Science on Screen: Don’t Look Up

Science on Screen is a partnership between the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Boston and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to pair classic, cult and current films with talks by local academics to bring together science literacy and cinema. Amherst Cinema is a long-time participant in the series and, this year, they invited me to come give a talk about mis/disinformation. After some debate – they proposed talking about The Social Network, a film I don’t love – we settled on Don’t Look Up, a film that deserves more attention than it got, as it was released just as the world was reopening from the pandemic.

I thought I was going to talk about the climate science message of Don’t Look Up and the challenges of scientific communication in our media moment. But the last 75 days or so happened, and other details of the film seemed work emphasizing, including the ways in which this film, written late last decade, anticipated some of the stupidest moments of our current predicament.

I’m attaching my remarks because a) I probably didn’t give as precise a version of this talk as I meant to, b) I worked hard on them and, c) they’re in dialog with a post from last week, where I tried to take on the idea of “post-truth” politics. I suspect there’s at least one more essay in this series, likely about authenticity, which I’m still sharpening my thinking about.

I had seen Don’t Look Up twice when I wrote these notes – once shortly after its online premiere and second time a few months ago, as I started drafting the talk. In those watchings, I found the film preachy and smug, self-satisfied with pointing out how dumb everyone’s reaction to impending catastrophe was. It was a different experience watching it with a crowd in a theater. Not only is it a visually powerful film (and Amherst Cinema has terrific facilities – it looked and sounded great), but it’s a particular type of funny that benefits from a room laughing along with it. Alone, it’s a bit too sharp, a bit too real, a bit too depressing – in a group, you get the experience of sharing the absurdity, the feeling that all you can do is laugh to keep from crying. It’s a film that deserved a theatrical run – I suspect it would be better remembered and appreciated it if we’d seen it that way.

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Hi everyone. I’m very pleased to be with you tonight. We scheduled films for this series back in the fall, so perhaps it was a lucky coincidence that we are able to present a highly political apocalypse comedy… or perhaps a dark foreshadowing. I will say that I’ve written this introductory talk and ripped it up at least five times this past month as current events have demanded.

Don’t Look Up is the most recent film by Adam McKay, a comedy writer who got his start on Saturday Night Live and who wrote and directed some of Will Farrell’s best known work, including Anchorman and Talladega Nights. It’s not necessarily who you’d expect to create an epic length social satire about impending apocalypse, but McKay made a turn towards more serious fare, adapting and directing Michael Lewis’s The Big Short about the financial crisis of 2008, and a cutting portrait of Dick Cheney, called Vice, released in 2018.

Don’t Look Up is not a film about the COVID pandemic, but it was profoundly shaped by the pandemic. It was announced in late 2019, but filming was disrupted by the pandemic, and ended up being completed between November 2020 and February 2021, a time during which vaccines were not widely available and most of the world was on lockdown. When it was released in December 2021, lots of us were wearing masks in public, avoiding restaurants and wondering whether the world would ever return to “normal”.

The film had originally been scheduled for distribution by Paramount – it sold to Netflix and released on Christmas Eve 2021, and set the record for the second-most watched film on Netflix, with 360 million watch hours. (This is not necessarily a great indicator of quality, as it’s slightly outpaced by the Dwayne Johnson comedy Red Notice) If you’re wondering why you didn’t see it in the theater, that’s why – this was a film most viewers experienced in their home, and it’s not hard to see the political divisiveness portrayed in the film as a commentary on the battles erupting around the US about mask wearing, vaccine mandates, school closures and everything else we argued about early in the Biden presidency.

In fact, one of the major challenges with Don’t Look Up is that it reads as a little too on the nose. This is a story about the failure of institutions – all institutions from the media to the government to the university. And spoiler alert – it’s an apocalypse film without a happy ending. But when you discover that main reason humanity fails to stop the apocalypse is a neurodivergent tech billionaire obsessed with humanity’s colonization of space who’s got a disturbing amount of influence on the US president, I just want you to remember that this was written in 2019, at a moment where people bought Teslas and weren’t especially worried about the political message they were sending by doing so.

