End of the Liberal Ego: Film Criticism. Robin Averbeck
Robin Averbeck is an author and activist. She teaches history at CSU Chico and her book, Liberalism Is Not Enough, was published by UNC Press in 2018.
One of the many oddities of living in our current moment of global ecological crisis is the eerie sensation that we are being watched by future generations. As climate change inches ever closer to the point of no return, we desperately remind ourselves that in order to avoid an apocalyptic disaster, we must act now. Drawing on the assumption that people can be made to care about children when adult human beings fail to elicit their sympathy, we often hear the exhortation, “what will our children think of us?! What will we say to them when they ask what we did to save the planet?!”
Well, the children might be disappointed to find out that when someone made a movie about this exact inability to act, many of us were too distracted about how offensive it was to spend any time reflecting on the problems it highlighted. In December of 2021 – just a few months after we found out we have only two decades to mitigate complete disaster – Don’t Look Up hit Netflix in the midst of the holiday season, and quickly set a new record for most streaming hours in a week. A film by comedic and dramatic writer and director Adam McKay, Don’t Look Up satirized our lived reality by imagining a scenario where a life-ending comet is hurtling towards earth and, despite ample warning, human beings – thwarted by political nihilism and greed – fail to stop it from slamming into the planet.
Imagining our future chroniclers, one can imagine Don’t Look Up standing out as a premier primary source for illustrating that not only did we fail to do anything about climate change, but we were well aware of this paralysis and tried everything to shake ourselves out of it. As much or more than any movie before it, the film is a product of this particular crisis and a detailed reflection on exactly how and why we’re stuck.
Unfortunately, so was the critical response to the film.
The most obvious example of this dynamic was the acrimonious debate about the film on twitter. The criticisms varied – the film was condescending, shrill, too depressing – but a consistent theme was one of incredulous anger around how the message was presented, rather than reflecting on the message itself. As Nathan J. Robinson pointed out, the discussion “exemplified the problem that the film was trying to draw attention to. Some of the responses to the movie could have appeared in the movie itself.”[1] Running through these tantrums, however, was more than just another example of social media turning everything into a mud flinging fight. It also spoke deeply to a number of liberal shibboleths the film, perhaps unwittingly, ran roughshod over. We can begin to excavate those tenets by looking more closely at what mainstream critics didn’t like about the film.
First, they argued that the characters in Don’t Look Up are crude, simple caricatures. “Unfortunately,” writes Richard Roeper from the Chicago Sun-Times, “we’re spending time with one broad caricature after another.”[2] David Roony complains about the film’s “cartoonishly obvious characterizations,” and also describes them as “caricature.”[3] Closely related to the accusation of caricature is the complaint that the humor of the film is too “obvious.” Nick Alan writes that the film is “only pointing out the obvious and the easy, over and over.”[4] Roony also describes the jokes as “smart-assy pseudo-cleverness.”[5]
Smart-assy, maybe, but actually intelligent, the critics argued, absolutely not. Clearly assuming that anything that can be described as caricature must also be stupid to its core, they bemoaned what they regarded as an absolutely vulgar lack of sophistication. Roony finds the film to be bereft of “depth, nuance or any sort of intelligent curiosity,” and Justin Chang found the targets of the film’s humor to be so easy that he compares it to shooting fish in a barrel, and argues that key scenes could have been better if “more incisively written (or at least more cleverly improvised).” [6] Joe Morgenstern found the humor so stupid as to be offensive, writing that the film’s premise “might have been great fun if it had been executed with some respect for our intelligence.”[7]
But respect, critics agreed, was nowhere to be found in the film. While they argued that the film failed to be funny or smart, they did seem to think it succeeded in being counterproductively offensive. Charles Bramesco writes in The Guaradian that “[McKay’s] script states the obvious as if everyone else is too stupid to realize it and does so from a position of lofty superiority that would drive away any partisans who still need to be won over.” Bramesco calls McKay’s depiction of average citizens as “damningly smug,” and despairs that “McKay is so un-shy about expressing his blanket contempt that one starts to wonder who this could possibly be for.” [8] Well, apparently not for him.
