[The scariest thing about Don’t Look Up is that absurd as it
is, it barely exaggerates. Much of our political elite are just as
greedy and foolish, our media just as vapid, and our response to
impending disaster exactly as mind-bogglingly irrational.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

ADAM MCKAY’S DON’T LOOK UP CAPTURES THE STUPIDITY OF OUR
POLITICAL ERA  
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Branco Marcetic
January 2, 2022
Jacobin
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_ The scariest thing about Don’t Look Up is that absurd as it is,
it barely exaggerates. Much of our political elite are just as greedy
and foolish, our media just as vapid, and our response to impending
disaster exactly as mind-bogglingly irrational. _

Don’t Look Up shows that subtlety isn't always a virtue. ,
Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection

 

The times we live in are both shot through with menace and impossibly
stupid. This is one of the defining features of this political era,
and yet I can’t think of many movies in the post-2016 years that
capture this dynamic, or even bother to try, like Adam
McKay’s _Don’t Look Up_.

The marquee productions about capital “P” politics in the Donald
Trump years had plenty of the former. Vehicles like _The Post_
[[link removed]] and _The
Comey Rule_
[[link removed]] filtered
the news we all sat around watching and reading after the 2016
election through the lens of a 1970s-style political thriller, and
were celebrated for flattering establishment biases. The heroes were
institutions like the press and the FBI, nobly defending norms and
democracy from a Nixonian assault unparalleled in its danger. It’s
no coincidence this came at a time when much of the establishment had
convinced themselves they were on the verge of uncovering a sprawling
espionage scandal and dictatorial conspiracy all in one.

_Don’t Look Up _feels a much better fit for the reality we’re
actually living through. There’s no villainous authoritarian ending
democracy; as in our world, American democracy in the film has already
been smothered under the weight of oligarch money and corporate
profit-chasing. There’s no secret evil conspiracy, at least in the
salacious form these Trump-era stories imagined; the villains are a
self-obsessed, blinkered elite, and it’s their greed, venality, and
stupidity that lead them to evil decisions.

 
If nothing else, the discourse now swirling around the movie has
probably clued you in that it’s an allegory for climate disaster.
Astronomers Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and Randall Mindy
(Leonardo DiCaprio) discover a comet the size of Mount Everest making
a beeline for Earth, and determine (after desperately triple-checking
and rechecking) that it’s set to cause an apocalyptic event of the
kind that killed the dinosaurs in only six months’ time. They soon
fly to Washington to brief the president.

Climate change has long been compared to an approaching asteroid by
incredulous scientists and activists who ask, as they tear their hair
out, if we’d respond with the same denial and delay to the kind of
planetary disaster immortalized in end-of-history blockbusters
like _Armageddon_. Those movies have conditioned us to assume that
no, we’d put together a plucky team of characters, rough around the
edges but with a lot of heart, who, with the help of modern science
and unlimited government resources, would win out over the space rock.
Their only obstacles would be their own personal issues, their
inability to work as a team, and the immensity of the task itself.

McKay and David Sirota, the journalist, _Jacobin _contributor,
and former Bernie Sanders speechwriter who cowrote the film’s
story, flip that timeworn scenario on its head. What if stopping the
actual disaster _wasn’t_ the hardest part? What if the hardest
part was convincing anyone to even bother trying?

Dibiasky and Mindy are frustrated every step of the way in their
efforts. The head of NASA — a political donor, we later learn, with
no background in astronomy — at first doesn’t believe it.
President Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her dimwit son and chief of staff,
Jason (Jonah Hill), initially blow them off, then look for a rationale
to delay doing anything about it; the midterms are coming up, after
all. The press is mostly uninterested, and the one establishment paper
that treats the story as the blockbuster it is quickly gives up on it
after the White House disputes the science. The duo lands on a popular
morning show, but an exasperated Dibiasky is ignored and mocked after
what looks like an on-air meltdown.

Things don’t get much easier once the government finally does take
the threat seriously, a version of what might happen if Michael
Bay’s oil drillers had to operate in our world of cultural
polarization, runaway greed, and social-media-driven psychosis. In all
its absurdity, the movie is a depressingly accurate portrayal of this
specific era, from the vapid media landscape and the foibles of social
media stardom to its mock political ad of a suburban mother earnestly
telling the camera that “the jobs the comet’s gonna create sound
great.”

All of this would be moot if the movie was no good. Thankfully, the
movie is rooted in terrific comedic performances from a stacked cast
— the two leads in particular — who keep us caring about their
characters even as they dare us to give up on them. Mindy becomes
intoxicated with his own microcelebrity and becomes little more than a
government flack. Dibiasky checks out of the struggle entirely in
sullen apathy. It’s remembering what truly matters — human
connection, relationships, the small pleasures like sitting around a
dinner table together — that brings them back from the brink, even
as the planet slides over it. The result is at once entertaining,
tense, and devastating.

