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 Bombⁱ is probably Kubrick's best movie. Somehow the implausible goofiness doesn't detract, perhaps because Sellers' rather ad-hoc, improvisationist style purifies Kubrick's psychomania like some sort of magical filter taking out the wormwood oil out of otherwise "perfectly fine" samagon. In any case, it's not that model airplanes filmed banking while the interior shots depict straight and level flight poses any problems -- I even suspect if the inside were engineered to actually match the outside I'd have proposed it be reshot incorrectly. That's the bane of human life : correct incorrectness utterly blows out of the water the merely, unadornedly correct.

Supposedly this is "dark satire" or whatever ; but earnestly the darkest part is the suspicion (which I can't imagine buds in my own mind alone) that the depicted undesirable course there avoided was, in fact, preferable to the supposedly desired direction we've been bumblingly following ever since. Imagine, if indeed they put one guy to ten (well endowed) gals down each mineshaft back in 1964 and then glassed the surface, would aspies still be a thing today ? Yes, you couldn't live off the land, then as now. But at least you wouldn't be stuck with all the extras getting in the way. Would that have been so bad ? Truly ?

For the first time since as long as I can remember, I look upon nuclear holocaust as rather a missed opportunity than anything else. Imagine, had it happened we'd have to be drinking bottled water and... ummm... I mean, self-quarantine, right ?

What a terrible loss!

1. 1964, by Stanley Kubrick, with Peter Sellers, George C. Scott. [↩]