Analysis Of The Screwball Comedy

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Everyone says, everywhere you go, that everything is about sex. Wars and films were no different. The “screwball comedy” was a movie making style popular in the 1940’s. This style was created so filmmakers could put more risqué moments in their films while still abiding by the censorship laws. These movies were “sex comedies without the sex” (Andrew Sarria, film critic discussing screwball comedies). Stanley Kubrick used this idea to fuel a satire about the idealistic Cold War in 1964 to supposedly fight communism. Dr. Strangelove debunks the myth of American moral superiority through the constant sexual undertones and over masculinity throughout the film and instead portrays the Cold War as groups of testosterone fueled, sex driven men compensating for inferiority complexes.
The movie opens playing the song “Try a Little Tenderness” while showing a mid-air refuel of a bomber plane, Focusing on an opening shot of a long nozzle as it lowers into the gas tank of another plane and remaining focused on the long nozzle as the planes fly away. The refuel, while harmless and normal procedure for planes flying for longer periods of time, looks much like “a plane screwing another plane” (LAWRENCE WHITEHURST, YouTube commenter). This not so subtle sexuality sets the audience up to feel sexual tension within the first few minutes of the film. Once the viewer is thinking of the underlying sexual references in the film, the idea of actual sexual inadequacies being used in the modern militia seems less and less preposterous.
Yet the sexual symbols do not stop after the opening credits. General Ripper is smoking very large cigars throughout the film, and Dr. Strangelove smokes a smaller cigarette during his screen time. Cigars and cigarettes ...

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...onship. Putting these words on the bombs shows the complete end to any good relationship with Russia along with an anger towards women, stemming from sexual frustration. All this while they drop their bombs on Laputa, meaning whore.
In Dr. Strangelove; How I Learned to Stop and Love the Bomb American men are classified as hyper-sexualized testosterone driven beasts. The phallic imagery of the guns, cigars, and bombs and the hidden sexual tendencies all bring home the same point. The desperation of military men to drop the bomb during the Cold War was not to stop the spread of communism. It was to soothe the men’s inferiority complexes and prove America’s power. Oscar Wilde said, “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” The sexual power struggle that is prevalent in Stanley Kubrick's political picture is most definitely a strange love.

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