SOURCE: “Dr. Strangelove (1964): Nightmare Comedy and the Ideology of Liberal Consensus,” in American Quarterly, Vol. XXXI, No. 5, Winter, 1979, pp. 697-717.

In the following essay, Maland discusses how Dr. Strangelove functions as a response to the American nuclear policy of the early 1960s.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) is one of the most fascinating and important American films of the 1960s. As a sensitive artistic response to its age, the film presents a moral protest of revulsion against the dominant cultural paradigm in America—what Geoffrey Hodgson has termed the Ideology of Liberal Consensus.¹ Appearing at roughly the same time as other works critical of the dominant paradigm—Catch 22 is a good literary example of the stance—Dr. Strangelove presented an adversary view of society which was to become much more widely shared among some Americans in the late...