Don’t Look Up
A film that contributes to the irrationality that it condemns
Adam McKay’s recently released Netflix film, Don’t Look Up, is a parody of the various tendencies, attitudes, and beliefs in American society that render it unable to attend to problems that it is scientifically and technically capable of resolving. The message is that, unless there is change, the extinction of the human species may be the consequence.
Cuban film critic Rolando Pérez Betancourt observes that the film shows a “highly idioticized society” in which manipulations and lies are tools of daily communication, where the White House, the press, and the social media indulge in the most absurd falsifications. As former Boston Herald art critic Daniel Gewertz writes in The Arts Fuse: “Don’t Look Up is a clever, unapologetically brash satire about a future America so consumed with celebrity worship, brain-numbing infotainment, social media popularity, and political gamesmanship that it refuses to take the impending destruction of planet Earth seriously.”
In Don’t Loo…