On ‘Don’t Look Up,’ Bo Burnham’s ‘Inside,’ and the end of the world
Note: This post includes spoilers for “Don’t Look Up.”
What makes us laugh depends a great deal on our own perspective.
The question of whether comedy is dead has been asked around the internet in the last few years. While “Don’t Look Up” may be a disaster movie, it is absolutely supposed to be a comedy — no movie that ends with Meryl Streep eaten by a space dinosaur to pay off a joke planted an hour earlier and includes Jonah Hill emerging from the smoldering rubble of a destroyed planet, still swaggering about as the last man on Earth, could be anything else. So, sure, it’s a black comedy. But a black comedy is still a comedy.
The real question, then, is if something is still a comedy when nothing is particularly funny. The aspects that are played for gags are the realities we’ve basically already experienced. As any Saturday Night Live watcher has come to understand, watching Alec Baldwin play Donald Trump by basically doing and saying the same things Trump already does and says isn’t particularly funny, because Trump himself is so far beyond the pale that he’s basically impossible to parody within his actual context. (This is, for what it’s worth, why James Austin Johnson’s impersonation is more effective — it takes everything absurd about Trump and puts it into equally absurd, other scenarios, not the ones where he’s crafting national policy around what makes him look good on television).
The film has been described as satire, but it’s mostly not that. It is, in the SNL vein, simply pieces of actual news regurgitated or reimagined through fictional characters that are so close to actual people as to be indistinguishable. It’s an image of subtlety taped to an anvil, dropped on your head from above. It’s just a repackaging of the horrors of real life, thinly disguised, delivered to you once again.
The film accurately depicts our political reality as one full of opportunists and nepotism, replete with rallies, and sloganed hats, and denials of basic truth. It accurately depicts our click- and celebrity-obsessed media, and the idea that celebrity breakups garner more attention than threats of human extinction. Comedy may not be dead in 2021, but that certainly isn’t it.
The extent to which real life caught up to already written components of the film does not bolster its case as effective satire, either. Rather, it condemns the film’s lack of imagination or its understanding of just how dire our situation really is at this present moment in history. I mean this both broadly in terms of our societal failure to trust in science and live in a shared reality, and specifically in regards to climate change.
(I’m not going to spend time explaining why dense carbon reserves fossilized over millions of years being burned back into the atmosphere all at once might have catastrophic effects. The rest of this post assumes you understand the science, or at least understand that people who devote their entire lives to studying it know more than your uncle who watched a four-minute YouTube video.)
Parody is inert when reality is more outlandish than anything a writers room can come up with.
If “Don’t Look Up” is supposed to be some sort of a shock, a terrifying mirror of what our country is today, well…it isn’t. The problem with America isn’t that we don’t know what’s broken. We know. We already know that cynical opportunists will use misinformation to fuel their own profit and power. We already know that we’re institutionally broken and lack the collective will to take on, much less solve, an existential crisis. We already know that the constant overflow of infotainment pumped into our living rooms and phones and mainlined straight into our brains is too overwhelming and distracting for us to accomplish even basic tasks sometimes. The libertarian billionaire tech overlords aren’t going to save us. We know.
And?
The film doesn’t offer us anything that actually goes anywhere. That’s what differentiates it from dark, satirical classics like “Dr. Strangelove,” which took the nuclear tensions of the time and showed just how little it would take to push us to actual, assured mutual destruction. Again, we’re already there in 2021. Even the “deniers” know this. They just don’t care.
Perhaps the least realistic scene in the film is when one of Streep (imagined as some sort of Trump/Sarah Palin hybrid)’s followers does, in fact, look up, seeing the giant comet approaching in the night sky, and exclaims, “They lied to us!” It leads to the crowd turning on the president and her staff, throwing bottles at the stage. That shows how much the filmmakers fundamentally misunderstand the problem we’re actually facing, and perhaps also explains why they don’t have any perspective or accountability for their own roles in it all.
Those filmmakers are Adam McKay — who rose to prominence with “Anchorman” and has been writing and directing blockbusters ever since — and David Sirota, a progressive journalist who went on to work as a speechwriter for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. That’s a duo that seems well-positioned to critique the entertainment and political landscape of America. And they certainly do mock these things, but the jabs only dent the surface, failing to really understand or explore the underlying nature of why we’re paralyzed instead of engaged.
Ironically, there’s another production from Netflix that came out earlier in 2021 that does a far better job of expressing the duality of our oversaturated, constantly outraged, exhausted state of being. In “Inside,” Bo Burnham does more by himself in a room than McKay and Sirota do with two-and-a-half hours of film, $75 million, and an Oscar-studded cast.
“Inside” is obviously framed around the pandemic and deals with plenty of the isolation, anxiety and depression it brought for many of us. But there is also a heavy focus on climate change and humanity’s existential threats. And, most importantly, it is imbued with the introspection and self-examination that “Don’t Look Up” sorely lacks.
Both works essentially confront white liberal existential dread, as YouTuber F.D Signify puts it. But “Don’t Look Up” seems to be some cry for help to fix things, to help them get back to normal before it’s too late. Meanwhile, “Inside” understands that everything was broken to begin with, as these lines from “All Eyes on Me” make clear:
You say the ocean’s rising like I give a shit
You say the whole world’s ending, honey, it already did
Nothing meaningful in America is going to change without massive structural overhaul. Combating climate change won’t start with people recycling and buying more eco-consciously and magically filter upward to the world’s governments. It will require the collective will of people in power to make major policy changes and commit to them in a way that can’t simply be undone by the next person who enters office because it’s politically expedient to do so. That young people in America have seen a group of leaders devoid of the political will to do so has left us understandably unenthused about the future.
