By Mariana Navarrete, Arts & Culture Editor
Netflix’s recent movie “Don’t Look Up” is a satire that parallels the responses institutions and corporations make on climate change using a comet as a metaphor.
“Don’t Look Up” was released on Netflix on December 24; and between January 2 to the 9, it was the most globally viewed movie.
The movie starts with Ph.D. student Kate Dibiasky, played by Jennifer Lawrence, spotting a comet in an observatory advised by her professor Dr. Mindy, acted by Leonardo Di Caprio. Both discover that the comet will hit Earth in six months.
After their discovery, the astronomers rush to the White House to tell President Orlean, played by Meryl Streep, about the “planet-killer” comet. Orlean decided to “sit tight and assess.”
The president’s inaction makes the two scientists spread the word through any media possible. First, they leaked the news to a newspaper. This leak led to them appearing on a morning show.
After sitting tight and assessing, Orlean begins a mission with NASA to divert the comet. However, she changes her mind when advised by a billionaire donor and owner of the tech company BASH, called Peter Isherwell, who mimics billionaire Elon Musk. Isherwell has a plan to divert the comet into a safe landing to profit from its precious metals. In The Guardian, NASA climate scientist Dr. Peter Kalmus wrote that this movie is “the most accurate film about society’s terrifying nonresponse to climate breakdown I’ve seen.”
In the movie, the astronomers were not taken seriously by the President or the news media. Throughout the movie they questioned themselves repeatedly: “Why aren’t people terrified?” “What do we have to say?” “What do we have to do?”
In The Guardian, “Don’t Look Up”’s director, producer, and actor Adam McKay co-wrote an article with climate policy scientist Dr. Ayana. In the article, McKay mentioned that he used humor throughout the movie to demonstrate how it can be a weapon against the climate crisis. “Research shows that humor can lower our defenses and make hard truths easier to hear,” McKay wrote.
Despite what McKay said about the film’s purpose, it failed to portray the climate crisis realistically and lacked an intersectional sense of urgency.
The comet is a metaphor for climate change. We are currently experiencing a scenario while governments worldwide fail to take immediate action to prevent irreversible damage to the Earth. Governments have also illustrated a lack of intersectionality within the climate crisis, just like the movie does.
The movie shows the American perspective and ignores how climate change could potentially harm low-income communities and countries referred to as the “Global South.” At the end of the film, even though thousands of scientists worldwide confirmed the end of the world, it was still irrelevant to President Orlean.
The BBC expands on this concept explaining how climate scientists are muting voices from the Global South. Researchers from the Carbon Brief website examined the backgrounds of around 1,300 authors involved in the 100 most cited climate change research papers from 2016-2020.
Around 90 percent of these scientists were affiliated with North American, European, or Australian academic institutions. When it comes to authors, none of the top 100 papers are led by a scientist from Africa or South America.
The lack of diverse voices means essential perspectives are ignored. Climate change will not only punish those in the developing world. Studies show that those who are poor globally are more at risk from the various hazards environmental degradation poses than their more affluent peers.
The climate crisis disproportionately impacts marginalized populations; which is not shown in the movie.
“Don’t Look Up” could have shown the urgency of a lower-income class affected by the comet, so the extended analogy of the climate crisis could be fully portrayed.
President Orlean tells Dr. Mindy about a spaceship that holds 2,000 people to leave Earth towards the movie’s end. Here, working-class families would have been omitted.
The movie also excludes indigenous voices. Climate change cannot be addressed without listening to indigenous people, who make up 5 percent of the world’s population but protect around 80 percent of biodiversity. The film does not mention indigenous leadership, knowledge, or sovereignty.
While the comet excels portraying the sense of urgency that climate action must make to prevent irreversible damage, McKay missed the bigger picture outside his Hollywood celebrity boundaries
