Gizmodo posted an article about the movie Don’t Look Up yesterday.
I really liked Adam Withers’ comment to that post:
I think the reason so many of us aren’t really talking about climate change is because we’re fucking tired and hopeless. We’ve reached the point the characters reach in the final act – we’ve talked, we’ve advocated, we’ve “raised awareness,” we’ve supported politicians we thought would do something, and we’ve realized that there is nothing more we can do about this. Nothing more than we’ve already done. The people with the power to actually save us, who could make choices that would make a real difference, aren’t going to and won’t be swayed by anything we have the power to do. The public is too stupid, self-involved, or out of touch to give enough of a shit to put enough pressure on those people. We’re out of moves, and while we can see what needs doing, we don’t have any power to force it to happen.
So, we’re focusing on the people in our immediate sphere and trying to enjoy life as much as we can so we don’t just go crazy with grief and fear and anger. Climate change is coming, it will not be averted, and at best our only hope left is that, once the effects start really ruining life for/killing people, it’ll shake the rest of the populace hard enough that they’ll finally stand up and give a damn. But until that day, we don’t have the strength left to keep caring so much about something we are powerless against.
Funny how apparently it’s “a climate movie” to so many people. I didn’t explicitly see the comet as a metaphor for the climate, and there were so many more layers to the movie. I experienced it as a much wider criticism to present-day politics, social media, science, society as a whole etc.
I guess a lot of people missed a huge part of that.
One thing that puzzled me was that the evil business guy predicted that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character would die alone. But he didn’t – he died together with his friends.