Don’t Look Up: A Crisis of Shared Knowledge
This article contains spoilers for the film Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021).
Image courtesy of Niko Tavernise / Netflix.
Within a month of its release on December 5, 2021, Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021) became one of Netflix’s most popular movies, and it was followed by a deluge of articles with hot takes on the movie. Among those who claim to be concerned about the climate crisis, some argue that Don’t Look Up captures fundamental aspects of how our country is responding to the impending climate disaster. Others expressed disappointment that the film didn’t represent the essence of the climate change disaster and instead highlighted the sanctimonious attitudes of a too—online liberal-left. Some—fortunately not too many—are more concerned about telling us that the climate crisis isn’t that bad.
In Don’t Look Up, the existential threat to humanity comes in the form of a huge comet that could cause extinction. While there’s a concrete plan that can deflect the comet with high probability, a tech billionaire sabotages this plan and pushes for a flimsy strategy which will stop the comet and extract rare minerals to achieve economic dominance over China. There’s a pedantic debate about whether or not the comet and the response to the comet is a good allegory for how we are dealing with the climate crisis. I am not interested in that. A film that perfectly demonstrates the reality of climate change will either be ridiculously contrived, or a documentary.
What matters isn’t how close the film’s portrayal is to the climate crisis, but whether it tells us something meaningful about events wrapped in the concept of “catastrophe and bad response.” From this concept, certain phenomena like climate crisis, COVID, nuclear warfare, or perhaps a comet emerge and solidify. Whether intentionally or not, I think the film does tell us something meaningful, and I want to focus on what I thought was most terrifying. Don’t Look Up is a story about how an undemocratic recipe of credentialism, corporations capturing academic institutions, the media’s co-optation of the scientific, and the failure to uphold democratic infrastructures (namely, peer review and accountable journalism) creates a nihilistic void of skepticism. This void can easily be exploited by the most cynical actors in society to create a situation where people no longer have a framework which can be used to determine the accuracy of what is messaged to them; that is, a crisis of shared knowledge, an epistemological crisis.
The movie Don’t Look Up starts with Michigan State University professor Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and graduate student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) discovering a comet which could cause extinction in 6 months and 14 days. Even after they verify this with NASA scientists, their appointment with President Orlean (Meryl Streep) is delayed due to a sensational sexting scandal. When they finally meet, President Orlean focuses on the cost of intervening with the comet and her popularity to make a quick political calculation that they will “sit tight and assess.” With her self-promoting bookshelf, ostentatious displays of wealth, and pictures with corrupt politicians like Clinton and Cheney, she’s the perfect caricature of a self-interested politician. However, a more subtle and interesting detail in the film is that the White House’s inaction is couched in a credentialist denigration of Michigan State University. Not only does President Orlean’s son scoff “Come on, bro” when NASA’s Head of Planetary Defense says that Michigan State University has an excellent Astronomy Department, but President Orlean also notes that she wanted “Ivy Leaguers” on the project to verify the information. Later, it’s revealed that the head of NASA, who told the New York Herald (the film’s equivalent of the New York Times) that Mindy and Kate were wrong to say that calculations were definite, was a “former anesthesiologist and President Orlean superdonor.” I’d be willing to gamble that she went to Harvard!
Credentialism again rears its head when Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), the unnerving CEO of a technology company called Bash Cellular which has spread itself across sectors, proposes a plan to break the comet into tiny pieces and extract minerals from them. This is after Irshwell single-handedly interrupts and cancels a fairly robust plan to deflect the comet. In a stinging parody of corporate presentations—full with holographic images, innovation lingo, spiritual language, and ridiculous acronyms—he cites two Nobel Prize-winning professors from Stanford and Princeton for the research used in his company’s plan. Although this research hasn’t been peer reviewed, the mere mention of these institutions and the prestigious prize grabs the attention of government officials and even Mindy. Not only does this scene remind us of the unfounded obsequiousness which is fostered for scientists with “prestige” through media and corporations, but it is also a chilling reminder of how academic institutions are blending together with corporate America.
