Don't Look Up: the first good movie about climate change

One of the most devilish aspects of climate change is that it
resists good art. But Adam McKay, director first of comedies like
Anchorman and later of more serious fare like The Big Short, has
cracked the code. Don’t Look Up (in theaters today; coming to
Netflix on Dec. 24) is the first climate movie — the first work
of art about climate change of any kind — to hold my rapt
attention from start to finish. It is fantastic.


One reason it’s so good is that it isn’t really about climate
change at all. It’s about a pair of scientists, played by Leo
DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, who discover that a large comet
is heading directly toward Earth and will strike, and wipe out
all life on the planet, in just over six months. They try to tell
people. It does not go well.


Don’t Look Up attempts to capture, not so much climate change
itself, but one of the most vertiginously weird aspects of
understanding climate change: you know this terrible thing is
coming and yet … no one’s acting like it. You end up feeling like
the ranting guy on the street corner waving a sign about how the
end is nigh.


The movie is about having knowledge but being unable to make the
knowledge matter, being unable to make anyone hear or act on it.
By compressing the timeline to six months and making the threat a
singular force, visible in the sky, it brings the absurdity of
the situation to the surface. It’s hilarious, and if you’ve spent
years banging your head against a wall trying to get people to
pay attention to climate change, you will find a great deal of
catharsis in the laughter.


Before we get to the movie, a word on climate and art.


Climate change makes for bad art


By its very nature, climate change is abstract, the sum of
millions of observations and long chains of reasoning. It unfolds
slowly, over the course of decades and centuries. Its effects are
felt incrementally, across the globe, in disparate ways.


In short, climate change isn’t a good villain. It has no plans or
intentions. It’s not even a singular force, it is simply the
descriptor we apply to the panoply of changes happening around
us.


The magic trick of good art is that it uses specificity —
particular people, places, and relationships — to evoke universal
human feelings. We have been designed by evolution to feel most
intensely about things that are close to us, within spatial and
temporal boundaries that are legible to us. We’re not designed to
feel anything about a projected 50-year change in global average
temperature.


We can know and understand that forecast in an intellectual way,
but to really feel it, to integrate it into one’s basic
narratives and worldview, requires conscious cultivation. It does
not come naturally; it is not universal.


That makes climate change a lousy subject for art. Over the years
that I have been writing about it I have been exposed to many,
many songs, poems, documentaries, short stories, and novels about
it. They are all like vegan food: the intentions are commendable,
the spirit is good, it even looks on the outside like normal
food, but the taste … let’s just say, it feels like I’m supposed
to be eating it, and if I weren’t supposed to, I’d be eating
something else that tastes better.


(Vegans: I love you. Please do not write me angry emails.)


So too with climate art. It runs into one or more of four main
dangers.


One, it can be treacly. This is most climate documentaries:
swelling orchestral music beneath shot after shot of Natural
Beauty Under Threat.


Two, in order to compress climate change into something dramatic
on a human time scale, it can mangle the science, as in 2004’s
The Day After Tomorrow, wherein a key scene finds our heroes
fleeing from an oncoming wall of, uh, freezing. It’s not that I’m
a stickler for strict scientific accuracy in art, but once you
make climate change into a disaster fit for a disaster movie,
you’ve changed all the structural features that make the climate
crisis what it is. You’re not illuminating anything about the
reality.


Three, it can be overly oblique, a metaphor for climate change
that is so generic — “nature is good” (Avatar); “dystopia is bad”
(Snowpiercer) — as to say nothing about climate change in
particular.


Fourth, it can end up being didactic or educational. Though it is
by all accounts informed and magisterial, I could could not get
through Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. After
an intense first chapter, it became a series of white papers
teaching me stuff I already know. If I wanted to read PDFs I’d
just read PDFs.


Climate is perilous territory for art. That brings us to Don’t
Look Up.


Don’t Look Up defies the trend


I went into this film with extremely low expectations. I’ve seen
the subject of climate change humble too many eager artists and
storytellers to have much faith that anyone in Hollywood would
get it right.


When I heard the basic setup — an analogy that everyone in the
climate world has pondered at some point — my expectations did
not rise. There are so many ways a story like that could go
wrong. It could be broad or ham-handed; it could be overly
clever; it could be didactic and preachy.


But somehow it’s great. I suppose that’s what happens when you
get this idea in the hands of smart writers (politics’ own David
Sirota helped with the story; McKay wrote the screenplay) and an
unbelievably stacked cast.


DiCaprio and Lawerence convincingly shrink into nebbishy
scientists, he with a middle-aged gut, she with unfortunate
bangs. The MAGA president and the boozy cable news host could
easily have been caricatures, but Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett
are incapable of a false note. Every role down to the most
incidental is played by marquee performers who fill their screen
time with thoughtful choices. Every performance lands, keeping
the proceedings grounded even as they grow more ridiculous.


It’s extremely funny, but not with rat-a-tat jokes. These are
recognizably human characters, not broad types, stuck in absurd
situations; the laughs arise out of the structure. There’s an
editing technique used again and again: just as a scene is in the
midst of its manic peak, there will be a hard cut to a new, quiet
scene, often characters trying to process what happened. It made
me laugh every time. (Credit to the venerable Hank Corwin for
editing.)


Though it flirts with it at times, it never descends into farce.
It’s just that everyone finds themselves lost in the same
disorienting information environment, unable to connect.


Also? About two-thirds of the way through the movie, Timothée
Chalamet wanders in as a character with no obvious connection to
the plot and no clear reason to be there, but who is nonetheless
an absolute delight for every second he’s on screen.


The film manages to be funny and allegorical and human all at
once. But I think long-time climate hawks will take special
pleasure in it.


So many climate feels, captured for the first time


I have no idea how normal people — people who haven’t spent most
of their adult lives immersed in the subject of climate change —
will process this movie. Will they see the climate analogy at
all? It could just as easily be read as an analogy for Covid, or
biodiversity loss, or nuclear war.


But if you’re a climate hawk, there’s no mistaking it: McKay has
clearly been involved in this subject for a while. He captures a
whole series of feelings and experiences that are painfully
familiar.


There’s the feeling of telling the government about a threat and
having it shrugged off. There’s the feeling of telling the press
about the threat and having it subsumed and lost in the
flattening stream of 24-hour content. There’s the feeling of
being mocked and memed for being alarmed. There’s the feeling of
needing to prove people wrong on the internet.


There’s the feeling of watching a body of science become the
target of wild conspiracy theories and a partisan culture war.
There’s the feeling of seeing the most obvious solutions to the
problem delayed and deferred over corporate profits. There’s the
feeling of seeing people jump straight from denial to nihilism,
without any being-helpful stage in the middle. There’s the
sinking feeling of watching people who have accepted the threat
turning to glittery promises of future high-tech solutions.


There’s the feeling — which DiCaprio captures in a mid-movie rant
that I, at least, found incredibly emotional — of hoping against
hope that someone in charge, despite all the appearance of
venality and stupidity, knows what they’re doing, has a handle on
this thing.


And perhaps most acute of all, there’s the feeling that we simply
can’t communicate any more, that there’s no way to establish a
shared reality or shared priorities. Everything is absorbed by
the information/media/entertainment machine, blasted out at the
same volume as dozens of other daily clickbait outrages, and soon
forgotten, like all the rest. Nothing lands, nothing sticks.
There’s no way to cut through the noise.


“If we can’t all agree at the bare minimum that a giant comet the
size of Mt. Everest hurtling its way toward planet Earth is not a
f*****g good thing,” DiCaprio cries, his voice cracking, “then
what the hell happened to us? I mean, my God, how do we even talk
to each other? What have we done to ourselves? How do we fix it?”


The movie does not offer answers to these questions. Without any
spoilers, I can say it’s a pretty pessimistic take on our
capacity for collective action. But I found it incredibly
cathartic just to see my specific brand of anguish portrayed with
such insight, more than I ever expected from a big-budget
Hollywood movie.


Back here in the real world, climate remains stubbornly
uncathartic. It has no six-month deadline; it will play out
slowly over our whole lives and beyond. There will be no final
moment of recognition and no clear line between success and
failure. The result will be an unsatisfying muddle at every
stage, with more suffering than there should have been but less
than there could have been.


Still, we know that, in some sense, the comet has already begun
striking. We’ve already lost some stability, some biodiversity,
some lands and lives, and we will lose more, no matter what we
do. It’s baked in at this point. We are living in the most stable
climate we will ever experience. Every decade from now on will
get warmer — more of the comet will strike. We can only control
the scale of the damage.


After I watched Don’t Look Up (thank you Netflix), as I was
eating dinner with my family, I couldn’t stop thinking about
DiCaprio’s final words in the movie, as he is surrounded at the
dinner table by family and friends: “We really did have
everything, didn’t we?”


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other
subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
www.volts.wtf/subscribe