Or for the majority of the liberal commentariat, who agreed broadly on these three things: that McKay’s film was simple, stupid, and offensive. Let’s take these complaints one at a time and see if we can excavate why so many critics seemed prepared to return McKay’s apparent contempt with plenty of their own.
To start, the liberal fetish for complexity – at least when it applies to our contemporary political situation – is fully on display here. There are some exceptions where they will allow for starkly drawn lines of black and white; abstractly, on questions of free speech or non-violence and more concretely, anything concerning slavery or the holocaust. But bring such an analysis into the present and they recoil in horror. Consider the reaction of Peter Debruge, who grumbles about Jonah Hill’s character, the inane and arrogant son of the president.[9] Debruge describes him as “obnoxious” and “irritating,” apparently missing that this was entirely the point – or rather, complaining that it was. How crude, to compose a portrait of a contemporary political insider who has absolutely no redeeming qualities! What, exactly, are we supposed to do with that?
Not, apparently, acknowledge that things actually have gotten this bad – that our political elite really are this craven and soulless, and that our political institutions are in fact completely incapable of handling even the most urgent and grave of existential threats. Which gets us to the function of the knee-jerk reaction against stark political commentary when applied to the present. If safely ensconced in the past – of course slave owners were ugly characters, of course the Nazis were bad – liberals can handle this kind of narrative. But as soon as we move into the present, any such characterizations become a repulsive moral offense. Consider Debruge’s incongruous admission that Don’t Look Up includes “dead-on sendups of stunts we’ve witnessed in recent politics.” This is an odd confession to make in a generally negative review, particularly since Debruge roots his critique of the film partially in the bizarre assertion that the government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic should actually make us more hopeful about the capacity of our institutions to respond to crisis. And if the film’s characters are accurate representations of say, the nihilism of the contemporary GOP, then why the hostility? Debruge provides the answer to this question when he acknowledges that Don’t Look Up departs from most disaster films in that “the threat isn’t what’s to come so much as the state of affairs as they now stand,” but then refuses to accept that assessment. Referring to the film’s Silicon Valley villain character, who convinces the president to try to turn the comet into a money-soaked mining opportunity, he writes “comet denial isn’t the same thing as climate-change skepticism, obviously, but once we do acknowledge the problem, we can probably all agree that a Jobs-Musk-Branson billionaire isn’t the person to fix it (or in this case, to mine the comet for precious resources rather than destroying it).”
Well, actually, no. No we can’t. The overall point McKay is making is quite relevant and even realistic – depressingly so. As Nathan J. Robinson writes, this moment in the film “is not a simplistic, everyone-knows-this-already-how-obvious-can-you-be point. The same kind of thinking guides some of the worst public policy prescriptions on climate. In mainstream newspapers, and from the mouths of mainstream economists, you can hear that we don’t need to do much because letting climate change rip will be better for the GDP than trying to stop it.”[10] Similarly, critics bemoaned the waste of Meryl Streep’s talent on a character they near unanimously derided as a caricature. But considering that Donald Trump is an actual person who actually did become the president, how could Streep’s role possibly be written any other way? As some of the more astute critics noted, part of the problem here is how to do satire in an age where political and civic life has become so absurd, that it’s almost impossible to outdo the own self-satirization of the bad faith nihilists that run the country. Yet that so many liberals respond to this barely-exaggerated depiction of our current reality with anger at McKay is telling. McKay is presenting what is, at the end of the day, a fairly accurate representation – but all mainstream critics can do is lash back at him for daring to suggest that the clusterfuck that is America has deteriorated far past the point of subtly.
