American Politics & Pop Culture

I enjoyed the film “Dr. Strangelove or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb�. I found Kubrick’s representation of technology in the film very interesting. In Charles Maland's article, he talks about the use of technology and what it says about our society, “This challenge to technology-both to the stress on technique in society and to the increasing importance of machines in modern life-was to become a dominant theme in the late 1960s�. Kubrick’s use of technology made the film the satirical comedy that it was. Kubrick’s idea of the importance technology was kind of over the top. If the technology in the movie would have worked efficiently, human kind would have been saved. This seems a bit drastic but Kubrick definitely gets his point across about the importance of technology in every day life. Maland’s mentions, “Kubrick develops his attitude toward technology in Dr. Strangelove by making use of both machines of destruction and machines of communication; the problem in the film is that while people handle the machines of destruction with great alacrity, the more neutral machines of communication are either ineffectual or turned toward destructive purposes�. This meaning that man is more than ready to use dangerous technology that they know nothing about but is not able to use technology, such as a telephone, correctly. The movie began with the failure of the phones for communication in the time where they can’t reach the plane to tell them to turn the plane around and not to bomb Russia. I believe that one of Kubrick’s ideas for the movie was showing the incompetence of man and how they think they can use such deadly machines when they can’t even handle a simple technology such as a phone. This was shown with many uses of technology throughout the film, for example, as I mentioned earlier, the pentagon couldn’t communicate with the plane sent to bomb Russia, or when Peter Sellers was trying to call the president from a pay phone and didn’t have enough money to make the important call. Showing that in times of need, communication wasn’t possible. It also didn’t seem like a big importance to fix the communication. For example, President Muffley was on the phone with Demitree for a long time talking about nonsense things. They seemed to be taking their time talking to each other, like nothing bad was happening. Kubrick is saying, if man can't handle a simple technology such as a phone, how do they think they can handle such deadly machines of destruction? Overall, this movie was interesting. It was definitely something I have never seen before and the satirical humor made for a very entertaining film to watch.