Strangelove

     Today my mom came home from the library with a stack full of movies as she often does.  Usually they are romances, corny western movies, and other genres I'm generally not very interested in.  Today though i was pleasantly surprised when I was reading through the movie titles and one of them was our very own Dr. Strangelove!  Now Im not sure of the movies popularity outside of high school film classes but i was surprised when I found out my dad had been the one who recommended it because he had seen it before.
     All of this reminded me to go online and share my thoughts on Strangelove.  I must say i did enjoy the movie but I wish it had been serious rather than a comedy.  The movie is funny, but as someone who enjoys learning about history, and is fascinated by the Cold War, I would have liked to have seen the original serious version of the film that they tried to make.  The concept of the Cold War is really quite ironic though as Mr. Bennett pointed out.  The missiles we created would ultimately fail if they worked "correctly".  Its a paradox really.  I remember our A.P. World History textbooks titled the chapter on this era in world history as "The Bipolar World".  That title is certainly fitting as anyone over the age of about 55 can tell you.  Thats a reason that I've always enjoyed learning about the Cold War so much.  Its one of the only wars that really wasn't a war at all. It was a standoff with the highest stakes in human history.  It was a display of human madness, and ultimately the power of diplomacy to overcome conflict.  It was something that happened relatively recently and a conflict that really defines a generation of Americans the way our generation will always have 9/11.  Not that they are things to be proud of, but they are literally world changing events that we lived through (especially 9/11 because it happened in NYC).
      Because of the extreme seriousness of the Cold War it is often hard to see just how absurd it was.  Its a war that no nation could ever "win".  And I think thats the message of the film.  It is clearly an anti war movie and although it is a comedy it still has a strong political voice.  Although the people who produced Strangelove are not naive enough to think that all wars can be ended (because they have accepted the faulted human element that they constantly emphasis throughout the movie) they still make a call for peace in our still bipolar world.