The Cold War Fears of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove

1224 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Red scare 1950

The Cold War Fears of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove

Stanley Kubrick's 1963 political satire, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is a stinging commentary of the Cold War paranoia of the time. Kubrick addresses a myriad of themes throughout the picture, offering an even darker side to an already bleak situation. The movie is also layered with many levels of subtle motifs that require multiple viewings to fully realize. The director also uses several techniques to give an overall ominous feel to the picture. The movies title character is overplayed though making a few disappointing moments. This is overacting is a little disappointing but does little to diminish the greatness of the film.

The film uses a number of themes showing our less admirable responses to the Cold War period of the 50's and 60's. This time period was one of fear in which nuclear annihilation was ever-present in the minds of Americans and Russians. Kubrick chronicles the time period with its playing up of the arms race gaps by creating "Doomsday Device Gaps" and "Mine Shaft Gaps" to ridicule the two superpowers ever-increasing competition to have the most of everything. This constant drive to ensure that we had just as much destructive capability as the Russians drove both countries into huge amounts of debt. A large part of the national debt can be attributed to military over-spending. This competition to have to most weapons also gave us the capability to destroy the world many times over.

Another theme parodies McCarthyism and the Red Scares that it produced. General Jack D. Ripper produces paranoid rants that sound as if they could have come from the transcripts of the House Un-American Activities Commission....

... middle of paper ...

... still funny look into our recent history. With important issues that apply not only to the time the movie was made but possibly to our present and our future it offers a warning against war controlled culture and nuclear proliferation. This and the other themes of the movies are still worth considering today. The levels of hidden imagery in the film make it worth watching multiple times to try to find more of the levels and then to try to integrate them into the overall story. Like a painting by Dali you feel that every new thing you uncover has another waiting below it. The camera angles and lighting are tied into the film to turn the whole story into a smooth flowing work that is more pleasing to watch in black and white than most movies are in color. The overacting makes a few scenes in to movie difficult to watch but the rest of the film picks up the slack.

Show More
Related

  • Stephen Crane and Walt Whitman: The Natural and the Language of Social Protest

    1813 Words  | 4 Pages

    Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. Sculley Bradley, Richard Beatty, and E. Hudson Long Eds. New York: W.W. Norton, 1962.

    Read More

  • A Comparison Of Dr. Strangelove And Slaughterhouse-Five

    1055 Words  | 3 Pages

    The film Dr Strangelove or How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb is a satirical film, illustrating Kubrick's interpretation of his world at the time. It surrounds the rumours about the Soviets Union spreading communism and constructing a

    Read More

  • Dr. Strangelove Satire

    638 Words  | 2 Pages

    Americans during the 60s lived in constant fear of nuclear war, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The film shows how easy it is for one person to destroy the world in a nuclear firestorm if governments are not careful enough. Ripper’s argument about fluoridated water also reflects the belief of some Americans that fluorine was actually a Cold War weapon by the Soviets to turn American communist. General Jack D. Ripper himself also served to present an American stereotype along with General Turgidson. They both seeked to destroy the Soviet Union without any care to logic or human life. Turgidson, in particular, reminds me of Patton, who wanted to invade the Soviet Union after WWII, and MacArthur, who wanted to invade China during the Korean War. Both of these generals epitomize how people thought of Americans as zealously anti communist and violently stupid. Additionally, Dr. Strangelove and his proposal for fallout shelters show how much the Cold War interfered with Americans’ lives with the constant duck and cover drills and shelters for nuclear war. Finally, the captain of the B-52, King Kong, also represents American stereotypes with his southern accent and his patriotic final act of sitting on top of the bomb while it is falling down towards the Soviet Union. When he found out about the orders, he did not question them and went down fighting. Many people regarded Americans as gun toting southerners who were just as patriotic as they were trigger

    Read More

  • The 1980 Miracle on Ice

    1321 Words  | 3 Pages

    In 1980, it seemed like the United States was not as dominant in the world as it had been before. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union began after World War II. The two nations had joined forces as members of the Allies, but tensions arose after the war. The Americans were very worried about the spread of Soviet communism, and tried to prevent it with a policy of containment, where the United States would protect countries from outside oppression. The Cold War also expanded to include the race between the Soviets and Americans to create atomic weapons. Furthermore, there was a race between the two countries to put the first man in space, which was accomplished by the United States in 1961 (“Cold War History”). The Cold War was a standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union to try to prove their dominance in the world. Each country wanted to have more power and diminish the power of the other. At home, Americans were paranoid with the thought of Soviet spies and communists hiding amongst them, dubbed the “Red Scare.” President Richard Nixon and the Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic A...

    Read More

  • Impact of the Film, Dr. Strangelove, on American Attitudes Towards the Atomic Bomb and Cold War

    5224 Words  | 11 Pages

    Impact of the Film, Dr. Strangelove, on American Attitudes Towards the Atomic Bomb and Cold War

    Read More

  • Dust Bowl Cause

    1530 Words  | 4 Pages

    The Dust Bowl grazed across the Midwest of the United States, destroying the ecology and agriculture of the United States and Canadian Prairies"1. The Midwest had been experiencing a severe drought when the wind started to collect any loose dry dirt building up gigantic dust clouds. The 1920 's were so prosperous with many new inventions and lifestyles being adapted. Farmers now had the aid of a tractor to help plow the fields faster and farther.2 Was the newly plowed dirt the cause of the Dust Bowl, historian, Professor R. Douglas Hurt seems to think so.

