I avoided watching Adam McKay’s 2021 film Don’t Look Up for about a month and a half. Discourse churned endlessly around the film, at least in the circles of the internet I reside in, and I didn’t want that to impact my view. Once the cries of “best” and “worst movie ever” died down, I finally sat down to watch it. I left with mixed opinions.
Let’s start with the good stuff: It’s funny.
With such political content, it’s easy to jump straight to analysis of the film’s message without acknowledging the entertainment value. The movie’s comedy makes the two and a half hours worth it.
There’s a snarky charm to McKay’s films that I genuinely enjoy, and it’s always a good time to see vile people get ridiculed. The funniest jokes, however, were the stupidest ones. It wasn’t the parody of Trumpisms and media anchors that really got me; it was the silly stuff. It was Jennifer Lawrence’s character, Kate Dibiasky, obsessively wondering why an Air Force Lieutenant General charged her for free snacks in the Pentagon.
Those dumb, little jokes worked better than the attempts at pop culture commentary, all of which felt like an old guy’s conception of Zoomer culture. The weakest bits were always about how wacky and superficial pop culture is. Replace the celebrities and you could do the exact same joke in a movie ten years ago, and even then it would feel dated.
Of course, this movie wouldn’t have stirred up vast amounts of discourse if it was a comedy alone. Ever since its release on Netflix, there was an air of importance around the film. Yes, it was a comedy, but it was also a satire of society today. The chattering consensus among the positive reviewers on the left was that this movie mattered. This movie was grabbing our shoulders and shaking us and screaming, “Wake. The fuck. Up.”
The film revels in tonal whiplash because of this. It skips back and forth from little jokes like Dibiasky’s snack grudge to real, intense moments of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Dr. Randall Mindy, screaming at the camera (literally) that we are all going to die. The metaphorical framing of the movie begins to fade by the final act of the film, and it seems as though McKay is reaching through the screen and saying, “This is a climate change movie.”
It all coalesces in the climactic final scene. All the characters gather around a dinner table and try to have a normal, final meal before the end. The joking tone is gone. In a scene reminiscent of the final moment in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), the characters die together in a cathartic and emotional burst. Before the meteor collides they comment, “we really did try, didn’t we?”
This is what rubbed me the wrong way. Our liberal protagonists end the film having done everything they could—a social media campaign and some TV appearances—and, sure, they’re all going to die, but at the very least, on the way out, they can know that they were right. Nothing captures a liberal fantasy better.
In a mid-credit scene following the death of Earth, the rich elites and politicians who escaped their doom arrive on a new planet through the technology of Elon Musk/Jeff Bezos/Rich Asshole stand in Peter Isherwell, played by Mark Rylance. They climb out of cryogenic sleep pods and enter a new planet, only to be eaten alive by alien birds.
This is our condolence: Sure, we’re doomed. But at least we can hope that the fuckers building bunkers right now will be too stupid to make it without us.
Did we really try?
The real thrust of the film takes place in the media and the White House. There’s a sense that McKay believes this is where politics takes place. There are gestures to protests, but even these protests near the end of the film only demand that people “look up,” while the conservative politicians run a Trumpist campaign demanding that people “don’t look up,” a heavy-handed parallel since these chants rhythmically sound like “Donald Trump.”
Throughout the film, the real goal is to make people acknowledge the meteor. The battle of politics is primarily a battle of information or worldview. While the film does acknowledge the material side of politics—they choose not to nuke the meteor out of the sky because they discover it is made of valuable metals—the film’s main battleground is awareness.
Of course, this does successfully satirize one aspect of modern discourse. Throughout COVID-19 we have seen that information is part of the political battlefield, as people actively deny the lethality of the pandemic or the efficacy of the vaccine. However, the problem does not disappear once people all acknowledge that there’s a problem.
While denialism certainly plays a role in climate change, the more troubling reality is that many people are very aware of climate change. While the film wants to shrug the blame onto the shoulders of a stupid populace, the reality is that the problem is more complex than that. Companies frequently “green-wash” harmful practices to communicate that they are taking climate change seriously. They’re acknowledging the problem.
There are plenty of liberals who strongly believe in the problem. They use reusable bags and bike to work. While such practices can be commendable, and a sustainable society would require such changes, these individualist approaches do very little to impact the broad, corporate nature of climate change. In practice, they become signifiers. They exist so that, as you leave the store, you can know that at least you looked up. When we all die, at least you die knowing you were right.
