Don't Look Up the Robes of the Elite

The film "Don't Look Up"  irritated the hell out of me on first viewing – so much so, I fast fowarded through it but I watched it again properly and I revised my opinion, somewhat.  

Mark Rylance is an acting genius as is Meryl Streep but I'd rather they hadn't made a US female president a raging narcissist who sends pictures of her fanny to porn stars she elevates to the Supreme Court, etc etc.  

It got way too heavy handed – often slipping from satire into a sort of parodic slapstick. I still can’t decide whether the film makers were being self-consciously heavy-handed – deliberately going beyond satire into cartoonish parody in order to reach those they think they need to reach, ie not the already environmentally aware and active, but all those who have been successfully blinded, deafened, and dumbed down by all the plastic shite and disinformation.

 

Did they decide that the target audience needs an apocalyptic beating about the head with the star-spangled obvious because their critical faculties have either not been developed at all or have been corroded by the toxic garbage that is US-style popular entertainment and information media?

 

Were they being doubly ironic? Were they self-consciously and cynically cashing in on the impending environmental catastrophe as much as the Rylance character sought to cash in on a planet-killing asteroid on collision course with Earth?

 

One pretty obvious layer of irony is the title – the injunction “don’t look up” is precisely what all the layers of plastic garbage and fake news are meant to achieve – don’t look up to see what the economic and political elites are actually doing to us and the planet, keep your eyes fixed on the screen and your head filled with ephemera.

 

One thing’s certain, people are watching it, but whether they all get the urgent, allegorical message is another thing entirely – as is whether enough of them will get off their well-padded butts and act. 

 

Another facet that annoyed me was the use of the plot device of a planet-killing comet with all its speed and urgency. The thing with climate change is it's just not that screamingly obvious – yet – and if it were, many people, being what their masters have made them, are as likely to slide into fatalism or nihilism as they are to unite to take the actions needed to save the planet and all who currently survive on her. 

It's a delicate balance – conveying the absolute urgency of acting hard and fast whilst still making people believe that doing so will mean their kids and grand kids will actually have a planet to live well on.