What does it really mean for a movie to hold up a mirror to society? Isn’t that an extinction level event? Let’s not be dramatic here. I get it. I can feel you judging me. That's palpable. After breaking down the financial crisis in The Big Short,
and the Bush-era politics in Vice, Don’t Look Up is the latest movie from Adam McKay to dive into a complex societal issue. This time it’s about climate change, or rather; it’s about our reaction to climate change. Actually, it’s about a comet hurling towards the Earth that is threatening to destroy us while we are too distracted by petty concerns, but you know, it’s pretty clear what that is supposed to represent, and boy has it ruffled some feathers. There are many critics that liked the film, praising it for its sharp commentary , its humanistic touch, and for capturing the feeling that the entire world is losing its mind. And there are many that did not, calling it cynical and insufferably smug, a satire so lumbering that it’s enough to turn a tree hugger into a pro-fracker, and blaming McKay for being the most out of touch he’s ever been. Then there are the critics who believe that all the others are missing the entire point and that discussing the movie without really addressing what it was trying to do is precisely that which the movie critiques. Even McKay himself, apparently loving the heated debate about his movie, dropped in to once more emphasized that it’s really best looked at as a climate change metaphor, after which someone blamed him for suggesting that not liking his movie equals not caring about climate change, to which someone else pointed out that this is not what he was saying at all, these people just cannot stand the message of the film. I have, like, a quarter million subscribers, honey.
I gotta use my voice to get the truth out there, right? In short, there sure are a lot of opinions about this movie, and the thing is; I kind of agree with all of them. Don’t Look Up is a movie that I felt very conflicted about, I think it succeeded in some areas, while falling short in some others. Part of it has to do with the movie itself, part of it is because of the inherently complex nature of the subject it is discussing, and given that I’ve been analyzing movies for a living for some time now, and also happen to have a master’s degree in environmental sociology, I want to see if can add some understanding to both. And so today, let’s talk about Don’t Look Up, break down its central metaphor and examine what it really has to say about climate change, how successfully it does so, and what it really means for a movie to hold up a mirror to society. And then that happens.
- What is that? That's America's housing market. Before we get into Don’t Look Up, let’s take another look at The Big Short first, for even though it was widely praised by both critics and audiences, I still think that movie doesn’t get enough credit for low-key inventing a new cinematic language, or at least; a new way for movies to depict and dissect real world issues. Most notably, The Big Short never lets you forget you are watching a movie. It is not a story that tries to relive the financial crisis, it is a story about the financial crisis, it’s a present day perspective looking back at a strange and highly complicated event that caused tremendous harm, to try and understand what happened and how for the sake of an audience that by and large still didn’t have any real answers. I'm guessing most of you still don't really know what happened. Yeah, you got a soundbite you repeat so you don't sound dumb, but come on. And it does all this through a rather unique blend of staged drama, comedic satire, documentary style filmmaking, and those strange bits where famous people interrupt the story to just straight up explain things directly to the audience. Here’s world-famous chef Anthony Bourdain to explain. Here's Margot Robbie in a bubble bath to explain. What this achieves is, for one, a layer of transparency. The movie will for example make a note when corners are cut for the sake of a better flowing story, Okay, so this part isn't totally accurate... or when something that seems unrealistic actually happened. Mark Baum really did that.
Now you see what I had to deal with? But most importantly, it gives us a real insight into the financial world and all the structural elements that eventually caused everything to come crashing down. You've been saying that the system's broken for years, Mark.
So... why are you so shocked? The reason this is so important is because that is what gives us a deeper understanding not only of what happened, but also of how it happened. It doesn’t just give us villains to point our fingers at in moral outrage, it also gives us a deeper understanding of why they acted the way that they did, it makes us empathize with them, which, mind you, is not the same as sympathizing, and see the true nature of the problem. For example, while you probably didn’t care for all the money bros recklessly handing out mortgages for their own selfish interest, you do understand that it’s not their flawed moral character that was the real issue, but the banks that incentivized them to do so by buying up the mortgages no matter how risky they were. If I write a loan on Friday afternoon, big bank is gonna buy it by Monday lunch. Subsequently, you could also understand the banks for doing so because after all, all these mortgages were packaged and repackaged until it was only logical that there wasn’t any one banker who knew what was really in them. How do you know the bonds are worthless, aren't they filled with fucking thousands of pages of mortgages? I read them. You could even understand the people at the ratings agencies and see them not necessarily as corrupt individuals but as employees pressured by their working environment. If we don't work with them, they will go to our competitors.
