The reader on red alert: Stanley Kubrick, Peter George, and the evolution of fear

Abstract

One of the purposes of studying adaptation is to allow, periodically, for a reassessment of the dominant assumptions concerning the relation between films and their non-filmic, often literary intertexts. The relation between Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Peter George’s novel Two Hours to Doom or, to use its U.S. title, Red Alert , is in need of such reassessment. In particular, the currently influential work of Peter Kramer on Dr. Strangelove presents us with an argument in which Kubrick’s film is a wholesale correction of George’s novel. This paper wishes to revise this influential reading, bringing our attention back to the literary and political complexity of George’s novel. Kubrick’s film, I want to argue, is not a correction but an historically situated adaptation. The paper presents this revision in the context of an emergent reassessment of Peter George’s wider career as a novelist.