Political Frame in Dr Strangelove
Dr Strangelove is a film produced by the famous Stanley Kubrick who tries to use Satire in addressing a worldwide threat of cold war fears of a nuclear conflict between the Soviet Union and the united states. The movie gets centred around an insane Air Command officer termed as General Jack Ripper (Gasser et al., 2018, p.5). In the film, Ripper gets to make a solo decision of plotting to poison the US inhabitants without informing his superiors, one who was the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Buck and the other; the president; Merkin Muffley. My essay gets based on Lee G Bolman’s argument on the political frame. The film will get related to Bolman’s and Deals ideas of the three key concepts of the political structure, which are power, conflict, competition and politics.
According to Bolman and Deal, organizations get metaphorized as arenas, jungles or even contests. The theory means to explain the concept of power, indicating the reason as to why it is possessed by a few(Bolman & Deal, 2017, p.7). The idea notes the fact that narrow-minded people get to compete for power and the available scarce economies. In such an organization, conflict gets quiet prevalent following ideological differences in needs, lifestyle and perceptions among the individuals in question. Such an organization also tends to experience frequent coercion and bargaining. Alliances get formed in this kind of organization basing on personal interests and change. The theory further suggests that problems in the organization emanate from power being over-concentrated in the wrong place, or rather, the people who possess it being quite rigid and conservative that nothing can get done about it. The idea in this theory is a sorry truth which gets to happen in the daily lives that we live in. Stanley Kubrick further both this frame to life in his production of the Dr Strangelove film through the following three concepts:
Conflict
Many times, conflict gets associated with misunderstandings arising for many reasons. As Bolman and Deal argue, in the jungle theory, an organization is a typical arena where people get to contest for different reasons. In the Dr Strangelove film, the aspect of conflict in an organization hets depicted due to the need for rising into power. The film mainly depicts battle as arising from ideological differences in the organization. The mad Brigadier gets equipped with strange feelings that the fluoridation of the water supply in America is a Soviet plan to toxify the whole community of the states. Due to this indifferent thinking, Ripper, therefore, plots for a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The conflict arises where he does not get to inform his superiors, who would not agree with his strategy due to this venture, the organization as a whole work towards stopping this international cataclysm.
Competition
The critical concept of competition in political theory gets further denoted in the movie. As Ripper gets to try tooth and nail to execute his mission of the holocaust, he gets to shut down any communication around Burpelson as he was the only one with the knowledge of the code meant to recall the B-2 bombers. Competition gets depicted when Captain Lionel Mandrake insists that he may also have the information on how he could remember the cypher if he could get conveyed with a message from the outside world, which would in this case; be hard as Ripper had held him as his captive back at Burpelson. Still in the bid to defeat Ripper in his plot for the attack, the significant people in the war room such as Muffley, Turgidson and Dr Strangelove; get to discuss ways of stopping the attack(Baklanova, & Barbasoyeva, 2019, p. 122). This aspect of competition gets to substantially prove the notion that an organization is ideally an arena where people get to compete to protect their different interests and ideas.
Power
Power has been, according to research, the capability of those in power to affect the behaviour of the subordinate, especially with the control of resources(“Introduction,” 2017, p.13). The aspect of power and authority gets displayed in the scene in the war room where, Muffey, one of the senior administrators; gets to use his influence to bring in a Soviet emissary, Alexi de Sadesky into the war room. The move he pulled was against his counter part’s desire; Turgidson. Muffey got able to pull this move because he was the president and therefore, he used this to his advantage to make a unilateral decision, even when some of his colleagues were not in agreement; something which must have been “the power of having power.”
Multi-frame Thinking
Basing on the exhibit shown in Lee G Bolman’s book, multi-frame thinking involves the incorporation of all the four frames, which all have a different image and a different reality. The model indicates that using four-framed thinking may be useful in an in-depth understanding of an organization (AIR COMBAT COMMAND LANGLEY AFB VA, 2013, p.8). This concept could get incorporated in the above film, whereby the family frame may get used. The members of the organization may have viewed Ripper with more love so that they may also get to understand why he claimed the fluoridation was a poisonous strategy to America (as in the family frame). Further, the factory frame could even get used whereby appropriated division of labour gets applied, thereby preventing members of the organization making calls that are not in their capacity, just like president Muffey. Application of these concepts would have avoided the unnecessary conflicts and quarrels between the members in the war room of the US government.
References
AIR COMBAT COMMAND LANGLEY AFB VA. (2013). Final Creech Air Force base capital improvements program environmental assessment. https://doi.org/10.21236/ada607877
Baklanova, E. A., & Barbasoyeva, M. V. (2019). Some reasons and ways of communicative failures’ prevention in the process of teaching Russian as foreign to Lao students. Pedagogical Review, (5), 117-129. https://doi.org/10.23951/2307-6127-2019-5-117-129
Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2017). Reframing organizations. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119281856
Gasser, P., Loss, R., & Reddie, A. (2018). Assessing the strategic effects of artificial intelligence (Workshop summary). https://doi.org/10.2172/1544928
Introduction. (2017). Instantaneous Power Theory and Applications to Power Conditioning, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119307181.ch1