And it is not my decision. I have a boss. The point is that again and again, The Big Short makes it clear that the financial crisis didn’t happen because of a few bad apples, but because of the overarching structure that made it possible, or better yet; inevitable, for a catastrophe to happen. Yes, there's some shady shit going down, but trust me, it's fueled by stupidity! And as such, I think this movie is not just a solid breakdown of the 2008 financial crisis, it is also a fantastic insight into the banality of evil. (and keep this in mind, because it becomes important later when I discuss Don’t Look Up) The Big Short portrays the financial system as one that is clearly ignorant, corrupt and destructive when viewed in its entirety, but also one where, if you zoom in, it becomes extremely difficult to pinpoint any one individual as the definitive guilty party. And even more so, as much as you would hate to admit it, it makes you realize that if you were in any of those positions, if you had those same opportunities to make easy money, if you were an employee at one of those firms, if you were a part of that environment, you would most likely have acted exactly the same. Just take a look at the main characters of this story. I look him in the face and I say, "How can you sleep at night "knowing that you are ripping off working people?" While presented as morally righteous, intellectually superior or just young and ambitious, it’s made pretty clear that none of them get into this mess, or come out of it, with their hands clean. Is it maybe in your best interest to have the ratings change? How many credit default swaps do you own? It doesn't make me wrong.
- No. It just makes you a hypocrite. Because when you really think about it, at the end of the day what did they actually achieve, except for making an obscene amount of money of the backs of those who they perceive as suckers? I liked how the movie takes them down a notch to draw attention to what all this was actually about. You just bet against the American economy.
- Fuck, yeah, we did! Fuck, yeah! Which means... Which means if we're right... If we're right, people lose homes. People lose jobs. People lose retirement savings. People lose pensions. The Big Short generates a lot of sympathy for all the people who, in the end, were affected the most. Because while they too would have been an easy target to blame, you know, like why would poor people take out so many loans, or buy houses they cannot afford, the movie actually shows the reality; the reality that people were by and large being duped by this ignorant, corrupt, and destructive system, and that ultimately, they were the ones to truly suffer because of it. I just know, that at the end of the day average people are going to be the ones that are gonna have to pay for all this. And so, yeah, that is The Big Short in a nutshell; a movie that holds a mirror to society not only to reflect, but also to reveal; that helps us understand how something bad was allowed to happen; it displayed the power dynamics that were involved; how unethical and destructive behavior was facilitated on a structural level and basically pinpointed what went wrong without resorting to easy answers and shallow moralizing. The world is as you find it, and I will not apologize for doing
what needed to be done. Although I don’t think it’s quite on the same level as The Big Short, I probably like Vice more than most people. McKay took on an extra challenge here by not just having to deal with complicated information, but also with an absence of information as very little is known about the private life of the central character Dick Cheney. What was Dick Cheney thinking after his first meeting with George W.? How did he feel about the oppurtunity that was in front of him? Nevertheless, I think it does effectively show how our democracy isn’t as bottom-up as we’d like to believe, that is; bottom-up in the sense that people have opinions and values and vote for the politicians that best represent these. Rather, it’s much more of a top-down situation where it’s the people in power who manipulate and re-shape public opinion to align it with their own agenda. Most notably, we frequently see these focus groups where the ways of discussing complicated societal issues are deliberately workshopped and re-framed to ensure they will serve the political ideology of those in power, even if it misleads or misinforms the general population. Is anybody else confused about what Al-Qaeda is? Would it be less confusing if it was a country? McKay’s newfound cinematic language also works really well here as the inclusion of real world clips further demonstrates the effectiveness of this manipulative effort; emphasizing how this is not a tool that only works on a vulnerable few, but one that we are all susceptible to. You chose me. And I did what you asked. And that, in short, I think is the biggest merit of Vice; it draws attention to how we talk about things, and to the real power dynamics and motivations behind why do we so. As such, it even adds some additional understanding
to the aftermath of the financial crisis; The banks took the money the American people gave them and used it to pay themselves huge bonuses and lobby Congress to kill big reform. And then they blamed immigrants and poor people. And surely it is also relevant to the way we discuss climate change, which, finally, brings us to Don’t Look Up. It is going to happen.
