(January 2022) – By Jada Sirkin
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Isn't it beautiful that the same film can be read in so many ways? During the writing of this text, two articles, of the many there must be about Don't look up, caught my attention. While “Don't look up”, look at yourself, by Ian Cutris, focuses on the contradiction involved in the capitalization of the critique of capitalism, Comet of deliverance, by Charles Eisenstein, proposes a double reading: first, it questions the simplification with which the ecological problem is approached; second, it celebrates how the film shows how humans, faced with the imminence of death, remember the sacredness of life. I recommend reading the articles, because here I simplify their readings; I do so in order to account for the variety of interpretations that are squeezed out of the same material. Reading those articles, which focus on different areas than the one I focused on, opened my eyes to the complexity each phenomenon is —the ecological, the aesthetic, the political phenomenon. That said, I dive into my reading proposal.
The hypothesis is that the film Don’t look up (2021) has a double edge, already well known: with the intention of showing a problem, it simplifies it: concretely, here, the heroes are heroes and the villains are villains. It seems that we cannot get out of this polarized dynamic. Why? One possible answer: it is precisely this polarized dynamic that sustains our addictive consumer society; a consumer product is a readable (easily digestible) object defined by the fixation of good and evil: war (knowing which side we are on) sells. Capitalism is a self-expressive system functional to that perceptual structure we call ego. The ego functions insofar as it defines what is right and wrong —who is guilty, against what we have to fight.
However good its critical environmentalist intentions, however many viewers will probably benefit from its linear message (ecological awareness!), however funny Meryl Streep, great Jonah Hill, tender Leo Dicaprio and Melanie Lynskey, and disturbing Mark Rylance as the visionary and/or greedy businessman, the film is still organized in a familiar and polarized way: the good guys are the good guys and the bad guys are guilty.
Enabled by the declared satirical texture (we will laugh with complicity at what we have come to believe we are), here the bad guys are insanely idiotic and guilty; the good guys, blameless and moralistic. Yes, it's true, that farce we call real life unfolds in the same polarized way. The question is, who says we owe one more performance (representation) to the insistent theater of reality?
That life is like this is not a good excuse, because "like this" is a simplification that is functional to a certain vision of the world. Life (like this film, like every phenomenon) is many things at once; that in everyday social exchange we simplify it horribly does not mean that we have to do the same (keep doing the same) in those contexts of supposed freedom that we snatchingly call art. If here the specific excuse to justify the good-and-bad polarization is the intention to make anti-ecological social dynamics visible, I think the film doesn't contribute much in that sense either. After Donald Trump, fiction will have to try harder. Human life has become too complex for us to rely this much on such linear messages.
Of course, I cannot (nor do I pretend to) know what effects this film will have. A piece is what we make of it. I do not mean to claim that this film, with its linear message, cannot generate debate and reflection. It surely will. Maybe, in front of the screen, someone will wake up. And good for that! What I wonder here is what subtleties slip through the fibers of the environmentalist discourse. What I wonder, simply, is why good-and-bad again. If the intention was to convey a message of ecological urgency, was the polarization of good guys and bad guys necessary?
Jennifer Lawrence represents the morally unquestionable figure —the good in a beautiful, outraged body. Obviously, she is the one with whom we are most invited (forced) to identify: we know what she knows, we feel her helplessness. DiCaprio, for his part, is momentarily caught by the media idiocy and the sensuality of the spectacle —but only to, touching the bottom of the ocean of evil, recede and make the right decision, which obviously involves returning home and getting his family (always the family!) back. Although the good guy is almost captured, he does not cross the threshold. That almost, while it may reveal complexities, in the end confirms simplifications: if the good guy does not manage to turn bad, the villains remain the others. And this is not minor, because the foundations of the ecological problem are precisely in the perceptual construction of an us and them, which, of course, becomes us OR them.. The guilty ones are always the others.
Hypothesis: the first anti-ecological step was (is) to perceive ourselves as separate from the world —for that, we call that world nature, and thus become owners of the creative gift of the artificial. The second anti-ecological step was (is) to define a system of good guys and bad guys that determines who does seek reunion with nature (the awakened ones) and who does not (the guilty soulless ones). The problem then is located in those who do not. The Netflix narrative (profiting from the simplification of polarized militant discourses) serves the systematic capitalist need to think of us as divided. Divide and conquer, they say; but who will conquer?
If the ship has capacity for 2000 millionaires, the 2000 will have to die devoured by the colorful rheas of who knows what planet. No one is saved, to live is to die. At least within this reality board, there is no escape from the constant reorganization of material forms. We have to die every day. But we keep refusing, and, as we refuse death (transformation) we are still unable to function within the hyper-complex system we call Life.
We can think of human evolution as the slow attempt to get this strange bug we call homo sapiens to join the terrestrial dance. Accusing others sometimes serves as an excuse for not recognizing that we the good guys also have to learn to move with the Earth's choreography. The story of Us vs. the Others proves to be fallacious and obsolete. So, if the old good guys-and-bad guys story is not working for us, the question would be how ecological is a narrative that systematically puts the problem outside —on the other?
To say that businessmen and politicians are evil and/or stupid serves us to avoid recognizing that, deep down, they act (we act!) driven by a deep and ancient fear. Caricaturing those supposedly responsible for ecological misfortune can serve to shake up the most dormant parts of our consciousness, and to process (with laughter) indigestible realities; but, paradoxically, it also serves to keep us at a superficial level of inquiry. We can go deeper, to the very root of our anti-ecological behavior: that foundational fear that characterizes our species. So, the question is, how ecological is a fiction (a life) that does not acknowledge and explore that ancient fear from which all the atrocities (clumsiness) of the human attempt to learn to dance the strange ballet of life on Earth unconsciously emanate?
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