A bad metaphor at a bad time
While this information battle is a fatal flaw for the film, an even deeper problem is its timing.
When Boots Riley’s 2018 film Sorry to Bother You was released, many assumed that it was a parody of the Trump era. It was seen as a criticism of conservative capitalism and racism. While Riley obviously opposes Trump, he wrote the film during the Obama era. This is always a challenge to political films. It takes time to make movies and our political discourse moves so fast. A film that was written at one political moment is often released at a very different moment, and this change in context changes its meaning.
Don’t Look Up is a satire of the Trump era. Since it focuses on the re-election of President Janie Orlean, played by Meryl Streep, it’s safe to say that the movie is about the last year of the Trump presidency. Following the general sense of doom and hysteria surrounding the 2020 election, the film generally fits the mood among liberals at the time. There was a sense that if Trump was elected, we were all going to die.
Of course, Joe Biden was elected in 2020. Since this film focuses primarily on a conservative administration, it does very little to critique liberals outside of the media. The main focus is on a corrupt, conservative president, however this is critiquing something that doesn’t exist anymore. The film is, in a way, a liberal horror film about Trump winning in 2020.
Now that we don’t have this moronic caricature in the White House, there’s no real push from this movie to change anything. We dodged the bullet already by electing a nice, liberal old man. We have someone in the White House who “looks up.”
Of course, Biden isn’t an advocate of the Green New Deal and billionaires like the ones Isherwell parodies still have relationships with politicians in congress. The problem hasn’t really gone away, but we have plenty of people in power who “look up.” They see us, they hear us, and they won’t do much.
Assuming we lived in an alternate universe where Trump did win in 2020 and the world that this film describes played out, the metaphor of the meteor would still fail. In part, this is because the meteor is a zero-sum game. If the meteor collides, everyone dies. This isn’t exactly the case with climate change.
The third act of the movie treats the failure of activists and awareness movements as the final chapter. Once it’s done, it’s done. No going back. Sit at the table with your family and feel some joy before you explode. However, while climate change is an existential threat, there are a myriad of options that could play out, and fractions of a degree difference look like millions of lives. Even if the game is lost, there is still mitigation and action that can be taken.
Even if we’re staring at the meteor above us, there are still actions that could save a lot of lives. Of course, this film would be incredibly complex if it got into these weeds, but it still leaves the audience with a deep, deep sense of defeatism. By the end of the film, the viewer either thinks, “whew, glad we avoided that and elected Biden” or they think, “it’s all too late,” and then try to squeeze some joy out of being right, adding a dollop of ressentiment for good measure.
Beyond looking up
In the end, the film’s demand of its audience is to have the right emotions. As Dr. Mindy screams at the camera during a climactic moment in the final act, the real request he’s making is that you grieve. The real crisis in America, according to the film, is that people aren’t scared. The film is begging you to be scared, but it isn’t really begging you to do anything.
The politics that play out throughout the film take place in the media and in the White House, but we see very little real activism aside from displays of emotion or expertise. You can compare this to Paul Schrader’s film First Reformed (2017) which, although you may disapprove of the means, does include the protagonist considering violent, drastic action. That film wants you to grieve, and then to do something. Don’t Look Up wants you to believe in science, and then watch the world end in the comfort of your home.
Right now is not the time for defeatism. Climate change is not a meteor, and even the most last-minute change can save numerous lives. Climate change will not look like the planet exploding, it will look like refugees flooding to American shores. Climate change will not look like sudden death, it will be slow, and it will require mitigation. This is existential, but it can also hopeful.
In First Reformed, the audience is invited to hold both hope and despair simultaneously. I believe this is a path forward. While I enjoyed McKay’s jabs at vile people and his snarky satire of current events, he left me cold. He did not provide a path forward because he could not imagine change taking place anywhere aside from electoral politics or news media. If you are watching Don’t Look Up to see bad people get mocked, you’re in for a treat. That’s what McKay does best, and it’s why I believe Vice (2018) worked much better as a film. But as McKay steps into contemporary issues of existential weight that desperately need imaginative paths forward, the responsibility to say something aside from “things are fucked” is even more crucial. In this regard, Don’t Look Up is a failure.