Politics masquerading as film. The spectacle and affective allure of cinema redefines the traditional (liberal) political operation of art: from coincidental serendipity to hysterical mass-mobilization. It highlights concerns with the current state of climate politics based on the COVID19 model.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Cate Blanchett has the best line of the movie towards the end when the comet is about to hit when she is asked whether she wants to go have sex or something in the few brief moments remaining: 'Honestly, I think I'd rather just drink and talk shit about people'. That was great. The rest of the movie, not so much.

In the first place, it is way over-produced. Too much effort to make it look like the coolest, most on-trend assemblage of pop-cultural reflection and citation ever produced. The giant colored credits, the over-saturated HD colors, the haircuts, the clothes, the nonstop jingle-music and, of course, jazz¹ that ties it all together. If you incubated a film in a corporate boardroom you couldn't get a more honed and perfected two and a half hours of at-home cinema-spectacle designed to tantalize the senses of teenage children. Which is strange, because the story credit goes to a person (David Sirota) who you wouldn't expect to align with that kind of thing. This is actually what is interesting about the movie.

When art generally approaches politics it has traditionally done it in a coincidental, unintentional mode: by focusing to the total exclusion of everything else in life on the one thing that motivates the artist, and through this focus, a communication of a state-of-mind and perspective arises. Then, it is based in that communication that a politics of fidelity can—but not necessarily does—arise. The politics of art is thus a serendipitous social redemption from the singular expression of the artist. And in many ways, it is the self-interested focus of the artist that indicates its naive disinterest in influencing another's opinion that impels authentic discourse to emerge in response to it: leaving ambiguous its intentions vis a vi another, one feels impelled to articulate that which the work means to them, the way in which what is expressed in the work transcends singular experience, evoking connections of broader social and cultural significance. It is through this being-called-upon by the art that the entire assemblage of what is an indirect, coincidental politics arises in response to it. It is not necessarily explicitly political, because what one has to say in response can never exactly be predicted; but it is political because, being now faithful to what has been provoked in the artwork, the unity of understanding that has been catalyzed feels impelled to protect the sanctity of its new understanding while excluding that which is incorrectly or improperly addressed to it or in its name. It is only in this way that an explicit politics does arise with respect to an artwork such as a film: through the eventual necessity to specify the unity of response across a multitude.

Don't Look Up is not political in this way. Rather, the movie presents itself as the coolest, most glamorous way in which a politics could be expressed. In fact, the movie is politics itself: it is a political project masquerading as a movie. There is no internal drama that develops through the course of the movie: it is on rails from beginning to end, only wanting to show you what it has already determined it wants to show you. The editing reflects this: scenes cut so quick one has no idea even what the point of the scene was. Comedy based on the silence after a joke is spoken is nowadays cliché: one gets it, the silence means it was sarcastic. This movie seems to get it as well, through the way in which it attempts to refuse this form of comedy. So, we get the bizarre situation where what is obviously sarcasm is cut away so fast that it then seems like an ordinary form of speech. Jonah Hill gets the most blatant example of this: cut high and dry in a fast succession of sarcastic statements, the movie, by refusing its own comedy, and to keep a lid on its improvisation doesn't have the effect of producing the voyeurism and perspective of a documentary (which seems to be its intention); rather, in a perverted form of the documentary concept, the editing betrays the political intentions of its production rather than that of its author.

Reinforcing this is the endless parade of stars that populate the movie: from leading roles to dumpster hipster, every role is filled by a star. Apart from the fact that this works against the movie being able to take any role seriously when its the lead role of Dune that is pretending to be an impoverished lefty-radical—it also exposes the movie itself as a vehicle for expressing political allegiance. As new stars reveal themselves throughout the film, it becomes an unavoidable, palpable feeling how anyone and everyone who cares about climate has clamored to get themselves into this thing, whether voluntarily or by conscription. And while the long-winded performance of Ariana Grande might seem like a needed pause in the emotional composition (the basic structure of film), it is long enough to become a concert within the movie. For a few minutes we are watching a concert that no longer feels like a documentary of a concert, or like a depiction of a concert in a fiction: it seems like a real-time concert in reality: a performer singing her explicit lyrics about how stupid climate-deniers are in the context of a film that has receded from view to give her complete and total center stage. The concert, like every other element of the film, exposes the logic of the film as little more than the lattice-work within which the many forms of climate activism find their place.

All together then, the movie manifests as precisely that which it explicitly represents: it is a giant comet of star-studded power and glamour that is the vehicle through which the underlying global force of climate-change activism finds its expression. The film doesn't need to make any sense on its own: its obvious what its about. It just needs to fulfill the requirements of cinema spectacle through which it produces the affective capture particular to cinema—that then, in a perversion of the traditional political mode of art, forms the basis for a climate politics². The movie takes it for granted that there is a climate crisis, what needs to be done about it, how serious it is: its only purpose is to parody the living shit out of every last element of resistance to its comet of global transformation so as to render the world as it is a mush of pliable stupidity that can no longer harbor any resistance to its demands. Which is why Don't Look Up is frightening. Not because of the danger of the comet it depicts: but because of the comet it produces.

