Introduction
The Netflix video ‘Don’t Look Up’ pays attention to two astronomers who endeavor to alert humans regarding an approaching comet that is going to destroy the entire society. The movie depicts the response to climate disaster to the government, media as well as celebrities. In addition, the impact occurrence is used as a metaphor for climate change. This film is a collaboration between Hyperobject Films and Bluegrass Industries. Paramount Pictures set this film forth in November 2019 before Netflix purchased it not long after. After negotiating with McKay about screenplay modifications, Lawrence became the top-most participant of the film to enroll, succeeded by DiCaprio.
The remaining portions of the film were completed through 2020, with filming scheduled to commence in Massachusetts in April of that year. It began in November 2020 and terminated in February 2021 due to the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic. This movie broke a brand new record for having the most hours of viewing in one week on Netflix throughout the initial twenty days after its premiere. As a result, the movie became Netflix’s second most-watched film. The film will be examined through the lens of four themes: worldviews and hegemony, neoliberalism, corporate social responsibility, and climate change in this thesis.
World Views and Hegemony
The composition of “Don’t Look Up” is non-critical, reminding the viewer of all the things that this film fails represent. The question of how politics causes disinformation is not addressed in this film. Furthermore, this film fails to show how misconduct, whether perpetrated by the President or a pop singer, is the true opium of the public (Rich, 2022, p. 11). This movie does, however, convey a feeling of comedy to the viewer by pushing against the walls of its humorous moments, which many people consider to be flawed (Banerjee, et al., 2008, P. 203). Furthermore, a significant number of viewers think that this movie does not have much to say about the importance of film technology as used in the movie.
In terms of technology, the film stars Mark Rylance as a tech genius who wields more power than the President of the United States. According to audience feedback, this film tries to touch a number of political hot buttons while simply reproducing the obvious (Duménil and Lévy, 2016, p. 1). The structure of McKay produces a range that has an impact all across the world, but only when viewers discover how extensive the stock footage is. This grandeur has the effect of reducing humanity to a comprehensive insignificance. Furthermore, montages of social media, which began a new categorization after each important discovery are amusing. These montages involved the repudiated phrase ‘Don’t Look Up’ which provided the movie with its title.
Linus Sandgren, an Oscar winner, was McKay’s cinematographer for this film. This cinematographer is clearly jittery when manipulating the camera in this film. The existence of a particular clip that appears to show the camera falling shortly before cutting away supports this claim. Additionally, it is nearly irrelevant that “Don’t Look Up” is yet to be ranked as McKay’s worst film, because the confidence of potential and significance that this movie sets on itself is far more irritating. Generally, this film focuses on implications of climate change and how human beings are doing little and nothing to combat it (Crouch et al., 2016, p. 497). This is an excellent idea for a well-known comedy with catastrophic consequences. On the contrary, McKay has stuffed this film with hot air in the hopes that viewers will be enthralled by the story’s shoddy humor.
Neo-Liberalism
Neoliberalism refers to strategies that combine politics and economics with the intention of conveying economic supremacy from governments to private sectors. Various neoliberal initiatives intend to boost free market operations by reducing government rules and government expenditure (Li, 2017, p.1). In this Netflix hit, two astronomers (Leonardo Di Caprio and Jennifer Lawrence) devise a massive comet moving straight to Earth. These astronomers desperately try to inform the US President Barack Obama, played by Meryl Streep. They anticipate a swift government action to avert calamity while there is still time. However, a confluence of self-serving political parties, wealthy people’s beneficial interests, a public schooled not to look up, and a media aiming at respecting these beneficial interests thwarts their efforts. It is a clear show of support for the threat of climate catastrophe, with politicians mocking, trivializing, and even ignoring scientific experts’ and climatologists’ appeals and warnings.
However, following 40 years of dominance by neoliberal pro-market economic practices, the analogy might be used to nearly any situation requiring a meaningful reaction, especially when there are stakes involved. As a result, public services are no longer as successful as they previously were in adapting to long-term climatic changes or short-term pandemics (Banerjee et al., 2020, p. 952). Their administrative and decision-making capacities, as well as their ability to respond to supply-chain disruptions in many nations and surge capability in health-care systems, have all been abandoned (Gane, 2013, p. 27). All of these measures are undertaken as a homage to efficiency, but at the price of fundamentalism and vulnerability.
Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate social responsibility films are intended to generate empathy in order to attract money and exposure for a charity or cause. This role entails conveying a compelling story while also educating the audience on a social issue (Barker, 2013, p. 263). The main lesson of this film is on how non-facts are spread in society, which is relevant to both the COVID-19 pandemic and the major lie about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Don’t Look Up stars Timothée Chalamet, Tyler Perry, Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Rylance, and Jennifer Lawrence. Despite some complaints from critics that the overarching concept is unduly preachy, they keep the movie moving along smoothly (Barker, 2013, p. 264). In addition, Rylance’s Isherwell portrays Money Genius, a Tech Hero with no interior existence (Bres and Gond, 2014, p. 1). Rather, he appears in the photograph to meet the demands of others (Kaler, 2006 p. 312). He receives a nearly unbelievable power, and the money accompanies it, in return. Despite the bad analysis, ‘Don’t Look Up’ has a smart and fascinating group of individuals that depict a truth-based communication.
Scientifically, this film portrays how personal concerns, inexperience, and an obsession with details over clarity can prevent young researchers from gaining direct access to data. The most incriminating failure, according to this film, is on the voting public part (Chorev, 2009 p. 35). ‘Don’t Look Up’ depicts a society consumed in social communication causing residents to fail in appreciating the significance of basic abilities in keeping a modern democracy through Isherwell’s hypothetical “BASH” network. The usefulness of a jaded, self-satisfied media is depicted in this movie, but it is only a minor plot point (Dumay et al., 2016 p. 185). This film is also an ineffectual and self-centered US president nominates equally inept people to handle important agencies and jobs. This nomination includes appointing an anesthesiologist to lead NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the theme of the film.
Climate Change
At the outset of the film, Jennifer Lawrence’s astronomer and Leonardo DiCaprio’s colleague scientist appear on a morning news show. They inform human beings that the destruction would occur in exactly 6 months whereby earth would be dismantled. During a normal check of space, Lawrence found a big comet traveling straight for humanity. Every second spent in idle talk brings the hosts closer to their goal (Ostry et al., 2016, p. 1). She goes on to explain that the end of the world might be intended to be horrifying rather than humorous.
There is more to ‘Don’t Look Up’ than just climate change. The film begins with a scientist performing the polar opposite of gazing upwards (Banerjee, 2008, p. 227). She utilizes a cutting-edge telescope to explore the sky and in the process discovers a new comet huge enough to dismantle the entire Earth. A nearer look reveals that this comet is obviously on its way to Earth. In a culture flooded with misleading information, looking up places the tone for a tutorial on how to articulate what individuals perceive with their own eyes (Garriga and Melé, 2004, p. 55). ‘Don’t Look Up’ has been linked to climate change in numerous reviews, yet this association entirely misses the point.
‘Uninhabitable Earth’ by David Wallace-Wells’ is a film that McKay quotes as a motivation for this movie, contains a whole section devoted to “Storytelling.” This section might seem weird in a film that primarily records how change of climate threatens to make most of the earth uninhabitable for human life (Rockstrom, 2013, p. 1). However, Wallace-Wells concedes that “political reforms to prevent calamity will never come unless human beings begin to realize the consequences linked with climate change” (Zalasiewicz et al., 2021, p. 1). The number of fictional works that have had a substantial impact on public opinion is minimal, and by certain measures, it is a silly question to ask (Davis, 2014, p. 8). However, the stakes are high in terms of climate crisis and McKay stresses frequently that the intention was to inspire the public.
Conclusion
The general goal of this video was to increase awareness of the extreme importance of climate crisis, which it accomplished admirably. Additionally, the founder of End Climate Silence found spoke with the New York Times concerning climate change. “You can’t have films that inspire people to act until society accepts climate change, which this film will assist to achieve,” he said. (Bandura and Cherry, 2020, p. 945). Nonetheless, awareness is not the ideal word to use to describe what the movie is trying to do. Finally, climate change is never addressed, and the essential metaphor necessitates prior knowledge to comprehend, let alone be successful. (Carroll, 2003, p. 7). This metaphor depicts the facts of the climate issue as well as the inadequacy of the society and media to accurately reflect this priority.
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