While it’s already terrifying that Bash Cellular is using credentials rather than peer review to inform their project and the media isn’t reporting on this, the ease with which institutions co-opt dissenters adds to the film’s horror. After he learns about Bash Cellular’s project, Mindy convinces himself that the Bash and White House Team need him in the room to make sure that this expedition doesn’t go too terribly. As he takes this role, Mindy more fully embraces his recently granted position as America’s sexy scientist, and he intensifies his raunchy extramarital affair with the news reporter who interviews him. Whether it’s because he’s drunk on his fame and affair, bought into a self-indulgent mythos that the flimsy research suggested by Bash Cellular will lead to a good outcome because he’s there, or can find no other option but to stick with this project, Mindy compromises his integrity by uncritically backing the project. He even appears in an ad sponsored by Bash and FEMA which foregrounds the “jobs the comet will provide,” and emphasizes “our scientists” (referring to the scientists on the Bash Cellular and White House collaborations) as the scientists who the public should seek over others for answers. The moment Mindy started working with the White House and became part of the “in group” after his first high-rated media appearance—even before the original plan to deflect the comet was aborted—he had already demonstrated his role in the credentialist fervor when he called the people in the White House team “the best and the brightest”: possibly a reference to David Halberstam’s account (The Best and the Brightest) of how cocky government bureaucrats and technocrats deceived the public about Vietnam and made embarrassing decisions abroad. The way Mindy continues to defend and promote these people, even after knowing that their work is not necessarily scientifically sound, demonstrates that his subservience to them comes out of something other than scientific integrity.
Sure, Mindy is exceptional because he later turns his back on the alliance between Bash Cellular and the White House after many other scientists are removed for asking questions and even Irshwell turns on him for asking questions. But why would anyone believe Mindy now? Even if he hadn’t entirely discredited himself by jumping ship, what’s the public supposed to believe? The corrupt tech companies and two likely dark-money funded, Nobel Prize-winning scientists from Stanford and Princeton who are propped up by a smitten media and subservient government officials, or a peer-reviewed group of scientists with data, evidence, and corroboration to back their claims? Or, should I say, the qualified, Nobel Prize-winning, well-known Stanford and Princeton scientists approved by the White House, or a bunch of wacky, jealous scientists from “second-tier universities” who want a bit of attention? A failing media, like the one depicted in this movie, could allow you to color the credibility either way. When Riley Bina, the pop-star of the movie played by Ariana Grande, sings the lyrics “Look up, what he’s really trying to say is get your head out of your ass. Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists,” the futility and meaninglessness of this plea for the people in the movie is heart-breaking; that’s because you’d be justified to ask which goddamn scientists? The Ivy Leaguers and the Bash geniuses or the other ones?
The film highlights the importance of peer review in research to its viewer, but the point is how difficult it is for a person in the Don’t Look Up universe to understand what’s happening. The journalists are more than happy to simply not give a shit about the importance of peer review when providing “information” to the public. Peer review is, after all, the crux of democratic decision making in academia; an ideal peer review’s function is to accommodate how everyone can make mistakes when developing and contributing knowledge. This process offers us the hope that we’re reaching our potential in the mission of creating a good approximation of our reality. Similarly, journalism’s role in a democracy is to empower the public, and the vastly undemocratic landscape in Don’t Look Up is underscored by the media’s failure to give people tools that they can use to understand and assess evidence, including an understanding of peer review. Not only does the parasitic journalism cause both journalism and peer review to fail in their democratic missions, but it’s also autocratic to have a publically unaccountable company influence government decisions and have talons in academia, or allow the FBI to operate like a shadow government which can arrest people who want to reveal information in the public interest, like Kate was after she revealed her distress about Bash Cellular’s terrible plan.
With all these obstacles and a complex of secrecy, corporate control, and clandestine relationships and connections (including the journalist who has slept with two former presidents), journalism—both in this film and in real life—is hopelessly intertwined with the powerful and will often shift public opinion in its favor. Without other apparatuses that inform people based on evidence and foreground the value of evidence, the situation when this powerful complex of media, corporations, and government is right or wrong is more or less indistinguishable. As public journalism has been largely defunded and corporate-owned media outlets ignore facts to “beat” the other side, cater to a shrinking elite base, and launch coordinated strikes on independent platforms and journalists, our apparatuses of evidence-based criticism and interrogation are actually under attack. The chaos surrounding what people believe about the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates this difficulty to distinguish between reality and deception perfectly.
Much of the script for Don’t Look Up was written before COVID-19, but there is an uncanny similarity between how the media complex treated Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci and Mindy. Fauci, a man who appeared as a shining beacon of hope after a truly deranged and conspiratorial pandemic response, first framed his prior statement about mask-wearing as a noble lie to prevent panic but then later backtracked to say there they didn't know mask-wearing helped at that point. Even if he had good intentions, he should have resigned for the sake of the public interest after he discredited his own trustworthiness twice, but instead he decided to go on a ride to media stardom, like Mindy. In fact, in an eerie echoing of how Ariana Grande asked people to trust Mindy in a song near the end of the movie (after he had pissed all over his credibility), Ariana Grande and James Corden actually posted a music video celebrating the vaccines and the end of lockdowns in which Corden sings about “his favorite M.D. Anthony Fauci” while people behind him hold up a cloth with Fauci’s face on it. Fauci went on to further undermine public trust by making inconsistent, declarative statements about what is needed to achieve immunity. Fauci was also vague about his account of funding at the Wuhan lab, and the NIH released a statement which some claim implies the US did fund Gain-Of-Function research in China after Fauci testified that the US did not (and sassily snapped at Rand Paul, probably for the media views). While there doesn’t seem to be any consensus in the research community about whether or not it really was Gain-Of-Function research, and some may have made this claim in bad faith, more mistrust was sowed by the utter failure of the partisan liberal faction of the media to at least properly acknowledge that dangerous research had occurred. It was soon revealed that the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance had worked together to bypass restrictions on COVID experiments. In parallel to all this, emails showed that he worked with Dr. Francis Collins to suppress lab leak theory, even though some scientists thought it would be stunning for something like this to develop in nature.
