More so than any other director, Stanley Kubrick understood how humans obscure their dark, aggressive, tribal, and predatory emotions from themselves. Many people go through life with the smug self-assurance that they are “nice guys” and “nice girls,” and would never harm anyone, express an immoral sentiment, or participate in a corrupt enterprise. Indeed, they often indulge in self-congratulatory emotions about holding all the right opinions and signaling all the right virtues.
This blind spot to one’s own capacity for doing terrible things—especially under certain circumstances—is one of the reasons why humans don’t learn from the catastrophes of the past. In the American context, we review the horrors of history and think, “Only Germans or Japanese or Chinese or Russians or Turks would commit such atrocities. We Americans would never do that.”
I believe that Kubrick’s greatest, most disturbing, and most comical masterpiece is his 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Virtually every scene manages to be hilarious, terrifying, and true to life at the same time. The titular character, Dr. Strangelove (born Merkwürdigliebe) is apparently a former Nazi rocket scientist who works for the Department of Defense. In the film’s climactic scene, he explains to the bewildered President and Joint Chiefs of Staff that the Russian “Doomsday Machine” — a system of nuclear weapons connected to a gigantic computer programmed to eliminate human decision making — may seem strange and surprising to the guys in the room, but is in fact a system he has already analyzed and described in a study he was contracted to perform for the Rand Corporation.
Hellbound and Down 