Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a black and white movie, describes how the future world be destroyed by the detonation of nuclear bombs. The movie begins with that United States Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper orders his executive officer, Lionel Mandrake, to put the base on alert and sends bombers with nuclear bombs to attack the U.S.S.R. Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, the Soviet ambassador tells President Merkin Muffley that if the U.S.S.R. is hit by nuclear bombs, it will trigger a "Doomsday Machine" which will destroy all lives on Earth. General Buck Turgidson attempts to convince the President to let the attack continue and so the Soviet military cannot fight back. Instead of listening to Turgidson’s …show more content…
Released in 1964, Dr. Strangelove is a black comedy film that shows people’s fear to nuclear power in the twentieth century. What Americans scared the most during the Cold War was that a mad man in high place would use the nuclear bomb and trigger World War Three, which would destroy the Earth through nuclear power. Furthermore, the film shows a variety of people’s aspects of thinking. General Ripper, for instance, decides to attack the U.S.S.R. without notifying the President because of his patriotism and awareness of crisis. On the other hand, the President gives up the opportunity to attack the communists to their surprise because he considers the result of nuclear war will be miserable. The President’s opinion was the same as that of most of the people in the twentieth century. Their scares and worries to the nuclear power are clearly illustrated by the film. Therefore, considering the time and background of this movie produced, it can be asserted that this film has historical meaning of the Cold …show more content…
Not only being in black and white but also having limited special effects, Dr. Strangelove poorly shows the intensity of fighting and nuclear destruction scenes. Also, all the actions happen in monotonous three backgrounds, which are the inside of an airplane, a meeting room, and an office, making the film even more boring. In addition, since Peter Sellers acted three characters in the film, it is distracting and confusing when people watch the film and it also leads people to make unnecessary connections among these characters. The exaggerated acting of Sellers sometimes does not fit in the scenes, such as the funny conversation with Dimitri, which should be more serious and anxious. Although the cinematography was limited in the sixties, the filming and acting of this movie still weakens present-day people’s level of interest to
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
The Cold War was a period of dark and melancholic times when the entire world lived in fear that the boiling pot may spill. The protectionist measures taken by Eisenhower kept the communists in check to suspend the progression of USSR’s radical ambitions and programs. From the suspenseful delirium from the Cold War, the United States often engaged in a dangerous policy of brinksmanship through the mid-1950s. Fortunately, these actions did not lead to a global nuclear disaster as both the US and USSR fully understood what the weapons of mass destruction were capable of.
The Cold War was the most important historic event in the 20th century after the Second World War, from 1945 till 1991 between two most powerful countries in that period – Soviet Union and USA. The Cold War invested a lot in world politics. What is the Cold War? This was a war for dominance in the world. In 1945 the USA was the only one country in the world that had the nuclear weapons. But in the 1949 USSR started to learn their nuclear weapons. In further developments forced the USSR was soon created by nuclear, and then thermonuclear weapons. (Isaacs J, 2008) Fight has become very dangerous for all.
Stanley Kubrick’s sexual parody, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, illustrates an unfathomed nuclear catastrophe. Released in the midst of the Cold War, this 1964 film satirizes the heightened tensions between America and Russia. Many sexual insinuations are implemented to ridicule the serious issue of a global nuclear holocaust, in an effort to countervail the terror that plagued America at that time. Organizing principles, such as Kubrick’s blunt political attitudes about the absurdity of war and the satirical genre, are echoed by the film style of his anti-war black comedy, Dr. Strangelove.
The early 1950s was a time of tension and uncertainty in the world. The Cold War replaced ‘hot’ war. Humankind had gone from the terror of actual war to the terror of the potential of nuclear war. The situation was aggravated by the ongoing conflict in Korea which pitted the forces of the ‘Free World’ against the specter of international Communism. Anticommunist hysteria gripped the US political scene, mirroring many of the excesses of the Stalinist enemy that it was in struggle with in the international arena.
In the third decade of the Cold War, less than two years after the United States population had been scared half-way to death by the Cuban Missile Crisis, Dr. Strangelove invaded the nation's movie theatres and showed the country the end of the world. Touted by critics then and now as the film of the decade, Dr. Strangelove savagely mocked the President, the entire military defense establishment, and the rhetoric of the Cold War. To a nation that was living through the stress of the nuclear arms race and had faced the real prospect of nuclear war, the satiric treatment of the nation's leaders was an orgasmic release from deep fears and tensions. Its detractors argued that the film was juvenile, offensive, and inaccurate. Viewed, however, in its context of the Cold War and nuclear proliferation, Dr....
