"if I told you the meaning of my films, it wouldn't be ambiguous-and if you didn't discover it for yourself, it wouldn't mean anything anyway." -Stanley Kubrick The film Dr. Strangelove has many interpretations and has minute details that have been studied for decades, yet still remain open for interpretation. For starters, the film features very carefully planned lighting that accentuates the mood and personality of the characters. Mandrake is surrounded by computers and bright lighting, lending viewers to the fact that he is driven by reason. Ripper, on the other hand, is smoking a cigar in a dimly lit room, which i believe Kubrick is using to show how his judgement is clouded by his own emotions and prejudices.
"Their topic was the foreign and nuclear strategy of the United States as a world power. A few weeks later, Kubrick would read in the New York Times that Kissinger had taken an influential post as an adviser on national security at the Kennedy white house. Shortly after that, Kennedy would adjust U.S policy on nuclear weapons to make them more useable"
-Grant B. Stillman
This is one of the major themes in Dr. Strangelove: nuclear war, and how government policies and human nature progress it into a full blown epidemic with possibly disastrous consequences. Kubrick comments on the inevitability of this when he portrays the paranoia experienced by Ripper with everything from Soviet attack to fluoridated water. The feeling of paranoia felt by both sides is completely natural when faced with the possibility of nuclear holocaust. The image on the top of the page of Slim Pickens riding the bomb is a visual representation of how willing we are to destroy each other and how our minds can be clouded by war and illusions of power. What Kubrick is probably trying to assert through this film is that the arms race is inevitable and that when all else fails, we must force ourselves to laugh at the situation.
Kubrick, Stanley, dir. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the
Bomb. 1964. Columbia Pictures, 2009.
Stillman, Grant, “Two of the MaDdest Scientists.” Film History. 20 (2008): 487-500.
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