Dr. Strangelove

Kubrick's 1964 comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb uses satire to make humor out of an incredibly dark subject. The film was based upon a novel called Red Alert, which was intended to be a realistic analysis of what would happen should a nuclear attack be accidentally launched. Kubrick kept the attention to detail and realism found in the novel's plot, yet performed it with hugely exaggerated characters. The soldiers, generals, and politicians all portray their respective stereotypes to the extreme, humorously criticizing our nation's leadership while still adhering to the dark plot line.

The movie switches between three main settings: the bomber plane, the rouge airbase from which it was launched, and the US war room. Kubrick uses satire most heavily in the war room, where leaders sit around a lavish table having pedantic arguments over what to do. This premise itself is ironic, as while war rages on in the other two locations, the men chosen to save us are fruitlessly bickering. One expects them to eventually come up with some brilliant solution, but instead the conversation simply shifts from saving the world to their own personal survival plans as the situation becomes more bleak. Many of the important characters in the war room are satires of specific politicians of the time. The character of President Merkin Muffley, for example, is a jab at real life presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. Muffley remains calm throughout the film, but is incredibly unassertive and neutral to the point where he's useless. This parody of Stevenson's own mild mannered nature is best seen in the famous quote "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!", which Muffley delivers completely unaware of its irony. Also in the room is General Turgidson, a jingoistic exaggeration of the war crazy generals of the time. He's constantly pushing to launch a full attack on Russia and is overly concerned with any "gaps" (areas where Russia is ahead of the US) he can find. Dr. Strangelove himself is a parody of the Nazi scientists the US brought over to work on our missile programs following the end of WWII. While he claims to now be helping us against the Russians, he keeps accidentally referring to the President as "Mein Fuhrer" and doing the Nazi salute with his prosthetic arm. The other leaders completely ignore this obvious allegiance to the Nazi party as Strangelove is likely the only one who can save them, poking fun at our nation's willingness to work with these horrible war criminals in order to beat the Russians in the arms race.

The film's ending is as pessimistic as its premise, making the time wasted by the huge personalities in the war room incredibly frustrating. By portraying it like this Kubrick was able to not only highlight the dangers of nuclear war, but also criticize how our politicians' stubbornness, idealism, and self-interest would make them utterly ineffective in stopping such a conflict.