Maybe I’m wrong because I don’t really follow them, but I don’t think McKay or Sirota believed this movie was saying something new or that it would change the world. From their account of the inspiration for the script, they were just feeling frustrated like everyone else with how unserious the establishment is being about climate change so they made a satire about that feeling of frustration and helplessness. I’m sure they want it to help raise urgency, but I don’t think they have the pretense that the movie is something more important than another piece of propaganda to urge people to act.
But the thing I find weird about the criticism is not that I think the movie is perfect, it’s really that the movie itself seems unimportant and that is like a big theme of the movie. We live in a culture that has hypernormalized the slow walk to the apocalypse, and we keep existing in this surreal hellscape of frivolity and grifting around that fact. It’s like everybody is either in a hypnotic state of coping or they’re just delusional due to helplessness, and it’s because the whole structure of society just can’t abide such a massive existential crisis. It is too inconvenient to the ruling class, so they try to spin it into anything from a good thing, to something that can’t be happening, or to something that we’re just watching on NatGeo as though we are aliens observing our own “natural” death.
So I can see why McKay and Sirota keep seeming to respond to criticism by talking about climate change, which keeps pissing off critics who call it deflection or condescension. Don’t Look Up is just a movie, but it’s a movie ABOUT the actually existing, really happening climate apocalypse and the feeling of helplessness it inspires for average people. Putting emphasis in some article or essay on how it’s boring, or not subtle enough, or not new enough feels insane. We’re in the process of condemning billions of people to death and disaster, in this case the medium of film as mass entertainment is just one of the few means of communicating about it. Its quality as “art” or “entertainment” is the kind of frivolity we are forced by the machinery of hegemonic capitalist culture to bury our heads in to not face the really happening disaster. The absurdity of the fact this is one of our only ways to communicate is in the film. It just feels bizarre that the movie is basically like “isn’t it psychotic that we can’t talk about the end of the world without ‘media training’” and then some big criticism of the movie is that it wasn’t artistic/subtle enough.
But this isn’t to say you have to like the movie, I could see it just being boring to someone. It’s more the group that are spending time criticizing the movie. I dunno, just feels perverse. Like who gives a shit about the movie, if it weren’t for climate change this would just be a parody of disaster movies. The reason people are scared while watching it is because it’s really happening and we all know it.
It sounds like it suffers from Bo Burnham syndrome: accurately assessing the problems that exist in society but refusing to go any further and actually try to prescribe a solution, and providing this sort of unhealthy catharsis where everyone gets to say "oh yeah that's so true" and then shrug their shoulders and go on with their lives
Initially, I thought they were going to keep the president's party ambiguous because she had a bunch of pictures with Bill Clinton and people like that in her office, but then she goes full MAGA and I was a little disappointed
I thought they were pulling traits from both parties for the president, because when you get past the PR they're reacting the crisis in the same way on behalf of the same people. The US can't maintain hegemony without the oil economy.
I felt it was a bit of a combo. Trump's personality, but the whole dem thing about not doing anything because "but muh midterms".
I think the reason it has to be Trump though is because no democratic administration would be able to (or even want to) do anything more than the republicans would. And the democrats in the movie eat shit in the midterms, so it's not like they didn't have a chance*. If the democrats can't win an election, how can they stop a comet? Hell, in real life the democrats can't even defeat the parliamentarian.
*I know the timelines for elections make this wonky, but it's a movie. Even if they won, people wouldn't be seated in time.
I think it (unintentionally?) shows that libs are so impotent that they couldn't even fathom that possibility - which is super bleak.
Idk made me laugh. People keep saying it's like idiocracy but I didn't really get that "I'm one of the smart ones" vibe. We're people really 3xpecting a movie that'd single handedly cure brain worms and climate change? I don't think they ever claimed it would
It actually is amazing in showing that libs will let the world burn before even considering revolution.
I liked the movie personally. I suppose it’s a bit lib, but it’s not like it ended on a message of “Just vote and we’ll all be okay!” Maybe it’d be cool if it outright said “The only way to prevent this is violent communist revolution” but that’s not what this movie was.
I think the feeling that movie was made with was the same feeling I had watching it; Intense frustration and anxiety. It basically summed up how I’ve now been feeling every day for years which is “What the fuck are we doing???? Do you all not see this??? We’re all going to fucking die please fucking do something about it!!!” I especially liked Jennifer Lawrence’s line about crying 5 times a day, I related to her character a lot.
At the end of the day it’s just a movie. It’s not going to change anything and it was never intended to. It’s an artwork that demonstrates frustration with the climate crisis being allowed to continue. You wouldn’t expect a painting to change the world, don’t expect a movie to either.
It's not a bad movie, but I saw a Twitter screenshot describing it as a reactionary reflection of reality and I can get that. It's too real for satire at times and while I've seen some leftists say the end is supposed to leave you acknowledging direct action as the only way, I feel like that's just projection. DiCaprio is out there pushing the :vote: line and the official Twitter was encouraging people to sign up for a non-profit or something.
Same here, I think it blunted a lot of the message for liberals making the president very Trump/Republican coded. I actually had an argument with family members during this movie about how Fauci isn't one of these brave, truth telling scientists in the movie telling all the politicians to take this seriously.
that was my biggest fear and why i dont want to tell my parents to watch it.
I think the movie is almost perfect. It's documentation or a little time capsule that captures the current moment and how both evil and incompetent our rulers are. Obviously there are some things they could change. Show Congress doing nothing. Focus less on the president and that single capitalist. And have a better ending for the main characters other than talking around a table. That scene didn't seem like it had much of a point. It would have been interesting if they found a secondary way to take out the meteor using the capitalist rocket things, but it would destroy the meteor. Give the main characters something to fight for. Basically do what Sorry to Bother You did. But I think their defeatedness is part of the point so it still works.
