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**JANUARY 5, 2022**
Kuttner on TAP
Look Up!
Appreciate the brilliance of the season's most profound,
category-busting movie.
Don't Look Up is described as a parody of Trumpism and climate denial.
It is elegantly that. But more importantly, the movie is a dead-on
satire of the interconnected debasement of America's politics, pop
culture, conventional media, social media, spectacle, tech and corporate
elite-and of how the corruption of each element corrupts the other,
feeding the general cynicism and the craving for a fascist savior,
political or corporate.
Credit goes to the director, writers, and producers: Adam McKay, David
Sirota, Kevin Messick, and Ron Suskind. The public seems to grasp what
this movie is about more than many critics.
Don't Look Up is the top Netflix hit, so no spoiler alert is needed: A
graduate student (Jennifer Lawrence) discovers that a comet is headed
directly for Earth, where it will wipe out human life. She and her
professor (Leonardo DiCaprio) meet with the president (Meryl Streep),
who is torn between denial and acting decisively to save the planet
(Trump and vaccines?).
The president has a demented chief-of-staff son (the Trump kids). I am
told that the opportunistic Streep character was intended as three parts
Trump and one part the Clintons.
The president, after dithering, initially orders NASA to send a nuclear
weapon to explode in space and deflect the comet. But here comes the
best part of the movie.
A tech billionaire, played by Mark Rylance, realizes that the comet
contains trillions of dollars' worth of rare minerals. So he devises a
rival mission, blessed by the president, to break the comet into bits
that will fall into the ocean to be profitably harvested. The mission
fails.
In a formidable cast, Rylance steals the show. The Rylance character is
the CEO of BASH Cellular, a data-mining company that can read people's
thoughts and predict their futures.
Rylance was actually a late addition. At one point, DiCaprio was to play
both the scientist and the billionaire, and the billionaire was a more
conventional business thug. Rylance, soft-spoken and new-agey, has
created a character who perfectly captures the creepy, messianic allure
of Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos et al., as well as their hypocrisy and
willingness to sacrifice humanity.
As a Rylance obsessive, I have seen him, live, playing an astonishing
range of roles from Richard III to a Minnesota ice fisherman, and this
could be his most inventive and true creation of a character ever.
One of the movie's many grace notes is the send-up of manic happy-news
talk shows. Here, the co-hosts interview the scientists but want only an
upbeat story. Even the good-guy scientist of the piece (DiCaprio) ends
up corrupted, promoting the comet's commercial potential and having a
cheesy fling with the talk show co-host (Cate Blanchett), whose
character is as cynical off camera as she is giddily upbeat on TV.
Those who have dismissed the movie as too much of a downer, or too
obvious a parody of science denial, miss the point.
**Don't Look Up** is far richer as an excavation of the codependency
of corporate and political fascism, enabled by the distraction of
spectacle, social media, and tech.
The takeaway: If we are doomed, it is not mainly because of climate
denial.
****
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
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Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter
**Robert Kuttner's latest book is**
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.
[link removed]
Rollups: There's a Hospital Bed Monopoly
Hillrom controls about 75 percent of the hospital bed market, and is
using its market power to undercut rivals, according to a federal
lawsuit. BY DAVID DAYEN
The Big Student Loan Lie
The numbers
thrown around in the debate over whether to cancel student debt are made
up. BY JOHN R. BROOKS
The Rampant Fraudulent Billing in Outsourced Veterans' Health Care
With taxpayers on the hook for services never performed BY SUZANNE
GORDON
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