Note: This article contains major spoilers for Don’t Look Up.
If you didn’t know Don’t Look Up’s script was penned by SNL’s former head writer, you could work it out by reverse engineering. The film is intended as an unflinching evisceration of modern US politics. Yet, it suggests that America’s failure in solving large-scale issues is not down to the hideous imbalance of the country’s hierarchies or any fatal diseases afflicting the body politic. Instead, it’s because a ghoulish gallery of self-serving caricatures has set up home in the country’s control centre. It follows in a long line of ineffectual liberal rhetoric that identifies some of the maniacal bobbleheads operating the Murder Factory but then suggests that we should have level-headed altruists take their place.
Don’t Look Up opens its eyes on grunt-level astronomer Kate Dibiasky, who discovers an approaching comet that will kill all life on Earth unless someone intervenes. She kicks the news up to her boss, Dr. Randall Mindy, who then punts it to Teddy Oglethorpe, the head of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The three drill through the strata of US communication, only for their urgent warnings to fall on deaf ears at every level.
The image-conscious President Orlean, and her failson Chief of Staff, Jason, are too disconnected from reality to act and have their minds set on how a global extinction event might rebalance the polls. The light entertainment fluffers at The Daily Rip defang the implications of impending armageddon, lest the gravity of it weigh down their painfully positive TV patter. The slack-jawed public is too distracted by shiny memes and the celebrity of the day to internalise that they have weeks to live. The journalistic old guard loses interest in the story after discovering that macabre scientific doomsaying isn’t driving engagement figures and that there’s “debate” over the topic.
The President eventually raises the alarm, but only as a decoy to pull focus away from a sex scandal under her roof. On social media, frenzied bystanders tweet either in support of doing something about the comet, or leaving it be, with some stubbornly denying its existence. The White House throws all its weight behind billionaire tech weirdo Peter Isherwell who promises to simultaneously extract valuable minerals from the lump of ice while also obliterating it. All this, despite the scientific community’s scepticism of his deus ex machina. Severely overestimating his company, Isherwell watches as multiple of his drones explode, causing the American elite to scramble for the escape pods. As the comet becomes visible to the naked eye, even the most bullish denialists realise their leaders have sold them out. Kate, Randall, and the Mindy family hold hands, and flame engulfs them.
The most common Don’t Look Up takes credit the movie with having its finger on the pulse of contemporary culture. The quibbles are over whether it’s too on-the-nose or whether being punched directly in the face with our political crisis is just what we need. Yet, far from being an up-to-the-second scan of America in its broken physiology, I can’t help but think that it’s all too selective in its interpretation of Yankee society. For one thing, despite production for this film being announced as recently as 2019, it already feels like its conception of the country’s executive branch is out of date.
Janie Orlean is unapologetically inspired by Trump. If we can’t read her as a shorthand for the former President, she at least represents a style of governance ushered in by old Donnie. She is out of touch with the needs of the American populace and has stocked the halls of power with the unqualified, personal friends and family, and meathead Sgt. Hartman types. But that’s not America’s President today, literally or spiritually.
The incumbent is Biden, who was sold as an antidote to everything Trump. A sort of working-class whisperer who wasn’t going to linger in the ivory tower but come down to ground level to listen to the concerns of the everyday person. He would unite the divided political houses of America, and in a show of concession, laid a place at the table for many Democrats who ran against him. His campaign promises involved limitless infrastructure spending, student debt forgiveness, putting COVID in the grave, and a utopian climate cleanup. Like other centrists before him, Biden has spent his term up to now dropping pieces of his promised policy like patches of dead skin sloughing off. The best-case scenario is that a lot of college graduates are still going to be saddled with a lot of debt. And the commander in chief is going out of his way to negotiate the dissolutions of infrastructure provisions, decided COVID is not a federal issue, and has no universal plan to quell the destruction of the environment.
If there’s one area in which I feel Don’t Look Up is unusually insightful for a mainstream film, it’s in recognising the populist rhetoric of the exploitative rich. Peter Isherwell varnishes his avaricious cash grab with overblown prophecies of “job creation” and generating wealth for humanity. But the businessmen that Peter Isherwell lampoons, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, the ones who skate by on these dubious promises, are thriving under a Biden administration. This language of “job creation” and “generating wealth” for communities is exactly the kind of speak the Dems traffic in to prop up those industry titans.
We may not have seen the back of Trump; he could run again in 2024. And we definitely haven’t seen off nepotism, machismo, and stoking the coals of bigotry as replacements for taking care of people. But if Comet Dibiasky arrives tomorrow, it won’t hit us because, as Don’t Look Up posits, we have a heartless, egoistic American leader. It’ll be because we have a head honcho who uses the face of an Oglethorpe or Mindy, a cool head in the room who cares about the big issues, but who is stretching so far across the aisle, he’s liable to pull something.
And while Dems might posture as beating back the myopic nationalism of the Trump extended universe, they position America in about the same place in the international pantheon. To them, every other nation is either invisible or exists only in relation to the US. Don’t Look Up contains typical manifestations of this philosophy in the media, with non-Americans reduced to clips in a news montage. The film never screens scenes of foreigners attempting to cooperate with the US to destroy the comet or even engineering independent solutions. I’m not saying that in the real world, there aren’t other countries that believe they are the rightful protagonist of Earth, but the USA has this issue too. And it has that trumped-up sense of importance while retaining an almost unrivalled ability to do worldwide damage with it.
