Don't Look Around

 

By sheer number of viewing hours, the new feature film Don’t Look Up is an enormous hit—the biggest Netflik has had since it began.  Adam McKay’s movie portraying responses to the warning of a comet about to obliterate life on Earth has also been met with deeply divided critical and popular opinion.  Presumably a large proportion of that opinion is guided by the movie’s metaphorical target: America’s response to the climate crisis.

 Apart from comparisons to the satirical standard of Doctor Strangelove (1964), few written reactions to the movie reach back much farther than 1998’s Armageddon, in which Bruce Willis saves the world from an oncoming asteroid (the other such movie of that year—and the better one—Deep Impact, is seldom mentioned.)  But the basic movement of Don’t Look Up follows a template that goes back at least to the 1951 George Pal classic, When Worlds Collide:  Astronomers accidentally find the planet-killing object, they sound the alarm to “the authorities,” they are ridiculed and disbelieved. 

 It is the specifics of how the plot plays out in contemporary America that McKay portrays with mesmerizing precision.  He also manages to get laughs, but it is really the laughter of recognition, the release of seeing the absurdity of our reality playing out. 

 When Worlds Collide emerged at the beginning of another age of absurdity, the nuclear age.  The history of the period makes clear that almost immediately after Hiroshima, a lot of people realized how craziness had come to rule the world.  But official denial in the decade of conformity and McCarthyism forced an eerie and sometimes frantic quietism.  Besides which, the specter of sudden nuclear apocalypse at any moment was too overwhelming to contemplate.  Official denial became deliberate and then unconscious national denial.

 But then there were all those atomic monsters, alien invasions and cosmic catastrophes in mostly B movies all through the decade. On the Beach (1959) was a drama about nuclear war without showing it. There never was a feature film that depicted nuclear holocaust—and it wasn’t until the 1980s that television took it on, notably with The Day After (1983), watched by 100 million Americans—and President Ronald Reagan, who was powerfully affected by it. 

But by 1964 it could be the subject of satire.  Though Doctor Strangelove is now a widely recognized classic, it was controversial in its day.  Its plot was absurd and yet could happen.  Several of its key characters seemed like caricatures, yet they resembled known types and even real people.  The difference between real life General Curtis Le May and movie character General Buck Turgidson may have chiefly been that George C. Scott was a more expressive actor.

 The characters in Don’t Look Up are notably not so exaggerated.  In the age of Trump, not even Meryl Streep’s President is as over the top.  (Jonah Hill as her son and chief of staff—presumably a stand-in for Don Jr.—may be the movie’ s only overt comic character.)  The absurdity of nearly everyone else is in the main plot is real—in some cases, speeded up, but true to contemporary life. Without blatant stereotypes and simplistic caricatures, some viewers don’t recognize this as satire.  But the history of satire is richer than recent movie history. 

The satire is partly in the metaphor.  The filmmakers are apparently not being shy about saying their intent was to make this movie metaphorically about America’s treatment of the climate crisis.  As some writers have recognized, the metaphor can also extend to the Covid Crisis, and the ongoing political crisis symbolized by January 6/2021. 

 The climate metaphor works in some ways and not in others, but that’s par for the course—otherwise it wouldn’t be a metaphor.  Unlike an annihilating comet collision, the effects of climate distortion destroy over a long time.  Its causes are different, and different measures are required to address it.  Those measures are not as simple as shooting a rocket at it.  In terms of awareness and acceptance, the expensive and long term campaign by giant fossil fuel interests to deny its existence may well have been decisive, and that factor is absent from this film. 

But like a comet on the edge of the solar system, climate catastrophe was a future threat not discernible to the naked eye. And political self-interest as well as media trivializing have been factors in supporting the natural reluctance, the manufactured resistance and the toxic denial that prevented society from facing the consequences before they become inevitable.

 There’s a difference between oversimplifying (always a tendency in movies about a complex subject as well as  in traditional conventions of satire), and simplifying in order to concentrate on similarities, which is what this movie mostly succeeds in doing.   For its subject, after all, is not climate or comets.  The subject is how America reacts to a credible if unfamiliar threat to its existence--such as the very real and extremely consequential example of the climate crisis.

 In an otherwise cogent article in Vox, Kelsey Piper rejects the climate metaphor by glibly and without explanation dismissing the idea that the climate crisis is a threat to human survival.  Clearly such destruction would not necessarily happen all at once, like a comet colliding.  But there is plenty of evidence that the threat to the survival of human civilization as we know it is real and profound.  The UN has more or less officially linked the climate crisis with the threat of a mass extinction event, meaning that life as we know it on this planet would be over.  If the climate crisis gets predictably worse and mass extinction occurs, some remnants of the human species may survive, but life as we know it almost certainly will not. 

Which brings us to the final scene of Don’t Look Up.  The political conflict in the latter part of the movie is between those who plead for people to “look up” and see the comet, which is the analogue of seeing the evidence, both scientific and in the fires, floods, sea rise and extreme weather in the obvious world.  But the metaphorical MAGA crowd follow their leaders’ chants of “don’t look up.” Which is: don’t look at the fires, don’t notice the Covid death toll, and don’t look at the footage of the attack on the Capitol. Again, as blatant and absurd as the real American moment.

 Throughout the film, the astronomers played by Leonardo DiCaprio (Dr. Mindy) and Jennifer Lawrence (Kate Dibiasky) have tried to get leaders and the public to face the reality and do something about it before it is too late, while their personal lives spiral out of control.  By the end, as the comet is about to arrive, they come together in the DiCaprio character’s Midwestern suburban home, forming a last family, for a final dinner.  They pointedly ignore talking about what’s about to happen, though they do each say what they are grateful for, a ritual that some now observe at Thanksgiving. 