Hence the frequency of critics decrying McKay’s film as obvious, his targets too easy, his characters too simple. Although they do not spend much time debunking their relevance – which is telling – it is imperative that they shut down any idea that these obvious points and these sociopathic caricatures are the most important realities our society faces today. Because if they are, not only does that mean that we are really screwed – but also that the liberal commentary class is passing into complete irrelevance. In a world where an actual president embodied the concept of “fascism for dummies,” what do liberal prophets of complexity really have to offer? If the planet is going to be increasingly uninhabitable, and a fascist takeover of the country is imminent, what is needed is not, actually, an elite class of political influencers competing over who has the most sophisticated take.
Given that threat, it makes sense that commentators emphasized the stupidity of Don’t Look Up. Putting aside the question of how we think about or measure intelligence, most of us instinctually regard it as one of the finest qualities a person can have – one of the cardinal virtues, if you will, of our competitive, theoretically meritocratic society. And so ironically, while so many critics derided McKay for a form of childish snobbery that took easy (read stupid) shots at a host of American type-characters, their own vitriol functioned as a form of virtue signaling to the rest of their peers. Notice David Roony in The Hollywood Reporter, going out of his way to mark himself as one of the better sorts: “[No] doubt some will find its easy digs at the indifference of a shamelessly self-dealing White House administration, the greed of a monolithic tech company, the vapidity of upbeat morning television and the outsize influence of social media quite hilarious,” he writes. “I did not.”[11]
This performance of intelligence got even weirder when critics negatively compared Don’t Look Up to previous works of satire which could hardly be described as much more subtle than the work of McKay. Richard Roeper complains about the “broad caricature” of “Ron Perlman’s gun-crazy Col. Ben Drask, who literally fires his weapons at the approaching comet,” while Roony negatively compares the film to the most famous satire about American political culture when he quips, “Dr. Strangelove it ain’t.”[12] But what an odd couplet of complaints, considering that Dr. Strangelove famously ends with a caricature of an American cowboy literally riding a falling atom bomb like a rodeo bull. And Kubrick’s evil German scientist might be more focused than the collage of various characters that McKay’s Silicon Valley weirdo is, but less exaggerated he is not. Similarly, David Fear of Rolling Stone wrote “Somewhere out there, someone may be crafting the ultimate Swiftian skewering of our cultural death-spiral moment — but Don’t Look Up is most certainly not that.”[13] While there’s no doubt that this is true – insofar as comparing any author to someone several centuries before can be tricky – one must wonder if Fear has actually read Swift. We are, after all, talking about the man who penned a satirical pamphlet that proposed selling Irish children to the rich to eat for dinner as a means of making his point. Now what is more simplistic or outrageous: the idea that the English elite would actually consume human children, or that a Silicon Valley megalomaniac billionaire could convince the leaders of the United States to risk the survival of the planet to in order to cash in? Once again, as only a few critics pointed out, the real limitation of Don’t Look Up is not its simplicity, but the problem of constructing satire in an era that is so absurd and nihilistic that exaggeration becomes a challenge.
No, the real problem for these critics is not that Don’t Look Up is too simplistic, easy or stupid, but that it’s not a film that validates their own sense of intelligence and self-importance. It’s not a movie that they can congratulate themselves for appreciating once the credits roll. It’s a movie for everyone, making fundamental points with broad strokes that everyone will understand. It is not a film, on the other hand, geared towards those who make their living on providing the next thoughtful – but not terribly urgent or consequential – idea on culture, or politics, or art. They never stop to ask, then, if taking “easy” shots at how our media operates or crafting “obvious” caricatures of contemporary political figures necessarily means that the film only succeeds in “merely embodying the laziness of its targets.”[14] The idea of a film magnifying what most of us already know while also being a good film, with a clear message, is outside of their imagination. Only the abstruse and subtle receive their nods of approval.[15]
All the more ironic, then, that the personal snobbery of McKay becomes a key point in some of their reviews. Rooney calls the film “a cynical, insufferably smug satire,” and David Fear describes it as “a righteous two-hour lecture masquerading as a satire,” and McKay as a “self-appointed prophet of rage.”[16] Why the animus? One gets the feeling that they have been personally offended, that although they did not identify with any of the characters on screen, they couldn’t help but feel McKay pointing the finger in their direction. Considering that the film itself comments on how those bearing bad news are attacked as a way of neutralizing the truth, the amount of vitriol (and this essay has not even touched the Twitter commentary) aimed at McKay ironically makes his movie seem even more relevant. The messenger is attacked while the message, meanwhile, is either ignored or dismissed as so obvious that only the stupids would find it entertaining, funny, or compelling.