That attitude is alive and well in Don’t Look Up. Outside of America, there’s only one other attempt to prevent cataclysm: a joint effort by Russia, China, and India that ends in their craft exploding. Even many technologically advanced countries like Singapore or Japan are apparently happy to twiddle their thumbs while waiting for death. The European Space Agency has also picked a bad time to vacation from their usual job of launching rockets into space.
The film is also distanced from how existential threats are reported and received in reality. Does celeb culture have an outsized footprint in the western mindset? Yeah, probably. Is the average citizen too checked out from politics? Yes, they are. Are the airwaves replete with superficial reporting of political fracases that fails to reveal the culprits behind them? Absolutely. All that is true, and it’s also true that most mainstream news takes stories of wide-scale terminal threats seriously. Deadly spectres like climate change and COVID are spoken about in a tone of the utmost seriousness. Even outlets like Fox News, which intentionally downplay certain threats to their viewers, mostly don’t produce light entertainment because they know that viewers are more rapt when ensnared by fear.
Some politicians try to hand-wave away disasters like environmental collapse and/or the worldwide pandemic. But again, the problem in tackling these issues at the moment is not that the majority of the national operators don’t acknowledge their existence and severity. It’s that they do that and still don’t enact solutions. And while there are a depressing number of Americans who won’t believe scientists on these topics, or think the apocalypse will just blow over, it’s not a fringe position that these threats are real and deserve our attention.
72% of Americans believe in climate change, and around 70% agree that COVID is still a major threat to public health. Those aren’t good numbers; they’re awful. However, they disprove the notion that the public, in their totality, is so vapid and moronic that they can’t begin to process the dangers of a five-kilometre wide comet. Especially considering that we’re not talking about a complex, esoteric demise in the distant future. We’re talking about something immediate and total in its destruction.
Additionally, when daunting and devastating political crises go unrecognised by the status quo or the public at large, there are always organisations, publications, and activists who push back against them. This is the case for, say, the genocide in Yemen or the famines in Ethiopia. You won’t spot these institutions and actors if you think that politics begins and ends in the halls of Washington, NYT, and Facebook, but they’re out there. Unfortunately, those are the boundaries of Don’t Look Up’s politics. And again, it flatters liberals to believe that there aren’t movements and organisations that have been trying to fight the battles that the people in power have failed to.
Accusations of “liberal elitism” are often abused to anti-intellectual ends or to market an alternate kind of elite. However, it’s hard for Don’t Look Up to deflect accusations of liberal elitism when it depicts the public as mindless robots echoing the prevailing media consensus. Or, for that matter, when it shows them as lacking any independent political activity. The public in this satire are superficial philistines who post knee-jerk, intellectually bankrupt social media garbage. They break into a literal bar fight when they learn the government has traded their lives for dollars. The public needs experts to guide us on scientific topics because we don’t have the knowledge base or resources for research that they do. But we are human beings with varied and sometimes well-developed opinions. Don’t Look Up becomes guilty of the same short-sighted worldview it accuses the public of by declaring that people as a whole are just too on their phones these days.
Some might argue that trying to read the pulse of the public by just placing two fingers to tweets and TikToks is itself being too on the phone. The movie condemns Isherwell’s cellular tech as being excessive and useless but doesn’t consider how that same technology could be shaping or filtering public opinion as it appears on the web. Not only can you find keen insight on these communication forums. Not only are they used to organise grassroots opposition to oppressive states. Both realities that Don’t Look Up does not acknowledge. It’s also systems like those Ishwerwell’s company designs that reward glib spontaneous takes and float them above the more rigorous social analysis. Yet, the film accepts the output of those systems as objective snapshots of what the public thinks. This worldview is really common among esteemed liberal journalists because they are generally isolated from the average person. The closest they come to understanding their thought processes is through the garbled repeater of trending topics.
It’s not even clear why Don’t Look Up’s public must understand there’s a comet headed to vaporise life on Earth. People look up, they see the reaper hovering above them, and then what? I know the political actions that I think a populace could take with that knowledge, but the film doesn’t. Because it never shows the public taking a pivotal political role, its central conflict feels fruitless. The film could say that there is no democratic action the public could take, but it leaves the details nebulous without ever acknowledging that they are nebulous.
Don’t Look Up is symbolic of the centrist attitude as it existed during Trump’s presidency and even exists today. By pointing its camera squarely at reactionaries and then claiming it has encompassed all of America, it avoids investigation of Democrats and more demure Republicans. So, it doesn’t have to lay cataclysmic failures at the feet of American politicians as a group. The problem can be limited to a couple of specific schools of media and right-wing politicians of the Trump genus. The film can ignore any more progressive response to Trumpism and superficial media than you get by watching a NASA scientist on CNN. But make no mistake, it’s not just the Orleans and Daily Rips rotting America’s organs. The Democratic Party are actively maintaining the stage on which people like Orlean and Isherwell act out their best-laid plans. They even perform on that stage themselves. As long as someone keeps you fixed on the most obviously destructive threat in view, you’ll never notice. Thanks for reading.