    Read More

  • Connecting McCarthyism and The Crucible

    1363 Words  | 3 Pages

    "The Red Scare: McCarthyism." Essortment Articles: Free Online Articles on Health, Science, Education & More... Web. 29 Dec. 2011. .

    Read More

  • The Life and Art of Mark Twain

    2297 Words  | 5 Pages

    Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835 under the name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens as “the sixth living child of John and Jane Clemens” in the town of Florida, Monroe County, Missouri (Cox 7). While there his father operated a general store and tried fruitlessly to create an invention to bring him riches. Therefore, before long, the store failed and John Clemens moved the family to Hannibal, Missouri which Mark Twain would make famous. Little Sam, as he was called in his younger years, was never particularly close to him family with the exception of his mother who he greatly admired and looked up to. At this time Twain five siblings, his three brothers “Orion, Benjamin, and Henry, and his [two] sisters, Pamela and Mary” (Cox 9).

    Read More

  • What Are The Effects Of The Dust Bowl Essay

    1034 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Dust Bowl was the name given to the Great Plains region devastated by drought in 1930’s when America was going through the Great Depression. The 150,000 square-mile area included Oklahoma, Texas and sections of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico. This area had little rainfall, light soil, and high winds, a destructive combination. When the drought struck from 1934 to 1937, the soil lacked a strong root system of grass as an anchor, so the winds easily picked up the loose topsoil and swirled it into dense dust clouds, called “black blizzards.” The dust storms wreaked havoc, choking cattle and pasture lands. The black blizzards drove 60 percent of the population from the region.

    Read More

  • Essay On The Dust Bowl

    1579 Words  | 4 Pages

    Throughout the history of the United States, never before was there a longer period of dust storms to occur as The Dust Bowl, most commonly known as “the dirty thirties.” The Dust Bowl affected farmers in parts of the United States and Canada, but it was most commonly found in the Southwest/Midwest. Unlike other severe catastrophes which caused damage to ones ecology and agriculture, “Georg Borgstrom, has ranked the creation of the Dust Bowl as one of the three worst ecological blunders in history” (Worster 4) due to the fact it only took fifty years to accomplish. Many living in the Southern plains during this time of period struggled to maintain a living, “The bank, the fifty-thousand-acre owner can’t be responsible. You’re on land that isn’t yours. Once over the line maybe you can pick cotton in the fall. Maybe you can go on relief. Why don’t you go to California? There’s work there, and it never gets cold” (Steinbeck 23). The greed within the farmers during the 18th century unfortunately led to the Dust Bowl because they were too focussed on obtaining available rich acres to expand their industry and business for money. Ultimately, this led to the occurrence of “Black Sunday,” the migration of farmers fleeing to the Western parts of America, and the economic factors of those affected by the Dust Bowl.

    Read More

  • The Dust Bowl

    1050 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Dust Bowl was "the darkest moment in the twentieth-century life of the southern plains," (pg. 4) as described by Donald Worster in his book "The Dust Bowl." It was a time of drought, famine, and poverty that existed in the 1930's. It's cause, as Worster presents in a very thorough manner, was a chain of events that was perpetuated by the basic capitalistic society's "need" for expansion and consumption. Considered by some as one of the worst ecological catastrophes in the history of man, Worster argues that the Dust Bowl was created not by nature's work, but by an American culture that was working exactly the way it was planned. In essence, the Dust Bowl was the effect of a society, which deliberately set out to take all it could from the earth while giving next to nothing back.

    Read More

  • Music Therapy: The Effect That Underfunding Of Special Education

    617 Words  | 2 Pages

    While Music Therapy has gained wide-spread acclaim for its effectiveness and garnered increasing attention in the fields of Medicine and Psychology, it has not quite effervesced into the level of popularity proportional to how effective it has actually proven to be. For the purposes of this paper, the focus will be restricted to Special Education. Specifically, what will be examined is the effect that underfunding of Special Education has on the children themselves and their ability to socialize and assimilate into society as functional members. Due to the nature of Special Education, the challenges it poses to teachers, parents, other students, and society at large are significant. This population represents neurological, physiological, and

    Read More

  • Dementia And Music Therapy

    984 Words  | 2 Pages

    B., Gfeller, K. E., & Thaut, M. H. (2008). An Introduction to Music Therapy: Theory and

    Read More

  • The Realism of Kenneth Waltz

    2320 Words  | 5 Pages

    Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Prod. Stanley Kubrick, Victor Lyndon, and Ken Adam. By Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, Peter George, Gilbert Taylor, Anthony Harvey, and Laurie Johnson. Perf. Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens, and James Earl Jones. BLC, 1963. DVD.

    Read More

  • The Dust Storm In The 1930's

    1048 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the early 1920’s a series of unfortunate events contributed to the Dust Bowl. The first few contributions were drought and strong winds. Soon dust storms started sprouting up around the midwest. As the amount of storms increased more citizens scrambled away. Turning the midwestern areas into the Dust Bowl. And to top it off all of this was happening at the beginning of the Great Depression, which began in 1929. Which was mostly caused by multiple stocks crashing. Causing great ecological and economical misery for everyone. Leading the oakies towards the coast of California.

    Read More

More about The Cold War Fears of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove

Open Document