Don’t Look Up — a critical analysis by cinemóvil nyc

written by Ali Jaffery, edited by cinemóvil nyc

Don’t Look Up was released on Netflix over the holidays, topping the streaming charts off the weight of its star-power alone, and liberals speedily took to social media to extol its supposed virtues. We, the members of Cine Móvil (a radical autonomous film screening collective founded in the wake of uprising) thought little of this discourse, as liberals tend to treat anything vaguely “woke” as if its mana from heaven. However, over the past two weeks we couldn’t help but notice many Leftists (and DemSocs) speaking positively of the film and it’s “message.” So we decided to pen the following review for the Liberals who think this film is necessary viewing and the Leftists that think it can have a positive impact. Among other things, we aim to explain how, at its root level, Don’t Look Up constitutes a nihilistic Rebel Yell­­ for Liberals (and white people) who, as things currently stand, will be content with millions dying in the Global South so long as they get to survive. We will also explore the insidious ideological hypocrisy of streaming giants like Netflix. Finally, we will end our analysis with thoughts on how to play an active part in demanding more from so-called political art.

There are several moments in Adam Mckay’s Don’t Look Up that pay direct homage to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove — from the 60s-style opening credits which weakly ape Saul Bass, to the image of a deranged military cowboy enthusiastically riding a nuclear rocket to certain doom. Strangelove, that quintessential end-of-days satirical masterpiece, placed extreme doubts in the U.S government’s nuclear safeguards, competency, and overall character. That the film pushed these ideas at a time when the imperial arm of the state commanded (indeed, demanded) near-total veneration was both clear-sighted and audacious, and to this day the film retains its vitality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Strangelove’s sage veracity was confirmed decades later when declassified documents revealed 1960s America’s fail-safe protocols would indeed have allowed a fanatical general to launch nuclear weapons without any oversight. Further, military personnel at the time are reported to have expressed frequent concerns about the psychological stability of their top brass. So in a sense Dr. Strangelove performed the movie-going public a great service that extended beyond mere entertainment — it instilled a deserved mistrust in the institutions directly responsible for their existential safety. It may not have been enough to immediately cause a systematic reevaluation of nuclear fail-safe protocols (that would come several years later), but at the very least The People were granted an intuitive understanding of the danger they were in.

By contrast, the object of scorn in Don’t Look Up is “The People” themselves. Not satisfied with pointing the blame at the political machine or the oil-profiting corporations (nor the total media control wielded by the latter), writer/director Adam Mckay sees The People as gullible, venal and unworthy of being saved from certain death. The film posits that humanity would not even rise up to stop its own extinction if given 6 months’ notice to do so (in the real world, revolutions have succeeded quicker than that, and with much less at stake). The potential of the film’s amorphously-defined hoi polloi to cohere around collective common interests is nil. The People are instead primarily represented by a grotesque funhouse refraction of Tweets and TikTok videos which the film periodically unleashes across the screen in response to the proclamations of TV newscasters, politicians, and bureaucratic scientists. Perhaps this explains why perpetually-online low-grade influencers across social media have so easily identified with this film’s narrative, some of them even going so far as to admit they were moved by the film’s tacky denouement. They represent the vacuous spirit of this film.

These soul-deadening qualities are reinforced by the film’s mundane aesthetic. Shot and edited unerringly like a high-budget TV ad for life insurance, and paired with a score that often sounds indistinguishable from temp or “placeholder” music (a career low for composer Nicholas Brittel), scenes hurtle along without taking a moment to let things breathe, or to mine the character interactions for deeper subtlety and humor. The relentless editing and largely handheld camerawork affords the filmmakers the “freedom” to not bother themselves with the hard work of crafting an interesting film. Fundamental elements of film craft, such as staging and lighting, seem to have been hardly considered at all before the day of shooting. That viewers and critics alike aren’t tending to note these pedestrian visual qualities is proof-positive that critical analysis of visual storytelling is at its all-time nadir. The film is so unappealing to look at for anyone with a half-trained eye that it makes Mckay’s previous dramedy The Big Short look like Sidney Lumet’s Network.

