ARTUR RENZO

Released in 1964, Dr. Strangelove struck a chord with spectators eager to purge themselves of Cold War McCarthyist rhetoric and anxieties, and which had just witnessed the possibility of nuclear war pass before their eyes. With an irreverent sensibility in tune with the wave of political and cultural agitation that would culminate in 1968, the film obtained critical and box office success. It was also charged with being nihilistic, cynical, and apolitical, by critics who decried its aesthetic procedures for mimicking and reinforcing the very alienating fascination it purportedly aimed to criticize in postwar society. A closer formal analysis, coupled with an excavation of post-war consumer society elements mobilized in the film’s materials, indicates, however, an awareness (albeit intuitive) of the minefield it was treading. Investigating the relationship between aesthetic form and social process, this research seeks to draw out the consequences of the provocative inversion the film presents us with, in which countercultural motifs of sexual and bodily liberation linked to pleasure and release (and even utopian imagination) appear personified in the destructive forces of order.