Making it more like Sorry to Bother You would have made it better, but would have robbed it of the ability to burrow into lib minds.
From their account of the inspiration for the script, they were just feeling frustrated like everyone else with how unserious the establishment is being about climate change so they made a satire about that feeling of frustration and helplessness
This essentially, the film was so unsubtle in its satire it basically amounted to the writers venting about how hopeless the immediate future is.
Frankly I thought the title explicitly referring to how political and economic elites transform existential crises that threaten billioins of lives into just another culture warring campaign was spot on. I think people are angry about how unsubtle the satire was is because they're frustrated too, because reality is literally stranger than fiction at this point. Whether or not you Look Up is literally, in real life, nothing more than a referendum on your personal partisan identity. The "debate" no longer matters, why you should or shouldn't Look Up has literally been removed from the playing field and we're yelling at each other about nothing.
Yeah I enjoyed it and can’t believe why so many people seem to hate it -_- same with the new matrix too. I guess my tastes just differ from the mainstream narratives now, even leftist ones.
Left and movie twitter seems to hate don't look up but generally likes the new Matrix.
McKay or Sirota
I have no idea how they define themselves but their POV is basically liberal. I watched the movie and I was entirely unsurprised that didn't think of it as satire in any way, shape, or form. I don't think Americans even know what satire is. Satire has to be critical and cutting. Don't Look Up was neither. The movie had an unabashed liberal perspective and I sort of got bored.
It was what I expected - a social commentary and a farce. American politics in its totality and capitalism both escaped criticism. Meryl Streep is the president and she's clearly a republican - even those that word is never, ever said. Her son, Jonah Hill, is also a senior advisor and he's a lampoon of Trump's children and Trumpian nepotism.
Mark Rylance plays a billionaire and he's a fantastic actor but I thought his role and his dialog were limp. He's half-crazy and greedy as fuck. So he's the personification of greed above all else. The system isn't the bad guy. Politics isn't the bad guy. Companies aren't the bad guy. Billionaires aren't the bad guy. He alone is the bad guy.
The president might as well have been a democrat. The story would have been slightly different but if the filmmakers were honest - the world would have still ended anyway. McKay and Sirota would never, ever make that movie even though it is pretty fucking funny that it doesn't matter who is in power.
McKay and Sirota are clearly on the Blue Team so I'd bet my entire life savings that they will have nothing to say about the CDC giving the Biden administration the thumbs up to say "Fuck you workers. Get back to work." This is like their "jobs" gag in the movie except it's happening in real life and people will needlessly die because our system is a slave to capitalism.
As for Biden not actually doing a thing to stop climate chaos - I suppose they'll eventually say they are "disappointed' with him. And then a few years from now they'll probably be reluctant geoengineering proponents because it'll be too late for anything else.
I think the movie, perhaps unintentionally, exemplify how useless libs are. Our scientist protagonists are so libbed up that they don't even think of an alternative. There is a scene the makes it look possible, but then the revolutionary fervor is extinguished and the lib character compromises, completely cowed by state power.
McKay and Sirota are clearly on the Blue Team so I’d bet my entire life savings that they will have nothing to say about the CDC giving the Biden administration the thumbs up to say “Fuck you workers. Get back to work.” This is like their “jobs” gag in the movie except it’s happening in real life and people will needlessly die because our system is a slave to capitalism.
https://twitter.com/davidsirota/status/1476219645757562885
https://twitter.com/davidsirota/status/1476213358416121856
https://twitter.com/davidsirota/status/1476089038436110337
Sirota is a liberal, but at least he's still sort of an "opposition" liberal.
One of the things that made me stop paying attention to Bad Faith was when Sirota went on to liberally whine about the problems of the world and conflate "American democracy" with lots of things and was exasperatedly like "I don't know what the solution is... a benevolent king?!" https://youtu.be/7T4PCmj8EkY?t=4271
Bad Faith
I never heard his voice before. It's amazing how many podcasts there are. After I commented - I read this article that he co-wrote...
Democrats' Betrayals Are Jeopardizing American Democracy - Rolling Stone
History is screaming at Democrats to both rescue the economy and save democracy from a meltdown. They’re doing the opposite.
On the surface - it seems like a good article. It's very critical of the democrats. The writers talk about how corporate donors and an army of business lobbyists pervert everything. But they "forgot" to mention how the democrats quickly and gleefully rubber stamp every astronomical military budget.
I wonder what Sirota would define to be an ideal world. Maybe it's the US and the US military overseeing every country transitioning to an American-style democracy.
I think what he wants more than anything else is not to know. If the propaganda operation was that little bit more convincing that he didn't know everything was the CIA transitioning countries to Demokracy with Amerikan Karakteristiks he'd probably be like "yes, socialism is when the government does stuff and we've almost achieved global socialism!"
I'd love to know what Sirota really thinks of the military and the CIA. Is in honest in private with his closest friends? Or even then does he not say everything?
Spoiler: there's a brief scene which heavily implies that a joint launch of non-US countries was deliberately sabotaged.
It's the grainy news shot of the explosion on the launch pad and there's two APC's that say "UN" on the side in the foreground.
I didn't notice it. I was upset by that scene just because it seemed to be saying "well obviously Russia and India would be even more ineffective than a Musk/Bezos space company".
I like to go into a movie totally dry and feel I should avoid reading even your commentary about the commentary on it but I'm guessing you recommend?
Not OP, but I recommend it. Bit lib I suppose, but good overall I think.
Yeah but they still generated CO2 during the making of the movie, curious. I am very intelligent. :very-intelligent:
