Review of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

Moving picture, 95 minutes

Stanley Kubrick (director).

One of those cases where the quality of the special effects consistently hurts the experience of what is otherwise ingenious.

The first time I saw this, I think I was 17, and I didn’t quite get the phallic symbolism of the ending. I read up on it and thought that kind of humour was basically referential, based on the popularization of Freudian theory at the time, but I was wrong. 100 years earlier, Verne did the same thing in the opening chapter of From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and it was hilarious.

References here: Fail-Safe (1964), “Bureau of Proto Society” (2015), HyperNormalisation (2016).

moving picture fiction