Walking out of the viewing of Dr. Stangelove last week, the crowd was stunned. The film is incredibly unique, it’s dark, funny, and surreal. I had never seen it before, but this entire week my suitemates and I have been quoting it non-stop. In fact, I think it’s one of my favorite movies. It’s very rare that a movie sticks with you or affects you in the same way Dr. Strangelove has done for me. The beauty of the movie is that its seemingly absurdist story of the world being destroyed is actually not absurdist at all. In fact, nuclear nuclear weapons have been prepped to launch on account of misunderstandings more than once. That is absolutely insane to me, and Dr. Stangelove does a wonderful job of showing how something so normal to us (nuclear weapon stockpiles) is absolutely ludicrous.

After seeing this movie, I’ve spent much of this past week thinking about nuclear weapons, and about the end of humanity in general. I listened to a podcast on how a member of the air force was fired simply because he asked if there was a check and balance on the president, who would order a nuclear strike. I also read about how a member of the Manhattan Project had designed a nuclear weapon with the strength to spew enough dirt into the atmosphere to cause an ice age, similar to the level of power of the Doomsday device in Dr. Strangelove. He proposed this weapon to the military in the 1950’s but it was rejected because the military saw no use in a literal apocalyptic tool. It’s difficult to put into words how this makes me feel, it’s a mixture of amusement, incredulity, and melancholy. Dr. Stangelove is great because it portrays all these feelings in a way that I fail to do. It shows how silly and scary humanity can be.