Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Before the film, we'll be joined by Professor Muhamet Yildiz—MIT Professor of Economics at MIT Economics Department—who will discuss Game Theory.

Stanley Kubrick’s painfully funny take on Cold War anxiety is one of the fiercest satires of human folly ever to come out of Hollywood. The matchless shape-shifter Peter Sellers plays three wildly different roles: Royal Air Force Captain Lionel Mandrake, timidly trying to stop a nuclear attack on the USSR ordered by an unbalanced general; the ineffectual and perpetually dumbfounded U.S. President Merkin Muffley, who must deliver the very bad news to the Soviet premier; and the titular Strangelove himself, a wheelchair-bound presidential adviser with a Nazi past. Finding improbable hilarity in nearly every unimaginable scenario, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a subversive masterpiece that officially announced Kubrick as an unparalleled stylist and pitch-black ironist. — Criterion Collection

About the Speaker

Muhamet Yildiz is a Professor of Economics at MIT Economics Department. He has been at MIT since he received his doctoral degree in 2000 from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is an expert in Microeconomic Theory and Game Theory. His research focuses on the role of beliefs and incomplete information in strategic environments. He is known for his study on sensitivity of strategic behavior to higher-order beliefs (i.e. beliefs about other players’ beliefs). He has also extensively studied the emergence of biased beliefs and the impact of such biases in strategic environment focusing often negotiation delays and commination breakdown.