Tales of a Strange Love in Dr. Strangelove Essay -- Dr. Strangelove Es

Tales of a Strange Love in Dr. Strangelove   Dr. Strangelove , filmmaker Stanley Kubrick's nuclear war satire, portrays America's leaders as fumbling idiots and forces American viewers to question the ability of their government.   Dr. Strangelove's   cast explores the quirks and dysfunctional personality traits that a layperson would find far-fetched in a person of power.   The characters are diverse yet unified in their unfailing stupidity and naivete.   The film's hysterical dialogue sheds a darkly comic light at the most ironic of times-war.   This film came out at a height of paranoia of the nuclear age and the Cold War, just after the Cuban Missile Crisis.   It depicts a horrible, tragic incident in which a breach in the government and diplomatic mistakes result in nuclear holocaust. General Ripper, a psychotic anti-Communist, exploits a loophole in the chain of command and orders nuclear warheads to be dropped on Russia.   Ripper, in a moment of humor, explains his motivation-most likely gleaned from bits of "red" propaganda he has internalized:   "I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination,   Communist subversion,   and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."   He elaborates further citing the Communist fluoridation of U.S. drinking water as the most dangerous of Soviet plots to infiltrate and destroy the American people.   With all the sense of a Joe McCarthy, Ripper is prepared to begin and accept the consequences of a nuclear war. The impending disaster is soon brought to the attention of America's President Muffle and his team of able advisers, who quickly prove themselves worthless wastes of space.   The President scr... ...ar. By presenting war with humor, the film conveys just how much of a farce the nuclear arms race really was. The extreme views of the characters aren't fiction; Baby Boomers, for example, can recall debates about "acceptable" civilian losses in the event of a bomb being dropped.   Kubrick satirizes this time period wonderfully, capturing the insanity of a world gone mad. The key question of the film really is:   who is running the mad house?   In a world where world leaders scramble and bicker childishly and take advice from Nazi Germans, a world where bombs can be dropped at the will of a psychotic general, one seems better off to recline and laugh at the pure insanity of it all. Works Cited Dr Strangelove or : How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.   Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Perf.   Peter Sellers and George C. Scott.   London:   Columbia Pictures, 1964.