Don’t Look Up
This despairing satire, written, produced and directed by the veteran moviemaker, Adam McKay, seems one of the most pessimistic films since Dr. Strangelove. As in Kubrick’s comedy of a grand and inevitable demise of humanity, self-rendered, Twain’s mankind, no damned good after all, will not only incur their own destruction but become little more than hapless spectators of that Violent Finality.
McKay’s tragicomedy is staged largely in the relentlessly televised world of the day’s political-media-celebrity culture whose lead actors are news anchors, prominent politicians, business and financial leaders, and celebrities. Especially, he dramatizes, this world is peopled by fools for whom awareness of existential threats imposes no sobriety. Awareness creates no motive to defend our well-being. Even as doom hurtles toward Homo saps, they seem powerless to react in any saving way. They keep their Nero fiddles in the downstairs closet.
The storyline: Leonardo DiCaprio is an astronomy professor whose bright student, played by Jennifer Lawrence, discovers with absolute certainty a massive meteorite hurtling toward an apocalyptic collision with Earth; unless immediate measures are taken, including a project to intercept and nuke the meteorite off its course, life as we know it on Earth will end.
McKay, leaving nothing he can think of to chance, has publicly said the obvious: his dread drama is a metaphor for the Climate Change Crisis.
As the professor and his student seek to sound an urgent warning, they find themselves lost in futility as they desperately run hither and yon around the world of the Powerful–the president, military generals, news anchors, and so on. Theirs is the inverse of the story of the naked Emperor. Tyler Perry, acting as a news anchor on a network bringing CNN and ilk to mind, turns in the finest performance among the Foolish Prominent. Rather than talk about the crisis to the professor and his student on a crucial interview set, he insists with a smarmy smile and a gracious manner that the most pressing question is whether there is human-like life Out There in space. The president (Meryl Streep) wants to study the problem further before taking action. A New Age billionaire owner of a leading high-tech company wants to use the dooming drama to make more money. And so it goes.
The movie is essentially a journey among such lemmings–their types, classes and styles.
McKay, it seems clear, has given up on humanity and decided to accept the foreshortened (and, you must surmise he believes) merely temporary satisfaction–a prelude to catastrophe–of dark satire.
In sum: Don’t Look Up is a cynical guide, not a warning. For McKay, it’s too late for a warning.
Meanwhile, for equilibrium, try, say, Shane. Or Twelve O’Clock High.
Leave the World Behind
Leave the World Behind has a nightmarish quality that makes it an important if flawed movie. The film adaptation of Ramaan Alam’s apocalyptic novel of the same name signals a growing spirit of these days, a fatalistic and pessimistic realization that we are in both an Age of Technology and an unprecedented Time of Existential Threats in which the latter may well be beyond our avoidance, even assuming we might sometime understand them actionably. Alam imagines a fearsome dream in which modern symptoms of catastrophe simply materialize, seem beyond effective understanding, and are seen either as dread mysteries or outlandish and ultimately incomprehensible conspiracies. In sum, a sense of the arrival of Doom runs through this movie. The final scene is bitterly ironic.
The storyline: Amanda Sandford (Julia Roberts), a middle-age resident of New York City, weary of the humanity in the crowded city, spontaneously arranges a vacation to an Airbnb mansion on Long Island for herself and her husband, Clay (Ethan Hawke), a professor, and her two children, Archie, a teenager, and Rose, of elementary school age. They are all obsessed with technology–phones, GPS, TV, etc. On their first evening there, suddenly the owners of the house, G. H. Scott (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter, Ruth, show up; after some hassle, both the Scotts and the Sanfords end up staying in the house together.
As in a dream, strange, ominous things begin to happen, soon signaling a possible Apocalypse. More and more deer begin to show up, and even threateningly, in the spacious back yard. A flock of flamingos lands in the swimming pool. By now nothing–phones, GPS, TV, computers–works. Along with these events, a large oil tanker bears down on a beach where the Sandfords are relaxing–the massive vessel seems out of control–and the family barely escapes on the run from the horrendous beaching. Later an airliner crashes on that beach, with G. H. Scott, alone and on the run, barely escaping the crash. Meanwhile, Clay, driving a local road in search of clues about the strange happenings, encounters a large and growing pile-up of out-of-control self-driving Teslas whose auto-pilot software has gone dead. Back at the house more deer show up; now they appear even more menacing. Suddenly, ear-splitting noise inexplicably erupts for a while (later surmised to be caused by a microwave weapon). Small mushroom clouds are seen in the distance over New York City. Archie’s teeth begin to fall out (perhaps from radiation?). Meanwhile, with all of their personal communication technology dead, the nightmarish futile search for an explanation grows ever more desperate among all the characters. And meanwhile other ominous signs are appearing.
Toward the end, a survivalist/conspiracy theorist, Danny (Kevin Bacon), who has stocked up in advance on food, water and other necessities, fashions for the group various conspiracy theories: a coup by a rogue military force, possibly comprised of a band of nations who are against the U.S. Or, perhaps, says Danny, a different conspiracy is occurring in which the “powerful” are allowing cyberattacks and blackouts and other failures to create an environment for a civil war beneficial to the plotters.
The character, Danny, is himself a high point in the story. There are no pretentions in the movie to a sophisticated psychological treatment of the frequent human clinging to conspiracies as a sort of defense against impersonal and baffling forces (e.g., demographics, globalization, urbanization) which change local as well as national cultures. But the presence and personality of Danny, who stocks up on necessities to “ride out” the mysterious awfulness, makes much sense in this apocalyptic tale.
Apropos: In the final scene, Rose is alone in a survival shelter stocked with food and, thanks to an emergency system, able to watch the finale of her favorite TV program, “Friends.”
No one can accuse Alam of a soft irony.
Leave the World Behind makes one think of at least two things affecting our outlook in these times: major looming existential threats (far from completely shown in the movie); and a secular perspective on what novelist Thomas Wolfe noted of human life: “The pathos of temporality.”
Herewith first:
-Nuclear War
-Environmental Disaster
-Massive Cyberattacks, Out-Of-Control Hostile Technology, Other Catastrophic Technology Ironies
-Orwellian Dystopia (Authoritarianism, etc)
-Pandemic (Natural)
-Pandemic (Man Made)
-Asteroid Collision
-Super Volcano
-Solar Storm or Gamma-Ray Burst
-Threat X
And second:
Given what physicists and other scientists have discovered about the universe(s?), namely, that invoked here is a humanly unimaginable and overwhelming scale and violence whose time is measured in billions of years and within which the “Goldilocks” happenstance of humanity on the mere pebble of Earth is but a blink of temporality; and further given the natural order of human existence–the Darwinian strife, stress, pain and brevity–must one think that the Spirit of Place today is a blend of wonder and especially foreboding?
Leave the World Behind seems to me to be just barely glimpsing this growing and dualistic sense of things in our time.