Netflix, for its part, knows that it’s not in the business of making art, but of producing #Content for people to throw on the TV while half-browsing their phones, and are pleased to simply have you streaming *their* background fodder instead of their competitor’s. Tellingly, the main streaming giants have in recent times taken to measuring “engagement” by cumulative hours watched, instead of number of viewers. Your time is their profit, and last year Netflix recorded $25 billion in revenue, with a massive $221 billion market cap.

Don’t Look Up truly has nothing useful to say about climate change, and to understand why one need look no further than the film’s financial backers. Netflix’s largest shareholders are, it turns out, the biggest Oil and Coal profiteers in the entire world — Blackrock Inc, Vanguard Group Inc, Capital Research Global Investors, among others. These investment firms are directly causing our climate collapse and it is no coincidence that they own a commanding portion of Netflix. They also own large stakes in the other streaming giants (Disney, HBO, etc), making them the primary stakeholders whom the major media corporations must appease, both financially and ideologically with every film and TV show they produce. Awareness of this fact flies directly in the face of Liberal notions that this film is a vital work challenging the system. The film’s nihilism, lack of faith in humanity, and lack of nuanced class analysis is not a contrivance. The film would not have been funded by any of the streaming giants if it did not contain these qualities, or if it were in any way challenging their stockholder’s sacred cash cow. The capitalist ruling class learned in the past century that controlling the media and its messaging, while maintaining the illusion that the media is “free,” is the way to achieve total social control of the masses under capitalism. A key part of this strategy is to occasionally produce movies, TV shows, and news stories that appear to be “woke” — insofar as they reference the effects of capitalist exploitation — while failing to diagnose the root causes of the problem and neglecting to show people acting collectively to defeat their capitalist / colonial oppressors. That would be giving people bad ideas. Bad for the bottom-line. Bad for the stability of the market. Meanwhile, they get the best of both worlds: convincing the average person that the free press/media is alive and well, when it is in fact dead, gone, and hardly existed in America to begin with.

The film’s central symbolism — climate change being represented by a world-ending comet — also supports the agenda of Netflix’s oil-funded stockholders in ways that are worth unpacking. By showing us the improbably spectacular and instantaneous destruction of the entire planet, it makes it easier for us to accept:

1) Slow-rolling and incremental effects of climate change, because at least we should be grateful that we’re not all being wiped out immediately, and

2) The neofascist creep which is being steadily managed by the aforementioned neoliberal order of multinational corporations & investment firms who wield immense power over the material world. A growing lack of faith in the people and our government easily leads folks towards accepting the tough, unwavering response of (eco-)fascism. This relationality is borne out by modern history.

But as with any film that hurls tons of shit at the wall just to see what sticks, some portions of Don’t Look Up do indeed hit the target. In particular, there are two plot points in this film that are worth noting.

Firstly, the conceit that the ruling class would seek to profit off of a world-ending crisis is cogent and plainly credible. However, the film does not extend this understanding of the ruling class to any kind of real examination of the perversity of their greed as it exists today. Late in the film, Leonardo Dicaprio’s beleaguered astronomer, in trying to decide whether to raise the alarm about the evil corporation BASH’s plan to extract minerals from the comet, offers that part of the extractive wealth ($32 trillion total) will be used to “end world hunger.” The other characters dismiss this as lie, sure, but anyone who has been paying even a little attention to that distinctly capitalist issue knows that food scarcity (like housing scarcity) is purely artificial. In reality, we currently produce more than enough food for every person on the planet. The film reveals itself to be an ill-informed white Liberal fever dream in the subsequent sequence, where we see scant footage of ordinary folks finally rising up. The film takes pains here to push the nihilistic liberal lie that uprisings against governments and ruling classes is never justifiable, always wrong, and never works. The white liberal urge to never open a history book that isn’t a patriotic hagiography makes it unsurprising that they are the demographic who constitutes Don’t Looks Up’s most ardent and vocal fanbase.

Secondly, the decision to have Dicaprio’s Anthony Fauci-esque character sell-out to the bureaucratic machine is a savvy story choice, made all the more novel by the near-perfect timing of the film’s holiday release coinciding with the exact moment when Fauci’s Bureaucrat-first, Scientist-second scam reached its apogee. Over the holidays, with Omicron causing historic infections throughout the country, the CDC rolled back its science-based restrictions in order to maximize the profits of the ruling class — a choice which by the CDC’s own projections will murder 44,000 Americans this month alone. Sacrifices to the economy which augur untold millions more to come.

