'Don't Look Up' Is a Smart Movie About Indifference
Caring about science won't get you anywhere if you don't care about other people
If I hadn't already thought indifference was worth at least a newsletter, Don’t Look Up would have convinced me. Failure to care about what matters --- to care in a way that makes it count that you cared --- is its subject.
Don’t Look Up’s cast of A-list stars depicts a mad society whose people can't get it together to fend off a world-destroying comet that's going to hit their planet in six months. Unfortunately, that society is ours.
(Spoilers follow, obviously.)
To its credit, the movie has managed to annoy and/or thrill people across our usual culture-war lines. This is because it doesn’t blame our collective incompetence on the familiar villains of the Left (“those people don’t trust the science!’’) or the Right (“these so-called experts want to destroy what we love!”). The diagnosis here is a kind of self-indulgence shared by us all.
Instead of thinking “a catastrophe is about to happen to Earth,” each person in this movie thinks “a catastrophe is about to happen to me.” They only think they’re working on the real problem (“how do we save the world?”) when in fact they’re working on a different one (“how do I make myself feel better?”).
So the characters zoom around the film, taking actions that feel important, meaningful and satisfying, but which are all futile. Some grope for ways to not worry ("we're for the jobs the comet will bring"). Others lose themselves among self-made distractions: jobs, ratings, publicity, wanting to kiss someone, wanting to tell someone off. Leonardo DiCaprio's lead scientist gets lost online, where he enjoys rebutting comet deniers. Feels good. Achieves nothing. Later in the movie, many thousands of people go to rallies around the phrase “Look Up!” — while others go to counter-rallies to cry “Don’t Look Up!” Everyone feels good standing up for their side. They achieve nothing. As the End nears, millions watch a benefit concert to support the scientists. The music and visuals are real pretty. That too achieves nothing.
A lot of very smart people --- for instance, Scott Alexander, here and Ross Douthat, here — think the movie’s message is a muddle, because it doesn’t show us who is right. We don’t see anyone stand outside the confusion it depicts.
But the point of Don’t Look Up is that there is no such place to stand. The tendency to make the crisis about yourself is general. It affects smart, virtuous, rational people as much as it affects dumb, venal, impulsive ones.
Some 15 years ago, the philosopher and anthropologist Thomas de Zengotita proposed, in his book Mediated, that media saturation is the root cause of this universal confusion. Before the era of live TV, he wrote, people learned of disasters from telegraphs and newspapers even radio. That involved distance and delay. When you learned the Titanic had sunk a few days earlier, you were clear that it had happened to some poor souls in the faraway North Atlantic — not to you.
But 21st-century media is different. It offers instant immersion in the news, with a flow of facts and images that leaves any willing viewer on any couch as involved emotionally, and often better informed, than the people on the screen, who are actually running from the catastrophe.
Does she want to have this wrenching emotional experience, though? Maybe yes. Maybe no. What is significant isn’t which choice, but the fact that there is one. When you can decide how much reality you want to experience, and which channel you experience it through, then the focus of your attention isn’t on that reality. It’s on yourself. The sinking of the Titanic, in the pre-mediated world of 1912, was a terrible fate that struck only its passengers and those who knew them. On the other hand, the death of Princess Diana in 1997 was a tragedy that happened to — anyone who felt they wanted to immerse themselves in the news.
When de Zengotita made this argument, a lot of people already had a selfie-stick habit of putting themselves in the picture when talking about the news. “This is what I was doing in my yard in Sheboygan when the World Trade Center came down.” A decade and a half later, the habit of mind that de Zengotita called “the flattered self,” who’s picking and choosing what experiences he’ll accept, is far stronger. And that’s the world Don’t Look Up is satirizing. Stick with it all the way to the last post-credit scene, you’ll see what I mean.
When the news is always about you, rather than about the world, you’ve lost a lot of incentive to take in news you don’t want to hear. You’ve arranged your news the way you like it. Why should you have to listen to someone who doesn’t agree?
I don’t mean by this that the film is doing the familiar liberal drumbeat of “trust the scientists!” I think it’s delving a little deeper into the problem of indifference.
The story’s twists and turns remind us that human beings are built to care about human things — other people, their feelings, and their needs. When people feel they care about an overwhelming global problem, their real motivation is concern for the human beings who told them about that problem, and the ones who will be affected by it. That’s why organizations ask for contributions by showing pictures of the people who need your help.
What happens, though, if you don’t trust the people who told you about the problem? Then, you tell yourself, maybe this problem isn’t really there. And there is no more profound indifference than to say, “that thing you care about? It doesn’t exist!”
Democracies have a way out of this trap: free and open debate. If you willingly participate in a conversation with someone who is (you think) all wrong, you are, in effect, saying “I don’t care about that thing you mentioned. But I do care about you, as a fellow citizen, and/or fellow human being. Therefore I will engage in a conversation about why you believe in your thing and why I don’t. And maybe I will change your mind, or maybe you will change mine.”
The world of Don’t Look Up is a world in which that second-order trust has broken down. In that world, people are indifferent to the comet warning and they are indifferent to people who believe it. Or — equally true — the comet believers are indifferent to the people who don’t believe it. And so we get scene after scene in which people do not listen to one another. That’s the constant thread running through its rapid switches of tone and point of view.
I most emphatically do not mean “both sides have a point” or “let’s compromise” when it comes to existential global threats. I just mean that even when one side is 100 percent correct, the two (or however many) sides still have to talk. People who don’t trust one another will not do that. People who don’t trust one another can’t persuade one another.
The fatal failing in Don’t Look Up isn’t that some characters are indifferent to the scientists’ discovery. It’s that all characters are indifferent to people who aren’t like them.
So they all care, in their way, about the end of the world. But they won’t, or can’t, care about other people. Which means they might as well not care. In the end, when it’s too late, we get an almost-final scene of people doing what they failed to do from the start: Sitting together at a table, simply talking and listening.
And while we’re talking movies…
Seeing reality clearly while others are fooled, then discovering that the best thing you can do to help others is dramatic stuff that makes you feel cool --- that's pretty much the plot of the Matrix films. Red pill, kung fu, guns, cool bodysuits, and all that. But even the Matrix franchise seems to have evolved away from that self-indulgent notion of "caring." In The Matrix Resurrections, Neo and Trinity come to see that their exploits didn't actually change the world. And then, at the end, there's a surprising scene. (Spoiler follows.)
Trinity, having recovered her memory and her old mojo, prepares to leave the Matrix. But then her children rush in, telling her they need her, and they try to pull her away. It's painful to watch, and a little later, she and Neo make a point of whacking the Big Bad Guy, The Analyst, "for using children." It's a small but distinct nod to the cost others pay after someone says "this life isn't for me -- that's right, this life that you're counting on me to sustain. I'm out."