DON’T LOOK UP - A RESPONSE BY KIT POWER

19/1/2022

This piece contains massive and comprehensive spoilers for Netflix movie Don’t Look Up, and Netflix series Midnight Mass.

I caught Don’t Look Up over the holiday period - I want to say the day before Christmas Eve, just me and the missus, sitting on the couch in a living room full of seasonal decorations.

It made me cry.

If my Twitter feed is any indication, there is, Lord help us, already A Discourse about the film, so let me start by addressing what little of it has leaked on to my timeline, the better to dismiss it and get on with talking about the movie itself; no, you don’t have to like it, that’s obviously an absurd position. If it didn’t work for you, regardless of your politics, it didn’t work. I find it sad-to-depressing-to-disparing that in the year of our Lord 2021 we still have to say shit like this out loud, but okay, sure, consider it said. I’m not writing this with the intention of converting you to being a Don’t Look Up stan. Frankly, I flatter myself that neither of us have that kind of time. I’m writing for the same reason I always do; because I’m feeling something and I want to try and unpick why. That’s the beginning and end of it, for me.

Discourse dismissed, let’s get into it.

And let’s start here; Don’t Look Up is not a comedy. It’s not a satire. It is, in point of fact, one wafer-thin allegory away from being a documentary. And, because it’s a documentary about our shared pathology (as 2021 bleeds into 2022 and the manmade climate armageddon unfolds while we all drive around in our PollutionMobiles and the 100 companies responsible for 71% of the emissions that left at current, essentially unchecked levels will probably kill everyone aged 40 years old or less reading this [and your kids and grandkids] go right on funding governing parties and changing their logos to various shades of green, while privately trying to solve the problem of preventing their personal security staff just killing them and taking all their stuff when the Shit inevitably Goes Down and they retreat to their bunkers), Don’t Look Up is, in point of fact, a fucking horror movie, of biblical proportions.

I’ve long been lamenting the death of satire, and Don’t Look Up is the first movie of the modern era I’ve seen that seems to understand that. Whilst there were moments that made me chuckle (most courtesy of Cate Blanchet, clearly having the time of her life as the monstrous, delightfully amoral “News” anchor Brie Evantee) this ‘comedy’ is nothing of the kind, and I think some of the baffling-to-me descriptions of the film as ‘bad’ stem from this misunderstanding; it’s labeled comedy, it’s not funny, therefore it’s bad. And honestly, it’s yet another one of those moments as a viewer where I feel like an alien; because, for me, that’s such mind bendingly bad film criticism that I kind of don’t know where to start. But okay, let’s start with; I think it’s rarely good criticism to complain about what a film isn’t, rather than what it is. I don’t give a shit what the studio labeled Don’t Look Up; nor, even, what the intentions of the writers and performers were in producing it. I mean, that’s a lie, as a film nerd I’m fascinated by that type of thing; but as a viewer, I give not one solitary shit, and neither, with the greatest possible respect, should you. What we, collectively, should concern ourselves with, IMO, is what’s in front of us.

And Don’t Look Up is a horror movie about the end of the world; worse, about an apocalypse we’re living through, right now.

Because The Comet is real. It’s called Climate Change, and we’ve had decades to do something about it, and generations of our leaders have failed spectacularly to do so, and now, as the first shockwaves of this apocalypse are at our doors, as more and more smartphone footage fills our timelines with floods and wildfires, until one day, the smartphone is in your hand, and you’re livestreaming the end of your world, right fucking now, our leaders still do nothing. And they do nothing for the same reasons the leaders in the movie do nothing; political expediency, and profit.

The key character in this regard is Mark Rylance’s Peter Isherwell, a masterful combination of Mark Zuccerberg, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos; he has Zuc’s Total Information mindset and data access, but his air-headed, emperor’s-clothes lunacy is pure Musk. Whilst I could have done without the implicit linkage of neurodiversity with sociopathology, I can’t deny that the character gave me the willies; there are few things in life scarier than seeing someone with an obviously, transparently insane ideology that is entirely unmoored from reality being taken incredibly seriously by everyone in power.

*looks to camera*

And, like, sure, if you were expecting to laugh, and you didn’t, I guess… but the line between horror and comedy has always been razor thin, right? And the punchine of the movie, over and over again, is We’re All Going To Die Because The Small Number Of People With All The Power Are Insane; so, no, it’s not fucking funny, but that doesn’t mean it’s not good.

For fuck’s sake.

And sticking with Isherwell, it’s worth working through just how excruciatingly on the nose his arc is. President Orlean (Meryl Streep absolutely nailing the vain vacuum at the heart of so many career politicians) initially rejects the end of the world data because she’s facing a tough midterm, then does a swift 180 once she realizes it can be turned into a political win. At a press conference announcement that probably looks over the top to anyone young enough not to remember “Mission Accomplished”, she rolls out The Science, The Plan, and The Hero (yet another brilliant turn in a bit part, this time from my man Ron Pearlman). And the plan is not subtle, and it might not work, but - crucially - operation Blow The Damn Thing Up is launched early enough that, if things do go wrong, there’s time to work on plan B.

