*This piece is part of our Critics In Conversation series, where two writers offer different perspectives on the same film. Read Wesley Stenzel’s review here.*
In the beginning there was darkness. Then, light. Heat crept into the universe, tickling the furthest corners, which once knew only blackness and ice. Then there was air, mist, organic compounds. Plants and animals. On the seventh day, God created man. You know the rest. We’ve come to a place, possibly the end of that story, where there is too much heat. Man asserted his domain over creation, as God had evidently planned. But man surpassed God, and now creation hangs in the balance. What do we do?
There seem to be so many answers, yet so few people willing to listen. At least people whose actions would really matter. Climate scientists release terrifying analyses of data, we all read them, nothing changes. Climate activists stage large scale protests, enough people are disturbed by them to make news, nothing changes. The world as we know it fills and fills with heat. The sea levels rise. We inch closer than ever to the zero hour. What cataclysmic, climate change-induced event, unignorable in scope and kind, has to happen for us all to wake up? When will the voice that’s clear enough to cut through all the cynicism, greed, political bifurcation, and morbid distraction emerge? Can you save us Britney Spears?
The American writer-director Adam McKay is the latest figure to step up to the plate and take his swing at the climate change problem. Don’t Look Up, his latest, follows a pair of astronomers ’(Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio) attempts to get the world to take seriously a giant comet hurtling at our planet. There’s a 99.7% chance it will directly collide with Earth, and when it does, it will be total extinction. Lawrence’s Kate Dibiasky and DiCaprio’s Randall Mindy wheel around the three ring circus of our contemporary society, trying to make allies out of emissaries from the news media (Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry), politics (Meryl Streep and Jonah Hill), entertainment (Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi), and business (Mark Rylance). They fail completely. Each of these characters is portrayed as a vapid, greedy idiot, unwilling to be disturbed for even a second from, to borrow Janet Malcom’s phrase, their endless narcisst’s holiday.
Humanity ultimately chooses not to save itself. The comet strikes; life is extinguished.
Don’t Look Up is a difficult film to evaluate, despite how easy it is to watch and understand. Films of its kind, what used to be called in the studio era “message pictures,” all present the same problem: do you evaluate the message, or the picture? Can the two even be separated? What if, in the case of Don’t Look Up, as so many critics have felt, the message is good but the picture is bad? Well, is the message really good enough to overpower bad filmmaking? And is the filmmaking really that bad?
Where to begin. Not with the cheap and tacky title sequence, DiCaprio’s mincing, histrionic performance, the wild tonal imbalance, or a crude misperception of the function of satire. No, this film’s problems begin and end with editing. McKay seems (mercifully) to have mostly moved on from the gimmicky, fourth-wall breaking editing style that distinguished The Big Short, his first social satire. Don’t Look Up doesn’t cut to inane inserts of hot celebs speaking directly to the subtext of the events being depicted dietetically in the film. It was easy to be taken in by the cool-factor shimmering on the surface of that style back in 2015. The cuts are quick and curt, the dialogue is fresh, the celebrities, seductive. But as the gulf widens between the coasts and the country, “elites” and “the masses,” the makers of media and its decreasingly passive consumers, that style began to reveal one of McKay’s core flaws as a filmmaker: his contempt for regular people. What once seemed clever now seems condescending, as though there are the people involved in making movies like his, who “get it,” and the people at home and in the theaters, who don’t, and wouldn’t if it weren’t being spoonfed to them by the magnanimous pretty people inside the screen.
Though these inserts are almost completely removed from Don’t Look Up, McKay and editor Hank Crowin haven’t figured out how to put together an engaging sequence that doesn’t use the same basic dialectical structure they used to fit them into. Scenes in Don’t Look Up meant to build suspense are reduced to blubber by nonsensical cuts to the comet, or people walking around densely packed cities, or what appears to be stock footage of wildlife reminiscent of a Mastercard commercial. It’s hard to actually track what characters are saying because of it, which makes it even harder to care why they’re saying it.
Don’t Look Up in other words isn’t perfectly made. But does that matter? Depending on how you read a now infamous tweet from McKay, maybe not. In response to a rash of early criticism against the film, ranging across the political spectrum from left to right, from institutional critics and armchair bloggers alike, and from aesthetic repulsion to disagreements with content, McKay wrote this: “Loving all the heated debate our movie. But if you don’t have at least a small ember of anxiety about the climate collapsing (or the U.S. teetering) I’m not sure Don’t Look Up makes any sense.” It’s tempting to read this sentiment literally. That McKay is suggesting criticism of the film isn’t the result of trained culture interpreters interpreting a piece of culture and finding issues, but from an indifference toward climate change on the part of those interpreters. I can’t believe, and frankly don’t want to believe, that someone as seemingly genial and intelligent as McKay could be as cowardly, idiotic, and deceitful as one would need to be to say that and mean it. Whatever he meant, there is something behind that statement—only faintly detectable after the wave of disbelief washes over and after the corroding process of trying find a good faith interpretation concludes—that I think even the most ardent Don’t Look Up hater senses. They may ignore it, as the urge the respond to such a pompous accusation takes over. But they ignore it to their detriment.
It’s come up for me in conversations not only about this film, but other films like it—Hillbilly Elegy and Joker come to mind. I’ll find myself discussing a film with someone, and when I step back and assess the general character of both our comments, it’s like we’re actually discussing two different films. Not in what we interpreted the film to mean, but how we interpreted the film. I sometimes feel embarrassed in hindsight to have found myself discussing writing, shot composition, and performances when my conversation partner was discussing feelings, themes, and spiritual impact. I know that I begin with the craft of a film to contextualize my arrival at the spirit of the thing, and I know that a film’s technical construction directly produces that spirit; the two are inextricable. But there are rare cases like Don’t Look Up, Hillbilly Elegy, and Joker (all films, not coincidentally, that have massive gulfs between critical and audience reaction) where the film’s spirit speaks to people despite its form, not through it.
Personally, I’m critical of the politics conveyed by all three of these films. But I also see the story, the larger, fundamentally human story, playing out behind the action of each film, simpler but also more potent, that people resonate with. We’ve all felt taken for granted by systems that we relied on and wanted their representatives to feel our pain. We’ve all felt simultaneously embarrassed by and defensive of the place where we come from. And we’re all worried about the world. All of us. This is what ironically makes McKay’s tweet so infuriating, and his film so successful with audiences. Despite the aesthetic sloppiness, despite the abiding condescension and smugness, we feel it.
And yet the high crime against the environment McKay charges us with in Don’t Look Up is indifference. Indeed, McKay is still holding fast to the hateful, outdated belief that “the people,” as represented by the thuggish MAGA crowd at President Orlean’s final rally, or the restaurant goers who riot when Dibiasky breaks the news that the comet’s still coming, are a huge part of the problem. That they would rather bury their heads in the sands of celebrity and social media than face the truth. If the people were any part of the problem, McKay’s film wouldn’t be doing well with them. If McKay had any curiosity why people are turning to social media and celebrity culture, he’d see that it’s a mitigation strategy for a people smart enough to recognize social rot, but too powerless to do anything about it. But McKay has always been more interested in making fun of symptoms than diagnosing causes. If he cared at all about the latter, his movies might play well with critics too.
Don’t Look Up appeals despite itself. The ending in particular hits hard, even after having sat through two hours of relentless, off-base, anti-social elitism. It may not be the movie McKay hoped would change the world. But according to him, even if it were, no one would do anything about it.