After the meal is over, and they are chatting about apple pie and coffee, Dr. Mindy leans back and says, “We really did have everything, didn't we?”  And then the walls explode.

 To me those are the most devastating lines in the film. As defined by its ending, this is an apocalyptic movie.  Like When Worlds Collide, there are a few human survivors, both on Earth and in the far future and far reaches of space—though in this film it is more than hinted that in neither place are they likely to survive for very long.  The implication of Doctor Strangelove’s ending is that human civilization is totally destroyed, but to the absurdly inappropriate tune of “We’ll Meet Again,” a sentimental song of weary courage from World War II.  The satirical point of it in Doctor Strangelove is that once the bombs start to fall, we won’t meet again. 

 There is some irony in Dr. Mindy’s statement when applied to the climate crisis metaphor, since that “everything” came at a cost of deforming the climate and everything that results.  Still, given the circumstances of that scene, a couple of other interpretations are possible.

 In his Vox article, Piper sees this scene and this statement as motivating action before it is too late. He sees it as urging us to “look up,” to become aware of survival threats, to “acknowledge, and then to actually act.”

 That’s the traditional role of an apocalyptic story: as a cautionary tale.  I might add that “look up” is applicable to more than the sky—especially when there are so many people walking through the unseen world with their eyes constantly cast down to the devices in their hands, and their heads and hearts in virtual communities where agreement is more important than observing the real world.

 This cautionary tale interpretation is perfectly appropriate, especially for viewers who will likely live into the decades when the dangers increase substantially, particularly the effects of the climate crisis as it jars the world order, and the mass extinctions that tear at the support systems of the planet.

 But I could not help but think of the experience of the person saying those lines in that last scene.  Jennifer Lawrence has her own connections to dystopian stories (The Hunger Games films) but Leonardo DiCaprio is extensively connected to the possibilities of apocalypse in the real world. 

For there is no prominent actor on the planet more deeply and obviously involved in environmental action, and particularly in warning of the threats to survival because of the climate crisis than Leonardo DiCaprio.  Those efforts go back to at least 1998 when he formed his foundation to address these issues.  I count at least three documentaries on climate that he narrated, hosted, produced or co-wrote, or a combination of these roles: The 11^th Hour in 2008, Before the Flood in 2016 and Ice on Fire in 2019.  He used his best actor Oscar speech in 2016 to talk about the climate crisis. He was an official UN representative on climate, and spoke at UN climate summits in 2014 and 2016.

 During that time (from the 90s to now), addressing the climate crisis went from being a bipartisan promise to a wedge issue dividing political parties as well as families.  Actions taken so far, or even pledged, are widely known to be insufficient.  Meanwhile, effects have gotten worse faster than even worst-case scenarios predicted. For the past several years, activists have concentrated on efforts to prevent the worst from happening in the far future, while warning that we need to prepare for the devastating effects that are by now all but inevitable in the nearer future, and in fact are underway.

 But this past year particularly shows that American society is not up to the challenge in significant ways. The ongoing response to the Covid crisis and the crisis of American democracy as well as the ongoing effects of climate suggest this society can’t deal coherently with much of anything.  That’s the awful truth we like to avoid confronting: don’t look around.  But if there is any chance to limit climate related devastation, this must be faced and fixed.  Releasing us to first laugh about it and then deal with it is this movie’s chief contribution.  

When Midwestern American academic scientist Dr. Mindy utters those last words, he knows what’s going to happen, and why.  I suspect that with his own set of experiences in learning the dimensions of the climate crisis, trying to communicate and then observing how things are at this moment, the actor Leonardo DiCaprio might, at least in part, be joining in the same sentiment.  For this remarkable scene in particular makes Don’t Look Up not only a cautionary tale, but an elegy. 

In the Star Trek universe, the future is interrupted by a devastating world nuclear war in the mid-21st century, leading to a new Dark Ages until the first warp flight and First Contact with the Vulcans.  Civilization resumes, with new goals, new attitudes, new rules.  As we get closer to the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, it's increasingly possible that climate crisis effects (drought, hunger, etc.) could itself trigger nuclear exchanges.  There are all kinds of ways the world could devolve into chaos before the worst effects of an unaddressed climate disruption change our Earth for a very, very long time.  That future would look nothing like the same San Francisco and New Orleans of Star Trek's 24th century.

But Star Trek at least imagines a future and how we might get there.  At the same time, through the metaphor of aliens, it imagines the lives of others who are different.  Imagining the future is a step towards taking responsibility for how the present shapes that future.  Imagining others engenders the empathy needed to work together to create a better future--and not incidentally, a better present.  There is a sense that elegy is appropriate and inevitable, given our current circumstances.   But a commitment to the kind of future Star Trek represents constitutes grounds for hope, and perhaps opportunity.

  Footnote (or maybe the after the credits bonus)

In When Worlds Collide film, there’s also intervention at a key moment by a very rich man.  The difference is that in the Pal movie, the millionaire wants to save his own life, so he finances the building of a spaceship. In the McKay movie, the tech billionaire prevents the effort to break up the comet for the prospect of profit—and then when that doesn’t work, he escapes in his own spaceship.  The alarming new roles of tech billionaires, as well as the more familiar corruption and cynicism of politicians (who don’t have to be Trumpians) and the conscious and apparently endemic failures of news media, together move this movie way too close to being a documentary.