Don’t look up, don’t look down, don’t look around, just keep your eyes wide shut
Don’t Look Up, the Netflix movie that premiered a couple of weeks ago, is a parable about our current American-style culture of denial. Climate change is the subtext, but so are all our other denials—about the pandemic, about inequality, about galloping fascism in the USA.
A huge planet-killing comet is on a crash course with Earth. A professor at a middle-tier university, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and a graduate student (Jennifer Lawrence), looking through a telescope for something else altogether, see it first. When they calculate the comet’s trajectory, they initially can’t believe their own results.
They recalculate once, twice, thrice. There is finally no doubt: The probability of impact is north of 99.75 percent, near certainty.
Bull’s eye: an asteroid bigger than the one that killed the dinosaurs will hit Earth. We are doomed unless we act — fast and furious. The only entity that would have a chance to do that is the U.S. government, although it’s uncertain that even a quick and forceful response would work.
But who would expect even that, given the track record? Here is where the fun, through a especially mordant form of humor, begins. The dinosaurs did not have the capacity of foreseeing their demise or doing anything about it. We just might, scientifically and technologically.
Yet our political system and mass media is tragically and hilariously dysfunctional. This film portrays that double reality superbly. Informed about the looming catastrophe, the president (played by Meryl Streep) does not immediately grasp the gravity of the situation, and anyway she has bigger fish to fry, namely getting the Senate to approve the appointment of an unqualified and morally comprised man to the Supreme Court.
Then there is the inevitable billionaire who wants what he wants, even more money. Elon Musk in another guise, technological prowess, miserable values. In this case, this billionaire sees the comet, laden with valuable minerals, not as a menace but as an opportunity, for profit of course, rationalized by the usual BS — jobs, jobs, jobs.
Billionaire concocts a dubious alternative to the government’s plan to blow the asteroid up with nuclear weapons, which would negate its economic value. Instead, the Billionaire wants to send rockets to break up the comet and harvest the valuable minerals when they fall to the sea. Profit uber all.
The scheme doesn’t work and it’s all over except the tsunamis, the earthquakes, and the mass death.
The most infuriating and dismaying part of the movie is what happens when the two scientists, having realized the fecklessness of the president and her administration, decide to go public and hit the media. Here we witness not the banality of evil (Hannah Arendt on Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann) but the evil of banality. The newspeople deal with the scientists’ shattering information as if they were conducting an interview with a minor celebrity. They work hard at keeping news about the probable end of the world as light as a feather. They focus on DiCaprio as the sexiest scientist in the world. The female anchor seduces him. They dismiss the junior female scientist as a shrill nut.
All this would seem to be hyperbolic, even cartoonish. Not today. Donald Trump, Rand Paul and just about every other Republican live, or pretend to live, in an alternative reality as much or more than the opportunistic characters in Don’t Look Up.
I am no movie reviewer nor a Netflix public relations flack. I will say this, however. This is the movie that best embodies a takedown of U.S. myth and reality in an entertaining and accessible way. Support for this statement is the fact that already, after only a few weeks of its release, this is the second most viewed movie in Netflix history.
This movie tells us that we could still save our home world, but only if we had a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, as Abraham Lincoln envisioned.
In contrast, we basically have a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich plus some white people who are not rich and with inadequate education, a surplus of prejudice, grievance, and fear holding veto power over progress toward a society equal and fair. I am talking about the Republicans, but there are one or two Democrats among the spoilers.
Sen. Joe Manchin, I am looking at you. You have a deficit of empathy and wisdom and far too much money for someone with your meager merits. Advocate for the dirtiest industry in America, coal. The words traitor and turncoat come to mind. Harsh words. Deserved words.
Robert J. Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the Manhattan project that created the atom bomb, feared that he had become Shiva, the Hindu deity who is the destroyer of worlds. But nobody has dared to use nuclear weapons in any war since 1945. For us, the destroyer of our world is coal and other fossil fuels. Manchin is a beneficiary and a shill for this Earth-killing stuff. History will not absolve him.