Already with the COVID-19 response, it has become clear that there is an enormous globalized formation seeking near-complete dominion over the entire world's population. It isn't only that they want to inject their serum in the arm of every living creature (if Pfizer gets its way), or through the endless numbers of regulations they are willing to impose in the name of their righteous fight (Amazon lockdowns, Google passports)—it is through the way in which their certainty about the morality of their purpose divides the world into those that are 'in it with us' and those that are 'against us' that defines the truly concerning dimension of this movement. The willingness to divide and to exclude vasts swathes of humanity in the accomplishment of a moral crusade to save lives from a now mostly harmless cold in Omicron; its refusal to consider for a moment any of the harms that are produced on account of its irrational effort to save every possible life; its clear anger with the way in which the pandemic has refused to conform to their 'science' and well-intentioned efforts; and now, their dishonest refusal to admit defeat at the hands of their 'imperfect' vaccine that even they have no confidence in that has become a perverted form of political expediency: one now willing to sacrifice senselessly the unvaccinated for no reason other than a mounting desire to return to normality, albeit a masked and perpetually boosted normality (which is the final insistence on their now 2-year point the world must accept). This entire global (liberal) movement has now been exposed as motivated by nothing more than a desire to be right: COVID-19 is their meaning for existing now and the irrationality we see is precisely a reflection of that. Being caught now at the cusp of having to admit being wrong, this entire liberal clique does what liberal culture authorizes: dishonesty and manipulation to get what it wants, regardless of what's true. It's one's right to be right: by enforcing that right one makes their own truth: a New Age fabricated truth whose only claim is based in its undeniable and rendered-unaccountable pervasiveness³.

This film is an expression of the fact that COVID-19 is not a one-off: the hysteria and irrationally motivated exclusionary moral crusade to rid the world of its contamination (in viral and human form, if there is a difference) is now explicitly what begins to take shape around this film as the first in a series of such mindless, blindly emotional political responses. Once again, the opposition is so stupid they can only be mocked and laughed at (the dumb anti-Vax, anti-masker that can go die, 'look how dumb he is dead now!'). With this film, one can see all the dimensions of what is wrong with the climate movement in its current incarnation as it seeks realization in the current sychophantic Democratic liberal context. There's nothing thoughtful about it, there's no specific vision for the future expressed within it: it is pure, unmitigated fear of the certainty of impending doom that renders any and all opposition to it as ridiculous. A French New Wave-esque⁴ mashup of Armageddon and Spaceballs with a desperate desire to be a modern Dr. Strangelove⁵, the satire of the film eviscerates all its opposition, it doesn't leave almost any stone unturned in that effort. And since its release, its advocates have taken up this mindless approach of mockery and derision: the battle lines are now drawn, you're either 'with us or against us'⁶, either working to save the planet or a 'climate villain'⁷. This is the way the planet is to be saved: the 'success' of the COVID-19 narrated-hysteria model is to be extended into something of even greater scale and scope.

Don't Look Up is a perversion of the political operation of art into a fascistic alloy between media corporation, State, and citizen. No longer is any space left for the traditionally liberal philosophical concept of coincidental social transformation, of the serendipity of change that is catalyzed through the example of one's deliberate comportment: all of this is eviscerated in the frenzy to do something, to do anything at all to stop the world from burning up in a 'fire tornado'. There is no longer any time for deliberate action—deliberation itself is the problem. Pass a bill, who cares what's in it, just pass it! is how the desperate scramble for the appearance of an answer expresses itself today. Lockdowns and Forced Injection are the New Sanctions and Missile Strikes is what we wrote here not long ago. And the same logic appears to now apply to the #ClimateCrisis. What is it precisely they want to do: STOP CLIMATE CHANGE! What do they want to do?! Subsidies, mandates, carbon reduction, renewable fuels, solar panels, earth-body-spirit something...The New York Times gets it when they ask in their article on Chile's new Climate Constitution: “Does the search for climate fixes require re-examining humanity’s relationship to nature itself?” Once again, progressives racing to be progressive have lost the plot: there is no coherent plan that grapples with the already evident contradictions in what is currently considered Confronting The Climate Crisis.

This is not the way forward. If there is a way forward that was laid out in cinematic form already, it has been done by Christopher Nolan in Interstellar and in Tenet. These are profound philosophical filmic interventions into issues of political importance that preserve what's important to preserve in humanity: it's freedom for self-actualization. These are films whose ideas for broad philosophical or historical change are based in a sincere belief in human-being. They are films that present the subtle contingency of the situation without being over-determined by solutions and a contrived moral urgency whose fulfillment becomes its own compulsion. Unfortunately, with Don't Look Up its already apparent there is no humanity worth saving. There is no outside to the expression of this movie, no place to locate an unintentional human humility in which to ground a thoughtful reasoned assessment of the situation: everything is already incorporated into its unsettled, ceaselessly shifting compulsion to account for everything. Prisoner to that substance-free reality one can only think while watching this movie: bring on the comet, please.

They thought of that too.

Footnotes