Lth movie Don’t Look Up rose, two weeks after its release, [le 24 décembre 2021] on Netflix, in the top 3 of the platform’s best audiences. This commercial success shows that its director, Adam McKay – with his duo of scientists convinced that the end of the world is imminent and who find themselves confronted with deaf and irresponsible policies – has succeeded in his bet: to reach the spectators and “to seek a feeling of very large community, which laughter could create” (as he said in an interview with Cinema notebooks, in January). But the question also arises as to whether Adam McKay has taken up the challenge of asking the general public central questions in ecocritical cinema.
Don’t Look Up is, in fact, part of the long history of eco-cinema which has tried to raise awareness of the current catastrophe. Especially documentaries: demonstrative like tomorrow (by Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent, 2015) or who made the radical choice to lengthen the long sequence shots to modify our perception (Lav Diaz, Wang Bing, Apichatpong Weerasethakul). One thinks, of course, of the films on Fukushima, so rich in evoking the blindness and denial of the authorities (No Man’s Zone, of Fujiwara, in 2012), media images that blind (Nuclear Nation, by Funahashi, in 2012), the participant observation of the filmmaker who shares the struggle of those he films (Soma Kanka, by Matsubayashi, in 2011) and listening which releases a new quality of attention (The Sound of the Waves in 2012 and Voices from the Waves: Shinchimachi in 2013, by Sakai and Hamaguchi).
To confront the ambient apathy and inaction, Adam McKay chose to wield excess and the distorting mirror. Since The Big Short (2015) and Vice (2018), he is a past master in the art of painting the stupidity of the advertising and media imagery of our societies.
To confront us with our own blindness to the current climate catastrophe, his satire targets, this time, the state of confusion of our societies which makes it impossible to distinguish the true from the false. This satire hits the bull’s eye because it sends us back to the incessant hubbub that today drowns out any discourse on the climate emergency.
Between satire and burlesque
On the clownish side, Adam McKay draws his asset Meryl Streep, for a stunning Trumpian variation of Dictator. We remain marked by his staggering scenes of television sets, on the loss of meaning of scientific discourse. Here, distortion reigns supreme, as well as indistinction and confusion, of which [l’historienne américaine des sciences] Naomi Oreskes showed how it can be constructed scientifically (in The Merchants of Doubt [Le Pommier, 2012], with Erik M. Conway).
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