Making My Piece With Don’t Look Up (2021)
Guest Writer Ryan Punith challenges the narrative behind Adam McKay’s doomsday film, Don’t Look Up (2021).
Everyone had that one kid in school they didn’t like. Maybe you got into fights with them in the schoolyard, maybe you spread rumors behind each others’ backs, or maybe you both were always fighting for the top rank during midterms. While the reasons behind these childhood rivalries were often petty and superficial, they were somehow always heated enough to span multiple years. When the teacher did intervene, their measures were often as long and irritating as they were ineffective, with no amount of disciplinary action ever truly settling the matter. Among the forced apologies, visits to the principals’ office, and letters sent to your parents, there was one punishment that was especially annoying to get. It was a single request, as simple to demand as it was difficult to answer: “Say one nice thing about each other.”
At some points, writing about Adam McKay’s doomsday satire Don’t Look Up (2021) brought me back to those early schooldays, racking my brain to find something positive to say about a film I didn’t at all enjoy. In the years since I watched it, my opinion felt cemented by all the things I disliked about it, and I never stopped to think about what I did like about it.
My main gripes with Don’t Look Up begin and end with its brand of comedy. The film’s plot is a thin-skinned allegory for climate change, which is portrayed as a world-ending asteroid strike that the US government ultimately ignores to protect the bottom-line of its lobbyists. While I’m usually a sucker for a joke at the government’s expense, I found most of the film’s heavy-handed swings to strike out.
Over its nearly three hour runtime, Don’t Look Up largely relies on one comedic tactic: irony. While irony can be a great vehicle for comedy, a good comedy film needs to be self-sufficient with it. One of my favorite film jokes in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World demonstrates this perfectly, where titular Scott Pilgrim escapes a confrontation with his girlfriend. The entire joke is told through a quick camera pan of Scott’s roommate quickly hiding him with the door, only for Scott to run back into direct eyeshot and break through the living room window. In spite of the girlfriend visibly glancing at Scott shattering the window, she remains entirely oblivious, the irony of which never failing to get a laugh out of me. In Don’t Look Up’s case, the irony is supplied by the audience. One of the core themes of the movie is the oversaturation of useless information and how it wastes our time - which the film leverages by oversaturating itself with useless information and wasting time. Although the film is nearly three hours, much of the runtime is dedicated to cheap banter and unimportant subplots, all stitched together by frantic jump cuts. By the halfway point, I felt like I’ve seen more one-off celebrity cameos and longshots of Leonardo DiCaprio having panic-sex than actual plot development.
In other words, Adam McKay’s film is one big meta joke, and you’re the butt of it for watching.
Where the meta-comedy gets even worse is when the characters are relied on for a reaction. Be it the president’s (Meryl Streep) complete disregard for scientific fact, the news anchors (Cate Blanchett, Tyler Perry) making light of the situation, or the incompetent tech billionaire (Mark Rylance) always getting what he wants and failing, the grad-student protagonist (Jennifer Lawrence) reacts with genuine anger at the world around her. This seemed to make for an unsettling take on 4th-wall humor where her character is “in on the joke” but doesn’t share in laughter. Rather, her writing makes Don’t Look Up turn its own thematic anger in on itself, an attempt at self-aware humor that just comes off as obnoxious self-indulgence.
Just like with that kid, I never knew much about Don’t Look Up’s background. Despite the years-long grudge I had with both of them, I didn’t bother to find what their reasons were - why they acted the way they did. After all, I only ever looked at them one way - the wrong way.
Don’t Look Up isn’t supposed to make you laugh, it’s supposed to make you angry. After repeated delays, both its script and cast faced multiple revisions down to the month before filming started in late 2020. Although the film’s main allegory is supposed to be climate change, it could stand for multiple historical incidents that happened that year alone like COVID, BLM, QAnon, and probably more I don’t remember. With the right context, Don’t Look Up depicts a complete inversion of pandemic-era events, literally mirroring the pains Americans felt in response to heightened displays of governmental and societal incompetence. In jest of celebrities who feigned solidarity with people orders of magnitude below their wealth and status, celebrities are deliberately cast to play roles that revel their height above the masses. In response to the shallow pandering of political figures amidst unprecedented racial tensions and injustice, their film counterparts are blatantly insensitive and proclaim their own intolerance. When the nation is constantly tuned in to see the next disaster, the film tells them not to; and in a time where you couldn’t talk about events as they were unfolding, the film outright says what’s happening. There is no exaggeration in the film, just pure honesty.
In writing about this film, I had to look back on a time in my life I wanted to forget; and just like with that kid, I came to realize I was rejecting the parts that reminded me of myself. Even after eventually settling our differences, I never really became friends with him. He’s now just a vague memory to me, serving as both a reminder of my past problems and a nudge towards personal growth. I’ve learned you can understand and even appreciate something without actually liking it, and that’s exactly how I’ve come to feel about Don’t Look Up. It’s still a shock-value film I largely hated watching, but it reminded me there are far more important things for me to hate instead. In the midst of abominable wages, billionaire-backed leaders, and regressions in personal rights, Americans are in desperate need of a wake-up call: We have to change something before Don’t Look Up becomes an understatement.