Peter Sellers was such a fine comic that the director Stanley Kubrick cast him in three different roles in the film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Or arguably four, if we count Dr. Merkwürdigliebe, the former name from Dr. Strangelove's hidden past. Kubrick's devastating satire was created in an era overshadowed by the threat of two global powers. The U-2 Incident, the Vietnam War, the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of JFK... Pretty nightmarish, right? Today, there are no machines stocked full of atom bombs patrolling along enemy borders, no pushing of ominous buttons, no more megalomaniac military-industrial complex and conspiracy theories. Peace reigns. Why would we ever be concerned about the world being in thrall to the military-industrial complex?
After more than half a century, though, Kubrick has lost none of his power. He presents a crisis to introduce those elements of exaggeration that are essential to any satire. Carl von Clausewitz once wrote that war is just politics with other means. But what happens when this war might be the last? If something irreversible occurs... Mind you, if we're talking about the bomb, there is also always another question waiting in the background: who is going to take responsibility for it all? Who is making the decision for us? But let's not get too serious! At the end of the day, we are only talking about a satire. And those strange looking things certainly aren't mushroom clouds. They are surely just of the normal, white, fluffy variety. Only with a rather funny shape.

In English, with Hungarian subtitles.

Presented by: Müpa Budapest