ACF At The Movies: The Brilliance Of "Don't Look Up", Two Years Later, With General Notes Regarding COVID-19

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Last night, a full two years after the hype and the omnipresence of Don’t Look Up, I sat down and watched it for the first time. Upon its December 2021 release, even the people who liked it couldn’t avoid noting just how heavy-handed and unsubtle (are those two different qualities? I think they are) Adam McKay’s shout-satire was. How would it come off now, in the cold post-COVID-hysteria light of day?

Just in case you were living in a Fairbanks City Transit bus at the time and were therefore (mostly?) isolated from the hype around Don’t Look Up, here’s a short plot description that absolutely will contain spoilers, as will the rest of this article: A Ph.D student (Jennifer Lawrence) finds a massive new comet in the sky. Her adviser (Leonardo DiCaprio), a Michigan State professor of astronomy, does a bit of orbital math and realizes that the comet, which is five or six miles across, is going to strike the Earth. After a few false starts, they finally get in to tell the President what is going to happen… and it all goes downhill from there.

The President, played by Meryl Streep as 70% Donald Trump and 30% Hillary Clinton, is mostly concerned about how the comet will affect the midterms. The media downplays the significance of the impeding “extinction-level” event, with a talk-show host asking if the comet might strike his ex-wife’s house, and repeatedly puts the news behind the relationship drama of an Ariana-Grande-style pop singer (played by Ariana Grande) and a generic black mumble rapper.

A scientifically reasonable plan to blow up the comet is derailed at the last minute by a Zuck/Elon/Timothy-Leary tech wizard who needs to mine it for rare earths and therefore wants to break it into thirty usable pieces before impact. (He’s paying South American countries in cash, up front, for expected tsunami deaths.) A Russian/Chinese/Indian attempt blows up on the launch pad.

The President, and the right-wing media, implore people to ignore the comet — “Don’t Look Up!” — while ridiculing the poor scientists who are only trying to share the truth! There are TV ads about “the jobs the comet will bring”. Ariana Grande attempts to fix the issue by writing and performing a song that tells her fans to “listen to the fucking scientists”.

When the Zuck dude’s plan fails, everyone on the planet is killed by the impact — but Zuck, the President, and 1,998 other people escape the planet using a starship. Nearly 23,000 years later, they land on an Earth-like paradise and are immediately butchered by the gorgeous, peacock-like local predators. The End.

The message, at the time, was obvious: a bunch of settled science done by good people regarding COVID-19 and the subsequent vaccine development was undermined by politicians, entertainers, right-wing demagogues, and the other enemies of The Our Democracy, with tragic consequences. But the central hand-wave of Don’t Look Up — namely, using real-science orbital mechanics as a stand-in for science-adjacent stuff like epidemiology, mRNA research, and wishful thinking about masks — is what makes the film so pathetic in retrospect. How many people went and got their vaccines after watching it? The number cannot have been zero. What was the net impact of those vaccinations? How many people were saved by them, and how many “died of suddenly”?

In retrospect, America could have used a bit more partisanship, a bit more ignorance, a bit more unfounded skepticism regarding COVID-19. Our leaders carpet-bombed nursing homes with sick people then forbade their relatives to go to the funerals. They changed their public position on masks to ensure adequate supplies for heathcare workers — but instead of making that plain, they simply lied about the “Science”. People were hounded out of jobs, homes, and public life for refusing an experimental vaccine as the State flexed new muscles of public/private partnership for the purpose of evading Constitutional protections.

The virus was also massively politicized by the people who have genuine power in this country. We were solemnly assured that COVID-19 could be caught in church but could not be caught during protests. People were arrested for standing on beaches alone. Every level of elected and unelected official became power-drunk. COVID-19 was used as a reason to silence annoying parents at school board meetings.

Let’s not forget the “lab leak theory”, which went from RACIST THEORY INVENTED BY THE MOST RACIST RACISTS to acknowledged fact with little media attention other than some hand-wringing that, as a consequence, virology idiots might not be allowed to play more idiot games with virology. It’s obvious in retrospect that Anthony Fauci deliberately circumvented safeguards and precautions in order to get his precious gain-of-function bullshit done in China. The United States deliberately created COVID-19 as part of a larger effort to enhance coronoviruses. Created, not released, mind you. Not as a bioweapon, not for an evil purpose, but for a far more banal reason, namely: our universities make money training virologists and they need something to do. It’s really that simple.