- Exactly. 99.78% to be exact. Oh, great. Okay, so it's not 100% Unlike The Big Short and Vice, Don’t Look Up opts for a metaphorical depiction of the societal issue it wants to discuss instead of for a straightforward one, which is a noteworthy choice on its own, because considering that climate change has been on the agenda for several decades now, you’d think there are plenty of real world climate change-related events to make a movie about. But no, we’re going with a metaphor; a dramatized story. To be precise; the story of a comet hurling towards the Earth. This comet is what we call a planet-killer. There are significant implications to this approach. For one, while it does have one 4th wall breaking moment where the movie pauses to note that the Planetary Defense Coordination Office is a real place, there no longer is a guiding character like Ryan Gosling in The Big Short or Jesse Plemons in Vice; someone who provides that extra bit of expository information which you don’t get as explicitly in dramatic stories that tend to adhere to the principle of ‘show don’t tell’. Normally, this is a good thing, but given McKay’s ambition to offer an honest insight into complex real world issues, I believe the inclusion of such characters was an effective approach to really help us understand the nuances that are inherently involved in systemic problems, without simplifying or ignoring them for the sake of storytelling. This issue is all the more important given how a planet-killing comet as a metaphor for climate change already significantly limits what it can reveal about it. To be fair, I do believe the comet works quite well as a slightly different metaphor, but I’ll get back to that towards the end. As a direct allegory for climate change however, well for starters I think it feeds into what is still an all to prevalent misconception of what climate change really is, that being; a singular catastrophic event. And more specifically; a singular catastrophic event that awaits us in the near future. You're just telling a story, keep it simple. No math!
- But it's all math. We’ve always struggled to effectively communicate the real meaning of human-caused climate change, and especially to find the right language and the right images to motivate action towards it. Ever since the early documentaries on climate change, and especially after The Day After Tomorrow, with its over-the-top Avengers-style coming together of every conceivable natural disaster, I do think this is a good movie by the way, it became clear that climate change doesn’t only pose a challenge as a world-changing event with significant societal consequences, it is also a communication problem, and perhaps even more so; a significant challenge to the limits of human understanding, which in turn has significant implications for our ability to mobilize on a collective level. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a famous chef, or Margot Robbie in a bubble bath to explain this, so here’s me at my desk to try and do it. There are several scholars that have given us great insights into the nature of climate change not so much as a scientific problem because as the political ecologist Bruno Latour pointed out, it’s already one of the most widely researched and most well-documented threats in human history. We know it’s happening and has been so for some time but more so as a societal issue. Philosopher Timothy Morton for example introduced the concept of hyperobjects, with climate change being the primary example. Hyperobjects can be described as “entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.” In simple terms, it’s a way to talk about phenomena that by their very nature, cannot be compressed or reduced within easily defined borders. They encompass a scale so vast, both in space and in time, that even though we can certainly see its effects and isolated elements, it’s basically impossible to discern any specific part of it that gives us a true sense of the whole. The term Anthropocene, which is a proposed geological era and supported by a number of scholars, also serves to emphasize that we have reached a point where our ecological impact will affect, and has already affected, the planet for millennia to come, it's a temporal distance that is almost impossible to grasp in any meaningful terms, and that is as equally empowering as it is disarming when it comes to taking meaningful action, as it suggests both that we were able to set something so grand into motion, but also that we might not have the same power to do anything about it now that it’s happening. Lastly, there is the risk society framework by sociologist Ulrich Beck, who helped us to understand how modern society is increasingly generating risks that exceed our capacity to deal with them, with climate change being again one of the primary examples. In addition to the earlier mentioned issues of complexity, scale and temporality, Beck also adds how the inability to observe these risks directly has made us reliant on experts and technological instruments, which is not only problematic because it implies that we are increasingly dealing with risks that we cannot directly perceive with our own basic human senses, but also because the complex nature of these risks makes it increasingly difficult for experts to accurately capture them, which in turn has resulted in a noteworthy crisis of legitimacy; both for the scientific community as well as for governments that we rely on for at least some degree of security. And this is the thing about the comet in Don’t Look Up; it’s simple. It’s concrete and tangible. Oh my God that's it, that's the comet! Especially once it gets close enough to Earth, as at one point