Don’t Just Watch: The Team Behind ‘Don’t Look’ Calls for Climate Action


“Don’t Look Up” is a rarity in Hollywood on several fronts. An important movie about climate change. It reached a record number of hours viewed in a single week, according to Netflix. It also spawned a slew of hot shots, along with sniping — which may be the first — among critics who disliked the film and scientists who liked it.

What remains to be seen is whether the film fulfills its director Adam McKay’s primary purpose of wanting it to be, in his own words, “a kick” that calls for urgent action on climate change.

“I have no illusions that a movie will cure the climate crisis,” Mr. McKay, whose previous films include “The Big Short” and “Vice,” wrote in an email to the Times. “But if it inspires conversation, critical thinking, and makes people less tolerant of inaction from their leaders, then I would say we achieved our goal.”

In “Don’t Look Up” Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play distraught scientists scrambling to get politicians to take action and the public to believe in them, while a planet-killing comet blasting toward Earth stands as a metaphor for the climate crisis.

After the movie’s release in December, climate scientists took to social media and penned the Op-Eds, saying they felt they were finally seen. Neil de Grasse Tyson tweeted out It looked like a documentary. Many fans likened the film to “A Modest Proposal,” a satirical article by Jonathan Swift written in the 18th century.

Naysayers, meanwhile, said he had overlooked those who literally understood the comet allegory, and questioned why Mr. McKay hadn’t been more outspoken about global warming. Writing in The New Yorker, Richard Brody said that if scientists didn’t like what movie critics had to say about science, “scientists should stop getting involved in art.”

Either way, there is little question that the film has been quite successful at a time when the leaders are failing to take the necessary measures to deal with the planetary emergency and the volume and ferocity of so-called “natural” disasters is reaching ever more dire heights. big nerve. According to Netflix, which reports its own figures, it’s one of the streaming giant’s most popular movies ever, with an unprecedented 152 million hours watched in a week.

“The purpose of the film was to raise awareness of the dire urgency of the climate crisis, and it did spectacularly well,” said Genevieve Günther, founder and director of End Climate Silence, an organization that promotes media coverage of climate change. .

“You can’t have movies that move people without culturally accepting climate change,” he added, “that will help produce this movie.”

a Hollywood irregular history depicting climate change in feature films, if that appeals to him. Some movies have made their villains eco-terrorists – see Thanos in “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Godzilla: King of the Monsters.” Or they inevitably present ecological collapse, as in the movies “Interstellar,” “Snowpiercer,” and Mad Max. It is rare for film to imagine a world where people successfully work together to alleviate the worst crises, protect biodiversity, and wean themselves off fossil fuels.

While “Don’t Look Up” doesn’t have a happy ending, Mr. McKay has repeatedly stressed that he wants people to work towards that goal. Netflix and climate scientists have partnered with a company. online platform lists ways people can take action. One of the movie’s stars, Jonah Hill, appeared on The Tonight Show and encouraged audiences to ask congressional representatives to pass HR 794, the Climate Emergency Act. And Mr. DiCaprio urged his 19.4 million Twitter followers to join in.

“We have the science,” Mr. McKay said on “The Daily Poster,” a website run by David Sirota, a journalist who also wrote on the film. “We can do that. We have renewable energy. We can invest in decarbonisation. If we have the action, the will and the awareness, there is a lot we can do.”

Hollywood has previously played a role in defining big problems. Stanley Kubrick’s satirical “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”—himself vilified at the time by some critics – and the “China Syndrome” shaped attitudes towards nuclear power and war. President Ronald Reagan after watching the 1983 television movie “The Day After,” which imagines the aftermath of an atomic war in the Cold War he wrote in his diaryThat the movie “greatly depressed him” and hardened his determination to “never see there was a nuclear war”. In 2012, while discussing his support for marriage equality, then-vice president Joe Biden credited the television series “Will & Grace” for educating the public.

Yet Michael Svoboda, professor of authorship at George Washington University and contributor to the web magazine Yale Climate Connections, said that while Mr. McKay is openly passionate about climate change, he doubts whether the film delivers a useful message that will produce results.

“Is he asking people to get more involved in politics? Trying to reach across the hall? It doesn’t look like that at all,” said Mr. Svoboda. “Does it create a kind of fatalism, even nihilism, thanks to its people who accept the inevitability after a good but especially poorly coordinated fight?”

While “Don’t Look Up” shoots at both the liberal elite and members of the right, Mr. Svoboda stated at the end of the film that it clearly vilifies Trump’s populism. “It’s unlikely to reach someone who is skeptical of climate change,” he said.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist and co-founder of the think tank Urban Oceans Lab, said all of this shows that the ardent response to the film shows a hunger for more climate content. This can put less pressure on a single piece of work to be everything for all people.

Dr. “I’m not debating whether a movie is perfect or not, but it’s clear that we need a lot more of these things,” Johnson said.

“Some people are inspired by terrible science projections,” he continued. “Some are inspired by solutions. Some are inspired by focusing on a movie that points to the absurdity of the fact that we’re destroying the only planet that makes any sense for humans to live on.”

Dr. Johnson added that he hopes the popularity of “Don’t Look Up” will prompt Hollywood to make more climate-focused films. “If you don’t like it, do better,” he said. “I will watch.”





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