Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 7 (1994): 67-81 Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove: Desire and the Fragmenting of Character Luis Miguel García Mainar Universidad de Zaragoza ABSTRACT This article is an attempt at analysing several aspects of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove from a point of view which includes concepts of both narratology and post-structuralist analysis. I study the level of the fábula and the characters (at the level of the story) in order to prove the existence in thefilmof a tendency to discard its apparently satiric aim and privilege a logic of spectacle. The contents of the fábula reveal that the film introduces fantasy to satisfy the audience's desire for identification and creates a self-conscious film which dismatles the satiric text. The study of the characters lays bare the existence of a complex web of signification around each one of them, produced by their being impersonated by well-known stars. The several interactions among the characters in thefilm,previous characters played by the actors and the actors as personae bring about a dissemination of meaning which deprives the characters of any satiric claim. They are transformed into mere objects to be enjoyed and incorporated to the pervading logic of spectacle, therefore pointing to the ever-present tendency of cinema to present itself as a product to be consumed rather than a text to be analysed. Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) has been traditionally studied as a member of the satiric genre, therefore possessing both a humorous and a denouncing ingredient. Using, for instance, Northrop Frye's generic classifications the film can be placed in a preestablished system of genres according to the most salient characteristics or themes of the text. Such generic criticism as Frye's belongs to the traditional strand of criticism whose main aim is to provide accurate definitions of literary modes, which can be applied to the highest possible number of works. These definitions are reached through an inductive process which distinguishes within a group of individual works some common characteristics, which are then reformulated as defining features of the genre those works constitute. Being an inductive process, it involves considering some features of the different works as the most specific and discarding the rest as accesory ones which may