Released by Netflix in 2021, Don’t Look Up was extremely popular in part because of its roster of big-name stars. Both Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence returned to the silver screen after extended absences. Lawrence herself declaring she took time off to “help the planet,” although later speaking about the acting break being due to mixed reviews of her projects and wanting more control over her career. However, looking at the publicly projected politics of both the actors and the film itself: which was about society’s response to a doomsday comet, the climate messaging being delivered “does not imagine an alternative set of realities” This proves possibly quite damaging to viewer’s self-efficacy toward climate change.
While making no direct connotation to the climate crisis (although Adam McKay made it clear in multiple interviews that it was a direct analogy), the film takes an extremely heavy handed, and ultimately damaging approach to satirising the USA’s societal response to an impending world ending catastrophe. It touches on making fun of celebrity commodity culture, the effects of late-capitalism, techno-fixes built off speculation, but none of its allegory actively creates any solutions for these crises. The ultimate conclusion of its narrative was that of accepting the fate of inaction and the consequences because absurdity rules the media landscape. It’s all the satire with none of the bite.
Leonardo DiCaprio, the main star of the film, mirrors the sort of performative activism going on in Don’t Look Up. While some like his vocal climate crisis focus, others find his actions to be grossly contradictory considering his lifestyle. International partying and exerting his high-wealth status to an effect that doesn’t support his carbon neutral aspirations. What both the film and its actors represent here is Hollywood’s perpetual problem to not centre any marginalised voices for climate justice.
Even while these first-world attitudes are satirised in the film, they are not placing both climate mitigation and adaptation at the forefront of the narrative with diverse perspectives. The interwoven stories of capitalistic and colonial inequality need to be addressed when telling this in the media, and Don’t Look Up does nothing to go above its white “apocalyptic imageries.” A liveable and sustainable future needs to be communicated in a way that represents global perspectives, and most importantly suggests some form of action to achieve that.
In an age where false balances are becoming the norm for journalistic reporting on the climate crisis, cinema needs to be a lot smarter with its allegory. It becomes very hard for audiences to imagine a world where we can adapt to the changes of climate change if all movies present us with uninspired, snarky and graceless satires. Without any solutions from a global and intersectional perspective, the idea for that imagination becomes nigh impossible.
Nevertheless, the Academy Awards thought the film worthy of inclusion for Best Picture. The extreme cognitive dissonance that is America patting itself on the back for making a film that is celebrated by a body which has a history of refusing to engage with actual activists is astounding. The self-satisfaction is ripe. When a film such as How to Blow Up a Pipeline which imagines people from diverse backgrounds coming together to enact “ethical sabotage” on the fossil fuel and other climate destroying industries is left to linger in the background come awards season – the case can be made that Don’t Look Up is precisely as far as the entertainment industry will go when dealing with climate emergency as a topic.
A single segment in an episode of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom (Main Justice 2014) did more than Don’t Look Up managed. The actual doomsday clock has ticked over, and the bubble of privilege has no real time for it.
Director: Adam McKay
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep
Writer: Adam McKay, David Sirota
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