happens in the movie, it can be perceived by everyone with the naked eye, and its consequences also become equally obvious. In other words; it’s just too clear of an image. That's it, that's the comet, look! It's right there! There is the obvious issue with the comet being an object of immediate and total, indiscriminate destruction, whereas the violence of climate change is slow and unequally distributed, and I’ll get to that. But I first want to address the way in which Don’t Look Up seems to hope for that moment where it will all be self-evident, where the reality of climate change is as obvious as a comet in the sky, and where, by extension, any debate with climate deniers is settled once and for all. We saw it, we saw it with our own eyes. What other proof do we need? Because first off, I feel this is an almost accidental form of denialism where we remain stuck in this stage where we keep waiting for climate change to be definitively happening, so to say, for it to become more clearly observable than it already is right now. It’s like we keep waiting for that one grand natural disaster that will prove everything, keep waiting for climate change to reveal itself in unambiguous terms, which naturally plays right into the hands of actual denialists who use such sentiments to insist that the science isn’t settled, and that things aren’t as bad as we think. We've been trying to tell you, we tried to tell you this whole time it's right there... Even if you take the scene where everyone finally witnesses the comet for themselves as symbolic for a more general sense of newfound agreement, in the context of the movie it is still based on a factual revelation that is equally and unambiguously observable to all, which is exactly what we’ll probably never see. Oh Jesus, here it comes!
Global warming! Years ago, the show South Park, perhaps somewhat inadvertently, already made fun of this idea of climate change suddenly becoming an immediate danger to everyone, which as a side note; was also when we still referred to climate change as global warming, but you know, that was before… Instead of global warming, we call it climate change. Secondly, because climate change is reduced to a threat that in its essence, is, or at some point will be, as obvious as a comet, the communication problem also becomes simplified. And this, as we’ve seen, is arguably the most important problem. For as the movie also seems to show with its initial mission to deflect the comet, there was time to act, and it is certainly true that if we had all unanimously acknowledged the issue of climate change decades ago and had immediately taken radical global action, then perhaps things would have turned out very differently. But we didn’t, and as to why, well, with a comet this answer is pretty much reduced to the simple matter of looking up, of recognizing the threat and having the will to take action. As such, the real challenge of capturing, communicating, and organizing action towards an impossibly complex phenomenon that in many ways transcends our capacity to even conceive it is turned into the rather simple act of just having to see it, which also makes it a rather simple moral issue; there are those who see and acknowledge the comet; these are the good ones, and those who refuse to; these are the bad ones, the ones who are so obviously and almost comically wrong that we can point our fingers at them with moral disdain, ridicule and condescension. Now, this is not to say that climate denialism is not a real problem, unfortunately, it still very much is. And I do admire how McKay once again draws attention to more systemic issues and power dynamics to understand our inaction. As the story progresses, we see a political system in which politicians are only concerned with their own elections, we see a tech industry with billionaires who see themselves as the saviors of humanity yet who only actually do something when there is an economic advantage to it, and we see a media culture that renders real communication virtually impossible by increasingly distracting us with scandals, gossip and other trivialities. Well, it's, you know, just something we do around here. We just keep the bad news light. But I also feel this doesn’t capture the issue with the appropriate nuance, especially compared to The Big Short and Vice, which not only pointed out the “villains”, but also gave us an understanding of the banality of their evil, of how their villainy was allowed to happen, or rather; how it was bound to happen because of the larger social structures surrounding them. And it is this element of empathy that I think is missing, or at the very least, is not as thorough as it should be by reducing the complexity of climate change-related issues to the simplicity of a comet. Citizens of the United States and peoples of the world. Ordinary citizens, for example, are almost entirely taken out of the equation, which is good in the sense that they cannot be blamed for the comet or be tasked with trying to stop it through individual action, but it also means that the movie cannot really comment on how this does happen in the real world where the burden of responsibility to do something about climate change has been, and still is, too often placed on individual citizens who should, as it argued, just make better lifestyle choices if they really want to save the environment. While this is not to say that individual actions don’t matter at all, it is to say that, in the same way as average people taking on too much debt wasn’t the decisive factor in our financial crisis, so too is our personal consumption not the decisive factor in our ecological one. So now it's to your advantage to act on the comet?
