It's a Pie Fight in the War Room!: A Media Review of "Don't Look Up"
In this media review of the Netflix sensation 'Don't Look Up', Roberts questions the quality of the movie and whether it can really, truly, be considered a satire.
Every now and again, as I am watching a movie, I think about a lecture given by the British author Will Self, titled Death of Film, which he gave in 2017. In it, he drones on in his sophisticated, ensorcelling style about film and how the changes in screen shot length and the introduction of CGI have led to the loss of mimesis and diegesis in film--showing and telling--which gave rise to the ISIS beheading 'films'. This lecture is so memorable that, whenever I watch a particularly bad movie, I find myself hoping that Self is right.
Cinema, be it movies or TV, has a history that is strewn with 'political' movies. Stendhal noted that politics in art is like a gunshot at a concert, and now our movie theaters and households are stages for fire fights. Our culture has become a place for drive-bys and execution-style killings, and the only score we keep with our cultural output now is a body count.
In this body count, one can include many horrible or propagandistic shows that mean all too little; The West Wing, JFK, or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, to name a few. This isn't even including the politico documentaries like Hillary and Mayor Pete, not to mention semi-fictional ones like Barry. Political movies are like a game of darts at the bar; people rarely hit the target, and when they do, it is usually an accident. Movies like Dr. Strangelove, The Best Man, and Bob Roberts come to mind, as do recent movies like Judas and the Black Messiah, where the target is hit. Whether these bull's eyes are on purpose or not seems to depend on what you think of the people who make the movies.
And now, we have Don't Look Up. It makes a claim to being a political satire. Or, to be more specific, its director Adam McKay and ghost writer David Sirota rant about this claim on Twitter. And many people believe them: Nathan Robinson wrote a ferocious defense of Don't Look Up in his magazine Current Affairs, arguing that people critical of the movie were focused on the wrong thing; that the quality of the movie should not get in the way of the ideas of the movie. He writes that:
"One problem with film reviews is that they are often so concerned with evaluating the quality of a movie that they don’t get [sic] chance to seriously discuss the ideas it raises. Reviewers are preoccupied with questions like: How is the acting? The editing? Is the dialogue sharp? The pacing energetic? Are certain mawkish indulgences by the director partly counteracted by a thoughtful score? In the case of a satire trying to make a point, does it make the point well, or does it do it “ham-fistedly”? Is it subtle and graceful or does it “beat you over the head”?"
I, too, have seen Don't Look Up, and my question to Robinson, as well as other defenders of the movie, is this: what ideas? It is one thing, certainly, to have directors, writers, and actors with ideas and interpretations of a film, but the thing about film is that it is art. Or, more correctly, it is an attempt at art. Art is about expression, and a movie of ideas--to reappropriate that term 'novel of ideas'--is art that expresses an idea. As noted before, movies are built upon two pillars; mimesis and diegesis. What does it show us? And what does it tell us?
Unlike Robinson, I think it is impossible to separate or prioritize these two things; I cannot sit through a mess of cinema and just 'absorb' the ideas. The cinema is supposed to express the ideas it wants us to absorb. Further, how is one to ascertain the ideas of a movie if the quality of that expression is lackluster? This is especially the case for a purported 'parable' like Don't Look Up, which is dealing with a set of ideas indirectly, through a story about something else. If expression, and its quality, are not important for a story that is an indirect parable of something, then when is it? If a movie cannot show us what it wishes to tell us, then what is it, really, but a waste of time?
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What is to be said of the quality of Don't Look Up? It is muddled, at best. The narrative is practically non-existent, with random plot lines put in and taken out without much thought to the viewer. In fact, I would accuse the writers of inserting different plot lines to accommodate their desire to have as many celebrities in this movie as possible. If anyone is skeptical, I want you to consider the whole 'love story' between Kate Dibiansky and the beatnik bumpkin Yule. It does nothing, and I mean nothing, for the plot at all. It truly was a last minute creation to justify bringing on everyone's favorite, droopy eyed dandy we call Timothée Chalamet.
The characters are neither static nor dynamic, because they are never really defined and given personalities. The dialogue is the best part of the whole film, because this film seems to rely on it for any attempt at expression it wants to make. Yet even this was plagued by tropes, cliches, and worn out jokes. And the setting is, at best, ephemeral; from 'off the grid' meaning someone is put in their hometown with the cellphone they previously had to having a random call center appear to talk to people about the meteorite, the setting is the background to a movie in constant 'fast travel'. Not to mention the random cuts to views of nature; perhaps Adam McKay secretly desires to be making documentaries for Discovery Channel, but a political satire is not the place for this.
The muddled quality of the art makes the assertion that Don't Look Up is a satire seem ambiguous. Like a wet cat in a bag, the supposed ideas and direction of the movie are hampered and unable to break out of the unstable and confused ecosystem of this movie.
Satire has targets, but who are the targets in Don't Look Up? Well, they target the government, right? Except one of the sympathetic characters is Dr. Theodore Oglethorpe, the head of NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination. Or the fact that the President basically carries out what they asked of her twice, albeit one was called back and the other attempt was just a failure. Is the media their target? Yeah…until they decide to hold a concert where everyone sings about the comet. Which, well, is quite a thing to accomplish for two scientists who were 'put off the grid' and silenced by their government…but I digress. This doesn't even begin to consider the incredibly bad humor of the film, something so extensive it requires its own essay.
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Lord Byron, that le diable boîteux of the Romantics, once wrote, "Fools are my theme, let satire be my song." Don't Look Up sure does sing us a song, but that song is not satire. For most of the film, it is like the writers of Don't Look Up constantly got cold feet, wanting to criticize things but instead ending up only making them look ridiculous, mostly by putting them in a storyline that, from the beginning, is not coherent. Satire is funny, but it is cutting. It is clear. It takes aim, and it fires. It is very hard to hit your targets, let alone line up for the shot, when your gun is jammed, the bullets are blanks, and someone stuffed a 'BANG' flag in the barrel. You find yourself sitting for a while, waiting for the gunner to realize that the gun is useless. If you listen to Robinson, though, all of this doesn’t matter; the ‘idea’ of the gun firing and hitting its targets are enough.
Much to my disappointment, this movie has been given a lot of comparison to Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Fair enough, I guess. Comparing a bad movie to a really good one usually helps you see what is so wrong with the movie in question, albeit this has not been the result.
But this comparison, whatever you think of it, made me remember something that might be common knowledge to most cinephiles. The ending to Dr. Strangelove, you see, was not the original one. Like most movies, things get cut, and in the case of Dr. Strangelove, the end of the movie was supposed to be a scene where everyone in the War Room was engaged in a pie fight. In an interview with Joseph Gelmis in 1969, Kubrick was asked about cutting a scene in 2001, and made reference to his political satire, saying:
"I always try to look at a completed film as if I had never seen it before. I usually have several weeks to run the film, alone and with audiences. Only in this way can you judge length. I've always done precisely that with my previous films; for example, after a screening of Dr. Strangelove I cut out a final scene in which the Russians and Americans in the War Room engage in a free-for-all fight with custard pies. I decided it was farce and not consistent with the satiric tone of the rest of the film."
And then it hit me; this movie was not a satire, that was not its 'song', to borrow from Byron. This movie was not a parable that revealed the insanity, inanity, and idiocy of our political system and just how dangerous that is, be it a comet or climate change. Don't Look Up was a movie about wanting to throw custard pies in the War Room; or to focus on the meaning of someone scamming you out of your money for snacks, which were free.
Its theme was its own ideas, and so its song was farce.