Artur Augusto Abdalla Renzo

Dr. Strangelove struck a chord in a country eager to purge McCarthyist rhetoric anxieties and McCarthyist rhetoric. The year was 1964 and the world had just seen the possibility of a nuclear war flash before its eyes. With an irreverent sensibility somewhat attuned to the wave of political and cultural upheaval that would culminate in 1968, the film achieved both critical and commercial success – particularly among young audiences of major cities and university towns. At the same time, it also faced accusations of being nihilistic, cynical, and apolitical from liberal and conservative critics alike who claimed that its aesthetic procedures mimicked and reinforced the fascination and alienation of the very society it purportedly aimed to criticize. However, a closer formal analysis of the film, coupled with an examination of the postwar consumer-society themes latent in its materials, indicates an awareness (albeit intuitive) of these pitfalls. By investigating the relationship between aesthetic form and social process, this dissertation seeks to draw out the consequences of the film’s provocative inversion, in which countercultural themes of sexual and bodily liberation tied to pleasure and excess (and even aspects of utopian imagination) appear embodied in the destructive forces of the establishment itself.