#39 ‘Dr. Strangelove’
Men, Missiles, and Mutual Assured Masturbation
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) is Stanley Kubrick’s dark, deranged comedy about nuclear annihilation and the emotionally constipated men who make it possible. It’s a satire, sure, but let’s be honest: it’s also a confession. This isn’t a movie about geopolitics—it’s about how the fate of the world rests in the trembling hands of men with daddy issues, raging paranoia, and a deep-seated fear of female autonomy.
From the moment the film opens on two bombers mid-air refueling in what can only be described as airborne foreplay, it’s clear: this isn’t just Cold War anxiety. This is a cinematic primal scream about male impotence dressed up in military drag.
Peter Sellers (tripling down) plays three roles: the foppish British liaison, the milquetoast U.S. President, and the titular Dr. Strangelove—a Nazi scientist with a rogue hand and a hard-on for fascist fantasy. Each man represents a different flavor of failure: politeness, passivity, perversion. Together, they form a bouquet of masculine inadequacy that somehow feels more terrifying than the bombs themselves.
But the real nightmare fuel? General Jack D. Ripper (subtle, Kubrick). He’s the man who unilaterally launches a nuclear strike because he believes fluoridated water is sapping his “precious bodily fluids.” This is the mind that commands armies. This is the logic that holds the launch codes. Paranoid, unhinged, and sexually terrified, Ripper embodies the film’s core thesis: that war—especially nuclear war—is just a catastrophic compensation ritual for men too scared to admit they’re afraid of their own erections.
And let’s not forget General Buck Turgidson (played with sweaty brilliance by George C. Scott), a cartoon of chest-thumping bravado who seems most excited not by global diplomacy but by the idea of getting to do something with all these toys. He’s not a general. He’s a little boy with nukes and an Oedipal grin.
Women? Technically, there’s one: Miss Scott, Turgidson’s secretary/mistress, who appears in a bikini, takes calls in bed, and vanishes from the narrative like any inconvenient female presence in a boys-only war room. She’s not a person. She’s a set decoration, a punchline, a reminder that in this world, the only feminine energy allowed is inflatable.
Kubrick shoots it all with clinical detachment, the black-and-white palette making everything feel sterile and doomed. The comedy is razor-sharp, the performances iconic, and the ending—a cowboy riding a bomb into oblivion—so perfect it hurts. But beneath the laughter is a very real horror: this isn’t absurdity. It’s barely exaggeration.
Dr. Strangelove is a film that understands men don’t destroy the world because they hate it. They destroy it because they can’t stand not being in control of it—and because no one ever taught them how to cry without dropping bombs.
4 out of 5 doomsday machines
(One for Sellers. One for Kubrick’s precision. One for the script’s acid wit. One for Slim Pickens’ yee-haw into Armageddon. The missing star was revoked due to a dangerously low level of female presence—and no, a pin-up poster doesn’t count.)
