End of the Liberal Ego: Film Criticism

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 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 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.NMR V5:I1, pg.218Unfortunately, so was the critical response to the film.The most obvious example of this dynamic was the acrimonious debate about the film on X (formerly known as 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." 71Running through these tantrums, however, was more than just another example of social media turning everything into a mudflinging 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." 72David Roony complains about the film's "cartoonishly obvious characterizations," and also describes them as "caricature." 73Closely related to the accusation of caricature is the complaint that the humor of the film is too "obvious."Nick Alan 71 Nathan J. Robinson, "Critics of 'Don't Look Up,' Are Missing the Entire Point," Current Affairs, December 26, 2021, https: