Cory's Reads #17: Don't Look Up and the Death of Discourse
Adam McKay has set a new moral imperative. Are we going to listen?
Just last week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced shortlists in 10 categories for the 94th Academy Awards. The categories include Best International Feature Film, Best Score, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, and several others. Fifteen films are eligible to move forward in each of the 10 categories, with official nominations to be announced on February 8th, 2022.
One such category, Best Original Song, features an exciting array of tunes. In a surprisingly musical year, nominees range from the emotional to the absurd. The English band Sparks received their first Oscar nomination, having experienced a revitalization in 2021 via both Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers and Leos Carax’s Annette, the latter of which is represented here via the catchy “So May We Start.” Lin-Manuel Miranda is also nominated for Encanto’s “Dos Oroguitas.” A win for Miranda would land him in the prestigious EGOT club.
It’s a big year for popstars as well. Billie Eilish is likely to land a nomination for “No Time to Die,” a song that has seemingly been around for years, but is eligible this year due to the Bond film’s delayed release. But I want to focus on “Just Look Up,” a satirical song of sorts from Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up. With its star-studded cast, McKay’s film is the most popular thing on Netflix. It’s therefore no surprise that “Just Look Up” finds itself on the Oscar shortlist. I wouldn’t be surprised if it lands an official nomination, offering the Academy an excuse to invite Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi to perform on live TV.
But the Academy’s recognition of the song from Don’t Look Up underscores all that is wrong with McKay’s film. Of course, no one involved with the film or the song is responsible for the Academy’s behavior, but there’s a hilarious irony to a song that — in the context of the film — is supposed to be cringeworthy and terrible, receiving a nomination from an awards body that is already pegged as ignorant and out-of-touch on a yearly basis.
And yet the irony would likely be lost on McKay, who leveraged a career as one of Hollywood’s premiere comedic filmmakers into a career as one of Hollywood’s most inessential political voices. McKay began his career in the SNL writer’s room, quickly ascending to head writer less than a year after his hiring. From there, he wrote and directed some of the most iconic comedies of the 2000’s, including Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Step Brothers, and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. What I find so amusing about McKay’s career trajectory is that his earlier work offered some hilariously insightful resonances with the political context in which they were made. Step Brothers even opens with a quote from George Bush, and it was hard to watch Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly masquerade as mean-spirited man-children without thinking of the former President. 2004’s Anchorman and its 2013 sequel offered more clever insights on the devolution of our media ecosystem than Don’t Look Up ever could.
(Philly-based readers may be intrigued to learn that Malvern native McKay modeled Ron Burgundy’s appearance after longtime Channel 6 news anchor Jim Gardner).
Somewhere along the way, McKay decided that his films needed to adopt a greater sense of urgency. They became more explicit in their politics, starting with 2015’s The Big Short. McKay traded in his scalpel for a hammer, and the results were impressive! I enjoyed that film immensely, and appreciated its ability to translate the esoterica surrounding the 2008 financial crisis with such blunt force. But The Big Short’s critical and commercial success changed McKay irrevocably. From 2015 onward, the director’s hammer would only get bigger and bigger and bigger.
It’s a shame, really. There’s a lot to like about McKay and his politics. He endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016 and again in 2020. He identifies as a democratic socialist, and has lent his talents to television hits like Eastbound & Down and Succession, the latter of which is one of the most clever cultural and political critiques on television. But McKay’s directorial voice remains bizarrely detached from his own political views, and from the incisive work he has done elsewhere. For someone who has, perhaps correctly, perceived a need for greater political action in our current entertainment landscape, McKay comes across as surprisingly self-indulgent. When 2018’s Vice spent over two hours telling us that Dick Cheney was evil (duh), audiences were left angry yet uncertain. Now what? Why tell us all of this nearly a decade later? McKay tried to make his point clear by having his protagonist recite Shakespearean soliloquys and address the audience directly, but the director’s lack of subtlety only served to belittle his viewers. When conservatives perhaps not-so-erroneously complain about Hollywood and its “liberal elites,” they are talking about McKay and his ugly brand of condescension.
This approach to political filmmaking reached its nadir with Don’t Look Up, the film currently taking the world by storm. For this one, McKay teamed up with another person whom I respect politically: journalist and former Bernie Sanders speechwriter David Sirota. A native of the Philly ‘burbs himself, Sirota has a longstanding friendship with McKay. I’ve followed his work for several years now, and he has long been one of the most essential voices among the American Left. But as it turns out, he’s not very good at writing movies! And that’s OK! Still, Sirota is not pleased with his film’s lukewarm reception, barking back at every mention of his film on Twitter.
