~~photo collage by my spouse~~
End-of-Days Content Parsers,
Before long, Don't Look Up could be the most-watched movie ever on Netflix. Even my friends who aren't in the business & don’t watch movies actually saw it & told me I had to see it too. So, I saw it.
And much like Adam McKay:
Don't Look Up made me root for the comet. I don't mean that I found the movie so dispiriting that I wanted the world to end. I just felt like the movie really wanted Leonardo Dicaprio to be right. That seemed like what mattered most. And I was half-rooting for him to be proven right, because I — a guy w/ a newsletter about another apocalypse — know what it’s like to be right, righteous, & unheard goddamnit!!!
But I was also very aware that if Leo was "right," that did mean the world would end & everyone on earth would die. The movie seemed less worried about that. Adding to the sense that something was off, I felt like the movie's other big goal was just sort of angry & irrelevant: to prove that those idiots -- i.e. politicians, cable news anchors, Ariana Grande, and anybody who enjoys a bit of celeb gossip -- were wrong. It wasn't so much punching up but punching at random at everybody... who was going to die anyway.
In all the disaster movies I can think of besides Don't Look Up, you're rooting for the disaster not to happen. Because disaster movies try pretty hard to show you what's at risk of being destroyed. You know, the disaster-fighting-hero's family. The oak tree in their backyard. The unaware crowd at the ballgame. The old person who lived through horrors. The child in the stroller who just wants to go to Disney.
That's the deepest logic of disaster movies: The movies have to love the world.
Don't Look Up just doesn't give a shit about any of that. There are brief acknowledgements of what will be lost: rapid-fire montages of "foreign peoples" and "nature" that looked like Nat Geo b-roll. Plus there's one genuinely unnerving scene at the end, with Leo, Melanie Lynskey, Rob Morgan, and Leo & Melanie's adult kids sitting around the kitchen table. In their final moments, where they just made small talk, I felt like I finally connected with these people.
But until that moment... even if you, unlike me, were enjoying the movie... did you ever feel that the movie loved... anything?
So... if it's not a world worth saving, what's this movie really about?
Supposedly, Don't Look Up is about climate change. It sets up an allegory for why we haven't confronted the coming apocalypse. But holy shit is its argument irrelevant. The movie takes place entirely in the spheres of American cable news & White House politics, with dynamics that are pretty specific to America. It probably goes without saying that America is only responsible for a small minority of climate-fucking pollutants. America's Republicans are the only major political party in any major country that deny climate change. It's just not a thing elsewhere in the same way. And uhhhhhh.... Only a few million people still watch American cable news!!! American chatter doesn't matter much against the global scope of the climate.
Eventually, the movie rolls out an ur-villain: an American tech trillionaire, who's a mash-up of Little Caesar's alien affect, plus Bezos and Elon's space fantasies... or Gates' affect... or Jobs' imperiousness. (When you think about it, those people are all hauntingly alike, eh?) But there's no measure by which they're personally responsible for causing climate change or preventing the rest of us from solving it. They -- utter fucking ghouls -- tend to be science-supporting Democrats who donate billions to research, including on climate. Plus, it's painful to admit as much, but does anybody have a more feasible plan for massively reducing fossil fuel consumption than Tesla?
if you suspect elon & mckay have a lot in common???
Don't Look Up may blame Elon & co, but what the movie really hates most is celebrities, in particular celebrities having sex, especially so if it's adulterous, triply so if the public pays attention. McKay states as much in his Vanity Fair profile, where he tells the author he thinks the title should be, “Adam McKay believes that personal profiles have destroyed America.”
McKay puts these ideas into the film. Leo's affair -- with a horned-up caricature far beneath Blanchett -- is his moral downfall. There are also a lot of non-sequiturs where Ariana Grande breaks-up-and-makes-up live on the air, playing a braindead version of herself. Those scenes are ungenerous to Ariana -- who makes HITS -- and even less so to the thirsty audience for her character’s antics.
Which bothered the shit out of me. Because if my wife tells me that she or some other super hot celebrity breaks up with their special friend? I'll probably ask a few follow-up questions.
I don't think that our near-universal interest in celebrity gossip has anything to do with our failure to address climate change. It’s such a natural human instinct: to peer at the glossiest among us, which we have indulged from the Pharaoh to Monroe.
And the morsel of celebrity gossip that has been most of interest to me of late? McKay's extensive dishing about his own break up with Will Ferrell. McKay divulges at tortured, talk-therapeutic length about how he treated Ferrell, the star who made his career possible & his former best friend. Their relationship had withered and then dissolved after McKay re-cast John C. Reilly in Ferrell’s role in their forthcoming Lakers series without telling him. ooooof.
Self-aware to a point, McKay knows he screwed up. But I can’t help but wonder if he also blames the celebrity-making machine — which has turned him into a bold-faced name — for some personal shortcomings. And having constructed the whole idea of celebrity as his personal boogeyman, it’s only natural that he blames it for the end of the world.
Don't Look Up is less about climate than celebrity. It's about the vapidity & shamelessness of the world's most famous and their capture of our culture and our politics. It's also about how even “the smart people” -- like Leo, with his glasses and beard much like McKay's -- must suffer through the indignities of becoming celebrities to spread their messages. But in becoming celebrities, they find their voices drowned out by people who are way more famous. Again, at its core, the movie is about being right, but not getting the attention you deserve.
So what's the movie really about? It's about how Adam McKay feels on Twitter. McKay is a Twitter warrior, and his movie’s vision of the world looks a lot like the Bird app. Its whole explanation for our failure to confront the climate — blue checks are craven, their followers are morons — ignores much of human activity, including how our economy actually works & the deeper reasons our weather has turned on us, but it does account for what goes down on that app, especially from his vantage, with a following of 1MM (which is a lot, but not the 7.2MM enjoyed by Don Jr.).
The movie’s solution for climate change doesn’t necessarily exclude, say, mass protests & carbon taxes, but it starts with people listening to Adam McKay.
Instead of conflating his personal experience of fame & being good-not-great at Twitter with the global nightmare of environmental collapse, McKay could've just made a satire of modern celebrity, a la Network. Maybe with a tighter focus & inspiration from that incredible film, he'd find the dark heart of the attention economy, which is also the root cause of the climate apocalypse: capitalism as a system, not individual tech dweebs who've won the terrible game, nor craven politicians… nor the many billion eyeballs that fall for their bait... or merely indulge in a little hot goss.
Look, I think telling a story about climate exclusively through the lens of celebrity is dumb, but what seems dangerous about this movie is its dismissal of republicans & even just the general public as mere followers — as fucking morons beyond repair. I worry it has encouraged millions & millions of viewers not to act, but to feel superior.
We know what happens when we write each other off. We go backwards -- fast. And that's not an option anymore, because as this movie does understand, the clock is ticking...
And there's no time left to be right.
Hollywood & Wider World Forever Y'all,
Max
P.S. fun to see annie hamilton have a legacy media moment. pre-quar, i met her two, maybe three times, and she was a hoot — high wattage, super nice.
P.P.S. if you found your way here via a yuge green genius? <333333333333
P.P.P.S. you can always holler at hollywoodforeveryall@gmail.com. i’ll tell you anything except my real name.