motion that results in the end of the world, so he turns out to be way worse than the original.
Group Captain Lionel Mandrake: A possible allusion to Mandrake the Magician, one of the world's first comic book superheroes. Though he gets punked down by Ripper for most of the movie, Mandrake does end up heroically figuring out the recall code. Mandrake is also the name of a plant thought to have aphrodisiac qualities.
Lieutenant Lothar Zogg: Lothar was the name of Mandrake the Magician's black strongman sidekick. Played by James Earl Jones, Lothar Zogg was probably just named that because he's black.
General Buck Turgidson: Well, "turgid" can describe when a person speaks in long complicated sentences and is generally full of themselves. It's also a word that's used to describe an erection. That sounds like Buck to us, and btw, how macho is the name Buck?
Colonel "Bat" Guano: Guano is bird or bat poop. The actual character doesn't seem like a crappy guy at all. It's probably also a reference to the term "bats*** insane," which describes the events of the movie pretty perfectly.
Major T. J. "King" Kong: Obviously, he's named after King Kong everybody's favorite giant gorilla. While the Major isn't much of a monster—just a patriotic cowboy—he does end up being the creature who destroys life on Earth.
Dr. Strangelove: Another General tells Turgidson that Strangelove's name in German is Merkwürdigliebe (which translates to…Strangelove). Why is he named Strangelove? You only have to see his orgasmic monologue about a postnuclear society to understand why. He gets excited about some pretty strange stuff.
Speech and Dialogue
Exaggerated dialects and accents abound in Dr. Strangelove. For example, what would Major Kong be without his signature Texan drawl and weird sayings? Here's one of our favorite Kong lines.
KONG: Stay on the bomb run boys. I'm goin' to get them doors open if it harelips everybody on Bear Creek.
Kong is full of this kind of stuff, and it's his folksy way of speaking that adds to his cowboy charm and image as a real American hero. When Pickens came on to the set for the first time with his cowboy clothes and drawl, people thought he was getting in character. Nope. It was really just him.
Kong isn't the only character with a distinct way of speaking. Kubrick took all possible advantage of Peter Sellers' brilliance with accents and impressions. How about President Muffley? Check out this quote:
MUFFLEY: Well it's good that you're fine and I'm fine. I agree with you. It's great to be fine. (laughs) Now then, Dimitri. You know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb.
Based in part on Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, who was from Illinois, Muffley constantly sounds like a good-hearted Midwesterner, full of warmth and honesty and understatement, if somewhat bland and worn-down.
Sellers gives Dr. Strangelove an accent he borrowed from the Austrian photographer Weegee, a specialist in crime-scene photography. Weegee visited the set as a consultant and inadvertently provided Sellers with his voice (source). Sellers would record Weegee's voice and practice the accent.
During the early part of the Cold War era, Nazis were considered pure evil and Germans in general were seen as suspicious. Germans were stereotyped as hyper-rational scientific and technical geniuses. That's why we all want to drive BMWs and why the archetypical mad scientists had to be German, starting with Rotwang in Metropolis. Sellers' German accent adds even more menace to an already pretty weird and unstable guy.
Here's Sellers again, this time as Mandrake, whose upper-class British way of speaking totally defines him.
MANDRAKE: I thought to myself our fellows hitting Russian radar cover in twenty minutes, dropping all their stuff, I'd better tell you, because if they do, it'll cause a bit of a stink, won't it?
The "bit of a stink" that Mandrake's talking about here is a thermonuclear war. His penchant for understatement is both hilarious and stereotypically British.