You know those movies you’ve always heard about but never seen? For me, that was “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964). I knew it was about the Cold War, that Stanley Kubrick directed it and that “Gravity Falls” referenced it in their finale 50 years later, but that was pretty much it. It’s a classic, but isn’t everything? I’ve already seen “Citizen Kane,” allegedly the best movie of all time; What else do you want from me?
Clearly people disagree with me, because filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s latest movie “Digger” (2026) is essentially “Dr. Strangelove” updated for our modern age. Both are black comedy satires dealing with the end of the world, and crucially, both films agree on something fundamental: the power of comedy to help us through perilous times.
I finally checked “Dr. Strangelove” off my to-watch list last summer, and I was surprised by how solemn it left me feeling. Throughout the film, a crew of men in their late thirties (and one woman) deliver increasingly absurd lines completely deadpan while discussing the end of the world. It’s funny, sure, but if you ever pause to genuinely consider the situation, it’s horrific. The fate of humanity is left in the hands of the most incompetent, nonsensical men, and there’s literally nothing we can do about it.
The film ends with a sequence of nuclear bombs exploding while Vera Lynn sings “We’ll Meet Again.” I remember sitting on my couch, watching mushroom clouds bloom on the TV screen, and feeling strangely peaceful. What is there to say when the world has already ended?
Of course, nuclear war isn’t quite the threat that it was in the 1960s. The president did just say it was fine to bomb Los Angeles, so maybe it’s actually making a comeback, but it’s certainly not as prevalent a fear as it was during the Cold War. We have bigger fears now, like being kidnapped off the streets or falling in love with an AI chatbot. So, what is our 21st-century equivalent? What’s the world-ending threat that we can’t really do much to stop?
Iñárritu thinks it’s climate change, and I’m tempted to agree. My entire life, I’ve been familiar with climate change as the phenomenon that’s eventually going to kill us all. And, unlike many of the other dangers we’re facing, it’s a global issue — just as nuclear war was in Kubrick’s heyday. The power to doom everyone lies only in the hands of a few.
In “Digger,” Iñárritu takes “Dr. Strangelove” and adapts its themes to be relevant today, while preserving the satirical black-comedy style. Instead of following Air Force officers and government advisors, “Digger” focuses primarily on Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon whose drilling in Greenland has detached a massive glacier. It’s up to him, alongside a decrepit U.S. President and his inane cabinet, to stop the glacier before it kills several million people in northern Europe.
Of course, stopping the glacier would mean admitting he was wrong, and that could lead to his extremely profitable oil rigs getting shut down. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?
While I was able to remain a little more removed from “Dr. Strangelove,” a distance granted by the sixty-some years between it and me, Iñárritu never lets you forget that the choices these men make have serious consequences. He shows you what the world looks like when the people in power only consider their own economic self-interest, and it does not look pretty. In fact, it looks scarily like the one we’re living in now.
So, what do we do with all of this? If the world is going to end, and there’s nothing we can do about it, how do we move forward? As it turns out, Kubrick’s answer back in 1964 and Iñárritu’s in 2026 are the same: laugh about it.
“Satire offers us a unique way to understand the world. It is the harsh mirror of reality held up in front of us, showing us everything we don’t want to admit.”
Satire offers us a unique way to understand the world. It is the harsh mirror of reality held up in front of us, showing us everything we don’t want to admit. Yet, while it presents objectively awful truth, we don’t walk away feeling depressed or hopeless. Instead, we’re left feeling the aftereffects of a good laugh, or possibly inspired to prevent fiction from becoming reality.
Or perhaps, like me, it leaves you with a quiet sense of peace. When I watch the end of the world unfold on the screen before me, it feels like I’m reaching an epiphany. There are some situations we cannot control, no matter how hard we try; one day, the world is going to end, but in the meantime, we just have to keep living the best that we can.
For me, satire is a way to process feelings of helplessness. Often, when I check the news, and see page after page of preventable disasters, it’s hard not to feel powerless. As one character in “Digger” points out, the world is “funny, and it’s stupid, and it’s scary and it makes no goddamn sense.” But watching movies like “Digger” and “Dr. Strangelove” helps me reclaim some of that. By acknowledging the absurdity of the world we live in, I’m able to avoid getting bogged down by some of its horrors.
As Kubrick himself wrote in his notes, “if the modern world could be summed up in a single word it would be absurd. The only truly creative response to this is the comic vision of life.”
When we exist in a world so seemingly devoid of rational thought, sometimes the only thing we can do is laugh, and through laughter, we can grieve a bit for what we’ve lost. So go rewatch the Internet Archive’s really low-quality upload of “Dr. Strangelove” or spend $20 to experience “Digger” at the theater before every last scene gets unintentionally spoiled to you. I promise you, the catharsis of the apocalypse is worth it.
Maggie McAteer SC ’30 spends too much time going down rabbit holes on Wikipedia and scrolling through Letterboxd reviews for movies she hasn’t seen. Catch her at the local AMC every weekend to make the most of the A-List subscription draining her bank account.
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