Sunday Pages: "Don't Look Up"
A film by Adam McKay
Dear Reader,
Long time, no see! The omicron-diluted holidays are over, and normal life, such as it is, resumes.
I got my booster at 4pm on December 30, and spent most of New Year’s Eve in a pleasant, spacey fog (except for the hour or two when I had a fever and a bad chill), and fell asleep well before midnight, successfully ignoring drunk Andy Cohen and the ball dropping. I suspect most people either did not go out, or had modest, muted celebrations. Perhaps this tentative New Year’s Eve will make for a better year this time around? I hope so.
On Christmas, I received a gift from the universe in the form of a new movie by Adam McKay, Don’t Look Up, that suddenly populated my Netflix screen. McKay is a longtime comedy writer, one of the executive producers of Succession, the writer and director of The Big Short and Vice, and one of very few filmmakers whose movies I always want to see. He’s, like, the anti-Wes Anderson.
The plot: Two undistinguished astronomers discover a comet that will collide with Earth in six months, ending all life on the planet. But they can’t seem to get anyone interested in this near-absolute certainty. I’ve seen the film compared to Idiocracy and to Dr. Strangelove. Certainly it is a brilliant piece of satire.
One of the first things you notice about Don’t Look Up is that the story is by McKay and [checks notes] David Sirota. The latter was a senior advisor, speechwriter, and Twitter attack dog for the Bernie Sanders campaign—the 2019 version, when the fact that the Russians were openly helping Sanders was a matter of federal record. How involved Sirota was in the deployment of the “Bernie bots” I cannot say, but there is no question that in terms of below-the-belt tactics, the Bernie accounts were far nastier to this Twitter user than all of MAGA combined. Also, there’s this:
A number of folks on Twitter say they won’t watch the movie because Sirota was involved. So let me say up front: I could not detect his fingerprints here. His main contribution seems to be that there is no Bernie character in Don’t Look Up—no scene where Congress is voting on whether to launch a nuclear strike to divert the comet from ending all life on the planet, and a rumpled, white-haired, Soviet-boosting socialist announces that he won’t vote for the bill unless the federal minimum wage is raised to $15. Which would have been funny!
The point is, Sirota’s involvement didn’t matter. Not to me. I loved the movie. I watched it on Christmas with my wife, who loved it too, and again last night with my 15-year-old son, who also loved it. (That the cast includes Gen Z favorites Timothée Chalamet, Ariana Grande, and Scott Mescudi—aka Kid Cudi—made it an easy sell). I am surprised to see so many meh reviews. But then, not everyone has spent the last five years shouting from the rooftops, warning of a danger they saw and understood before almost anyone else—a danger most people still don’t grasp. In my world, the comet is Trump/ Trumpism/ death of democracy.
And now, I’m going to write about Don’t Look Up as if you’ve already seen it. So if you haven’t, please stop reading, and bookmark this for later.
Seriously: SPOILER ALERT below the photo.
Don’t Look Up, for me, can be distilled to a few important lines of dialogue:
“Look, let’s establish, once again, that there is a huge comet headed towards Earth. And the reason we know that there is a comet is because we saw it. We saw it with our own eyes using a telescope. I mean, for god sake, we took a fucking picture of it! What other proof do we need? And if we can’t all agree at the bare minimum that a giant comet the size of Mount Everest, hurtling its way towards planet Earth, is not a fucking good thing, then what the hell happened to us?”
Almost every review I’ve read of Don’t Look Up suggests that it’s about climate change. I’ve watched it twice, and this take honestly never occurred to me. It can certainly be read as a commentary on vaccines/covid. But for me, it’s about the Trump/GOP attack on our democracy—an incontrovertible fact that half the country (and most of the media) has don’t-look-upped into a both-sides political issue.
“You guys, the truth is way more depressing. They’re not even smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them credit for.”
The banality of evil, yes, but also the banality of greed. Conspiracy theories melt away like so many wax candles, and all that’s left is a small confederacy of soulless, amoral ghouls, ready and willing for many people to suffer and die so they can add a few more nuggets of gold to their disgustingly large piles.
“There’s dope stuff, like material stuff, like sick apartments and watches, and cars, um, and clothes and shit that could all go away and I don’t wanna see that stuff go away. So I’m gonna say a prayer for that stuff. Amen.”
This is the prayer offered by Jonah Hill’s Jason Orlean, the president’s son and chief of staff, as the comet is about to hit. It’s played for laughs, but honestly, he’s on to something here. Consider: We’re all going to die someday. What we expect, when we go, is that the legacy of humanity will endure. The “stuff” that human beings have produced—vaccines, the Taj Mahal, Pet Sounds, Ford Mustangs, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the SNL “More Cowbell” sketch, and yes, sick apartments and watches—is our collective culture, our civilization. That no one would be left to appreciate any of this—that a lot of that, too, would be destroyed by the comet—would really bother me, if the scenario played out in real life. On the other hand, Keith Richards would still be around, so “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” would live forever.
“I’m grateful that we tried.”
This line, spoke by Jennifer Lawrence’s Kate at the last supper, really gets me. If democracy falls in the United States, if Trump escapes indictment and re-takes the White House, if jackbooted MAGA thugs round up all the dissidents and critics of the administration and drag me away kicking and screaming, this is what I will mutter under my breath.
“We really did have everything, didn’t we?”
The last thing Leonardo DiCaprio’s Randall says, at the same last supper, marveling at the world we made—a world that includes specialty coffee, the Four Kings of Harmony, and weapons so powerful that hurling them into space to destroy comets doesn’t seem like science fiction.
There’s so much good in the world. So much genius. So much hope. So much love.
All we have to do is look.
Photo credit: still shot from Don’t Look Up.
Happy new year, Greg. Watched this on New Year’s morning with an actor/screenwriter friend.
We have the exact same take as you.
This movie explores exactly what happens when Icarus flies too close to the sun and when Trump and Putin pussy minions make a play, still on going, to undermine democracy and cast us into a specter of misery and defeat.
No one notices at first, and then when some brave souls do and try to speak, the truth is perverted to meet the agenda of the crass narcissists and powermongers, filthy lucre and fame.
Lines delivered for laughs landed cold and hurt, sadly reflective of a society that forsakes spiritual growth and a sense of community for pleasure and instant gratification and avoids accountability and responsibility. Any sense of US and WE is obscured in its passion for I and ME.
There are those who live with the last line running through them though. And so you write, you beseech, you march, you speak, you tweet. You adopt the final words as a lullaby, a call to action, an evening prayer.
You wake up one morning, pack the car and head for DC.
And you don’t stop warning about the comet.
🙏🏻
Reminds me of this, Milton Mayer, They thought They aware Free, Germany 1933-1945. ‘“Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained, or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that unless one saw what the whole thing was in principle, what all the ‘little measures’…must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in the field sees the corn growing - each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.
You don’t want to talk, or even act, alone. You don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father never could have imagined.”