Don’t Listen to ‘Don’t Look Up’

Since so many people heard that the film was a metaphor for global warming, they had to put on Greta Thunberg’s face, which seemed to herald any possibility of enjoyment. For this, blame director Adam McKay, who went around preaching that the movie is funny, check it out, because it’s a parody of climate denialism. Grandfather told NPR.

Uh huh.

The first big problem here is that the climate puzzle is not like the challenge posed by an impending comet collision. The difference is difference between deciding whether to crouch when a bullet is speeding toward your head and deciding whether to engage in a long, costly war with uncertain benefits.

A satirical film needs to understand the subject it satirizes. Let’s “Dr. Strangelove,” a movie that “Don’t Look Up” would love to be compared. Though full of silliness of all kinds, its central joke will make Rand Corp. boasts: A secret Russian “doomsday device” can’t stop anything if it’s secret.

For anyone taking a positivist-materialist view of the universe, changing the composition of the atmosphere must have had some effect on climate. The element of willingness to satire is our sociological and psychological predisposition because we can’t really say how great the impact will be and the cost it will be worth to avoid it.

We’re stuck comparing today’s meticulously estimated global temperatures with baselines estimated from things like tree rims 100 years ago. Just last year, after 40 years, Official climate science started improving its computer forecasts with real-world temperature records (which could predict less likely to happen overheat). Despite a concerted effort of ridicule plus peer-approved debate, it also stopped using emissions projections that led people to increase their coal burning to unimaginable levels over the next century. .

These efforts may be sincere, but they are not the basis for confidence spending 105 trillion dollars (tempo McKinsey) over the next 30 years because of uncertain interests.

Not only can’t satire about climate change be found in Mr McKay’s film, but he claims to be there. Alas, there is no market for parodying the aspects that need parody most. Millions of us are too comfortable saying we’re passionate about an issue we don’t bother to understand. Our politicians have stopped questioning whether progressive policies in the name of climate change (e.g. electric cars) are actually affecting climate change. A certain kind of Harvard left-winger will disapprove of any proposal that is not against capitalism, racism, and patriarchy. A cadre of scientists by profession believe whatever the media needs them to believe. They are easily recognized because they use the “existential” modifier for a climate problem that does not actually threaten human existence.

In this sense, “Don’t Look Up” fails on its own, but on the conditions in which its director favors it, because no movie has the guts to take on it. fools ended the climate debate.

“Don’t Look Up” is funny, in a Strangelovian way, about contemporary political and social media culture. Mark Rylance is invaluable in his role as a parody of an internet billionaire’s TED talk, whose algorithm can tell the president of the United States, played by Meryl Streep, that she’s going to be eaten by “a con brontaroc” although “we don’t know what that means”. Cate Blanchett plays a beautiful woman likened to Fox News, excellently occupying the acting ground between the ordinary and the cynical. She deserves an Oscar.

Mr. McKay himself made a mistake no artist can ever make, indeed that would anger most people, shouting from every hilltop that his art “means what”.

This happens as you might expect: Mr. McKay tries to give his film a strong backing from “serious” commentators. It points to a disease of our times: excessive conformity, as if any insecurities could be banished by loudly declaring one’s allegiance to the dogma du jour.

The real fable isn’t on the screen, it’s the director sabotaging his film with his own incessant gesticulation. Luckily, the movie’s availability on Netflix is ​​its saving grace. No one has to pay $15 to try it, so hopefully audiences won’t be disheartened by Mr McKay’s blabbermouth act.