The film, Don’t Look Up, is a most
interesting film not only for how it relates science to political economy, but
also in that images of wildlife—Nature, as it were—are interspersed throughout
the movie, and it is Nature, rather than our circumscribed, petty, and yet
economically successful species, that continues on after a
large comet hits Earth and our species is wiped out. In fact, that
impact-event in the movie cancels out the one that really happened 66 million
years ago by returning dinosaurs to dominance. The
last scene in the movie shows some of the political and economic elite
waking up in their spaceship and landing on Earth more than 200,000 years in
the future only to be eaten by dinosaurs that look "cute." two of those stupid people had been in charge both in the White House and in business before the
comet hits, whereas the two principal astronomer-scientists who warn of the coming comet are repeatedly relegated and dismissed by the political and economic elite until the president realizes how she can use them politically—albeit just until the political winds turn again and comet-denial is more useful politically to the president. Does this sound familiar?
For a species to have reached
such plenty economically as ordinary people could live better than medieval
kings had in Europe and yet be so petty and reckless, essentially squandering
what the species had built up, with indifference even to an upcoming
cataclysmic event, is what the astronomer-protagonist in the film is left
marveling at just before his life, along with those of friends and family
sitting around his dinner table, is instantly ended. “We really tried,” he
says. I suspect that climate-activists may be saying the same thing regarding
the abject refusal of enough of our species and its power-brokers to take combatting
carbon-emissions seriously enough.
“Most social life seems a
conspiracy to discourage us from thinking” about “what, if anything, can we do
about death—now, while we are still alive?”[1]
Even so, “there is a rare type [of person] for whom death is present every
moment, putting his grim question mark to every aspect of life, and that person
cannot rest without some answers.”[2]
So it is that in the Katha Upanishad, Nachiketa beseeches Yama, the king
of death, to answer his burning question on whether there is an afterlife. “When
a person dies, there arises this doubt: ‘He still exists,’ say some; ‘he does
not,’ say others. I want you to teach me the truth. This is my third” wish.[3]
Although the answer is beyond the reach of human cognition and perception, Yama
reveals that the essence of a person, one’s essential self, or atman,
survives the death of the body. Nachiketa’s undaunted urge to know the truth
anyway points back to how much thoughts of death are part of life. That Thomas Hobbes’
Leviathan is based on the assumption that the instinct for
self-preservation is primary in human beings is yet another indication of how
important it is to us to put off our own death for as long as possible.
So it is a “red flag” in the
film, an indictment on human nature, that so very few people are thinking about
the prospect of their own death even though the two scientists and then even
the U.S. president have announced on television that a comet is hurling through
space, heading directly at Earth in what is known as an extinction event. Initially,
two television hosts dismiss the two astronomers who had calculated that the
comet would hit Earth and be of such magnitude that our species would go extinct;
those journalists are more interested in the romantic life of a young singer.
Not even the U.S. President, or her chief of staff, are much interested, at least
until after the midterms, for their party could lose control of both chambers
of Congress. It is only when the political calculation changes that the White
House decides to make a public announcement. This prudence is short-lived,
however, as the president calls for the space shuttle to abort its mission to
bomb the comet into a new trajectory that would miss the planet. An Elon-Musk-type,
new-age CEO of a cell-phone company has so much influence on the president, no
doubt from having made donations to her campaign, that she heeds his direction
to abort the in-progress space-shuttle mission to bomb the comet to divert it from
hitting Earth, and instead send risky, untested drilling machines to land on
the comet in order to blow it into pieces, which would then presumably fall
harmlessly to the Pacific Ocean to be harvested by the U.S. navy so tech
companies using computer chips could profit wildly. The CEO is a businessman, even
though he angrily rebuffs the astronomy professor for pointing out, “You are a
businessman,” who thus has absolutely no formal education in astrophysics and
spacecraft technology upon which to make the judgment to abort the mission that
would probably have diverted the comet. Instead, his idea is to send untested drillers
to land on the comet to dig holes in which to place bombs so the comet would
blow up into profitable chunks. The astronomy professor is correct when he
calls out the cell-phone techie, but the president sides with the latter
nonetheless.
Regarding just how pathetic
the president, her immature chief of staff, and the techie businessman are, at
the end of the movie, the professor turns down the president’s offer to join her,
the businessman and other elite personalities on a spacecraft that returns to Earth
when it is again habitable. You enjoy your (obnoxious) chief of staff; I’m
all set here, he tells the finally contrite president by phone. Faced with
an imminent extinction event, the level-headed astronomer makes the judgment
that it is better to die with friends and family then go on living with
superficial comet-deniers for whom already having a lot of power and wealth,
respectively, is not enough, and other people are to be used in line with power-aggrandizement
and higher profits.