At times, it was even difficult to tell whether Fauci was a public health figure or a big pharma spokesperson who wanted to use his position to protect their profits. The public health establishment and media spent months smearing and censoring journalists, scientists, and people for even expressing skepticism of the official narrative before courageous independent outlets were finally able to disseminate information about malfeasance. During this time, Fauci was even narcissistic enough to say “attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science.” Others in the public health and liberal media establishment have similarly messaged inconsistently and smugly balked at any sort of dissent, often calling for censorship and character assassination. Whatever you may think about the accuracy of specific parts of the narrative (vaccines, boosters, treatments, origins, restrictions, masking, travel etc.) in the COVID messaging sphere, the extent of inconsistency and corporate infection are legitimate grounds for a general skepticism towards chunks of the larger COVID-19 messaging milieu, and some skeptical questions which were previously labeled as conspiracy theories were later shown to be plausible and still open for questioning.
What do we do with this skepticism? Ideally, we interrogate it rigorously for evidence and ground our arguments in facts and documents. We should not quash skepticism and tell people they’re fascists or stupid for not following guidance, but rather ground ourselves in a commitment to democratic forms of knowledge production. This means engaging in our own healthy skepticism and deciding whether something is grounded in evidence, or if it’s wrong and can be improved. If the appropriate channels to deal with skepticism are not provided, however, where does someone with justified skepticism go? Either they live with the horror of realizing how powerless they’re in making sense of the world, or they latch onto some cynical narrative which gives them a story to make meaning out of their skepticism. When people with justifiable skepticism are caught in a reactionary movement which assuages the horror of not knowing, censorious and sanctimonious behavior only furthers their reactive narrative because they can use censorship and a smug refusal to address their skepticism as “evidence” that something important is being suppressed. Yes, that’s flawed reasoning, but there’s not much else one can do when trapped in an atmosphere which doesn’t engage with skepticism in a reasonable way.
People who believe in the powerful complex of media, corporations, and government are quick to blame and look down on others who think they’re being fed lies or can’t figure out when this powerful complex is telling the truth. The people who are blaming others, however, also can’t actually make that determination in the absence of their participation in democratic, evidence-based interrogation and engagement. If they’re correct about certain facts without that participation, it’s just a matter of luck, because they would have fallen for the same establishment which deceived the public about the comet. An empty appeal to trusting The Science (or The Credentialed or The Genius) as a transcendent deity, rather than collectively producing and interrogating knowledge, is an argument that works just as well for Bash Cellular as it does for Fauci and other public health figureheads. The logical conclusion to this situation, and where we might be heading, is a world in which people who aren’t privy to inaccessible information end up with the very nihilistic belief that anything could be true and then just choose what is convenient to them. Some people are already in that situation! The ambiguity of Ariana’s lyrics perfectly demonstrates how this suffocating, confused situation could kill us all if we don’t change our trends.
The solution to this horrific situation is not easy. It involves dismantling an entire complex of anti-democratic forces which plague our social production of knowledge and science; it means removing corporate influence from research; it means funding journalism which is truly in the public service and based on evidence and documents; it means not giving a cartel of universities higher precedence in scientific decision-making; it means allowing dissent and engaging with it appropriately, maybe even realizing many of us were just wrong. Don’t Look Up not only shows us that we’ll be absolutely screwed if the people making the “wrong decisions” wield the undemocratic levers of power, but it also tells us how people making the ”right decisions” with undemocratic levers of power will also cause a fraught response (mistrust and backlash). We already have such large epistemological fissures around us, and it seems impossible to bridge them now. It feels like people live in entirely different realities, but if we believe in the dignity of each person and their voice as a valuable asset to our democratic structures, then maybe we might be able to create publicly accountable infrastructure that puts people above power and profit and consequently reestablishes trust, engagement, and goodwill with one another. For this, we need to have an unrelenting commitment to civil liberties and the interests of all people above businesses. Don’t Look Up demonstrates how urgent it is for us to act, and we can only survive some catastrophic event if all of us take the responsibility to think carefully about our actions and how to avoid hurtling towards a world with an irreparable epistemological crisis.