Sirota is obviously proud of his film, as he should be! But his defenses of Don’t Look Up are largely in bad faith. Don’t Look Up is a bad movie for several reasons, none of which have to do with its focus on the climate crisis. A satirical metaphor for climate change is actually a pretty good idea! Unfortunately, that’s the extent of what’s “good” in the film. In Sirota’s defense, he is not credited as a screenwriter on the film. He simply has a “story by” and an executive producing credit. We may never know the exact division of labor between Sirota and McKay, but I’m willing to believe that the journalist’s intentions were in the right place, and that McKay is instead responsible for making a so-called satire so humorless and clunky.
Indeed, Don’t Look Up is shockingly unfunny. Its jokes are so forced, so unnatural, one might imagine that the film was meant to be recorded in front of a live studio audience. The lackluster script even leads to an outright terrible performance from Leonardo DiCaprio, something I didn’t even know was possible. Jonah Hill provides a few laughs as the U.S. President’s son, an obvious riff on the younger Trumps (although such a blatantly partisan reference only further highlights the film’s narrow scope). Don’t Look Up is trapped in a no man’s land of sorts. On one hand, its satire is so over-the-top and forced, it leaves absolutely nothing up to the imagination. I’ve seen the film described as “thought-provoking” when it couldn’t be further from it. McKay and Sirota ensure that viewers have absolutely no space to think or reflect, instead force-feeding them trite accusations about how we’re all too self-involved, stupid, and distracted to pay attention to the ongoing climate crisis. But Don’t Look Up is also oddly understated at times. This is partly due to its haphazard attempts to inject an actual narrative into a movie about two scientists trying to nail a TV interview for over two hours(!), but it also reflects the inadequacies of the film’s central metaphor.
In Don’t Look Up, a giant comet is hurtling towards earth, and no one seems to care. The situation is not quite analogous to the climate crisis, no matter how indignantly Sirota might be arguing otherwise. While it is absolutely true that media outlets obscure, downplay, or outright ignore all kinds of environmental issues, the looming threat of a comet impacting earth’s surface would absolutely fit with the kind of fearmongering and dramatization news networks love. The hosts of The Daily Rip (played by Cate Blanchett & Tyler Perry) may ask that their guests “keep things light,” but that is rarely the objective of news in our age of infotainment. If anything, Blanchett and Perry’s real-life counterparts would exaggerate the circumstances surrounding the comet, hoping to inspire fear and keep viewers paralyzed on their couches. That is where the film’s metaphor begins to fall apart.
There is plenty else to dislike about Don’t Look Up. It’s incredibly Eurocentric, demonstrating little interest in the global impact of a comet (or climate) crisis, not to mention a startling lack of understanding about geopolitics. Of course, American audiences aren’t concerned with such things either. Therein lies the “genius” of Don’t Look Up. The film’s core thesis is that Americans are too vapid and stupid to pay proper attention to both the climate crisis and the political/corporate elites profiting off of it. And yet, the film is as vapid and stupid as it gets! It’s a commercial venture through and through, and its success online and in the awards circuit can’t help but run counter to the lofty ambitions it’s set for itself.
And what are those ambitions exactly? Sirota sure seems proud that the #1 film on Netflix deals with climate, and McKay has admirably taken to Twitter to highlight genuine solutions (although I did find this particular Tweet using the promotional language of the film to be a rather pathetic excuse for a solution).
The reality is that climate change is very, very scary. Even amidst a global pandemic, it remains the greatest threat to our existence. And the situation is even more dire than many of us will ever understand. Don’t Look Up highlights several truths about our media ecosystem and the ways in which it exploits our shrinking attention-spans. But the film feels just as hopeless and exasperated as the rest of us, and if McKay truly wants to assert himself as a significant political voice, that just cannot be. Expressing the anxiety of the moment can be a valid and comforting thing — Paul Schrader did this to brilliant effect with 2018’s First Reformed — but McKay and his all-knowing style of filmmaking pretend to go one step further, when in reality he’s just as lost as the rest of us.