That is, until Isherwell starts whispering in the ear of the president. Literally.

And, again, look; if that’s too on-the-nose for you, fine, I get it. But, like… that is basically what’s going on, right now, in every single lobbying firm in Washington (and London, and Beijing, and and and). And for me, the moment the rockets turned around was an absolute express-elevator-down moment; I mean, my stomach lurched. Because while I didn’t know the specifics, the shape of what had just happened felt painfully familiar.

It’s kinda like the moment you find out they locked the doors.

And honestly I do think it’s kinda genius; of course the meteor is made up of rare precious metals and minerals. Of fucking course it is. And of course Elon Zuck-Gates thinks he can design drones that’ll break it apart when it’s close enough to the planet that the treasure will be recoverable when it lands.

And of course, of course, the fucking president goes for it.

(Sidebar: The reason they go for it, which the movie makes explicit at the end is, of course, that the risk calculation is fundamentally different for them; they have [or think they have] a Get Out Of The Apocalypse Free card. The mega rich and uber powerful are not like us. And we are not really real to them.)

The final third of this movie… again, I know there’s detractors out there, but for me, it felt like a super high speed rollercoaster ride through the fucking nightmare ghost train crazy mirror internal psychological landscape that anyone who’s been paying attention to the climate catastrophe has been experiencing for the last two decades and more. The ‘we support the jobs the meteor will bring’, the ‘nobody cares about peer review, look, the corporate sponsored people are clear it’s going to be safe’, the fucking govenrment helpines for those who are feeling anxious about the meteor, where kind operators will explain the benefits we all stand to gain from the riches the rock contains… I swear, I’m choking up again - with sadness, with rage - just recalling it.

Arianna Grande headlining a massive concert in aid of Comet Awareness (in a movie brimming with star turns in small parts, maybe my favorite of all, absolutely glorious, and ballsy) while Streep's mob chant the ‘Don’t Look Up’ slogan… I mean, fucking hell, the planet is melting, burning, and 40% of Americans think the last election was stolen by Joe Biden.

The End isn’t nigh. It’s fucking here.

Were there issues? Sure. Though I think it was Leo’s best performance to date, I’ll never be a huge fan, and there were elements of his character’s arc I wasn’t wild about; his flip/flop seduction by Isherwell and Orleans didn’t really make sense, for me; I understood it mirrored his sexual seduction by Evantee, and it’s not like poachers don’t sometimes turn gatekeeper in the land of Climate Science (money is a powerful thing) but I felt it undermined the character a bit, and Leo simply didn’t sell it, for me; unlike his final reel freak out, which felt painfully real. Similarly, his wife’s forgiveness (however deliciously barbed) was just the wrong side of pat, for me; I get the beat the movie was screaming towards by that point, but I just felt the moment needed a bit more time. That said, the meltdown he has in the studio near the end, as the dam bursts and he realizes the people that are running things really, really don’t have a clue was one I found deeply cathartic, and really spoke to the power of the piece as a whole.

Because, check it out; the only sane response to the current ongoing, still-evolving, still worsening climate crisis is howling bug-eyed fear. It really is. When Leo had his studio meltdown, screaming into the camera about the horror of the moment, I felt it; the rage, the fear, and the wave of despair immediately after the moment as he/I realized that the truth makes you look crazy.

Because the only sane response to our current moment is to scream like a lunatic. Because, absent a transformation of the global approach to power and material distribution on an order of magnitude we’ve literally never seen, the end of the world is very fucking Nigh indeed, and saying that makes me feel like one of the Time Square crazies with a fucking sandwich board, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.

And in that moment, I thought, well, at least someone else gets it; even if that someone else is Leo DiFuckingCaprio of all fucking people.

It’s not just him, of course. This was, as any movie is, a huge team effort, and it’s clear the front of camera team all understood what the writers and director were trying to achieve. And I’m profoundly grateful to them. Because while the movie doesn’t provide hope, it did give me something I hadn’t realized I’d been craving, and in doing so, served to validate my continued instinct towards producing dark fiction that really dives into the viscera of the things that cause me the most fear, and pain, and sadness.

The movie told me, simply, that I wasn’t alone; that there are others out there who understand the depth of the chasm we’re in, the incredibly powerful forces that militate against meaningful change; most of all, that, though you will be sneered at for doing so, bug eyed, screaming terror is, in point of fact, the correct, sane response to our current moment.

So, thanks for that. And welcome to 2022.

KP
16/1/22

For a more detailed, audio-based discussion of this movie, please pop over to YouTube and check out George Daniel Lea and I in conversation.