– Right... When it comes to the politics, I think it’s important to take into account that political action isn’t just challenged by corrupted politicians who are only concerned with themselves, but also simply because it is extremely difficult, even for good politicians, to push for radical and costly preventative measures when there is no clearly perceivable reward to be gained for the current generation, and when the threat is so easily brushed off as alarmist. I mean, just go back 5 years and try being a politician who wants to invest heavily in pandemic prevention and management, it’s just hard to gain support based on the precautionary principle. Don’t Look Up also mostly aims at the political right, The whole thing's liberal, it's got a liberal bias. which is understandable given that this is where most of the denialism tends to land, but if we’re being completely fair, there are definitely dogmatic beliefs regarding climate change and climate change action all across the political spectrum. I’ve already made a long video about the deeper philosophical misconceptions that underpin the more general attitude towards nature in our modern society, about how seeing climate change as a crisis to be solved is actually a somewhat problematic perspective, and about how we basically need a whole new of framework to help us make sense of and deal with our changing environment, so if you want a more academic breakdown of all this,
I’d recommend you watch that one. Also, I climbed a mountain and went to live in a cabin in the woods for a bit,
it was a whole adventure. But back to Don’t Look Up, the movie also has a weird sense of American exceptionalism. The UN is briefly mentioned as a sort of composite presence for the entirety of the rest of the world, but overall the comet, and the political failure to act on it, is presented as a mostly national issue, which obviously contradicts climate change as being, by its very nature, a global problem that involves global politics. Again, no famous chef or Margot Robbie in a bubble bath,
so it’s just me again. One significant obstacle to political action on the global scale is the question of climate justice; for example there is the question of who is most responsible and by extension; who should do the most to improve things based on the polluter pays principle, which is severely hampered by the debate about when exactly human-caused climate change began, and by the subsequent question of to what extent we should take into account that early contributors weren’t aware of the consequences, which in turn has led to another debate about when exactly we knew that climate change was something that we were knowingly contributing to. And for people like myself who live in small countries that are definitely vulnerable to climate change, there is also the frustration of trying to make political changes when bigger countries that are making a much bigger impact won’t do the same. It’s a sort of prisoner’s dilemma where the best outcome is achieved if everyone takes action, but no one is willing to take action unless others do it first. Lastly, there is the issue of the divide between the global north and the south; between the developed nations that both have the biggest ecological footprint as well as the most resources to do something about it, and the developing nations that have a significantly smaller ecological footprint, but also wish to progress and achieve wealth and prosperity like developed countries have, which will likely increase their ecological footprint in the future. As the Inconvenient Truth Sequel: Truth to Power also shows, this has led to significant political conflict as the global north for example is pushing the global south to either grow sustainably or not at all, while the global south blames the global north for denying them progress, especially considering the global north itself was able to grow unsustainably for so long and, in the eyes of the global south, is not taking any real measures to reduce its own impact. And all that is without even getting into the lingering power dynamics from colonialism and historical exploitation that is still allowing the global north to enjoy the privileges of its ecological footprint while exporting the costs to the global south. Social inequality also ties into an issue I briefly brought up earlier; that a comet is indiscriminate in its destruction, which of course isn’t the case with climate change. I actually got to witness this for myself when I visited one of Indonesia’s bigger cities as part of my bachelor’s degree. The city was facing a number of issues like rising sea levels, increasingly severe rainfall, and heavy urbanization that allowed less and less room for water to drain away, and that was actually causing the whole city to slowly sink into the ground, which in turn obviously made it even more vulnerable to rising sea levels. As you might have guessed, those who suffered the most under all this were the poorest people of the population; many of whom were living in the coastal areas that were most frequently plagued by floods, with some of them even experiencing a daily flooding of their homes as the tide came in and out. With no way to sell their houses, because you know, who would move into these places, these people had nowhere to go and no choice but to adapt to the slow violence that was being inflicted on them every single day. I'm grateful we tried.