In fact, critics argue, Don’t Look Up only contributes to the deadlock over climate change by offending vast swaths of its audience. This would likely be their answer to the question of what so upset them about the film – that it is actually counter-productive to its clear intent to further raise the alarm over climate change. The portraits of various American “sorts” are so unflattering, they argue, that only someone of McKay’s particular constellation of politics are going to respond positively to the message. “If a person feels attacked or disrespected or condescended to,” Charles Bramesco reminds us in his review of the film, “they’ll turn off their brain and block out the most rational, correct arguments on principle alone.”[17] This argument picks up on a critique, recently put forward by Kris De Meyer, John Kotcher, and others, that frightening people about the consequences of climate change does not, counter-intuitively, lead to action. On the contrary, it has a paralyzing effect. Likewise, critics argue, the impact of satire like McKay’s is not that more people are convinced to demand action on climate change, but that they disengage entirely from the political process swirling around it.
The problem with these arguments is that they misunderstand how social and political movements actually work. True to liberal form, they assume that progress is made and conflicts resolved by convincing enough opponents, through some combination of rational argument and flattery, to change their minds or compromise. I don’t doubt that some people found the film offensive – after all, we’ve already seen a lot of liberals did – or that the gut reaction of many audience members was to feel like they needed to take McKay down a notch. But what I do doubt is that any of those people were going to seriously take up the cause of saving the planet in the first place. In any political and social struggle that aims for serious and long-term change, the goal can never be the immediate changing of minds in the short-term. Indeed, for the reasons cited by the critics concerned about the harshness of McKay’s satire – that human beings, as Chang puts it, “are odd, emotional creatures” those committed to a delusion are unlikely to be coaxed out it; through a satirical film, emotional appeal, or even their long term personal interest.
Where progress can be made, however, is with all those who have not yet hitched their identity to any political position. Let’s lean on the metaphor of memes, here. When you inject large doses of an idea into the body politic, you’re not going to successfully infect the already vaccinated. Maybe a breakthrough case or two, but nothing statistically significant. But for the relatively unexposed, that political idea might take hold, and at the least they will become aware of it – it’s now a thinkable thought. They might share it with others. And over time, this is likely (although not guaranteed) to lead to the proliferation of that idea – and therefore altering the political environment itself, opening up new possibilities.
There are limitations with this model of political change when it comes to the climate crisis. The majority, if not all, of those “unvaccinated” people are young people, and we’re likely still looking at a decade or two before a substantial number of them can get into positions of political power sufficient to actually do something to save the planet. (And all this assumes, of course, that the United States doesn’t succumb to fascism by then.) But trying the liberal model – the short-term plan of “let’s convince people already committed to denial by speaking gently to them with abstract metaphors” is even more doomed to failure. And meanwhile, there are going to be some people compelled by the doomsday scenario of something like Don’t Look Up – and McKay has hardly made the political discussion around global warming worse by forcing into the national consciousness that, by God, things might have actually gotten this bad.
Because if they have, that means we can no longer go about business as usual. We can’t pass our days with only the routines of work, rest, leisure. And for some of us, the way we do our jobs themselves has to change; educators have to become activists, politicians have to become disruptors, and cultural critics, perhaps, have to prioritize politics over art. Perhaps that is the really unthinkable thought for the died-in-the-wool liberal; not that things are bad, but they are so bad that their particular function of separating smart from stupid, simplistic from sophisticated, is not what the world needs right now. What is needed is action and the solidarity required to make that happen. But if we’re too distracted by how that call to action is made – if it’s done differently than what flatters our personal notions of what’s Good or Admirable or True – then indeed, we might be doomed.
