Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Dr. Strangelove is one of those films that I come back to every few years and appreciate more and more each time.

I didn't see Dr. Strangelove until sometime in grad school. I gravitated toward dark comedies when I started writing screenplays, and that inevitably led me to Stanley Kubrick's film. Unfortunately, I was neither politically engaged at the time nor particularly fascinated with human folly. Mostly I was just fascinated with all things morbid, and that didn't help me write much of anything. What I wrote was neither informed nor particularly good.

When I was in high school, I chose to write a paper about Joseph Heller's Catch-22, which wasn't on a reading list of any sort but for some reason my high school library had a copy. I slogged through that tome, bitching the whole way about how I didn't understand what was going on and wondering why the book was such a classic. I finished the book, wrote the paper (which was not good), and chalked the experience up to yet another negative encounter with reading.

Only years later did I pick up Catch-22 again and recognize Joseph Heller's brilliance. If you're crazy, you can't fly. But you'd have to be crazy to fly.

A similar tone seems to permeate Dr. Strangelove. "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is a war room!" "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" plays at the start of Wing Attack Plan R, a plan from which there is no return, and becomes an ironic recurring theme each time we see the plane. When Mandrake tries to call the president so he can save the world, he runs out of loose change and can't make the call. He has to rob a Coke machine.

I come back to Dr. Strangelove now, after nearly 9 years of war in the Middle East, and I wonder how I didn't fully appreciate this film the first time or enjoy Catch-22 before. I read Catch-22 right around the time of the first Gulf War, so I had some awareness. I was in grad school at the start of the second Gulf War, which wasn't long after I'd seen Dr. Strangelove. I even knew some soldiers who were fighting.

I didn't get politically engaged until I was forced — when I became the opinion page editor at The Ball State Daily News and had to have opinions about things that mattered. I had to hire writers who had the same. I wrote editorials and discovered that I did, in fact, care once I learned enough about the issues. Along the way, I rediscovered my inner pinko commie liberal instincts during the Bush administration. Mostly, I became an opinionated asshole, and I wanted everyone to listen to me and think my way. Yeesh.

Since then, I've cooled off. I don't go on newspaper web sites and argue politics with mouth-breathers anymore. I don't write opinion pieces. I still care, but I went from completely disengaged to overly, obsessively, assholishly engaged, and now I've swung back to the middle somewhere, aware of what's up but able to choose my battles better, instead of choosing all of them.

I think that's why I'm a bigger Kubrick fan than ever now.