We’ve been told, throughout our young lives, that the whole point of life on earth is to leave things better than before for the next generation. We’re all part of a progress march toward a brighter future. But try telling that earnestly to anyone born after roughly 1980. Put simply, where is the proof? And what is the point, if our forebears have cooked the planet past the point of habitability? As Burnham notes in “Comedy”:
I wanna help to leave this world better than I found it
And I fear that comedy won’t help, and the fear is not unfounded
With these lines, Burnham makes it clear he understands this conflict in a way that McKay still doesn’t seem to. Shouting from your windows that you’re as mad as hell and you aren’t going to take this anymore does about as much good as clapping from your balconies for nurses dying in COVID-filled ICUs, which does about as much good as rehashing all of the things that are awful about modern society without any real critique about why they are so bad.
I don’t know if the demarcation line was for those of us who only know adult life in a post-9/11 America, or if it’s more tied to the interconnectedness — a little bit of everything, all of the time — of the internet and personal cell phone era. Either way, there seems to be a divide in the understanding of how the world works from the eldest millennials forward and everyone who was born before us. McKay is 53, Sirota just 46, the latter closer to my age than Burnham, who bemoans turning 30 in a song in “Inside” (he’s now 31). But my view and understanding of the world and our — as white, liberal men — place in it clearly aligns with Burnham’s.
That generational chasm also makes the warnings from our elders about the things we need to do in order to save the planet ring so hollow. The younger generation has been famously scolded for enjoying avocado toast while not being able to afford homes, while the well-paying jobs that society dangles are nearly all invested in protecting the planet-killing status quo. There’s an ad campaign running RIGHT NOW devoted to telling us how much we take for granted all of the magical ways that oil and gas bring convenience to our lives. Meanwhile, Millennials (71%) and Gen Zers (67%) are the two generations most prone to prioritizing addressing climate change.
So, which is it — keep on churning with our heads down, never looking up, hoping to make a better life for ourselves and our families, or sacrifice those comforts to try to make our own little dent against the unquenchable tides of end-stage capitalism? That’s the core of Burnham’s cognitive dissonance ballad, “That Funny Feeling”:
The whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door
McKay’s and Sirota’s vision fails to include any self-reflection, as their smarmy and defensive Twitter reactions make clear. Just because they and their circle may be finally coming around to understanding the severity of the climate crisis doesn’t mean the rest of us haven’t been here for years. It’s not that we don’t get it — we’re just nonplussed by their sudden alarm.
McKay related an anecdote in an interview with GQ about a famous agent who was so shaken by the film that she backed her car into a pole after a screening and told McKay she was going to change her whole life. That person (thankfully, for her own sake) remains anonymous in the story. But her lack of self-awareness highlights McKay’s similar obliviousness, through his decision to highlight her reaction. All that incident does is show how insulated and protected Hollywood is from a reality that the rest of us have been dealing with all the time. Imagine how sheltered you’d have to be to live in California (where I’ve spent more than half my life) and not understand the urgent threat of climate change.
In the song “How the World Works,” Burnham lays out his own scathing view of the ways we’re lied to about the way society actually functions, from grade school to our adult lives. In this sense, the song mirrors some of what “Don’t Look Up” tries to do. But not only is the more explicit delivery more effective, there is the rant from Burnham’s hand puppet, Socko, that comes on the heels of the the question “Don’t Look Up” never bothers to ask or answer — “What can I do to help?” — that feels like it could be directed right at McKay and Sirota: “Why do you rich, fucking white people insist on seeing every sociopolitical conflict through the myopic lens of your own self-actualization? This isn’t about you!”
Burnham’s referring to himself through this conversation, of course, acknowledging his own conflict of not knowing what else to do (“while being paid…and being the center of attention”).
In interviews, McKay seems to display a similar self-awareness, but that does not come through in the film. He’s happy to skewer the GOP, the media, Silicon Valley, et al., but never once turns the camera back on the well-meaning, rich, fucking white people (specifically Hollywood liberals, in this case) who made the film.
It’s worth pointing out that “Don’t Look Up” is littered with rich, fucking white people, like most of McKay’s work (in addition to “The Big Short” and “Vice,” he also co-created “Succession”). The couple of somewhat prominent Black characters bring some diversity to the cast, but there’s nothing about them that distinguishes either one from the white people around them. That whiteness is especially relevant in a film about climate change, about which the public discourse and anxiety is overwhelmingly white.
It’s why DiCaprio’s line, shortly before annihilation, meant to be some profound statement, shows just how backwards the approach of the entire film is: “We really had it all, didn’t we?”
Who is “we,” exactly, Leo? And how do you think “we” got it?
Even the choice of a comet as our existential threat manages to deflect the cause of the crisis away from humanity and the film’s creators. The climate crisis is not some arbitrary rock being hurtled in our direction from outer space. It’s our own mess, created by our own leveraging of our future for more comforts and luxuries today. We aren’t mired in inaction because we’re distracted away from the comet. The comet is the distraction. It’s the convenience and entertainment of modern day life all wrapped into one thing that’s eventually going to kill us. But we’re all looking up, all of the time. That’s the problem — we can’t turn away from it.
The climate crisis is our problem. Humans created it. Capitalism and the colonizing powers that drove Manifest Destiny and the Industrial Revolution and everything that followed created it. And we can’t even begin to wrap our minds around what it might take to fix it, or what “fixing it” even means, until we first acknowledge that. That’s something Burnham understands but, funnily enough, McKay and Sirota never seem to be able to look up from their own, myopic view of it all to realize.
