I love your revisions. One note would be have the comet first noticed around 300 years ago, then once again every 40 years, and in 1980 they realize the warble in the orbit has brought it into a collision course. The movie starts there, in 1980, and shows the 40 year montage of excuses and bald-faced lies we've been fed... and the rich western countries can take it from there...
"Climate change is more complicated then, well, everything. If we required all climate art to make perfect metaphors, we wouldn’t have any climate art at all. We certainly wouldn’t have any ridiculous, absurdist art like Don’t Look Up, which I absolutely loved." Exactly.
The thing about the backlash to this movie that is KILLING ME is that truly, people's aesthetic opinions of it are irrelevant. In fact, arguing about aesthetics is exactly one of the dumb things we invest in to the detriment of basically everything else. Our opinions about whether this movie are good or bad are irrelevant. What the movie is, is accurate. And that's what we need to (and won't) grapple with.
I loved "Don't Look Up". To me, it was the perfect example of our superficial, insane "bad is good, night is day" 1984-ish world in which we now live. I agree that some of the points could have been better made, but it certainly highlighted our utterly farcical our society has become.
Oh, and Jonah Hill was great in the movie!
P.S. I am happy to now be following Fish in Instagram!
I feel so validated that you enjoyed Don't Look Up! I've been defending it ardently amongst my friends the last couple of weeks. I love your suggestions to make it more accurate, though. Honestly McKay should make a new version!
Absurd that the mainstream media felt like they should “debunk” the movie. They completely missed the movie’s entire point and satire of their complicity in the coming decades, didn’t they?
I enjoyed the movie. My only frustration with the metaphor was also the central conceit of the moving. Taking a slow moving challenge that is hidden and imperceptible in daily experience and changing it into a single catastrophic event. If there was one "silver bullet" to solving climate change then I bet we'd find a lot more politicians willing to take that shot at being a hero.
My larger complaint with the movie is that in making the characters so laughably one-dimensional it also reinforces the notion that it is up to us to look to our leaders to solve these problems - and by extension the fault of the political class and journalists when problems go unsolved. I'm not convinced. Maybe idiocy at those levels dooms us and it isn't even worth trying. Or maybe we need to accept what we have to work with in the social sphere and find a way to make changes anyway - like this newsletter. I prefer the latter viewpoint.
I still recommend it to folks. It's good fun, and a decent parable.
I dunno, making the plot more accurate to mimic the obfuscation campaign around climate change doesn't really work for me: sure the tweaking would more accurately reflect the issues unfolding against the truth, but I think the main problem with the movie is that there really is no viable way to save the planet from another killer comet impact that is 6 months out, so even if all hands were on deck immediately, the best we could do wouldn't have been enough to avert such a large comet. Tweaking the details doesn't erase what I call the "Gilligan's Isle" moments that you have to just ignore the unreality of in order to enjoy it.
But we're spinning out alternatives, right? So what would be a potentially reversible apocalyptic threat that is 10 years out? That might provide the timeline from which you could show well developed cocoons of unreality to spin into different camps, providing the wide array of illusionary self delusion realities that one after another would collapse due to its own self-interest based delusions, leaving only the few groups who made adjustments along the way to stay aligned with the true realities at hand to pick up the pieces and move ahead.
Or there could be a Day the Earth Stood Still moment type of global unifying event that nobody could ignore, causing everyone to somehow re-think what they were involved in, in all cultures, at all levels, to restructure those varied activities to be consistent with a way of life that would reduce our carbon (and ecological) footprints to a sustainable level. Now THAT is science fiction!
I enjoyed the film too, though its satire was a bit overdrawn IMO, definitely cathartic, giving laughs about our abysmal political culture. What I'd really like to know is how it played out in our "heartland" of Trump-supporting deniers. Do they watch movies with DiCaprio, Streep or Lawrence? And more important, do they "get" satire? The comment by James Charlton below indicates they're likely to blow off its message--if they watch it at all, that is. Instead of preaching to the choir, we need to get new people on board (to mix metaphors).
Well to hear it from the likes of Dicaprio the earth is doomed. This is the same guy who when he was shooting a movie in Alberta Canada and experienced a chinook said that it was climate change. Really Lenny a chinook is climate change??? Chinooks have been with us since gawd knows when, myself experience one on 2 occassions and it was pretty neat, but it was not climate change then or is it now. Its guys like this who have little to no idea what they speak that creates a lot of foolishness and people buy into this sort of crap and people then say it must be true if Lenny Dicaprio said it, it just ain't so on any level.
Fabulous! I loved how you gave us the picture of how it's really going down, the essential injustice, and also credited the movie with doing a great job of what it set out to do. I have only recently learned about how economic analysts for corporations discount the future -which is what our children & children from all around the world will live in - and don't bring that cost into immediate consideration. It reminds me of the creation of nuclear wastes that no one knows what to do with and which are toxic generations into the future. Are we doing the same thing regarding climate impacts? I would appreciate your thoughts on this kind of accounting. Am I to understand that CO2 emissions, which we are now charging a fee for in Canada, going up to $170 a ton by 2030, can now be 'offset' by buying Direct Air Capture credits at $500 or $1000 a ton? How can we let it be put up there for free or peanuts and at the same time it costs a fortune to get it down(plus only tiny bits can be captured). Can you please cover this topic? thanks for a great column, really appreciate it.
I love your revisions. One note would be have the comet first noticed around 300 years ago, then once again every 40 years, and in 1980 they realize the warble in the orbit has brought it into a collision course. The movie starts there, in 1980, and shows the 40 year montage of excuses and bald-faced lies we've been fed... and the rich western countries can take it from there...
