The most pessimistic Kubrick film. Also the funniest.
In this masterful black comedy that mixes madness with machines, we witness the very real possibility of what it would take for human civilization to regress back to gorillas. And should our course go unaltered, we will in every way look and sound like the characters of Dr. Strangelove, who in turn resemble the gorillas of 2001. 

After seeing it well over 20x, here are some observations I made this viewing:

1). As Dr. Strangelove predates 2001, we’re basically watching a dress rehearsal of things to come.

2). There is no difference between Strangelove’s nuclear Armageddon and 2001’s monolith buried under mounds of moon rubble.

3). The Rippers of the world, who want to blow their enemies back to the Stone Age, provide a context for evaluating why 2001’s future civilization “intentionally buried” the monolith.

4). Ripper is the consequence of when gorillas develop a near-religious obsession with monolithic ideals of “purity.”

5). Isn’t it incredible that the destructive power and irrationality of one individual, Ripper, and his thirst for ideological purity, conspiracy, misinformation, and right-wing extremism, constitutes all of the chaos we see in Strangelove? Good thing this doesn’t happen in contemporary politics or military strategy today, right!? 🤔

6). The primal, infantile instinct we see on display in the War Room is no different than watching the gorillas fight over a water hole.

7). The War Room’s “rational” deliberations in Strangelove are honestly as funny as the leopard attacking the man-ape in 2001.

8). Strangelove’s machines take us back in time. 2001’s machines take us up to space. Ironically, the spacetime continuum mocks humanity’s machines in both films, leading to the same apocalyptic bottleneck.

9). The very machines that took us to infinity and beyond are the same machines that will reduce us and our world to mushroom clouds. Machines are inherently amoral. They can serve as tools of communication and progress, or as weapons of destruction and descent. Strangelove is more direct, more cynical about how humanity will use its machines. 2001 is more ambiguous and leaves our future in the gaze of a Star Child. 

10). That humanity chooses death-cult fantasy over reality in Strangelove continues the Kubrickian trend that humans — defined by their presumed mastery over the world — prefer apocalyptic self-destruction over the tenets of the Enlightenment, such as rationality, control, knowledge, progress, liberty, etc. Lolita proves this point in the Humbert-Quilty doubling. 2001 is the grand, cosmic rebuttal that holds out the ***possibility*** of making it through the bottleneck in tact, whereas Strangelove maniacally laughs at the idea.

11). HAL 9000 and the Doomsday machine are built on the same principles of repetition and predictability. Once set in motion, they are no longer subject to rational intervention, or human interference, but can cut off communication with outside forces just as swiftly as the humans who made them. This is the danger of Strangelove, the overreaching confidence in machine power to help us attain our goals without accounting for the ironies of when things backfire. Humans believing they can control their technology is the big cosmic joke of both 2001 and Dr. Strangelove.

12). I’m about 99% sure that Dr. Strangelove himself, the ex-Nazi scientist who was somehow hired to be the United States lead over weapons development, was the inventor of HAL 9000.

13). When the Dr. Strangeloves of the world begin addressing our authority figures as “Mein Führer” while musing over the moral implications of eugenics, you are no longer living in a drama but a comedy.

14). When people like Ripper, Strangelove and Turgidson are voted into office, there should be little surprise why the film ends the way it does. Translation for today’s world: we’re all fucked.

15). When machines outnumber people on planet Earth, like the sight of Mandrake occupying the computer room at the beginning, go ahead and start humming Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again.”

16). The exercise of freewill to avert catastrophe in Strangelove has been handed over to the machinery of “fail-safe” systems and “human reliability” tests. This posture is synonymous with the idea that machines will save us from human error and catastrophe, but the irony is never lost on Strangelove nor 2001. A Clockwork Orange will update “machinery” to “state institutions,” Full Metal Jacket with “military hierarchy,” and Barry Lyndon with “decadent aristocracies.” Same results in each film. The systems, made by humans, fail us. Our unfettered dependence upon authorities, conventions and systems create the illusion of stability subject to profound disillusion and destruction, and I think Kubrick finds it funny that humanity often thinks otherwise. 

17). There’s no way to know if Strangelove begins where 2001 ends, or if 2001 begins where Strangelove ends. It’s actually more probable that both films merge into an infinite feedback loop. See point 18.

18). Strangelove and 2001 form the ancient Ouroboros of our modern technological age: apes evolve to men and men, cutoff from reason and outside communication, devolve back to apes, who once again retreat into primal fantasy, madness and annihilation. Rinse and repeat. 

19). By showing how the human world symbolically moves back in time in Dr. Strangelove and linking it, through the Doomsday Machine, to humanity’s penchant for conspiratorial thinking, communication breakdown, and the perversion of rational-scientific discourse, Kubrick is able to imply that, from the moment Ripper calls for a “Code Red” from his sequestered base, his course inexorably leads all of humanity to 2001's ambiguous glare of the Star Child, the same Star Child who is yet to decide whether to heed the “cosmic burglar alarm” against nuclear bombs circling the planet.

20). Whether or not we succeed in destroying our planet, one thing is critical for us to wrap our heads around. Learning to compassionately bridle our technology in the face of weapons of mass destruction will be the single most important task facing us in the Twenty First Century.

Kubrick Ranked