- Man oh man, did we try, Although I do like that Don’t Look Up emphasizes how in the end it’s the ordinary citizens who are suffering the consequences while the rich and powerful save themselves, I'm just gonna go to the restroom for a moment. I don’t think it was quite able to capture what the actual harm of climate change looks like. And while the movie also shows how the rich and powerful are ultimately responsible for the planet’s destruction, as it is their greediness and grandiosity that sabotages the initial and most promising mission to deflect the comet and fails the later, far more reckless one, the comet was coming to destroy us either way. In other words, while there is blame to be placed for how the comet was responded to, there is no blame to be placed for its existence,
which also isn’t the case with climate change. I wonder if it would have been a more fitting metaphor to have a comet that was set to fly right past the Earth instead of collide with it. And that only when its riches are discovered and the rich and the powerful see an opportunity to become even more rich and powerful that a reckless mission is started to bring the comet into orbit where it can be mined. The media would be used to make beautiful promises to the people and get them excited for the new wealth and opportunities this will bring to everyone; Your dad and I are for the jobs the comet will provide. For a while, it’s all looking great, the Earth’s rarest materials are suddenly not so rare anymore and some progress is made. But then, it turns out that the technology that was supposed to lead us to paradise is failing us; it’s not just mining the comet but it’s slowly breaking it apart causing small meteors to rain down on everyone with increasing severity. At this point, we get the denialism, the ‘it’s not so bad, it’s only little bits and pieces here and there,’ and the assurances that ‘more and better technology will surely offset all these negative side effects, once the comet-miner 2.0 is released, all will be fine’ and perhaps even some deflection like ‘well, if you’re against comet mining don’t buy the products that are made with its materials.’ Meanwhile, those who have the means to do so have started enforcing their roofs, or if they are especially wealthy, are even building entire domes around their houses while the poor and the marginalized become increasingly exposed. International tensions worsen as conflicts arise between the mining and non-mining nations, resulting in a political stalemate until eventually, over the course of a few years or even a few generations, the comet breaks off into bigger and bigger pieces and, assuming it ends on the same note as the movie, everyone ends up being wiped out except for the privileged few who had the means and the power to build the strongest fortresses, but who then emerge to find that they don’t possess the skills that are actually essential for a society to survive, and so without everyone else, it is clear that they too are doomed to perish. Though I think this scenario would have better emphasized the social inequalities and the slow violence that climate change leads to, it is still not a perfect metaphor. Most notably, it doesn’t really account for another issue that I haven’t yet addressed; which is the issue of a comet coming with a solution that is of an entirely different nature than that of climate change. Deflecting or destroying a comet is certainly a costly and risky endeavor, but it doesn’t really demand for any structural changes in the society it threatens. It’s an external danger that, in theory at least, could have been externally dealt with, and the world would have been able go on in the same way that it did before. The same is not true for climate change, which, as we’ve discussed, is a highly complex, long-term and global problem, which makes it only logical that it is also one that, when it comes to solution strategies, is intrinsically intertwined with the culture, the values, and the sort of general zeitgeist we have come to internalize as a society. And it is at this point that, for me, the comet took on a slightly different meaning. For if we look back at the journey of the movie’s main characters, there is not just the obvious struggle to get people to care about climate change within a system that either casts you out for not playing by its rules, Well, the handsome astronomer can come back anytime, but the yelling lady... not so much. or that corrupts you to its own advantage. But you have to understand, this is now beyond our control. They have all the power. There is also the deeper struggle of just trying to talking about something real, something sincere, of trying to get people to meaningfully engage with the world and with each other. Sometimes we need to just be able to say things to one another.