I got invited to speak about Don’t Look Up because I study the relationship between media and democracy. Specifically, I teach a course at UMass in the fall called “Defending Democracy in a Digital World” and one in the spring called “Fixing Social Media” – in other words, I believe pretty strongly that media as a whole, and social media in particular, have a lot to do with our current moment in politics and the dissatisfactions we’re experiencing with democracy.

And there’s a way of reading this film that aligns with a popular and widespread critique of American media in particular put forward by a media scholar named Neil Postman in a book called “Amusing Ourselves to Death”.

Postman wrote his book – which is subtitled “Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business” as an extension of remarks he made on George Orwell’s “1984” at a panel at the Frankfurt Book Fair that year. He warned his readers that the danger for society was less the totalitarian surveillance state Orwell warned of, and more the Aldous Huxley “Brave New World” scenario in which we self-medicate ourselves into passivity and bliss, forgetting our responsibilities as citizens. Postman’s book argues that rational argument is possible in the medium of the printed word, but not on television, where time constraints and particularly the emotive power of the image make rational discourse impossible.

And that’s certainly one of the threads in this film. Our protagonists have a message – rooted in scientific discovery – about an impending catastrophe, and they lose the attention war, again and again, to the stupidest conceivable celebrity news and blatant political maneuvering. It’s a theme of the movie that scientists don’t know how to communicate – there’s multiple references to getting media training for the scientists – but when one of them does learn how to reach a broad audience, he loses track of the message he was trying to communicate in the first place.

The message is that our media is so dumb – and has made our citizenry so dumb – that we can’t possibly respond to an existential threat… which is a thesis Postman would likely have endorsed.

There are at least two problems with the Postman thesis.

One, it encourages us to feel pretty smug. Because many of us read the New York Times, live in a college town and attend academic lectures, we can conclude that we’re not part of the problem – we’re not afraid to look up! Many critics complained that this was a smug film: it invites you to side with the rational scientists against an irrational world and it may be satisfying to watch them fail because the world is impossibly stupid… but it’s not very helpful, if our goal is to figure out how to motivate people to take action and change the world.

(Just as an aside, for those of you not neck deep in internet meme culture, this is the “smug Leo” meme. There are at least three images of Leo DiCaprio, star of Don’t Look Up, that are routinely circulated to illustrate smugness, though oddly none associated with his role in this film.)

Second, the Postman thesis is forty years old. He published the book during the Reagan administration, a moment where Reagan’s telegeneity appeared to give him immunity to otherwise outrageous scandals like Iran Contra. At that moment, the enemy of rational thought was the sound byte – the reduction of complex issues into short, pithy statements:
“We did not trade arms for hostages” followed by “My heart and my best intentions tell me that’s true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.”

By the 2010s, we had a different threat to the information landscape. Mis and disinformation: Britain’s exit from the EU and the election of Donald Trump, both in 2016, suggested that something deeply unpredictable was happening with politics around the world. Pundits and scholars looked for an explanation for why voters had behaved so irrationally and came up with a likely suspect: fake news.

That’s the term that was initially chosen – it referred to news stories that were entirely fictitious, made up by college students in North Macedonia to gain clicks and earn ad revenue on Facebook. Craig Silverman, the American reporter who began interviewing these young entrepreneurs, found that they’d tried other fictions, including fake sports news and fake left-leaning news. What worked best was news that slandered Hillary Clinton and supported Donald Trump. Within weeks, Trump adopted the term “fake news” and twisted it in a way that would have made Orwell proud to mean “news I don’t like”. So the academic community chose a new set of terms: mis and disinformation, or if you’re really in the know, “information disorder”.

The logic behind all these phrases is the same: voters have been misled by inaccurate information, either spread intentionally (disinformation) or inadvertently (misinformation). Because voters were misinformed, they made bad decisions. We should respond by funding fact checking services and requiring social media platforms to check the information they spread.

