“Don’t Look Up” - when a movie is not a movie
What are movies for? It’s a question that often haunts cinematic discourse, as if a pithy response explaining the whys of cinema would make it more important. Yet, the question perplexes for its unhelpfulness. Film, like any art form, is best imagined not as for something; it exists because humanity does. And we cleave to art. A film, on its own, should not need to argue for its existence – its value is in its mere existence, as a piece of art. Yet, engagement with cinema so often feels mired in the search for the value of a movie beyond its existence as a movie.
Adam McKay’s “The Big Short”, a pop-oriented assessment of the events leading up to the 2007-2008 American financial crisis, was a marked turn from his previous ribald adult comedies. That swerve was followed by “Vice,” his “comedy” about the events leading up to the first-term of George W. Bush’s American presidency. With his latest film, “Don’t Look Up” he’s transgressed from the biopic route, although his focus is still on specific patterns of the real world, or his perception of it.
In the film, two astronomers discover a large comet that is on a collision course with Earth, with planet-wide extinction a potential outcome. A self-interested American president, a spineless media landscape and self-interested businessmen make for an apathetic cocktail that cannot, will not, and do not avert the crisis, despite the six-month warning. In “Don’t Look Up”, the people are not named figures in reality, but they are character-types familiar to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with American pop-culture: Meryl Streep as the American President cuts a Trumpesque figure; Mark
Rylance plays Peter Isherwell, a tech billionaire with echoes of Elon Musk; and Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett as co-hosts of a vacuous morning show look like they could be right at home on Fox, or even NBC. By the time Ariana Grande appears as an international music star, satirising her own pop-culture image, we get the point – this satirical evisceration takes aim at the contemporary world – the cognitive dissonance required to live in our hellscape reality, the incompetence of politicians, and the toothless nature of engagement with media.
But if “Don’t Look Up” has a transparent argument, it’s less articulate as an artistic endeavour. McKay’s movies have a cachet beyond the filmic due to them being about very important real-world issues. They no longer exist on their own as pieces of art, to be assessed and engaged with in that vein. But they become ideological documents about our world “as we know it”. For the critic, it begs the question: How do you consider a film which is so hinged to attributes that have nothing to do with the medium? How do you read a film when reading the film becomes a metaphor for reading the world?
In “Don’t Look Up,” Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dr Randall Mindy, an astronomy professor in Michigan who becomes part of an apocalyptic reality when his PhD candidate, Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), discovers an unknown comet hurtling towards the Earth. Kate and Randall try to convince the American president of the urgency, but the administration is more concerned with political scandals that feel more pertinent to them. When the astronomers try to leak the news to the media, they realise that the threat of certain doom is incidental for an American society which is more concerned with minutiae and entertainment than the seriousness of a doomsday prophecy. Whether or not this is a “realistic” scenario is unimportant within the narrative landscape of the film. McKay’s satire is setting up its own world-view of what his image of society is like, what these people are like, and how the drama unfolds. But if “Don’t Look Up” is teaching us to engage with it, it’s asking us to engage with its ideas but very rarely with its form as a piece of film, beyond the superficial.
McKay’s last three films, all edited by Hank Corwin, retain a frenetic aesthetic that’s marked by rapid-cutting between moments, close-ups on seemingly incongruous items, with a hand-held docudrama style that feels committed to evoking agitation. But, the visual language of “Don’t Look Up” feels so removed from the very fibre of its own meaning. McKay’s film is both allegory and satire.
The end-of-world comet, and the society’s ambivalent response, might be a stand-in for anything but most likely for the current climate change dilemma. But if an allegory is to work it must subsist on two levels: on the basic level of a story, without signifiers and referents; and on the level of the hidden meaning behind the story. “Don’t Look Up” falters in this regard. McKay’s overemphatic, unsubtle repetitions are the kind of overtness that might work in a single comedy sketch running a few minutes, it has one central point. But when extended to over two hours, the thrust of its argument falters. There’s no way to go with a satire if its artistic engagement stops at mere recognition.
We recognise in the first scene with the American president that she is narcissistic and unprepared. As the camera travels through her office to images of her with celebrities, the “joke” is in our recognition of what “type” she is. But the structure of the artistic engagement has more in common with a meme, instantaneously delightful but overtime more repetitive than illuminating. It’s why each character is best served by our first scene with them. McKay is perceptive about first-impressions – but the more “Don’t Look Up” goes on, the less it illuminates about itself or its argument that might not be better served by some other kind of artistic (or non-artistic) form “Don’t Look Up” feels structurally unwieldly because McKay’s authorial voice overwhelms the dramatic impact of the film’s form. The excoriation of our present reality is clear, but any kind of artistic engagement with these characters as people that feel like they exist within these frames feels limp. The film covers six months, time feels indistinct – the shift between hours, as opposed to days, or weeks is hazy. The actors feel underserved when their character motivations are schematic, more attributable to what the allegory needs to hold than to any kind of filmic engagement with the people in this story as people with any sense of personhood. But it makes sense that McKay seems to consider these characters with such ambivalence. Even more than his previous two films, “Don’t Look Up” seems to announce Adam McKay’s virulent contempt for all whom he observes.