It is strange that critics have almost uniformly neglected to account for this film’s congruence with the real-world Liberal bureaucratic horror we are facing at this very moment. It’s as if they somehow missed the core blunt “message” of the film — that our unwillingness to accurately diagnose our problems and talk about them without reservation is the failing which will lead to our downfall. Critics and most of the film’s acolytes completely miss, in pure Liberal fashion, how our contemporary crises, from COVID to climate change annihilate the most vulnerable among us first, and at an incremental rate. This incrementalism is *precisely* what allows for the suburban Liberal’s intransigence and inaction. It is not ignorance but selfishness, plain and simple. Not a metaphysical inability to communicate with each other as a result of cellphones and social media, but a class difference as old as Marx, which explains perfectly why the middle-class doesn’t care enough to break with their routine and stop this slow-rolling murder train. They know that they will be one of the last stops, and are betting that they will be able to pull the emergency brakes once the underclasses in the cars ahead of them die in sufficient droves to raise alarm. Just as the comet strikes Earth, Dicaprio’s decidedly middle-class character laments, “We really did have everything.” And so the middle class may as well ask, “Why can’t we just keep this bliss and contentment built off of mass exploitation and alienation of the populace forever? Why must there be consequences?”

The film and its online reactions highlight a middle/upper class that feels subconsciously Real Bad (UwU) about having participated in this horrible system from which they have benefited so immensely, and whose privileges they might very soon be forced to relinquish somewhat due to the Earth’s entropic tendency to course correct for the egoistic domination and destruction of its environs (“fuck around and find out”). Implicit in Leo’s final statement is also the notion that the privileged classes deserved everything they had. But how did The Privilged People squander the spoils of this unfair and brutal economic system? According to the logic of the film, by staring too much at their phones. Oh, and by not electing Bernie.

The film’s co-writer is David Sirota, Bernie Sanders’ former campaign adviser, and there are hints of the spurned candidate’s failed election bid littered throughout the script. In particular, the moment when BASH’s CEO has the President turn around the planet-saving rockets without completing their mission bares more than a passing resemblance to Super Tuesday 2020, when every candidate was ordered overnight by the ruling class to drop out and endorse Biden against Bernie. Pete Buttigieg’s private jet was even rerouted mid-flight by its billionaire owner to South Bend in order to abruptly announce the end of his campaign. It was soon revealed that former President Obama phoned him and promised him a spot on Biden’s cabinet to sweeten the deal.

But Don’t Look Up is still primarily the work of a writer/director in Adam Mckay, and as such it cannot help but tell us how he sees himself in the world. The film’s ending articulates an aggrandizing fear (with little basis in material reality) that Mckay’s billionaire bosses will leave him (the truth-teller) and his family behind to die in the climate crisis. In reality, with a net worth of $60 million, Mckay is in the upper echelons of Hollywood and will be buttressed against the effects of climate change for the rest of his life. With his riches he can buy land in the most climate advantageous wealthy enclaves the neocolonial capitalist world has to offer.

When the world-ending cataclysm does finally arrive, the film attempts to squeeze the totality of existence into a hopelessly banal minute-long montage. As with much of the film, the grasp far exceeds its reach. Relegating the immensity of the apocalypse and the eradication of all life in the known universe to a series of images that look and feel as inconsequential as snippets caught while idly channel surfing, belies once again how Mckay’s view of life in this film operates at an essentially superficial level. If there is any meaning to life for this filmmaker, it is surely expressed as our protagonists sit down for their final meal. The mise-en-scène here is that of the prototypical middle-class suburban dining room, and all we get is banal dialogue about food and minor personal anecdotes — anything but the elephant-in-the-room — which, as everyone who traveled to the suburbs for the holidays can attest, tends to constitute the entirety of the forced dialogue which takes place in these environs.

