Looking up

Don’t Look Up is the third movie in a row by the great feature filmmaker Adam McKay that condemns core elements of the predatory capitalist empire that largely owns and controls the world – and holds a death-grip on the fate of all species on the planet, not least the human species.

Released December 24, Don’t Look Up was originally intended as a climate collapse allegory that McKay conceived with the stalwart progressive journalist David Sirota, ‘a hard funny satire’ and ‘a big broad comedy,’ which became a sweeping multi-genre and genre-busting mix and meld work of art, in parts allegory, horror story, tragicomedy, film à clef, speculative fiction, drama, satire, romance, an apocalyptic farce of a yarn of cautionary tale by way of a massive comet impact on Earth, an ‘extinction level event.’

This cataclysm is analogous not only to climate collapse but to an apocalyptic pandemic or nuclear holocaust or any terminal disaster-in-progress. McKay’s esthetic and ethical – that is, artistic – build-up to Don’t Look Up was several decades in the making, including nearly two decades of highly popular feature filmmaking, mainly comedic and to varying degrees culturally critical and institutionally analytic. But it wasn’t until 2015 in The Big Short, followed by Vice (2018) and Don’t Look Up (2021), that McKay’s movies became rhetorically explicit, intellectually overt, by way of direct address, or near-direct address. McKay: “I want to make movies that are nakedly overt and find other ways to be clever and sly within them.” This approach, however historically vaunted, flies directly in the face of the one of main prohibitions of the establishment for fiction filmmaking and books – especially insofar as explicit topical art is progressive, let alone socialist, which McKay tends toward, calling himself a “-‘democratic socialist.’

In 2015, McKay’s fictive feature film The Big Short eviscerated – sometimes in explicit essayistic detail, filmed in clever and lively fashion – the state-capitalist financiers and enablers who engineered the implosion of the financial and economic system. This breakdown and gigantic theft was the result of enormously profitable fraud, committed by the One Percent for the One Percent. The Big Short might as well have been titled Battlefield Wall Street: Death By Financial Dictatorship.

After not entirely but mostly neglecting in The Big Short President Barack Obama’s key role of facilitating the ongoing dictatorship of finance over much of the US government, society, and culture, McKay in his next movie, Vice (2018), eviscerated Dick Cheney for his function as a military-industrial complex grim reaper. Vice depicts Cheney consolidating the unaccountable, anti-democracy power of the US executive and leading the charge to military conquest. The result: the slaughter of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in Iraq and Syria to the great profit of US corporations and finance. Vice might as well have been titled Battlefield Executive Office: Death By Fascist Dictatorship.

McKay’s third movie of this de facto trilogy, Don’t Look Up, condemns Big Culture (especially Big Tech and Big Media) and the predatory capitalist state that spearheads a profiteering, vicious and fictitious empire – all too real. Don’t Look Up shows an empire of lies and ‘pokes fun at the whole system’ while, in McKay’s words, it “tries to ask a bigger question” about “our broken discourse, our broken mechanisms of communication” leading to the destruction of the world. “We’ve broken the lines of communication. We’ve profitized and twisted and bent the very ways in which we communicate with each other.” Basically every socio-cultural entity and most people caught within those entities lie, compromise, or otherwise fraudulently exploit one another for money, power, and control in the here and now, the future be damned. Don’t Look Up might as well have been titled Battlefield Big Culture: Death By Cultural Dictatorship.

Though immediately scoring well with some critics and huge audiences worldwide via its Netflix release, Don’t Look Up has been denigrated by many other critics who have dismissed and ripped the movie as unprofessional, incompetent, trivializing, and contemptuous-pompous-narcissistic-highly-self-regarding. The establishment ideology of these critics runs deep. These critics are not stupid or evil or fraudulent (one hopes). Instead, the reality ‘is way more depressing’ – because so banal – in the words of the Jennifer Lawrence character who discovered the doomsday comet in Don’t Look Up. In her view, establishment authorities are “not even smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them credit for.” These critics are a part of the establishment mindset lanced in the movie.

Excerpted: ‘Looking Up From Don’t Look Up: Adam McKay and End Times’

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org