merkwürdigliebe

(first and two last photos from my instagram)

i loved this movie. i watch the ending all over again everyday. it is one of the most beautiful things i have ever seen. i have become obsessed with vera lynn's voice too.

the film was very different from what i vaguely pictured beforehand. i meant look at the poster: i thought it was solely about some conspiracy happening through phone conversations with some female figure holding a glass of martini with her dainty fragile fingers (although it partly was)

they dubbed it a black comedy. i tried to recall the moments i burst into a full, apprehensive laughs and i only found a few and it was not the wild ones. i held back a little when laughing because, what if that happened to me (for example the moments when some characters decide to end their lives joyfully, hysterically in one occasion, and sheepishly in another occasion). it was black for sure and ironic and shocking but i would not call it funny. i googled 'why is dr strangelove' and google had suggested me a completion of the sentence: 'funny'

here was the best answer offered by yahoo! answer (you might degrade the source website but i appreciated this view very much):

It's a black comedy aka dark comedy. It's not really meant to be laugh-out-loud hysterical. It's warped humor because we were living in a very dark, scary time period. Released in 1964, that was only two years after the Cuban missile crisis, and we were still embroiled in the Cold War, when part of the world was still behind the Iron Curtain, as it was referred to then. At this precarious time, "Dr. Strangelove" was a very brave movie, especially with its truly warped ending. Just think about the full title: "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb". 

Again, it isn't simply a comedic film. It's a dark comedy, a very bleak one that had some scarily close to life moments when it came to how some people viewed the situation, particularly the military, signaled by such names as Brigadier General Jack Ripper. 

NOTE: While I was writing this, someone came along with many of the same commentary, so I might simply delete this as unnecessary. I, too, grew up during this time period. I was about 10 years old when the missiles were in Cuba and Kennedy and Kruschev were facing off against each other. I was in the hospital when a doctor in the hallway in pediatrics was telling everyone how quickly a bomb could reach us and how angry at him the parents who were staying with the children became, furious about his thoughtlessness. My mother really cut him down to size, upset that he would talk that way where patients could overhear. 

In 1964, it was a frightening situation still, but "Dr. Strangelove" tried to get us to smile about it just a little, not laugh uproariously. That's not what the movie's about. Someone comments about Slim Pickens riding the bomb, which definitely quickly became an iconic image, referred to in other movies and even mimicked in a couple of them.