Rejecting the Anti-Populist Turn

The film thankfully swerves away from one of the worst impulses of
post-Trump discourse and its anti-populist tendencies
[[link removed]].
Critics have charged the filmmakers with smugness and contempt for
ordinary people, portraying a country too stupid to save itself.
They’re wrong.

The _people_ of the world of _Don’t Look Up_ decidedly aren’t
the problem. Bar patrons coax the horrible truth about the
government’s inaction out of our heroes and respond with concern and
violent outrage. A sweet Midwestern Christian boy played by Timothée
Chalamet casually assumes the comet isn’t real, but changes his mind
with evidence and exceedingly gentle persuasion. At a Trump-like
rally, Jason implores the crowd that they “Don’t look up,” until
a doughy, red-hatted attendee does, and sees the comet clearly
streaking right at them. “Fucking lied to us!” he yells.

In a reversal of the prevailing liberal narrative since 2016 — which
either casts all ordinary Trump voters as irredeemable, bigoted
villains, to the point of fantasizing
[[link removed]] that
they lose their health insurance, or dumps the blame on nonvoters for
failing their politicians — it’s the country’s _elites
and_ _institutions_, including the media, that are the real problem
in _Don’t Look Up_. All corrupted by money, they mislead,
manipulate, and distract the rest of us from what really matters.
Maybe this is why the film’s been met with surprising hostility
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a lot of the mainstream press, which have complained chiefly about the
film’s lack of subtlety.

But subtlety isn’t always a virtue. _Dr. Strangelove_, the Cold War
classic that McKay’s film has been widely and justifiably compared
to, was hardly a masterclass in understatement, featuring a US
military advised by a Nazi scientist with a sentient, murderous hand,
and its final shot of a cowboy pilot practically orgasming on top of a
falling nuclear warhead. There are different ways to make a movie, and
not every climate film has to be Paul Schrader’s excellent _First
Reformed_. The impressive streaming numbers
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Look Up_ so far suggest McKay and Sirota’s approach has been the
right one for their purposes of shaking the public by the shoulders
and begging them to pay attention.

I’m also not convinced the movie is as aggressively obvious as its
critics charge. My immediate thought after watching the movie went to
its _restraint_. If you’re not one of the relative minority of
people hyperaware of climate change or familiar with the movie before
it came out, there’s little to suggest its central allegory, short
of a handful of brief shots of polar bears and other wildlife in
end-of-the-world montages. It’s all ambiguous enough that, both
anecdotally and based on the movie’s reception so far
[[link removed]], a not
insignificant chunk of people thought it was actually about the
pandemic. Critics would do well to remember most people aren’t
highly educated, habitual news consumers like themselves.

The _Strangelove_ comparisons stick because both movies do a similar
thing: They take a fundamentally absurd, nonsensical piece of logic
that’s central to our politics — the nuclear policy of mutually
assured destruction in Kubrick’s film and the denial of and even
profit-making delusions toward the climate crisis in McKay’s — and
let them play out in front of us. The results are laughable and
unbelievable. It’s _insane_ that people in power and influence
would jeopardize stopping the literal apocalypse because they either
saw it as a moneymaking opportunity or because they didn’t want to
talk about bad news.

And yet this is the maddening reality of the climate crisis today,
where business and political figures insist that preventing planetary
disaster is too expensive and would cost jobs, and probably the most
progressive anchor on cable news casually justifies
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lack of his network’s climate coverage on the basis that it’s a
“ratings killer.” Just last week, one of the nation’s top
newspapers giddily celebrated
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leaders around the world were abandoning their climate pledges and
“starving the issue of political oxygen,” something it labels
“climate realism.”

For all the critics’ concerns that the movie is undermining its own
goal, or that it’s stealing the thunder of hardworking climate
campaigners, it’s worth looking to actual scientists
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There the film has been near universally
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one of the few bright spots in a year full of gloomy climate news. The
gripes about its lack of subtlety haven’t landed with climate
scientists, who instead recognize
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scenes of the astronomers vainly trying to warn a pair of professional
cable news morons not as over-the-top satire but as a reality
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lived through.

The scariest thing about _Don’t Look Up_ is that absurd as it is,
it barely exaggerates. Much of our political elite are just as greedy
and foolish, our media just as vapid, and our response to impending
disaster exactly as mind-bogglingly irrational as in the movie. But
there _is_ one major difference (and it does involve a spoiler): it
may be too late for the characters in _Don’t Look Up_, but it’s
not for us in the real world. Let’s prove McKay wrong by not sharing
his characters’ fate.

Branko Marcetic [[link removed]] is
a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday's Man: The Case
Against Joe Biden [[link removed]]. He
lives in Chicago, Illinois.

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