Science fiction is an
excellent genre for bringing up contemporary controversies without setting off
alarm-bells and thus having one’s message blocked by the opposition. The
allusions to President Trump and Hilary Clinton, and the tech titan Elon Musk
are hardly subtle. That the film was released in 2021 means that the
relationship between the president and the techie CEO are not based on the later
relationship between President Trump and Elon Musk. Instead, the president
character is, I submit, based on Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. The president
in the film is engaged in “comet-denial” as a political slogan similar to how
Trump was engaged in climate-change-denial during his first term, is a woman like
Hilary Clinton in subsuming everything, even the destruction of the species,
under political calculation, and easily forgetting to save her chief of staff
in the end, perhaps as the Clintons left Brent Forster in their wake before
Bill Clinton was president. The political-calculating, selfish president in the
film is herself an indictment on American democracy, for presumably she was
elected. At a certain point in the film, people need only look up to see the
comet for themselves to realize that the U.S. president was lying. The comet in
the movie, like climate change in our world, is real, and it is the political and
economic elite that in both the film and real life drop the ball, even though
the respective stakes are both huge. Of course, in both cases, the American
people are to blame too.
It is strange, in watching the
movie, how indifferent people generally are to even the possibility that they
could die in a bit over six months. Even after Ivy League experts ironically
favored by the White House confirm the calculations of the astronomy professor,
the president decides to play political games rather than take the first possible
opportunity to divert the comet. Then she decides to do the bidding of her techie
billionaire donor and “turn lemons into lemonade” by recklessly (in terms of
rocket technology) helping him to profit from the comet once it has been
pulverized and felled to the ground. Lemonade cannot be made if the lemons are
handled recklessly rather than rendered usable. Just before dies, the astronomy
professor remarks on the species to his friends and family, “We had everything.”
The implication is: and yet we blew it, because some powerful people
in business and government wanted more. Even though the techie billionaire
had developed a very advanced and financially lucrative cell phone, it is as if
that man perceived himself as not having enough, and thus as needing more.
The desire for more is a good
definition of greed. Even given declining marginal utility, there seems to be
no base limit of wealth that is enough in terms of a person not risking even
everything to profit more. A rational
person might realize that pushing the comet out of the way of Earth should be
priority number 1, and that NASA and other space agencies around the world
should be entrusted with that task, or else all current wealth could be lost,
as you can’t spend it when you’re dead. It is as some powerful people in the
business and political American elites dismissed even the 99.97% chance that
the comet would smack into the Earth because greed and power-aggrandizement are
instinctual urges that lie by distorting both cognition and perception. We “modern”
humans may be so used to being so narrowly self-interested in accumulating
money and power that we regard the indifference shown in the film to a
catastrophic event to be surreal or even as too incredulous to even be believed
in a film!
Even though the movie ramps up
the explosive and sudden climax to keep viewers titillated in movie theatres, the
same dynamic of indifference and denial applies as our species stews unabatedly
in a hotter and hotter climate that one day may be very difficult or even impossible
for our species to continue to live on Earth. This prospect having become realistic
when the film was made, and definitely in June, 2025, when both parts of the
E.U. and U.S. suffered from long heat-waves, should be enough to make
resisting coal and other business interests and their captured politicians by
making climate a high political and economic priority, but alas, too many
people are like the people in the movie, who are taken in by the comet-deniers
and profiteers, as if the masses of people were consisting of Nietzsche’s herd
animals that are oblivious as they are being taken to the slaughter house. Presuming
that we could just move to Mars or the Moon, and that we could even profit by
doing so is the sort of thinking that does not work out in the movie, so the
lesson is that it is reckless for us to deny climate-change and postpone cuts in
fossil-fuel emissions under the assumption that we will be able to pull a
rabbit out of a hat just in time when the time comes to pay the bill as species.
To be sure, whereas the comet hitting Earth is a sudden event, the baleful
effects of climate-change are gradual, yet accumulating, and thus human nature
is less well-equipped to take immediate action rather than putting it off. Even
so, the denial for partisan advantage and the proclivity of managers in
companies to compartmentalize at the expense even potentially of the survival
of the species even within a few generations are the same. Perhaps Nietzsche
was correct in claiming that ideas are really instinctual urges, and reasoning
is the tussling of contending urges—the most powerful of which reaches
consciousness. Rather than being a check on passions, reason is itself a
manifestation of instincts. The lesson of the film is that there is no
guarantee that the instinctual urge that dominates others is in line with self-preservation
and even the medium-term (and even short-term) survival of the species.
2. Ibid.
3. Katha Upanishad, 1.1.20, in The Upanishads, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1987).
