Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box (1929, G.W. Pabst)

Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box (1929, G.W. Pabst)

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

“I started the work on the screenplay with every intention of making the film a serious treatment of the problem of accidental nuclear war. As I kept trying to imagine the way in which things would really happen, ideas kept coming to me which I would discard because they were so ludicrous. I kept saying to myself, ‘I can’t do this. People will laugh.’

But after a month or so I began to realize that all the things I was throwing out were the things which were most truthful. After all, I what could be more absurd than the very idea of two mega-powers willing to wipe out all human life because of an accident, spiced up by political differences that will seem meaningless to people a hundred years from now as the theological differences of the Middle Ages appear to us today?”

-Stanley Kubrick