And Sellers plays the repressed social engineer Strangelove, the timid Merkin Muffley, and the persevering Mandrake -- all with mechanical precision. Kubrick's unflinching camera acts as a character, too, slyly observing the exposition of humanity in all its grimly humorous glory.

This film belongs to a culture that has rejected the status quo -- the quaint picturesque comedies of the 1940s and 1950s; it belongs to a culture that is bordering on nihilism, anarchy, revolution -- anything that will help it to get away from the culture that has brought us the faceless, nameless idiots running the War Room in Dr. Strangelove. The film offers no solutions -- it only asks us to present ourselves to world with fresh eyes, a pure soul able and willing to laugh at its human foibles and failings, and begin to meditate upon a new direction, a new solution perhaps to the problem of...
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