The Mills Brothers pop-song “Till Then” plays on the radio in a late-film car-ride. Mindy introduces the song to the other two passengers. Its subject, soldiers going off to World War II and hoping that those remaining kept them in their memories, feels fitting for the film’s apocalypse countdown. Rather than let the song play, even briefly, for the audience (or the characters) to get any sense of its lyricism or musicality, McKay chooses to have Mindy’s explanation overlay the song, the lyrics are even repeated as the song plays beneath. McKay does not trust the audience to understand how this melancholic song might be potent for people preparing to die. Instead, he must tell us in the most transparent terms; we would not understand otherwise. The moment, tiny in reality, becomes symptomatic of much of “Don’t Look Up”. McKay has very little trust in his audience and his characters. So, the film shouts its argument at us: the world we live in is terrible, and we are doomed if we do not change. Few would dispute that. But a good argument isn’t enough to make a good movie.
In an early moment, Lawrence’s frustrated Kate declares, “Maybe the destruction of the planet isn’t supposed to be fun. Maybe it’s supposed to be terrifying. And unsettling.” Well, “Don’t Look Up” certainly isn’t fun, but it’s also never terrifying or unsettling or illuminating. Instead, it is disjointed. It is also, less perceptive than it imagines. If we’ve learned anything over the last two years of the pandemic, it’s that the media is foaming at the mouth to announce the end of the world. Doomscrolling has been a shared endeavour over the pandemic, as we all engage with the worst news we can find, unable to look away from the awfulness of our reality. Yet, McKay insists that our attention spans are so woefully short that we must be coddled with gentle humour while the world burns. But “Don’t Look Up” wants to have it both ways. It wants to partake in the same kind of low-hanging surface-level silliness that the characters in its world are distracted by, but it also wants to critique the characters for wanting to be entertained. Only McKay can tell us how to correctly approach this crisis.
The aftermath of the premiere of “Don’t Look Up” at the end of 2021 has turned it into an enquiry on the issues within the movies rather than the movies. It’s tiresome when bad-faith readings of taste turn into valuing taste in art as some kind of ideological barometer. In late December, after a mixed critical response to the film, McKay and David Sirota (who provided the story idea) argued that ambivalence to the film was on par with wilful ignorance about the film. To dismiss the film was to dismiss the issues. But what happened to movies being movies? It means something, for example, that the most specific moments in “Don’t Look Up” feel removed from any kind of visual specificity. The film’s visual language is aimless and indistinct, rarely using the actual film form to engage with its argument.
McKay’s response isn’t peculiar in that regard and is part of an increasingly dispiriting way of viewing televisual art. Online trends on TikTok and Twitter have begun using taste in art as a barometer for relationships: If your spouse likes movie x, it’s a red-flag. Last September, a British Neo-Nazi was punished by being ordered to read Austen, Shakespeare, Trollope and other literary names as part of his comeuppance. The judge promised to test him on it afterwards. The judgement was exasperating not just for its reminder of the limits of the law and legal practitioners, but for the way it misunderstood the very essence of art. Yes. We may learn and be edified by art, but art does not exist as medicine or punishment. Our first instinct to cleave to art is not to be told what is right or wrong. By seeing art as a vessel for learning, and nothing more, these kinds or readings are as flat as the callous media conglomerate in “Don’t Look Up” that lacks the nuance to recognise the difference between the end of the world and the end of a relationship. A film is not a textbook, nor is it an essay; limiting cinema’s efficacy to its ethical, sociological, or even its philosophical stance is a reductive approach.
Film has been concerned with the environment since its start. Recently, the very tender “C’mon C’mon” punctuated its story with interviews from children asking the world to wake up to the awfulness of our present reality. “Don’t Look Up” is not peculiar for engaging with the hopelessness of the world around us. Its ideological acuity is not a mark of a film which credibly uses the form to engage with what it thinks. The sprawling cast of name actors in “Don’t Look Up” might harness their popularity to better effect in a McKay directed PSA, or even a film about celebrities making a PSA for the environment, when their own private lives are less attached to the cause. McKay does not seem committed to the type of nuance that might require, though. Instead, “Don’t Look Up” establishes its message within the first fifteen-minutes and keeps repeating it for the remaining two-hours with little variation. It is impressive ideology. It is less impressive as a film.