Why Are People So Mad About <em>Don't Look Up</em>?
Adam McKay’s disaster satire Don’t Look Up is many things at once: a parable of our distracted society, a primal scream of a warning, and a broad comedy from the writer/director of Anchorman. Such a delicate balance has made the star-studded Netflix film a polarizing movie.
Critics, audiences, and activists have both savaged and praised the movie, and the backlash has highlighted the difficulty of conveying an urgent message with comedy. Has political satire lost its power? Or has reality become so absurd that it’s now beyond parody?
That challenge was evident in the making of Don’t Look Up. As McKay told David Sims, he wrote the story about a planet-killing comet (and our society’s inability to act collectively to stop it) as a climate-change metaphor. But after the script was done, production shut down for the pandemic and he watched the follies of a real-life disaster surpass his fictional one.
COVID-19, climate change, and a planet-killing comet are very different crises. But the narrow-minded leaders of Don’t Look Up are unable to act against even the most obvious of existential threats. How close is its story to our own? And can its message make a difference?
Staff writers Sophie Gilbert, David Sims, and Spencer Kornhaber discuss the movie and the current state of satire on the Atlantic culture podcast The Review. Listen here:
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The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. It contains spoilers for Don’t Look Up.
Today we are here to talk about the disaster satire from Adam McKay that came out on Netflix last month. Here’s a bit of plot by way of recap, if you haven’t seen it or just want a refresher. The.
