Look up

SPOILER ALERT: the comet is us

Watching “Don’t Look Up” is one of the more surreal experiences I’ve had in a while. It is a film which expertly manifests the phenomenon it depicts, which is not very easy to do well. Comments by Adam McKay, who directed and co-wrote the film, and others connected to it cast into doubt just how conscious a decision it was to make a movie which accomplishes what it seems to me to accomplish. To him and to leading cast members like Leonardo DiCaprio, the film is a fairly straightforwardly allegorical story about humankind’s inability to mount an effective response to climate change. But it didn’t read that way to me, and I think it is best understood, whatever the creators’ intent, as making a far more serious point far more effectively.

Even if you haven’t already seen “Don’t Look Up”, you’ve likely managed to get a good sense of the plot given all the discussion about it. Two scientists discover a comet which is on a collision course with the earth. They attempt to bring this threat to the attention of the president, but when she fails to treat the matter with the appropriate seriousness they go to the press. Here, again, they are unable to provoke an adequate response. Serious newspaper journalists are put off by low reader interest, while the sunny television personalities are unable to process anything weightier than celebrity gossip. A belated effort to destroy the comet is scuttled when a tech billionaire persuades the president that he should be allowed to send his own spaceships to break it apart and mine it. Meanwhile society cleaves into opposed camps, one of which embraces the title of the movie as a slogan and so on, you get the idea. On the whole, American society is depicted as hopelessly divided and fundamentally unserious, incapable of turning away from social-media bullshit even when its very existence is threatened.

As a number of writers have pointed out, the scenario depicted in the movie is not really a great stand-in for climate change. Dealing effectively with a warming planet requires sustained, global collective action. It is going to require a transformation of society at significant expense and the benefits of this effort, if successful, will to an overwhelming extent flow to people who are not yet alive. Blowing up a comet, in contrast, could conceivably be achieved by one nation acting alone, without demanding much sacrifice from its citizens, who all stand to benefit directly and massively from being spared their imminent destruction. A better parallel, as folks like Matt Yglesias have noted, would be some other sort of serious risk—like a comet impact for that matter or, say, a pandemic. I think many people who have seen the film likely came away from it feeling that it worked best as a blistering indictment of society’s response to Covid-19, and indeed that seems a reasonable interpretation.

And yet I think that choosing to see “Don’t Look Up” as a story about any particular calamity slightly misses the point. The unfolding disaster, the film makes abundantly clear, is the frightening decline of our capacity as a country to take seriously the business of maintaining a functional society. The comet could be a stand-in for some existential threat or for no external threat at all; all that it represents is our doom, which could be pushed into the indefinite future if only we managed to recognize the state we’re in, but we can’t. The film, in that respect, is a desperate attempt to push the audience to see itself in the mirror, to force us to realize that we are the problem. And therein lies the real majesty of the movie. Audience members think they understand the nature of its social critique, and can thus sit back and enjoy it in whatever way their political predilections demand: either rolling their eyes in exasperation, or nodding along in ideological sympathy and lamenting that the inaction depicted in the film mirrors that in real life. But those reactions betray a failure to get it, to recognize the actual threat. It is a film which provokes in the audience exactly the response which is critiqued so effectively in that film.

As a consequence, it is hard to read public discussion about the movie without experiencing the vertiginous sense that one has become trapped within it. The critical reception feels like an extension of the film itself. Take this review by Richard Brody. He is in many ways an admirer but ultimately feels let down by it:

Instead of a political movie, “Don’t Look Up” is a cynical one. It’s basically a Jill Stein movie, a shrug that there’s no difference between the parties, that government is in the corrupt pocket of business and that the élites of all sorts are indifferent to the country’s actual interests.

There is of course an enormous difference between America’s political parties, and there are big and important real-world consequences to electing Republicans rather than Democrats. But the idea that the answer to America’s problems or indeed to climate change is to just elect more Democrats is a questionable one. For one thing, plenty of elected Democrats are in the pocket of business and, if not necessarily indifferent to the country’s actual interests then certainly less than eager to make hard political choices that would serve those interests. For another, it is far from clear that most Democratic voters are prepared to accept the changes needed to put the world on a path to a global temperature increase of no more than 2°C above the pre-industrial level.

Or rather, it is abundantly clear that most Democrats are not at all prepared to accept such changes. To deal effectively with climate change would take an effort of a profoundly ethical character. That is, it would require an unprecedented act of self-restraint on the part of we fortunate residents of rich countries for the benefit of others. But how many Democratic voters are prepared to engage in even modest acts of selflessness: to see their energy bills rise, or their taxes go up in order to fund massive investments in the emerging world, or even to have their beach view ever-so-slightly interrupted by a few distant windmills?

Uncomfortable as it may be to contemplate, fixing America’s slow-motion political catastrophe is in many ways a similar problem. The tens of millions of voters who prefer to cast their votes for Republicans, and the smaller but still significant number of people who mainline far-right media and seem happy for democracy to go if it means Democrats are kept out of power—they’re not going to just disappear because enough of the right people get elected. Like many, I find restrictions on people’s ability to vote and the inequities in representation enshrined in American law and legislative practice objectionable, and I would like to see them changed. But it seems incorrect to me to think that the movement which gave us the storming of the Capitol would just quietly go away if Democrats pursued radical reform of America’s electoral machinery. The divisions within American politics would continue to pose an extremely serious problem even if elected Democrats magically enacted all the reforms they say they want. Neither does either side of the intraparty debate between those who think Democrats should attempt to accommodate right-of-center views and those who instead want to enact bold left-wing reforms really promise to deliver America from its predicament. What is required of us is concerted, selfless action.

To sustain a democracy takes an ethical citizenry; not a population of saints, but a critical mass of people who are willing to put the interest of society as a whole above their own when they must. But there is on the whole a broad reluctance to accept that what we may actually need is a long slog of an effort to rebuild civil society and pursue ethical renewal. Understandably so; such things can’t be accomplished in a weekend, and neither is there a clear set of instructions for achieving them. But more importantly: Americans of all political stripes are too self-absorbed and too comfortable in their own little prejudice-affirming bubbles to make the effort. We would rather buy more things, watch another episode, and pretend that we’ve fulfilled our civic obligations because we believe this fallible human rather than that one and liked some good tweets. We are autonomous moral creatures, and we could at any moment take responsibility, at least, for our own actions: decide not to retweet invective or treat political opponents like lepers. But…it would be more satisfying not to. Can’t someone gamify it?

And that is what “Don’t Look Up” skewers with such cruel accuracy: a citizenry made up of people who are fundamentally incapable of behaving like serious people, like grown-ups, and who are consequently unable to make a few small sacrifices and take a few basic steps to safeguard a way of life that is, all things considered, pretty good. We are unable to see beyond our own narrow self-interest, to see how this or that thing that we want may come at the expense of someone else or the health of society as a whole. Or, we want to treat the difficult work of self-governance like another piece of content to consume, with heroes and villains, in which the responsibility to do anything about anything ultimately rests with others. And so we sit back and post and like and share and wait for our political enemies to go away. And every day the comet gets closer.