There’s something comforting about this view of the world: if we could prevent information disorder, by strengthening high quality journalism, requiring platforms to take down disordered information, we’d return to a world where we had a single set of facts in common and people made sensible political decisions. And again, this is a pretty comfortable worldview if you’re someone who, like me, is a member of the expert class, people who are well-informed for a living.

But correcting mis and disinfo hasn’t gone very far in improving America’s political culture or healing divisions. If anything, it has exacerbated divisions and led to accusations of political censorship on social media platforms. It’s not unreasonable to argue that democracy is difficult or impossible if we can’t all agree on a common set of facts. But it’s also possible to see that being told that your facts are wrong and can’t be spoken can feel Orwellian.

As the pandemic wore on, we saw parents who believed that closing schools was causing their children learning loss and emotional damage arguing with other parents who feared for the safety of the immunocompromised or otherwise vulnerable from a deadly disease. This is the sort of a debate a healthy society should be able to have, and that this debate became so vituperative might reflect some of the deep dysfunction in American society we’re experiencing now.

One aspect of the COVID debate I want to point out that’s become central to this moment in media and politics is the rise of “authenticity”. The huge difference between the media world Postman talked about and the world we live in today is the fact that billions of people aren’t just consuming and interpreting media – we are producing it as well. During COVID we saw a surge of people producing media of all sorts, documenting their struggles to adapt to life in this new reality and to process their fears. These mediums, particularly short video like TikTok and long form audio like podcasts operate around intimacy, the idea that you’re seeing an unvarnished, authentic self.

And like any change in a media landscape, it quickly gets harnessed towards political ends.

You might think of the 2024 presidential election as a choice between authentically stupid ideas and an inauthentic presentation of a mediocre status quo.

Authenticity won, and friends of mine who are Democratic party insiders tell me that they’re scared to talk to voters because they know that Democratic politicians don’t know how to connect to audiences that are turning to Barstool Sports and Joe Rogan as their guides to political and social issues.

Don’t Look Up sees authenticity as weakness. You’ll see moments where both Jennifer Lawrence and Leo DiCaprio’s characters can’t play the Reagan era game of sound bites because their emotions are too strong, and the film punishes them for it, in one case leading to an abduction by government agents that takes on all new resonance in the last month or so with ICE abducting international students to punish them for their speech.

McKay sees these moments of authenticity as a sign that these characters don’t know how to play a rigged game. But he’s wrong – one of the reasons authenticity is so powerful in media and politics is that we’re living in authentically terrifying times. Whether you’re terrified of climate change, of a housing crisis and the loss of a path to prosperity for most Americans, or the collapse of democracy, there’s ample reason right now to feel like institutions of all sorts are failing us and that an authentic cry of anguish or terror is a reasonable response.

McKay’s movie uses a 1980s theory of change to take on the problems of 2020. In Neil Postman’s world of Amusing Ourselves to Death, the most powerful figures are the global celebrities who dominate the market for global attention. In that world, a film starring the panoply of acting royalty this film features would have been guaranteed an audience and some award wins. Instead, it’s a 56% on Rotten Tomatoes with a few Academy Award nominations and no wins, and we’re watching it in a series that invites us to reconsider cult films.

But there’s something Don’t Look Up gets right. Many of our institutions are failing us. The experts don’t know what to do. The feelings of terror and helplessness lead people to behave strangely and unpredictably. McKay doesn’t offer us a solution to an ongoing apocalypse, but this film, at its best, offers us a moment of empathy. Look past the machinations of the politicians and the media stars, and look towards the people in the background trying to make sense of a reality that no longer makes sense, disrupted by COVID or climate change or by a slide into authoritarianism. If there’s a solution to this polycrisis, this interconnected mess of apocalyptic threats, it’s in the groups working to live through this scary moment, not through the politicians or celebrities who’ll get to escape to their bunkers or spaceships.

Thanks for listening, and enjoy the apocalypse.

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Source: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2025/04/04/science-on-screen-dont-look-up/