‘Dr Strangelove’ remains the essential anti-war film
‘Dr. Strangelove’ asks us not to fight in the War Room. That Cold War may be over, but rooms remain
By all accounts, Stanley Kubrick was an obsessive. The kind of maniac who would put an actor through 97 takes because his smile wasn’t smug enough. Considered both sadistic and clinical, the director was described by various collaborators as cold, manipulative, machine-like. Yet it took this famously impassive artist to make the most scorching, uproarious, goddamned hilarious anti-war film in cinema history. In the 1964 masterpiece Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb—available for rent on Amazon Prime and Apple TV—Kubrick doesn’t just take apart military arrogance and political impotence, he makes them dance.
The film isn’t a screed or a sermon, but a ballet of buffoons set on the brink of Armageddon. It is without question the funniest film about the end of the world—which is precisely what makes it so terrifying. Released in the throes of the Cold War, Dr. Strangelove made audiences laugh while they looked over their shoulders for mushroom clouds. Today, its punches land even harder. What was once satire now feels like premonition. The hair-triggers are still cocked. The men in suits are still playing God.
This is where Kubrick’s genius lies: in taking a scenario so absurd—where a rogue US general launches a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union because he believes fluoridation is a communist plot to sap our “precious bodily fluids"—and treating it with the straightest of faces. No mugging. No wink to the audience. Just a slow, methodical spiral into the kind of bureaucratic horror that would make Kafka giddy.
The film is packed with characters whose names alone feel like punchlines: General Buck Turgidson, Colonel Bat Guano, President Merkin Muffley. Then there’s the titular Doctor Strangelove, a wheelchair-bound ex-Nazi scientist with a mind of pure mayhem and a hand that keeps sieg-heil-ing against his will. These are caricatures sculpted to expose the rot beneath the rhetoric. These people who hold our fate in their trembling, chewing-gum-unwrapping fingers. Oh, what fingers they are.
Let us bow, deeply and reverently, to Peter Sellers, who delivers not one, not two, but three peerless performances, playing Muffley, Strangelove and Air Force Group Captain Lionel Mandrake with such elastic comic timing and tonal control that he manages to tap-dance around the apocalypse. The actor is straight-man, bumbler and lunatic all rolled into one yet Kubrick never lets the film collapse under this triple-helix presence. Sellers’ performances orbit each other like rogue satellites, each threatening collision.
Opposite him, George C. Scott—playing the bellicose General Turgidson—gives a performance that’s so manic, so perfectly pitched, it reportedly annoyed him to no end. Kubrick tricked him into it, asking him to do a few “wild takes" for fun, and then using only those. The result is a portrait of military masculinity that’s all chest-puffing and lip-quivering—the face of a man who wants to win a nuclear war because he’s sure we’d lose “only 10 or 20 million, tops".
Kubrick lingers long enough to show us the cost beneath the farce. This can be seen in the sterile geometry of the War Room, that giant table looming like a sacrificial altar under the coldest lights in cinema. It’s in the jingoistic anthem We’ll Meet Again playing over images of nuclear devastation. It’s in the way Dr. Strangelove rises from his wheelchair, shrieking “Mein Führer! I can walk!"—a punchline that doubles as a death knell.
Dr. Strangelove is a horror film. A satire, yes, but also a scream. Its terror lies in how plausible its absurdities feel. How quickly we accept the insanity because the men spouting it wear ties. The film’s most devastating insight is that destruction doesn’t come with fangs and fire—it comes with protocol and paperwork, and it’s signed in triplicate. Kubrick shows how the systems built to protect us are riddled with paradox. That the logic of mutually assured destruction is the sort of chess game where everyone agrees the best move is to blow up the board. That nuclear deterrence is not strategy, but theology. And that war, no matter how cleanly it’s strategised, is always—always—a failure of imagination.
Dr. Strangelove, unforgettably, asks us not to fight in the War Room. That Cold War may be over, but rooms remain. New wars, new doctrines, new men with access codes. We live in an era where drone strikes are debated over lunch, and where world leaders can threaten annihilation—or promise ceasefires—in 280 characters or less. The war rooms are no longer underground bunkers; they’re apps, algorithms, dashboards. The madness has gone digital. The absurdity persists.
Across the globe, political discourse has calcified into nationalism’s ugliest edge. Jingoism isn’t just tolerated, but trending. World leaders channel their inner Buck Turgidsons, barking threats with the confidence of those who will never have to visit a battlefield. The idea of war has been flattened into meme and metaphor, something to cheer, share, repost.
Satire is not about cynicism, but clarity. Comedy, when sharpened that much, can reveal truths too grotesque for drama. Dr. Strangelove is a reminder that art—real, dangerous, uncompromising art—is still our best weapon against war. Stop the bombing, love the worry.
Kubrick saw this coming. A world where war is theatre and theatre is policy. Where destruction is not avoided but auditioned for. Where leaders speak only in binaries like victory and defeat, reducing a ruinous and potentially world-altering battle to something akin to a sporting score. This helps nobody. The blood of innocents, spilt on the ground and accounted for by none, is the only bodily fluid that matters.
Raja Sen is a screenwriter and critic. He has co-written Chup, a film about killing critics, and is now creating an absurd comedy series. He posts @rajasen.
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