Humans continuously testing bounds of reality leads to a genre that is neither fiction nor fact, but terrifyingly both!
A still from Don’t Look Up
Not that you can adequately gauge love/hate of a film that’s only trending on Netflix—as with box-office, that merely tells you how many people watched it. What is kinda surprising to me is how Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up polarised film critics. There’s the obvious explanation by way of expectations, which is the mother of all opinion anyway.
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To list only Oscar winners, let alone A-list nominees and top-notch cameos, Don’t Look Up, an Oscar bait itself, stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Cate Blanchett and Mark Rylance. What could they possibly play to justify their collective presence in one prophet-of-doom pic?
In this case, a clever cocktail of people from public life, mixed into multiple characters, from a toxic Trump as a woman US President, with Ivanka + Kushner below, a Zuckerberg + Musk + Jobs right here, MSNBC TV’s co-host Mika Brzezinski there, right down to Ariana Grande pretty much showing up as herself elsewhere!
The assertion being if humans do go down, they’ll do so entertaining themselves to death! When all the world’s a spoof, in a hyper-connected, post-media age, what else must a political satirist do, but place a camera, to show it as we see it? Black comedy then becomes hopeless humour.
Only that as an audience, what we receive isn’t real, or documentary-like (Chernobyl); nor fictional, as a distant apocalypse (Independence Day). There are no more things known and unknown for there to be the doors. Maybe there should be a name for this genre.
Another good example would be the series, Black Mirror, where, say, people recording/replaying every moment of their lives through hard-disks in their eyes, or giving star-ratings to strangers on streets, is neither sci-fi nor journalism. Or it is terrifyingly both, firmly located in the zeitgeist.
Which is why Don’t Look Up feels very different from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964), about Cold War and the impending end of the world—I’m guessing, inspired by the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).
It’s neither like the writings of George Orwell or Hannah Arendt, after WWII, which gave the impression that mass misinformation and tyrannies at least help produce quality literature. They probably don’t. Their books got written after those dictatorships were gone.
Don’t Look Up is about two relatively fledgling astronomers (DiCaprio, Lawrence), who spot a fictional Comet Dibiasky, that is on its way to destroy the earth, in six months flat. They get access to the US President to present these indisputable facts.
The response from the President (Streep)—who’s more real than parody, with a smirk of smugness—goes: “Sit tight, and assess.” Which in Indian bureaucratese would translate to: “The situation is tense, but under control.”
She’s still more concerned with ratings/numbers in a forthcoming election. Now I don’t know if an actual comet could destroy the planet, as the film suggests. Chances are one in 65 million years, apparently—that’s what took away the dinosaur.
Although I do remember from Std 5 or 6, suggesting likelihood of a similar disaster, with Comet Swift Tuttle hurtling towards the earth in the mid ’90s, that helped me hugely with a science project in school!
The comet in Don’t Look Up is a stand-in for global warming. Sure, most of us don’t take it seriously as a crisis. Yes, we toss around tokenisms on saving the earth, as if the planet needs saving—it’ll carry on anyway, it’s our species that may not, no?
But this isn’t apathy, as much as the fact that humans aren’t probably wired to look beyond themselves—make that a generation or two ahead, max. For, what are children but somewhat an extension of narcissism/self-love as well.
I suspect, somewhere at the back of their minds, most are convinced, climate change will not altogether destroy them in their lifetime. They can take it easy, even get contrarian on practical demands.
I know this is serendipitous, and that McKay wrote Don’t Look Up before the pandemic. But what if we replaced the comet, not with climate change, but with COVID-19.
Not as a fictionalised Apocalypse Now! But as documentary evidence of exactly what followed, both in America and India. Observe the continuing obsession with elections, politics, demagogues and divides that deepened. Look at big companies that spoke of profits, nevertheless.
Observe anti-vaxxers to other naysayers, some of them climbing the Capitol Hill in Washington DC. Recall India’s ruling party that officially proclaimed having destroyed the global virus under their national leader, even before the second wave hit. Worried about the optics, these were humans, disregarding human issues, including mass deaths from an invisible enemy.
Yup, that’s what happened when the comet actually hit. No, the world didn’t come to an end. It did, for those who are no more. “[The powerful at the top] are not even smart enough for the evil you’re giving them credit for,” a Regular Joe character says in McKay’s film. Don’t Look Up is a comedy. I can see why so many saw no humour in it.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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