No looking up, please: We're American

Don't Look Up (DLU) - the latest Netflix blockbuster is an end of the world disaster movie that is actively promoted as a climate change allegory. One of the problems with today’s politics highlighted by McKay’s film is that of polarization. So it’s sad to see so much of the commentary on the movie marked by the same problem – either it’s a timely warning of the slippery slope to climate catastrophe, or a shrill and blunt piece of ideological cinema.

Here I’m going to make a case that DLU contains both helpful and unhelpful elements when it comes to efforts to deliver just and effective action on climate change. The film’s central analogy between climate change and a looming ‘planet-killer’ comet impact works in some ways and not in others. More problematic in my view are the ways the film reproduces American exceptionalism, and how that interacts with the comet analogy to risk turning a blind eye to critical issues of climate justice.

First, let’s consider some ways in which the film works as an allegory for climate change. It highlights the willingness of vested interests to kill the planet for short-term commercial gain. It warns that the US will pretend to global leadership, and offer unilateral rather than multilateral solutions. It emphasizes that the Silicon Valley model of technological innovation and development is entirely unsuited to tackling existential challenges, and more generally that commercial models of technology development will deliberately crowd-out (and even try to undermine) other possible responses, with potentially disastrous consequences (a particularly valuable cautionary tale for those promoting geoengineering technologies as a ‘complement’ to other climate action).

The reminders of a society where ‘the spectacle’ has become more important than reality and the consequent complicity of the media in climate delay and denial (and in creating and feeding on polarisation) are valuable too, ironically replicated and reinforced by the reactions of media critics to this movie – faithfully replicating their roles by failing to engage with the content and purpose of this piece of art. More generally DLU neatly portrays the motivated ignorance of media, politicians, businesses and many individuals. It hammers home that wealthy elites will not take responsibility for – and will do their best to entirely evade – the consequences of their greed. And in a rather exaggerated – but entertaining - form, DLU highlights that scientists are not immune to seduction by power and wealth. The complicity of supposedly ‘objective’ scientists unwilling to surrender status, influence and material wealth is one of the key drivers of ‘false solutions’ to climate change, just as it leads to over-reliance on uncertain novel technology in DLU.

And when the problem becomes obvious, DLU warns us that it won’t stop being divisive: there is not going to be an ‘aha’ moment when the impacts of climate change become so clear-cut that we all pull together … whether in time to stop catastrophe, or too late. Although in DLU such efforts fail, the film tells us that the only possibility of a ‘solution’ comes from working through the politics, and that even technological responses can’t escape politics.

On the other hand the nature of DLU’s problem simplifies things unhelpfully when it comes to the issue of technological salvation. There is no behavioural fix to a comet impact – but behavioural and lifestyle change are central to tackling climate change, and to climate justice. Even if, as many climate scientists might argue, we cannot manage climate change with behavioural or lifestyle measures alone any more, they still remain essential to avoiding the worst impacts, and putting our societies on a more sustainable course. Nor is climate change a problem that will hit everyone equally and instantly. In reality a comet impact would probably also have more drawn-out impacts, and might only wipe out civilization, not humanity, but that’s a minor quibble in this context. The main problem here is that in reproducing a presumption that ‘we’re all in this together’, the comet impact analogy sweeps away the historic context in which extractivism has already brought an end to the worlds of many indigenous and southern people, and is blind to the ways in which the claim we are ‘all in it together’ is used discursively to justify continued inequality and injustice (in responses to the Covid pandemic as much as in responses to climate change).

A lack of attention to diversity is endemic in DLU. On a small scale we see it in caricatured and questionable representations of women, people of colour and indigenous people. Despite the film’s efforts to portray the impacts of sexism – for instance the ways politicians and journalists try to attribute the comet discovery to the male professor, rather than the female student - the heroine is still at times caricatured as the angry (even hysterical) woman and the other major female characters are almost exclusively poor role models, including the alcoholic TV host, playing on her looks and inherited wealth, despite having multiple degrees. Similarly while the director of the Planetary Defense Authority is a black man, he is portrayed as weak and ineffective, and the only indigenous person we see is dancing a war-dance in the face of comet-fall. There is of course a deliberate sub-text here about who is permitted to exercise authority, but for this viewer at least, the balance was not well struck.

But the biggest shortfall in diversity is a product of an American exceptionalism that (perhaps again the topic of an unclear attempted subtext) dominates the movie. Despite the comet posing an existential threat to the whole world, the efforts of every other country are pretty well written off in two short scenes – one where UN proposes ‘going it alone’ – ironic given that the whole movie is about the US taking unilateral action, and another where an ‘accident’ destroys the Russian/Indian/Chinese mission, which is said to only be happening because they were ‘cut out’ of the opportunity to share in the mineral wealth of the cometary body. Otherwise we hear only passing mention of ‘Chilean refugees’ as part of a speech from the nepotistic chief-of-staff seeking to manipulate public support.

Perversely, the US focus risks the film being unhelpful within the US, seemingly writing off the possibility of climate concern from large slices of the US population by poking fun at them. Here the urge to satirise Trump and his supporters – while funny to many viewers – might actually further impede climate action. But this is not the only potentially unhelpful consequence of the US blinkers. The US focus devolves from a challenging theme delivered poorly to a serious problem insofar as the movie centres on denial. Yet outside the US, for the climate, denial is yesterday’s problem. The contemporary challenges are not getting people to ‘look up’ in the sense of listening to the scientists, but how we can prevent predatory delay and the continued imposition of the costs of climate action on those who have done least to cause it, but who already suffer more from its impacts. DLU touches on some if the issues involved, but leaves intact an imaginary that under the right leadership, the US could save the world (and implicitly, capitalism, consumerism etc). The solution is not changing the aspirations, but reforming the political system so leaders will listen to the scientists.

And this too is a worrying thought. The idea that there is ever a clear-cut ‘scientifically right’ option untainted by politics, is appealing, but dangerous. Climate scientists as scientists have no more a monopoly over truth and knowledge than do technologists or economists. Nor indeed does science hold a uniquely privileged way of understanding our world. We need to learn epistemic humility on the path to climate justice and sustainability.

January 31, 2022