But, to return this film’s ham-fisted metaphor to the real world: do we honestly believe that the bourgeois class would be mobilizing to stop climate change if not for the distracting effects of cellphones, social media, and Inside Edition? If misinformation on our devices is what is stopping us from overthrowing this plainly evil system, then how does that explain the past 50 years, in which revolution would have been warranted at practically any time and yet was never executed? Could it be that the destruction of the Communist movement via McCarthyism, the violent quelling of the Black Power movement through COINTELPRO, and the neoliberal order’s cybernetic push to instill an egocentric and consumerist cultural ideology are what neutered our collective ability to mobilize? In order to avoid climate collapse, do we not need to decide collectively how to restructure our geographic localities to achieve radical decarbonization and degrowth (actions which are antithetical to Capitalism)? These are all rhetorical questions. You should know the answer to all these question in 2022. Reach out to your local radical leftists if you need answers.

Critics of this film tend to leave it up to the audience to decide whether it will instigate positive change. This is purely intellectual cowardice. The individual clicks, views, hours or whatever other technocratic metrics the streaming monopolies use to measure a film’s “success” have only gone to increase Netflix’s quarterly valuation and thus line the pockets of the investment firms who are directly funding the climate apocalypse. It is a failing of cultural critics that they don’t consider the literal material conditions that determine what we see in theaters and what is pushed on streaming platforms, i.e. the multinational corporations with distinct interests in the maintenance of capitalist hegemony and derivation of profits from all of its concomitant affects. The critical myopia is a glaring shortcoming — one that perhaps belies a fear among writers and publications of encountering the ire of powerful corporate entities. Best to keep your head low and try not to consider how badly we all need to fight for a future worth living, so they think.

Critics have also tended to excuse the film’s invisibilizing of the non-superpower countries as a necessity of its plot conceit. But if the film is a parable for climate change, then it fails at all the most important levels. And in its nihilism it is inherently a counter-revolutionary work of art. The great Marxist philosopher & cultural critic Walter Benjamin warned of the fascist underpinnings of this type of artmaking in his seminal 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Noticing the increasingly nihilistic and reactionary underpinnings of art in the run up to the Nazi era, he wrote, “[Humankind’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” If nothing matters anymore, and we believe humanity to essentially be hopeless, then it surely becomes much easier for us to accept the brutal resolutions offered by fascists.

So the question for viewers becomes, have you succumbed to nihilism so deeply that you will not only accept but champion these plodding, grim, unimaginative representations of our late-stage capitalist clown show, without a glimmer of hope for a future beyond our unrelenting doom? Are you further resigned to let the fascist creep continue unabated? If so, then continue to cheerlead for films produced by our true global oppressors. And if not, then here’s an alternative idea, a vision if you will, of a future where Art ceases to be a product mediated by and for global elites…

Unlike the corruptible moguls of Hollywood, and their shadowy financiers, the members of Cine Móvil NYC are not nihilists spreading doom and gloom. We see real possibility for liberation in local communities — particularly in the radical reinvestment (of time, skills, and resources) in each other. If you take the money and energy you usually give to major corporations, whether media companies (Netflix, Disney, etc), retail venders (Amazon, Walmart, etc), or corporate-funded venues, and spend those resources instead on local alternatives, then those alternatives will grow and flourish. Disinvesting from the corporations is the only way to start reclaiming our power, and open up space for us to imagine the brighter futures that the rich are incapable of showing us (and don’t want us to believe are possible).

It really does matter who is funding and distributing a work of art, because these apparatuses determine the bounds and limits of *what* can be expressed and *how* it can be experienced. Art that is vitally transgressive, or revolutionary, or which allow us to imagine ways of moving beyond Capitalism will not be brought into the world by major corporations. It is not in their interest. They see The People as nothing more than digits and decimals to be shifted around in their investment profiles, maintaining and expanding their power. Their interests are opposite to ours.

As such, the only solution to this crisis of art production & distribution is to develop art and community outside of the clutches of the ruling class. Get out from under their foot. Support local artists, fund local art, and especially fund art is radical and anti-capitalist in its production and distribution methods. We at Cine Móvil have been encouraged to see radical film collectives springing up across the world in the past year, and are enthralled to see how these collectives have all been sharing ideas and resources with one another. Don’t Look Up represents the grim existential conclusion of rugged individualism. Through collective action, the seeds of possibility for liberation are endless. Time to begin sowing for the future harvest.