Apocalypse, from "Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (1964), directed by Stanley Kubrick
We have as part of our apocalypse fiesta perhaps the granddaddy of them all, the finale of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Needless to say, it's a staple of my International Politics on Film course; and it's almost certainly the greatest black comedy ever made. One thing you notice is it's a virtually all-male movie -- the one female actor who appears (Tracy Reed) plays a general's mistress who's been featured on the cover of Playboy. But Kubrick is merciless about masculine pretensions and pomposity, and he was probably the first to depict the connection of not just nuclear weaponry, but nuclear ideology, with patriarchy and male supremacy. There are dozens of examples in the film, but it's writ large in the finale, where we have the symbolically emasculated Dr. Strangelove conjuring a vision of an orgiastic, male-ruled utopia, which seems to go over pretty well with the guys. Note that this scene takes place in arguably the greatest set ever constructed, the War Room at Shepperton Studios in the UK. Then we get the immortal pairing of nuclear and thermonuclear blasts (it always amazes me to think that my late father watched two of these go off in the Australian desert in the '50s) with Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again," which manages to be funny, sentimental, and terrifying at once. Note also that here we see Peter Sellers playing two of his three roles in the movie, as President Merkin Muffley and Dr. Strangelove himself; combined with his exquisite turn as the make-do British officer, Lionel Mandrake (spoiler alert: another fertility reference), it makes for arguably the supreme example of comedic acting in post-World War Two cinema. But I also wanted to give you the iconic scene in which Slim Pickens rides the missile to his, and the world's, annihilation. You don't get much more phallic than that.
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