Fact meets Fiction: Made- up Cinematography & Real History ?
Based on the movie, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb*
Stanley Kubrick's movie from 1964 is a comedy film which satirizes the nuclear scare during the infamous Cold War Era. However, among the parodies and ridicules in the movie, which are meant to underpin the gravity of the situation for the viewer, Stanley Kubrick is making serious commentaries and judgments about the tense situation created by the two rivaling world powers behind which stand ordinarily ambitious men. He does this using various symbolisms hidden within the movie, whether they be the names of the main characters, their what seems at times eccentric/ ridiculous actions, their comments, and/or props used in the movie. Make sure you pay special attention to the President, the General and Dr.Strangelove himself.
Therefore, for this paper you are to find those symbolisms in Dr. Strangelove, analyze them and tie their analysis to the true historical facts concerning the impending doomsday.
*In 1989, the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. It was listed as number three on American Film Industry's 100 Years...100 Laughs.
THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY
From the late 1940s through the 1950s the United States experienced continued economic growth and low unemployment. Most of the nation participated in the prosperity and agreed about the beneficence of American capitalism and consumerism. New technologies in medicine and computing improved lives and began to reshape business. Television presented a unified and sanitized American culture to millions and radio brought rock 'n' roll to the masses. Only a few intellectuals questioned the rampant consumerism and the values of the growing corporate bureaucracies. Those who lived in the "other America" of rural and core-city poverty were generally ignored by the affluent and the intellectuals. The politics of the period symbolized by President Eisenhower the cautious war hero reflected the popular contentment. Blacks inspired by the Brown school desegregation decision began the protests that would bring the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. Locked into a policy of containment and a rigidly dualistic world view the United States was less successful in its overseas undertakings. Despite a string of alliances an awesome nuclear arsenal and vigorous use of covert operations the nation often found itself unable to shape world events to conform to American desires.
COLD WAR
The mutual hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union grew out of ideological incompatibility and concrete actions stretching back to World War I and before. The alliance of convenience and necessity against Germany temporarily muted the tensions but disagreement over the timing of the second front and antagonistic visions of postwar Europe pushed the two nations into a "Cold War" only a few months after the victory over the Axis. The Cold War was marked by confrontation and the fear of potential military conflict. The United States vowed to contain communism by any means available.Meanwhile the American people exhausted from a decade and a half of depression and war turned away from economic reform. They were worried about the alleged Soviet threat in Europe especially after the Soviet Union exploded its own atomic bomb in 1949. They were dismayed by the communist victory in China and perplexed by the limited war in Korea. Many Americans latched onto charges of domestic communist subversion as an explanation for the nation's inability to control world events. No one exploited this mood more effectively than Joseph McCarthy.