Don't Look Up - A Brief Analysis

Now that I've had some time to process it, I think it's fair to say that the Netflix film Don't Look Up does a fair job of satirising the class structure of our modern world. I’m told that it's supposedly satirising the media response to the climate crisis but I think there's more to it than that so I want to look at the film from a different angle to all the other reviews and analyses I’ve seen. There are stark parallels with reality that I want to draw attention to without spoiling the film. Hence this analysis handily doubles as a political analysis of our current state of affairs

The film starts off with a joke: “When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like the rest of the passengers”

In the film, the media are realistically portrayed as incompetent, complicit in our current state of affairs and full of talentless posh wankers. The sort of hack journalists who are hired for their ability to forgo any sort of ethical code and write mewling nonsense that obscures the financial activity of their owners for a hefty wage slip. This is probably the key reason why The Guardian gave the film such a bad review. I’d probably be a bit tetchy about being called out like that as well.

The political class, particularly Meryl Streep’s President, are characterised as egotistical populists whose only concern is in getting elected so they can maintain a particular status quo. Both Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer spring to mind here since both engaged in populism to get into their current positions and then almost immediately reneged on every promise and pledge they made.

And the sole billionaire in the film played by Mark Rylance is marked by his general eccentricity, inability to actually do anything useful and the relentless pursuit of wealth extraction over human welfare. Half of his corporation’s products explode and cause further catastrophes whilst the rest are barely functional. What's a few lost resources and lives in exchange for a healthy bottom line? Looking at you, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Those at the bottom who worked hard to unveil the impending disaster, the astronomers played by Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo Di Caprio, are ignored by all the former unless they submit to transforming themselves and said disaster into a profitable spectacle, profitable both in terms of wealth and political power. They are presented with a Hobson’s choice: If they don't, the truth never reaches the rest of the workers, If they do, the truth is obscured and diluted anyway. They are instead resigned to simply living the rest of their lives the best they can safe in the knowledge that an untimely death is ultimately inevitable. This grimly echoes the helplessness we all feel on a day to day basis, that we have little to control over our own affairs.

Lawrence’s character, however, appears to be the only class-conscious worker. In one scene she calls out the grotesque antics of Streep’s president and acknowledges that despite their differences, they need to work together to avert disaster. She is the one that eventually reveals the truth to the rest of the workers because no one else will. Predictably, it causes mass panic.

Di Caprio’s character, on the other hand, succumbs to the glitz and glamour of the upper class lifestyle. All of his fears and anxieties fade as he forgets his previous life. But as soon as he remembers his true purpose and acts upon it, he is just as quickly cast out of their special club and back into the lower classes.

The political power of traditional and social media in combination with the populism of the political class is used to convince other workers to ignore the impending catastrophe, despite its increasing obviousness, and to vote the populists back into power so wealth extraction by billionaires can continue. They are transformed into conspiracy theorists and told to ignore reality itself. It keeps the workers in a sense of false class-consciousness; they remain unaware of the nature of their own social class and how they are being exploited by the upper classes for this purpose.

In what I think is one of the most beautiful double-entendres I’ve ever seen, it is only when these workers actually look up that they find that the catastrophe is coming, both literally and in a political sense, entirely from above. It’s an amazing metaphor for workers becoming conscious of the social class that they occupy. It is an unfortunate fact of life that many only tend to acknowledge reality once it immediately and materially affects them. Those anti-vaxxers who’ve ended up in Covid ICU wards will tell you as much.

The allegorical resemblance to any recent or ongoing catastrophe in the film is merely a plot device to expose all of the former parallels with reality. The catastrophe could just as easily be the climate crisis, a zombie infestation, social collapse or, y'know, a recent pandemic. It wouldn’t change the central theme a jot.

Don’t Look Up presents itself as a satire and if we understand satire to be irony, exaggeration or ridicule as a means of criticising and exposing certain aspects of the world we live in, then it succeeds on every front. Almost too successfully; rather than life imitating art, art, in this case, is imitating life.

The media are supposed to be those who inform the world. The political class are meant to be those who run the world. Yet the presence of billionaires perverts the role of both the former. Whilst they are all at the whim of the profit motive, they remain ignorant to the impending catastrophes driven by their own exploitative actions. You might even say that they’re asleep at the wheel and we’re being helplessly plunged into the abyss.

And that leads me to the entire point of the film: Don't Look Up. Don't look to the upper classes to help us; they won't.

They have other vested interests and they will literally let the world burn before giving them up.