Don’t read on if you haven’t seen it and plan to, because spoilers.
The just-released film, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as two well-meaning astronomers who discover a “planet-killing” comet headed straight for earth, and Meryl Streep as a Trump-like President who glibly tries to ignore the problem, is currently the most popular movie on Netflix. For good reason, because it’s a rollicking fun satire of American politics, media, tech and celebrity culture.
The screenplay, which was cowritten by filmmaker Adam McKay and progressive muckraker David Sirota, suggests that Americans are so polarized by raw partisanship and dumbed down by clickbait and morning TV pablum that they wouldn’t take effective action against their impending doom. Even worse, that when the dysfunctional powers-that-be in Washington manage to launch a fleet of nuclear-armed rockets to blow the comet off course, a mega-rich tech mogul (played with subdued perfection by Mark Rylance) would be able to convince the President to abort their mission in favor of his own hare-brained plan to wait until it gets closer to earth in order to blow it into smaller, less dangerous pieces and then mine them for valuable rare minerals. Needless to say, things don’t end well.
Some of Don’t Look Up’s satirical moments are absolutely sublime. For example, when the comet gets close enough to be seen from Earth, DiCaprio and Lawrence’s characters attempt a last-ditch campaign to get people to “look up” in order to confirm with their own eyes that disaster is truly coming. In response, Streep’s President holds a series of MAGA-like rallies punctuated by chants of “Don’t look up” and public opinion remains hopelessly divided.
What McKay and Sirota are bluntly saying is, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson’s great line from A Few Good Men: Americans can’t handle the truth. Climate change isn’t quite like an “extinction-level event” due to happen in exactly six months and ten days like the movie’s impending comet strike, but if the richest and most powerful country on the earth can’t mobilize itself to repel an obvious mortal threat, why should we expect any different about the impending rise of the oceans and intensification of deadly weather?
Unfortunately, “we’re doomed” isn’t a winning message for dealing with climate change. Environmentalists tried for decades to rally people by scaring them with images of polluted rivers on fire and starving polar bears, to no avail. But the first great wave of environmental reform, which began in the late 1950s and crested in the early 1970s with the passage of landmark legislation and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, succeeded because most Americans prospered during those years and felt more hopeful about protecting the planet for themselves and future generations — not because we were freaked out about planetary destruction. This time is no different: we will act to defeat climate disaster if we are inspired by a better future. Or we won’t act at all.
It’s telling (to me at least) that when the action in Don’t Look Up shifts from the carnival parody that is Streep’s version of the Oval Office a la Trump to the DiCaprio and Lawrence’s last-ditch efforts to rally the public directly, the film shows us a treacly telethon starring Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi in front of an adoring audience rather than a mass movement marching on all the world’s capitols. Even worse, they’re singing a pop song complete with lyrics like “Look up, what he’s really trying to say; Is get your head out of your ass; Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists,” and “Just look up; Turn off that shit Fox News; ’Cause you’re about to die soon everybody.” It’s a searing send-up of the “We are the World” theory of change, but at least that song was a hopeful one. Meanwhile, back at “Look Up” headquarters, a morose-looking DiCaprio and Lawrence despair as the phones don’t light up in response. Then, in its closing scenes, they go back home for one last family dinner, congratulating themselves for having at least trying really hard to prevent the end of the world and then holding hands as their dining room implodes.
If, as McKay and Sirota seem to be saying, we lack the capacity to effectively organize ourselves, then indeed we are doomed. But Don’t Look Up doesn’t give movement organizers a fair shake. Like just about every movie about politics that has ever come out of Hollywood, it treats the problem of shifting power as a clash of personalities. And so, instead of inspiring more action to deflect the threats presented by global warming, it offers viewers cold discomfort. Thus in the end, it may be great satire, but it defeats its own purpose.