And last but not least is the villain in these movies. Most of the killers in these films are portrayed as mentally deranged and/or has some type of facial or bodily deformation and who have been traumatized at an early age. Even though these characters terrorized and murder people they have taken on the persona of anti-heroes in pop culture. Characters like Halloween’s Michael Myers, A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger and Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees have become the reason to go see these movies. However, over time,”their familiarity and the audience’s ability to identify and sympathize with them over the protagonist made these villains less threatening (Slasher Film (5))”.
Discussions of the causes of the Cold War are often divisive, creating disparate ideological camps that focus the blame in different directions depending on the academic’s political disposition. One popular argument places the blame largely on the American people, whose emphasis on “strength over compromise” and their deployment of the atomic bomb in the Second World War’s Pacific theatre apparently functioned as two key catalysts to the conflict between US and Soviet powers. This revisionist approach minimizes Stalin’s forceful approach and history of violent leadership throughout World War 2, and focuses instead on President Harry Truman’s apparent insensitivity to “reasonable Soviet security anxieties” in his quest to impose “American interests on the world.” Revisionist historians depict President Truman as a “Cold War monger,” whose unjustified political use of the atomic bomb and ornery diplomatic style forced Russia into the Cold War to oppose the spread of a looming capitalist democratic monopoly. In reality, Truman’s responsibility for the Cold War and the atomic bomb drop should be minimized.
One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a movie that portrays a life story of a criminal named McMurphy who is sent to a mental institution because he believes that he himself is insane. While McMurphy is in the mental ward, he encounters other patients and changes their perception of the “real” world. Before McMurphy came to the mental ward, it was a place filled with strict rules and orders that patients had to follow; these rules were created by the head nurse, Nurse Ratched. However, once McMurphy was in the ward, everything, including the atmosphere, changed. He was the first patient to disobey Nurse Ratched. Unlike other patients who continuously obeyed Nurse Ratched, McMurphy and another patient named Charlie Cheswick decided to rebel
Essay 2 Psychoanalysis is the method of psychological therapy originated by Sigmund Freud in which free association, dream interpretation, and analysis of resistance and transference are used to explore repressed or unconscious impulses, anxieties, and internal conflicts (“Psychoanalysis”). This transfers to analyzing writing in order to obtain a meaning behind the text. There are two types of people who read stories and articles. The first type attempts to understand the plot or topic while the second type reads to understand the meaning behind the text. Baldick is the second type who analyzes everything.
Have you ever stopped for a moment to contemplate where you are in life? If you haven’t, then take a moment right now to imagine where you are and where you would like to be. All of the actions you have taken, thoughts you have had, and the persona you convey have created the life you have lived thus far. In the movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the main character Walter Mitty has a habit of daydreaming to escape his mediocre life for a more “enhanced” life where he fantasizes about a richer and more rewarding existence. Throughout the film, Walter is able to foster
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) by John Frankenheimer provides great satirical the tone that the Korean War set forth in Cold War United States. The movie itself released while the Cuban Missile Crisis was unfolding in 1962 certainly sets the context of the viewers at the time. The movie depicts the fear of communism washing up on American soil as the 1950s were heavily marked as fearing the communists who might be seated within the United States government. The film critiques United States’s apocalyptic worst fears when it drafted its post-war foreign based on the Truman Doctrine and quivers over communism. Nevertheless, Manchurian Candidate is a political satire about the negative impacts of the transformation of United States society emerging
One of the major themes of Dr. Strangelove is the mass of paranoia, miscommunication, and distrust that the two superpowers are tangled in. The film doesn't portray this situation as being anything but terrible. General
What does this nation’s people remember most about the Cold War? Is it the fear, terror, and the absolute uncertainty of not knowing if tomorrow you might not wake up or worse, wake up to all out nuclear hell? “The most terrifying moment in my life was October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I did not know all the facts - we have learned only recently how close we were to war - but I knew enough to make me tremble”-Joseph Rotblat. During those October days of 1962, John F. Kennedy and the United States braced for a nuclear attack that nobody was sure was coming. On the other side Nikita Khrushchev was hungry for power after being dominated by the U.S. for years during the long years of the Cold War. Khrushchev wanted to have the nuclear upper hand in the western hemisphere. With the help of Fidel Castro, Khrushchev could put nuclear weapons in Cuba.
It was the 1960’s in America, a time of social consciousness, fear, war, distrust in government, and rebellion. It was a time in which bomb shelter ads on TV were common place. It was a time of tension and fears for communism creping though our neighborhoods and infiltrating American ideals. We were at war with a nation. After World War 2, there were two dominant nations, the United States and the Soviet Union. Political ideals and control over Germany would separate the allies into bitter rivals and enemies. The fear of the Soviet’s use of nuclear weapons was constantly in the backs of our minds. It was a global ...