DR. STRANGELOVE: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB

DR. STRANGELOVE: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (variously capitalized and punctuated). Stanley Kubrick, dir. UK: Hawk/Columbia, 1963 (completion), 1964 (US release). S. Kubrick, Terry Southern, Peter George, script—loosely based on Red Alert, by Peter George (writing as Peter Bryant).

Features mechanized humans (primarily Dr. Strangelove), humanized machines, men in a B-52, and humanity "trapped" in a doomsday machine (see below). Important for Kubrick's 2001 and CLOCKWORK ORANGE, q.v. this Category. Discussed by V. Sobchack in The Limits of Infinity.[1] Note Strangelove as an "inheritor" of "the hand of Rotwang" in METROPOLIS. See under Drama Criticism T.A. Nelson's Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze.

See Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner for STRANGELOVE as a kind of highly accurate fictional documentary, with laughs. In both the film and Ellsberg's book, "the Doomsday Machine" is not only the literal Russian Doomsday Device but figuratively the bureaucratic apparat of the US military and high-level officials (and we may assume, that of the Russians). Clearly that machine has a couple figurative screws loose in Generals Ripper and Turgidson, and Dr. Strangelove, but, as in Ellsberg's much later memoir, most of the human cogs in the deadly bureaucratic apparat are sane and trying to act responsibly.

RDE, initial; finishing 10Jun24