"Climate change is more complicated then, well, everything. If we required all climate art to make perfect metaphors, we wouldn’t have any climate art at all. We certainly wouldn’t have any ridiculous, absurdist art like Don’t Look Up, which I absolutely loved." Exactly.
The thing about the backlash to this movie that is KILLING ME is that truly, people's aesthetic opinions of it are irrelevant. In fact, arguing about aesthetics is exactly one of the dumb things we invest in to the detriment of basically everything else. Our opinions about whether this movie are good or bad are irrelevant. What the movie is, is accurate. And that's what we need to (and won't) grapple with.
I loved "Don't Look Up". To me, it was the perfect example of our superficial, insane "bad is good, night is day" 1984-ish world in which we now live. I agree that some of the points could have been better made, but it certainly highlighted our utterly farcical our society has become.
Oh, and Jonah Hill was great in the movie!
P.S. I am happy to now be following Fish in Instagram!
I feel so validated that you enjoyed Don't Look Up! I've been defending it ardently amongst my friends the last couple of weeks. I love your suggestions to make it more accurate, though. Honestly McKay should make a new version!
Absurd that the mainstream media felt like they should “debunk” the movie. They completely missed the movie’s entire point and satire of their complicity in the coming decades, didn’t they?
I enjoyed the movie. My only frustration with the metaphor was also the central conceit of the moving. Taking a slow moving challenge that is hidden and imperceptible in daily experience and changing it into a single catastrophic event. If there was one "silver bullet" to solving climate change then I bet we'd find a lot more politicians willing to take that shot at being a hero.
My larger complaint with the movie is that in making the characters so laughably one-dimensional it also reinforces the notion that it is up to us to look to our leaders to solve these problems - and by extension the fault of the political class and journalists when problems go unsolved. I'm not convinced. Maybe idiocy at those levels dooms us and it isn't even worth trying. Or maybe we need to accept what we have to work with in the social sphere and find a way to make changes anyway - like this newsletter. I prefer the latter viewpoint.
I still recommend it to folks. It's good fun, and a decent parable.
George Monbiot, with DDN nails the message in this short using DLU and DiCaprio as a platform to have a conversation. https://www.doubledown.news/watch/2022/january/11/the-tipping-point-that-will-destroy-the-world-george-monbiot?fbclid=IwAR0bgSmM2Hbl5C14VHa4oPxhCY6lSWG6RH_yoHkP7IlnpVzOYEmGRaOXadY
I dunno, making the plot more accurate to mimic the obfuscation campaign around climate change doesn't really work for me: sure the tweaking would more accurately reflect the issues unfolding against the truth, but I think the main problem with the movie is that there really is no viable way to save the planet from another killer comet impact that is 6 months out, so even if all hands were on deck immediately, the best we could do wouldn't have been enough to avert such a large comet. Tweaking the details doesn't erase what I call the "Gilligan's Isle" moments that you have to just ignore the unreality of in order to enjoy it.
But we're spinning out alternatives, right? So what would be a potentially reversible apocalyptic threat that is 10 years out? That might provide the timeline from which you could show well developed cocoons of unreality to spin into different camps, providing the wide array of illusionary self delusion realities that one after another would collapse due to its own self-interest based delusions, leaving only the few groups who made adjustments along the way to stay aligned with the true realities at hand to pick up the pieces and move ahead.
Or there could be a Day the Earth Stood Still moment type of global unifying event that nobody could ignore, causing everyone to somehow re-think what they were involved in, in all cultures, at all levels, to restructure those varied activities to be consistent with a way of life that would reduce our carbon (and ecological) footprints to a sustainable level. Now THAT is science fiction!
I enjoyed the film too, though its satire was a bit overdrawn IMO, definitely cathartic, giving laughs about our abysmal political culture. What I'd really like to know is how it played out in our "heartland" of Trump-supporting deniers. Do they watch movies with DiCaprio, Streep or Lawrence? And more important, do they "get" satire? The comment by James Charlton below indicates they're likely to blow off its message--if they watch it at all, that is. Instead of preaching to the choir, we need to get new people on board (to mix metaphors).
Well to hear it from the likes of Dicaprio the earth is doomed. This is the same guy who when he was shooting a movie in Alberta Canada and experienced a chinook said that it was climate change. Really Lenny a chinook is climate change??? Chinooks have been with us since gawd knows when, myself experience one on 2 occassions and it was pretty neat, but it was not climate change then or is it now. Its guys like this who have little to no idea what they speak that creates a lot of foolishness and people buy into this sort of crap and people then say it must be true if Lenny Dicaprio said it, it just ain't so on any level.
Fabulous! I loved how you gave us the picture of how it's really going down, the essential injustice, and also credited the movie with doing a great job of what it set out to do. I have only recently learned about how economic analysts for corporations discount the future -which is what our children & children from all around the world will live in - and don't bring that cost into immediate consideration. It reminds me of the creation of nuclear wastes that no one knows what to do with and which are toxic generations into the future. Are we doing the same thing regarding climate impacts? I would appreciate your thoughts on this kind of accounting. Am I to understand that CO2 emissions, which we are now charging a fee for in Canada, going up to $170 a ton by 2030, can now be 'offset' by buying Direct Air Capture credits at $500 or $1000 a ton? How can we let it be put up there for free or peanuts and at the same time it costs a fortune to get it down(plus only tiny bits can be captured). Can you please cover this topic? thanks for a great column, really appreciate it.