Welcome to the Weekly Movie Thread, your place on the Avocado to discuss films with your fellow commenters. Want to make a recommendation? Looking for recommendations? Want to share your opinions of movies, both new and classic?

This month we celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb. The movie is Stanley Kubrick’s only overtly comedic work… which makes a perverted amount of sense as it is about something as dark as a weapon that can kill all life on Earth.

The satire looks at the absurdity of a world where we’ve created a weapon whose sole purpose is to murder millions of civilians. But even worse, it’s in the hands of humans… and humans are not to be trusted. There’s a chain of command that looks down upon not following orders, even if those orders mean murdering innocent lives. There’s a power structure that looks at the apocalypse gleefully as a chance to get laid. There are paranoid conspiracy nuts who would like nothing more than to see the world end. The scariest part is how much of this doesn’t seem much like parody at all, but rather the world we’ve lived in since the bomb was created.

There is something truly mythical about the atomic bomb, in that humanity is the architect of its own destruction. Perhaps we don’t worry about it so much now… but how much of it is because we would never be able to function in everyday society if we were always thinking about how precarious our continued existence is, and how much we left the fate of the future in the hands of buffoons?

Bonus prompt: what film best captures our anxiety about nuclear weapons?