Turns out that an astounding number of American or even global problems, from pandemics to “From the river to the sea!” hysteria in our schools, can be attributed to the despicable practice of using guaranteed government loan cash to mint near-limitless numbers of Ph.Ds out of broken human beings who from then on simply work like blind mole rats to create something, anything, of note in that field. That’s how you get gain-of-function: because virologists exist, and they want to do it. That’s how you get Critical Race Theory: because basket-weaving-degree-holders don’t want to get real jobs. We raised two generations of “decolonizer” faculty and are then shocked, shocked! when they apply that thinking to Gaza. The math is simple. If you want to learn to be an electrician, you have to work at Arby’s every night so you can learn your trade during the day. If you want to get a useless Ph.D, you will be handed hundreds of thousands of seemingly free dollars, some of which you can spend on getting drunk, high, and laid around Washington Square or in the Haight. No surprise we’re short on electricians but the faculty, like the poor, will be with us always.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on Don’t Look Up! There’s a long-standing tradition of using absurd exaggerations to represent nuanced discussions — A Modest Proposal, anyone? — and this is no different. And there is some genuine brilliance in the film, particularly when it touches on the messianic-Leary-Zuck figure and how our modern tech processes work.

One particularly nice set piece contrasts how the United States does space work with how “Bash”, the SpaceX/Facebook stand-in from the film, does it. The initial NASA launch to destroy the comet is perfectly synchronized, flawless, and led by an iron-jawed military fellow in the John Glenn mold, played by nutjob Ron Perlman. The Bash launch is haphazard, with a “permitted percentage” of spaceships blowing up immediately. It’s a nice contrast of the “zero-defects” military/NASA mindset with the “move fast and break things” philosophy of SpaceX and every tech company, ever. And the final drama of blowing up the comet turns out to be a matter of how many of the drones in the Bash swarm can be permitted to fail. When the 2,000 fortunate people who left Earth finally manage reach the new planet, you can see a failing launch module hit a mountain in the background. “48.7 percent survival… more than I expected!”

It made me laugh, albeit ruefully. Your humble author was still in his twenties when he learned a fair amount of how Google works behind the scenes. This was in an era where rackmount servers were just coming into fashion and Google had tens of thousands of old-fashioned tower servers networked together in massive rooms. What astounded me the most was how Google handled a failing or failed server: they did nothing. The math suggested that it wasn’t worth taking the time and effort to replace a dead box in a room filled with hundreds of similar boxes. That effort would be better put towards the next server room, which would contain more advanced hardware and be more effective anyway.

This notion of throwing massive amounts of standardized hardware at everything and letting a certain amount of failure happen was Google’s primary contribution to how America works nowadays. It eventually trickled into small business; one of my support clients told me in 2010 that it was almost cheaper for her to buy a new server than it was for me to take the old one apart and fix it. I saw her decision as a likely harbinger of future events, and promptly left the computer-support space as fast as my uneven legs could carry me.

I would expect Hollywood, which has aligned itself closely with government in the past two decades, to treat the “tech bros” critically. So Don’t Look Up! isn’t really that big of a surprise in that regard. Yet there’s some irony that an institution so devoted to tearing down long-standing social practices in the name of limitless profit can’t recognize the similarity between using experimental drones to blow up a comet and the idea of forcing an experimental vaccine on all of humanity, nor can they see how the tech world simply takes the carelessness shown by Hollywood to Christian morality and applies it to, I don’t know, Web image standards. (This rant brought to you by AVIF and WebP.)

Future generations may see Don’t Look Up! as a 21st C. equivalent to Birth Of A Nation. A bit of journeyman film-making meant to justify certain attitudes on the part of powerful people. If they can do that — if they can see in retrospect how we caused a lot of misery and death by treating experimental drug development like it was a mere exercise in flawless and established orbital mechanics math — then the film will have served a much more important purpose than the pro-Fauci and pro-Biden message it was designed to send. And it gave Jennifer Lawrence a chance to work, which will no doubt bring a tear of joy to one of America’s favorite public intellectuals:

Where did you go, Ken Bone? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.