ABSTRACT
Rayment, Tomos, and Nadasdy examine Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove in the context of its satire of military memorialization in the nuclear age. Highlighting how Kubrick sends up the discourse of sacrifice for ʻthe greater good’ in the face of total war, the authors show Kubrick making farcical the ʻphantom memorialization’ that would follow nuclear annihilation. The authors also indicate how Kubrick’s approach not only challenged prevailing mores in an American society brainwashed, not least by Hollywood, to adulate the ʻheroic’ military, but was also one that, in its very form, constructed a metaphor for the ʻnuclear madness’ that gripped U.S. policymakers of the period. The film captures, they argue, the essential absurdity of the Cold War period specifically by its divergence from verisimilitude; for it is exactly in the unreal representation of its ʻclownocracy’ where the film creates truth. Satirizing at the level of form a time when the world had truly gone MAD, Strangelove, the authors suggest, creates an alternative form of ʻremembrance’, both for its audience at its date of release and for the viewer looking back at it from the vantage point of the twenty-first century.