[1] Nathan J. Robinson, “Critics of ‘Don’t Look Up,’ Are Missing the Entire Point,” Current Affairs, December 26, 2021. Accessed: https://web.archive.org/web/20211229215557/https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/12/critics-of-dont-look-up-are-missing-the-entire-point
[2] Richard Roeper, “ ‘Don’t Look Up’: Broad humor undermines satire about a country in denial,” Chicago Sun-Times, December 7, 2021. Accessed: https://chicago.suntimes.com/movies-and-tv/2021/12/7/22822438/dont-look-up-review-netflix-jennifer-lawrence-movie-leonardo-dicaprio-meryl-streep-adam-mckay
[3] David Roony, “Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in Adam McKay’s ‘Don’t Look Up’: Film Review,” The Hollywood Reporter, December 7, 2021. Accessed: Roeper, “ ‘Don’t Look Up’
[4] Nick Alan, “Don’t Look Up,” Roger Ebert.com, December 24, 2021. Accessed: https://web.archive.org/web/20220101172308/https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/dont-look-up-movie-review-2021
[5] Roony, “Don’t Look Up’: Film Review.”
[6] Roony, “‘Don’t Look Up’: Film Review,” and Justin Chang, “‘Don’t Look Up,’ but there’s a scattershot satire headed your way on Netflix,” The Los Angeles Times, December 7, 2021. Accessed: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2021-12-07/dont-look-up-review-netflix-dicaprio-lawrence
[7] Joe Morgenstern, “‘Don’t Look Up’ Review: A Cosmic Disaster,” The Wall St Journal, December 21, 2021. Accessed: https://web.archive.org/web/20211230042134/https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-look-up-review-a-cosmic-disaster-dont-look-up-leonardo-di-caprio-jennifer-lawrence-meryl-streep-kate-blanchett-timothee-chalamet-11640294136
[8] Charles Bramesco, “Look away: why star-studded comet satire Don’t Look Up is a disaster,” The Guardian, December 27, 2021. Accessed: https://web.archive.org/web/20211227071619/https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/dec/27/look-away-why-star-studded-comet-satire-dont-look-up-is-a-disaster
[9] Peter Debruge, “The Sky is Falling in Adam McKay’s Crank Comet Comedy,” Variety, December 7, 2021. Accessed: https://variety.com/2021/film/reviews/dont-look-up-review-leonardo-dicaprio-jennifer-lawrence-1235127627/
[10] Robinson, “Critics of ‘Don’t Look Up,’ Are Missing the Entire Point,” links in original.
[11] Roony, “‘Don’t Look Up’: Film Review.”
[12] Roeper, “ ‘Don’t Look Up,’” and Roony, “‘Don’t Look Up’: Film Review.”
[13] David Fear, “‘Don’t Look Up’…or You Might See One Bomb of a Movie Hurtling Right Toward You,” Rolling Stone Magazine, December 24, 2021. Accessed: https://variety.com/2021/film/reviews/dont-look-up-review-leonardo-dicaprio-jennifer-lawrence-1235127627/
[14] Chang, “‘Don’t Look Up,’ but there’s a scattershot satire headed your way on Netflix.”
[15] Which is not to say that the film is bereft of subtly. The moment when Lawrence’s character corrects the counter-culture teenagers that suspect evil brilliance on the part of American leaders by telling them they’re too stupid to pull off such grand schemes is an important moment that merely none of the critical reviewers cared to comment on. Nonetheless, if we accept the premise of their argument – that obvious equates with stupid, which equates with rubbish – it raises some serious questions about elitism and art.
[16] Roony, “‘Don’t Look Up’: Film Review,” and Fear, “‘Don’t Look Up’…or You Might See One Bomb of a Movie Hurtling Right Toward You.”
[17] Chang, “‘Don’t Look Up,’ but there’s a scattershot satire headed your way on Netflix.”