The Comedy and Philosophy of the Film "Don’t Look Up"

Netflix’s new #1 movie is Don’t Look Up, a "comedy" starring Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio, who play astronomy grad student Kate Dibiasky and her professor Dr. Randall Mindy. The former discovers a giant comet, and the latter figures out that it is destined to hit Earth. I know—hilarious, right? That's (supposedly) the "problem" with this movie: It is not funny. And it's not. Really. I can recall laughing only a couple of times—like when Jonah Hill (who plays the president’s son turned White House chief of staff) tried to kiss Jennifer Lawrence. Indeed, you get the sense that it is a comedy only from the style of the credits.

Why would I say it’s a must-watch? (Spoilers ahead.)

The reason that it is not funny is that it seems to be a failed attempt at satire. Satire succeeds when it takes something that is true—some property or tendency something or someone has—and then exaggerates it for comic effect. Saturday Night Live is famous for this; The Church Lady is an exaggeration of actual ladies that I knew growing up in church. They weren’t quite as bad (and they didn’t have their own talk show), but they did say and do the kind of things The Church Lady did, such as acting as though they were morally superior to everyone. (They did not dance, however; that is forbidden in the Nazarene church.) But satire fails when what is depicted is not actually an exaggeration.

What Don’t Look Up is supposed to exaggerate is how society would react if we discovered that a planet-killing comet was on a collision course with Earth. Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (played by Rob Morgan), the head of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, calls Kate and Randall to the White House—only for the White House to ignore them. “Do you know the world-is-ending meetings we have had over the years? Drought, famine, plague, population growth…” So Kate and Randall go on talk shows, desperate to make the public aware—only to have their discovery trivialized as “a little science experiment.” When Kate tries to emphasize the severity of the situation, the internet responds with a variety of memes designed to make fun of her.

Only when it is to her political advantage does President Orlean (Meryl Streep) vow to call for a mission to divert the comet. At the last minute, however, she recalls it because Sir Peter Isherwell—a tech billionaire (played by Mark Rylance) who is one of her major donors—has discovered that the comet contains trillions of dollars of rare minerals. Under the (obviously false) pretense that it will usher in a “golden age” (of universal justice, fairness, and opulence), he lays out a plan to break the comet up, safely land its fragments on Earth, and mine it.

The result is a wave of confusion. Only 37 percent don’t want the comet to hit, 40 percent “are for the jobs the comet will provide,” and 23 percent don’t believe the comet exists—not even the comet's appearing in the sky seems to change that. While Kate and Randall point out that people need to “just look up” to see that the threat is real, President Orlean co-opts the phrase, and her cultish followers chant “Don’t look up” at her rallies. They, she says, just want you to be afraid.

When Isherwell’s mission fails, Orlean and about 2,000 rich donors (minus her son) board a spaceship developed in secret to head to the nearest habitable planet. (It doesn't end well for them.) And while planet Earth is being destroyed, Kate, Randall, and some of their family and friends enjoy a nice meal, a prayer, and some small talk—like about how, if one grew up with it, one might prefer the taste of store-bought apple pie. Randall's last words, before they all die: "The thing of it is, we really did have everything, didn't we? I mean, when you think about it."

The reason you didn’t laugh at any of that is that you know something almost exactly like this is what would happen if such a comet were discovered. It’s not an exaggeration; it’s not hyperbole; it’s not satire. We’d deny it; we’d dismiss it; we’d make fun of those fighting for our survival. We’d put the opportunity to make the rich richer above the survival of the species. (After all, we have already done this with climate change and 23% of Americans don't think that Earth orbits the sun.) And the reason the film’s attempts at comedy fail is that that realization haunts the viewer throughout the entire movie. It’s almost as if Don’t Look Up is the sixth season of Black Mirror, which is not known for its comedy, but for the way it reflects society and exposes our foibles in a disturbingly accurate way.

Even Don’t Look Up's small lines that should be funny are too close to reality for comfort.

• The fact that President Orlean smokes makes her more popular, not less, because it means she “keeps it real.” Jason, the president’s son, openly admits that he would sleep with her and wants to see her in Playboy.
• “If people don’t want to be poor,” the president says, “they should choose better Lotto numbers.” Acting on the comet is only politically expedient because she got caught sending a picture of her “private parts” to her disgraced Supreme Court nominee.
• Isherwell’s tech company has so much data on people, it can predict not only their purchasing habits but their manner of death.
• A producer, whose movie Total Devastation is to release the day the comet will hit, wears a pin with both an “up” and “down” arrow because he thinks “as a country we need to stop arguing, and…virtue signaling, just get along [because] we are all tired of the politics.”
• Minutes away from the destruction of the planet, the Patriot News Network is reporting on the “only one story everyone’s talking about… topless urgent care centers.”

Besides its science fiction elements (like a working interplanetary spaceship), the film’s only unrealistic moment occurs at a rally when one of president Orlean’s supporters looks up, sees the comet, and realizes (along with the rest of the crowd) that he’s been lied to. (In reality, he’d admit that the comet exists, but insist that it’s not really a threat.)

Philosophy Essential Reads

How the Upanishads Transformed the Human Mind

There Is a Massive Blind Spot in Our Knowledge

And that’s why everyone on the planet should watch Don’t Look Up. Everyone should come face to face with—and deal, wrestle with, admit, and lament—what the film points to: The darkest side of what humanity has become, and what it likely entails. Indeed, I’m not even sure the makers of the film intended Don’t Look Up to be satire. It’s couched as a comedy, but it’s supposed to do exactly what it does: disturb the hell out of you.

Copyright David Kyle Johnson, 2021