Where does that leave a filmmaker like McKay? Where does that leave political filmmaking at large? Film is, of course, a form of commercial entertainment. It is meant to entertain. It is meant to turn a profit. Fools such as myself may sit at our computers and type away about what all these films mean, offering predictions on how they might change the world, but does art really have the capacity to do anything of the sort? It’s an unsettling question, one that I’ve asked many times before, and one that documentarian Adam Curtis has been rather outspoken about with recent works such as Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. McKay and Sirota obviously still believe in the power of culture to effect change, but it’s pretty easy to feel that way when your film stars some of the highest grossing stars in Hollywood, and is lining your pockets all the same. Because movies will always have at least somewhat of a commercial aim, it’d be silly to write them off entirely. And yet, movies like Don’t Look Up make me doubt the efficacy and utility of culture at large.
Interestingly, as forces mobilize to defend Don’t Look Up against its critics, our collective misgivings towards art and culture become more apparent than ever. The film has seen its fair share of supporters and detractors amongst critics and audience members alike, yet fans of the film seem intent on undermining and discrediting the institution of criticism at large. Of course, referring to these people as “fans” may be a misnomer. The film’s most outspoken supporters on Twitter (where all of today’s discourse calls home) are among the most notable members of the American Left, people I admire and respect greatly. Political commentators Briahna Joy Gray — who worked with Sirota on Bernie’s 2020 presidential campaign — and Krystal Ball were just two of the film’s most fervent fans. Ball’s words stuck out to me in particular, with their pointed attack on “elite critics.”
Ball is the co-host of one of my absolute favorite podcasts, Breaking Points, which she hosts alongside Saagar Enjeti. I trust both Breaking Points hosts on a wide variety of political topics, but the recent discourse surrounding Don’t Look Up has highlighted a rather obvious, albeit uncomfortable, truth regarding the inevitability of allegiances. Like the liberal and conservative coalitions that so many of these commentators criticize for their dangerous groupthink and blind loyalty, these ‘outsiders’ have formed a tight bond of their own. It’s only natural! These people are friends, and Tweets like Ball’s are most immediately read as acts of loyalty. She’s running to the defense of Sirota, a frequent collaborator, and understandably so. But in acting on their political and personal allegiances, Ball and her contemporaries have shifted the goalposts of the conversation entirely, stripping criticism of its power, and instead assigning it a moral imperative.
It’s funny, as this kind of dissolution of intellectualism is the exact sort of problem Ball and Enjeti might point out on an episode of Breaking Points. By rebranding the debate surrounding Don’t Look Up as a referendum on the value of criticism itself, the film’s defenders are empowering a dangerous apathy over art and what it is meant to do. Don’t Look Up may be an allegory for climate change, but that alone does not a good film make. Indeed, films about urgent matters such as the climate crisis certainly can take on particular importance, but only because they are actually great films! I already mentioned First Reformed, but I also recommend Dark Waters, Downsizing, and Arrival for a wider variety of films dealing with climate and other global crises. I remain intrigued by a film like Don’t Look Up, using satire to dissect such a pressing issue. But the film just isn’t funny. And it isn’t very good. And there’s no shame in someone like Sirota admitting that, and going back to the indispensable work he has been doing for years!
As for McKay, he might be stuck in the hell-world that is this cultural realm, where filmmakers such as himself can try to coexist with writers like me. We’ll all fight and make up, fight and make up, hopelessly praying that our art finally makes a difference.
I wish we lived in a world where a Netflix film could hold the key to solving the climate crisis. That sure would feel nice and validating. But I’m not so naïve. The work I do here at Cory’s Reads is fun. And every once in a while, it might even be important. But I’m aware that my art is at least partly a selfish venture. I wouldn’t dare to demean those who don’t appreciate it, or find it to be an abstraction. In fact, those people might be right!
Like any film, Don’t Look Up is a matter of personal taste. If it worked for you, that’s great! I’d imagine it really did wake up a certain audience (fortunately far removed from the insular bubble of Twitter discourse) to the horrors of the climate crisis.
But regardless of its quality, the film’s emergence has forced us to consider whether or not art matters at all. And perhaps the answer is that art does matter, until it wants to.
Anchorman was pretty great…Vice, not so much. McKay’s overhaul of his style has come as a direct response to this exact anxiety about art’s ability to effect change. And the blowback towards films like Vice and Don’t Look Up is similarly centered around such uncertainty. McKay’s earlier work received acclaim not just because it was funny, but because it was genuine. It permitted our own participation in the meaning-making process. Audiences don’t want to be bashed over the head with a director’s ideas. They want to arrive at their own conclusions. And the more art tries to impose its will and cement its significance, the less impact it is likely to have.
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