Ross Dutart: The crisis in the United States is not a natural disaster like a comet hitting the Earth, but the stupidity of the United States

【Text/Ross Dutat Translation/Observer Network Ning Que】

The story of the new film "Don't Look Up" is about a collision between a comet that destroys Earth and a stupid America. The film is not highly rated, with a freshness rating of only 55% on Rotten Tomatoes. However, it has been culturally successful. Now, when it is difficult to have a hot spot without talking about superhero movies, the film has broken the ratings record on Netflix, attracting the attention of many film critics and pundits, as well as criticism from the left and admiration from the right, which are politically unexpected.

Officially, the film is a parable about climate change. Director Adam McKay said this when he debated with critics online. McKay tweeted: "If you're not anxious about a climate-crashing or 'collapsed' America, I don't know what Else 'Don't Look Up' can deliver. It's like robots watching romance movies and asking, 'Why are they putting their faces on their faces?' ’”

However, art can always escape the intentions of its creators. Despite the director's official announcement, the film's comet footage is a bad metaphor for climate change. Eric Levitz of New York magazine tries to explain why, and his article is one of the best responses to the film's intention to intervene in policy. But in fact, the COVID-19 outbreak that preceded filming was more amenable to this metaphor, as the pandemic was a rapid, unexpected threat rather than a painful long-term challenge. In the end, "Don't Look Up" as a film and television work is only most effective when it represents the word that director Tytri inserted, "collapsed" America. Compared with the film's description of the systemic crisis in the United States, the specific existential threat can only be regarded as a small problem.

Stills from "Don't Look Up" (Source: Netflix)

I think that's the biggest reason why the film gets the attention, and even people who don't like it talk about it. Because it opens up one of the broadest perspectives on America's decline since The Line of Fire and The Sopranos.

However, many critics believe that the film has failed in general, and I see it this way. Because it's fraught with the urge to blame everyone, from TV news to social media, while at the same time wanting to deliver the message of "believing in science," the two are contradictory. The latter ensures that its satire on the expert class, the academic and industrial complex, is the mildest. Its plot ultimately focuses on the bad decision of a populist president, thus abandoning systematic criticism in favor of ideological attacks.

The film has a comprehensive depiction of decline, which is exactly what we need. On this basis, I intend to change the script. If someone had asked me to be a consultant for the film, the film might look like this:

Act 1: Amateur astronomers examine some of the telescope's photographs and find the comet. The photographs were collected by the government but were not examined at all. The discovery was hyped up by some doomsday survival enthusiasts and tech companies, and academic authorities believed the claim was wrong, with Twitter censoring users who insisted that the comet was about to hit Earth.

Act II: A group of astronomers at Harvard University confirm the comet's dangerous trajectory, and suddenly, the media begins to hype up the threat. But right-wing populist presidents who want to be re-elected prefer to postpone their response, so she touts an unknown Bible College astronomer who thinks the probability of an impact is less than 10 percent.

Act III: Protests erupt and sweep the country, and the president changes his policy, declaring a massive nuclear strike. However, the head of NASA, who was popular in the media, insisted that blowing up the comet would cause debris to fall and kill too many people. He advocated a more limited strike based on the research he had previously disserted, so that the comet would be off orbit. Fox News slandered him, but the mainstream media insisted that his strategy was scientific and that no decent person should object. So the United States tried his plan, but failed completely, because his paper was actually based on fraudulent experiments that were never implemented outside of his lab.

Act IV: The president ordered a sweeping blow, but it failed because most of the nuclear weapons failed and the military didn't check its own reserves because the money was spent hiring TikTok influencers to recruit Gen Z into the army. In desperation, the government turned to a Musk-style technical wizard whose "big guy" drill was expected to send a warhead into the center of the comet. Unfortunately, he personally oversaw the task, and while he was distracted by a twitter argument, the mission went fatally wrong.

Act V: With nowhere to go, parts of the United States pretend that the comet will not come, and others join a cult that holds a massive confessional ceremony for the sins of white patriarchy. At the last minute, a group of Chinese drones took off to meet the comet, disintegrating it, and its debris fell into the Pacific Ocean, where it was salvaged and mined by Chinese deep-sea robots — but a batch of debris "accidentally" hit the U.S. mainland, knocking down U.S. infrastructure and plunging the former world superpower into darkness.

Finally, the credits scrolled at the end of the credits are Chinese. We'll see you at the Oscars.

(This article was published on the Website of The New York Times on January 8, 2022)

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