We need to hear things. It’s something so simple, yet so vital, and somehow it seems to have been rendered impossible. The movie gives us some specific surface level reasons as to why, but when seen as a whole, it also invokes a deeper realization, one that isn’t as explicitly expressed but one that slowly dawned on me on a more intangible emotional level. It’s the realization that pretty much every generation living right now, at least here in the west, has been raised in the same historical period, one that can be defined by unprecedented progress, prosperity and relative stability. And that, perhaps, we’ve all mistakenly come to assume these characteristics as normal and everlasting. And you know, who could blame us, because for a while there, it seemed like everything was within our reach; countless innovations were leading the way to exciting new technologies; food supplies were no longer dependent on seasons or country, everything was just there the whole year around; we were all driving cars and flying across the world. I mean, we talked about the end of history, you know, we were so close. And then came the internet and suddenly we were able to reach everyone, everywhere and at any time. It was beautiful, promising. We conquered the physical world and were pioneering into a new one. But now, it feels like it’s all slipping away from us, it’s all turning against us. We already came to realize that our financial system is not the source of everlasting wealth as we had hoped, that our governments and political systems are not as unshakable and incorruptible as we thought. And now that the very foundations of the world we inhabit are changing, it’s like we’re moving into the endgame. We’re awakening, or perhaps; re-awakening to a world that is much bigger and complex than we are, that won’t submit itself to our dominion, and that is confronting us with a mirror image of who have really become, revealing how, despite all our riches and the possibilities it gave us, we were not really trying to make progress, we were not really striving for freedom as a communal sense of prosperity and security; we were merely trying to build our own private paradises, we were trying to be left alone, do whatever we want. Completely detached from any real sense of community, from nature, from all external influences, consequences, responsibilities. We were completely unconcerned with the world around us, we wanted to be. You think you're motivated by beliefs, high ethical beliefs. But you just run towards pleasure and away from pain. But what it has left us with, it seems, is just this profound sense of despair and powerlessness, not just because we’ve somehow locked ourselves into systems that rob us of our agency, and seem to make any meaningful change impossible. You want to hold... Get a mob and hold up picket signs? You wanna overthrow the government? I mean, look at this. But on a more interpersonal level too, it increasingly feels like all the things that were supposed to connect us, that were supposed to bring us together, are now tearing us apart. I think by now everyone has experienced a friend or family member drifting away into a worldview so different from ours that it feels like we can no longer agree with them on even the most basic elements of our reality, that we cannot even phantom how they could possibly look at the world so differently, and they probably feel the same way about us. There is something truly terrifying about the way we all seem to be diverging into parallel realities; increasingly out of touch, out of reach. I mean, my God, how do... How do we even talk to each other? What've we... What've we done to ourselves? How do we fix it? And that, in the end, might be the more important comet; not the one that is promising a total climate catastrophe, but the one that is slowly but surely revealing something important about ourselves; how there is something vital not only to our survival but also to our humanity that we’ve let gone to waste, that we’ve let ourselves get detached from by all this madness; all the distractions, the trivialities, the blind faith in our grandiosity, and the illusions of everlasting paradise, of unobstructed progress. Because no, the world is not going to end, and it isn’t all bad. There is a lot to be grateful for, we’ve done some wonderful things, some of which are nothing short of miraculous and will certainly be important as we move forward. And beneath all of it, you know, we’re still us. But nevertheless, it does feel like something is ending,
like we’re awakening from a dream. And in that sense, Don’t Look Up is not so much about our future
as it is about our past, about the closing of a chapter, one where, for a while… We really did have everything, didn’t we? Hey there, looks like you made it all the way to the end, I really hope you enjoyed this video that started out as a quick review but of course it got way out of hand. Uhm, I couldn’t really come up with a clever segue but this video was sponsored by Acorn TV, which is a really cool streaming service with captivating crime drama, mystery and thriller series from Britain and beyond. Personally, I’m always down to immerse myself in a solid miniseries,
it’s actually one of my favorite formats, it can go more in-depth than a movie but also doesn’t needlessly drag on, and Acorn TV offers plenty of those,
which for me is just perfect. You can watch everything completely commercial free on all of your devices,
with new content arriving every Monday, and all this for just $5.99 a month. If you want to try it out, you can go to Acorn.tv
and use the promo code ‘likestoriesofold’ to get 30 days for free. So just follow the link in the description,
to start your free month of great television, today.
