The Letterboxd Files: Don't Look Up
So much of the conversation around the new Adam McCay film gets it all wrong.
Welcome, everyone, to another installment of what I’ve decided to call The Letterboxd Files, a recurring segment where I take a review I wrote about a recent movie on letterboxd.com and flesh it out into a more formalized thing. The first time I did this was for No Time To Die last year, and I don’t plan on attempting to schedule these ahead of time or anything. If I realize I’m going long and have more to say about a film than I originally anticipated, I’ll try to translate it to this medium.
—
Out of all the buzzy award season movies this year, Don’t Look Up is likely the most controversial. While it’s certainly earned praise in some corners of the film world, many have trashed the Netflix offering for what they see as a smug tone and an on-the-nose plot: After a pair of scientists (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) discover a planet-killing comet hurtling toward Earth, the world’s politicians and billionaires (led by a president who appears to be a Trump/Hillary hybrid, played by Meryl Streep) lurch into inaction, attempting a series of market-based, ineffectual solutions while the world at large debates whether the comment actually exists.
Despite its somewhat chilly reception, the movie is very good! I know a lot of online film types have decided to gang up on it, and some of that is understandable. I don't know that I'd say it’s "smug," per se, but certainly "strident" and "obvious" are adjectives that come to mind, and it is not as funny as you would want a movie that is ostensibly a comedy to be (especially one that clocks in over two hours). But then again, maybe the big mistake was marketing it as a comedy at all, despite there being some good jokes and it also being the first movie I've liked (a very funny) Timothee Chalamet in.
Don’t Look Up is, at its most comedic, a pitch-black acrid satire (there are people calling it a 2.5-hour Gal Gadot Imagine video who out of their fucking minds; it's the exact opposite of what that video was trying to do). At its least comedic, in its final minutes, it's a downright horror film, an unflinching contemplation of a race of people unwilling, uncaring, incapable of doing anything about their own easily-predictable demise. It is also, in its own way, much more about America's systemic problems than it is about any one issue, which is another reason why I think the conversation/marketing around this movie has destroyed a lot of people's understanding of it: It is not about climate change, not really.
Except in the ways, of course, that it is. Director/screenwriter Adam McCay and his co-writer, former Bernie Sanders speechwriter David Sirota, have been outspoken about the coming climate disaster in the press for this movie, DiCaprio is a long-time climate advocate, and climate change is obviously the easiest real-world thing to map onto this movie's premise of "imminent environmental apocalypse will cause untold death and destruction." But at its core, it's less about that one issue than it is about the overarching idea that the world as a whole and the United States specifically no longer have an infrastructure, that there is nothing in place anymore that can solve complex problems. We took that shit out back and shot it in the head, or we stripmined it for component parts, which is something the tech billionaire played by Mark Rylance tries to do to the comet in this movie.
When it comes to conveying this concept, Don't Look Up is actually capable of a little subtlety and an impressive bit of range. Consider all the angles it takes here, like the underfunding of the original mission to break up the comet (the government uses decommissioned missiles and ships, presumably because they didn’t want to pay for up-to-date models), a program which is ultimately replaced by a much more lavish (and, crucially, unregulated) privatized approach. Consider Leo's arc, where the "good guy" becomes part of the D.C. media/consultant blob and begins to willingly accede to the accepted status quo without even realizing it. Consider most of all how every policy position and activity taken in the movie is almost immediately atomized into social capital -- which can only be spent in the eternal present, obscuring the idea of a concrete future.
This final, bleak point really comes into focus at Don’t Look Up’s crescendo, a pair of dueling rallies between advocates of a coordinated government response to the comet and a Trumpesque horde of conservative cranks, half of whom don’t believe a comet is coming at all. The critique is more immediately apparent in the events of the latter rally, where Streep peacocks around on stage for the thrill of instant adoration, but it’s equally applicable to the former. Everyone there, from the attendees to the celebrity performers, is obsessed with the optics, with what people will think of them being there and how being there makes them on the side of the angels. It's Michelle Obama talking about how we need to vote like our lives depended on it, despite everyone knowing deep down that nothing will happen if we do, just like nothing always happens.
Another discourse about this movie that I find sort of incomprehensible is that it is about how America is a country of stupid yokels. The movie is pretty clear that to the extent this is true, it's by design of the political and media strata in which all Americans are inevitably stewed. Every day, all around us, we are faced with institutions that are algorithmically designed to psychoanalyze us and feed us whatever is deemed to make us the most profitable (and unwilling or unable to question how we reached that state). If someone becomes a stupid yokel in America, how much of that is on them vs. the people running focus tests to make everyone dumb?
So, anyway, I really thought it was good. I don't know if I will ever want to watch it again. The movie’s last 15 minutes filled me with existential dread, as I pondered what kind of world will be left for my children. It was too long, and I think some of the dialogue could have been punched up. But I felt it in my gut during Leo’s primal scream moment after the rallies. The thesis of Don’t Look Up isn't that we should really do something. It's that we already should have, and we didn't, and we aren't, and we won't. The thesis is exactly what he screams: Fuck.
———
What else is good on the internet?
Marc Normandin wrote about the MLB lockout and why it’s dumb to blame the players for it.
———
From the field
I recently wrote for my film review gig a list of my favorite films of 2021. You may notice that Don’t Look Up is not featured; this is because I had not seen it at the time I wrote the piece. If I could insert it now, it would come in at number six.
———
Follow me on Twitter @RTHowitzer, read my Letterboxd reviews @mrchumbles, listen to my Star Trek podcast at outofcontreks.podbean.com, or email me at outofcontreks@gmail.com.