The Yassification of Political Discourse

An honest review of Adam McKay's 'Don't Look Up'

There are few things as tedious and exhausting as hypocritical celebrities attempting to deliver moral arguments to ordinary people. We have seen this many times throughout the past few years, where seemingly every mundane thing has a secondary purpose of “sharing a message” or “raising awareness” about a globally relevant conversation point which everyone already has a viewpoint on.

            Nothing fits into this theme more comfortably than the laughable excuse for a film that Adam McKay’s Netflix Original Don’t Look Up is. On the surface, the film is about a comet heading towards Earth which will cause an extinction-level event if action isn’t taken. About one inch below the surface, acting as the film’s entire raison d'être, is a “political commentary” on climate change, and how everyone is ignoring the science on it and refusing to take action.

This film has not been made to change anyone’s views on the climate crisis. It does not want multinational corporations or China (who are by far the greatest contributors to the problem) to take more action, nor does it want the average person to consider adopting alternative lifestyles. It is, at its best, smugly condescending towards ordinary people and, at worst, a bizarrely masturbatory showcase of exactly the type of person for whom watching a film counts as “activism”. I am struggling to imagine a single person who had never heard of the idea of climate change until they saw this film. I am struggling even more with the thought that the vast $75 million cost of production could not have had a larger impact on the climate crisis in countless other ways.

Nothing cements this view more than a brief look through director Adam McKay’s Twitter feed. One thread begins:

WE HAVE THE SCIENCE TO SOLVE THE CLIMATE CRISIS. Renewables, carbon removal and capture. It just needs to be scaled up & developed. We are missing AWARENESS, WILL AND ACTION.

Who is missing awareness? What can the ordinary person do? How much more would an investment of $75 million into renewables and carbon capture have helped than making a bad film whining about the situation?

As is now the usual case with the popular climate movement, proponents are adept at putting the blame on ordinary people not caring as the reason there hasn’t been a solution. At one point in Don’t Look Up, one character is heard saying they are looking forward to all of the jobs that the comet will create. At another, people are heard spouting out how they don’t believe the comet is even real. It is evident how this has been written and produced entirely by people and for people who believe that anything which doesn’t appear on the evening news is a conspiracy theory.

All of this is underlined by Meryl Streep’s character of President Orlean, portrayed as a sort of girlboss Trump but who would’ve been detested by every single Trump voter, who is too preoccupied with winning the midterms to care about the impending doom. She outright states that most of her supporters are “dumb rednecks”. None of the characters here have any footing in real life, but then again, when has any A-List actor or director ever had a real conversation with an ordinary person? Either this film was made for you, or it was made for people who love to hate you. There is no middle ground here.

Climate change is irrefutably real and will have disastrous consequences for many millions of people unless real action is taken. This film, however, does not care about that fact. Its existence conforms to many of the same platitudes that groups such as Extinction Rebellion do, in that if such global catastrophes were as imminent as their apologists actually believed, then they would almost certainly not be spending their time and resources on such ridiculous and pointless tasks, be that blocking a road or creating a film, neither of which will have any real impact whatsoever, aside from annoyance and a mass form of in-group fellatio.

Most of the popular critical reviews of this film have been favourable because they have either been written by climate scientists or they have commented on how climate scientists love it. This should not be as important a point as it is. Of course climate scientists are going to love a film which highlights them as being under appreciated sages who can save the world. Rightly, people should pay more attention to the catastrophe that climate change is becoming. But the key point being missed by celebrities and climate scientists alike is that ordinary people will not listen to condescension and complaints about nothing being done by exactly the type of people who are in the positions to make changes happen.

This is a film of a similar vein to many others before it, most clearly paralleling Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and most recently Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Last and First Men, both of which are infinitely better as art and as vehicles for a form of socio-political commentary on the end of the world. The key difference between these and McKay’s latest film is that they imagine the audience to be capable of independent thought, and test this just a little bit with some comparatively subtle metaphors and allegory. Don’t Look Up, on the other hand, is made for people who always think they are the smartest people in the room, while believing everyone else is stupid.

In terms of vapid arrogance, this film is right up there with Jen Psaki and whichever talk show host called for the execution of the unvaccinated this week. It is symptomatic of just how barren real discourse on important matters is today, replaced with whatever will get the most amount of clicks or views rather than what will actually be impactful. The sort of neoliberal yassification of political commentary evidenced by this film make me feel that, maybe, the end of the world may not be such a bad thing.

Take care, and probably don’t watch this film.

AJP x