A Short Note on The Turn of Adam McKay (Patreon)

Adam McKay has made some of my favorite comedies of all time.

They felt important, too. Mostly because studio comedies were still mired in this awful trend of “star vehicles” where bad scripts were given to a single overpaid star who would try to make it work on personality alone, with only a few other solid figures to round out the cast. But then McKay and Apatow came along with Anchorman and hit those who saw it like a nuclear bomb. It was a return to this delightful, unhinged absurdity of an earlier era. They even felt like a genuine heir to the ZAZ / Ramis / Lampoon movies that defined my youth. I also loved that it featured all these seemingly ego-less, like-minded stars who worked in true ensemble fashion. It’s no accident that these movies were filled top to bottom with talent that would go on to define the next decade. For McKay, the hits just kept coming. Talladega Nights was a drop dead funny followup and a massive hit. Step Brothers was right on par with Anchorman. And while a tad more uneven, I think The Other Guys has some of the best stuff he’s ever done.

But if you followed McKay, you also implicitly understood that he had other things on his mind (namely politics). You could sense him wanting to branch out and honestly, I was fully behind it. He had shown such a deft hand with absurdism that I felt like he could handle anything. Still, the switch came really swiftly. Heck, my friend even pointed out that the end credits graphs of The Other Guys can be viewed as a firm dividing line in his career. And while it feels almost inspired to end an absurdist comedy with a stark portrait of the depth of white collar crime, it’s unfortunate that what’s been happening since the switch has resulted in probably some movies that really, really don’t work for me.

To be fair, I genuinely get why people like The Big Short. I read the book prior and the material itself is incendiary, but it has a noble aim of making it digestible and fun. I genuinely like its spirit, but I had more trouble with it’s cinematic approach. It felt like a constant grab bag of errant styles, as if often unsure of itself. Which seemed odd given how much I loved the assured direction of his pure comedic work, but I chalked it up to nerves and hoped that it would solidify going forward. But instead, VICE felt like a deeper regression. It was a loud, grating, one note exercise in rehashing the past in a way that gets so, so close to characterizing the architecture of modern conservatism, yet somehow fails to draw a meaningful parallel to the Trumpian horror of the moment. Instead, the movie’s real aim feels like it comes out in the mid credits sequence, during a fake focus test about the movie itself. Therein two viewers devolve into stereotypical twitter arguments about the film being for “libtards” and the guy sincerely taking the bait retorts with things like “I have the ability to understand facts!” You know, the kind of nonsense thing that most of us have learned to see right through over the last 12 years of social media and thus not participate in. But it’s the button to this moment that speaks volumes. Because as the fight goes on, a young woman ignores it and says “I can’t wait to see the new Fast and the Furious movie, that looks lit.”

Unfortunately, it’s all I could think about afterward. Probably because it characterizes so many troubling things. For one, the Fast and the Furious movies are, you know, good, actually. Yeah they’re dumb as heck, but they’re also open hearted in all the right ways. They’re at once full of masculine posturing, but off this weird kind of vulnerability and optimism. You have to imagine that McKay hadn’t even seen them, which makes the swipe feel even worse. But it’s not just the mischaracterization of that series that bothers me, it’s that essential thesis that we’re all just too dumb and lazy and distracted by pop culture to really care. A sentiment that implies we should all be yelling at the conservative guy, too. It’s all part of attitude that Clint Worthington put recently about Adam McKay being “the kind of social satirist who's mad *at*, rather than *for*, his audience.”

Nowhere is this more evident than with Don’t Look Up. Which is a shame for a movie that assembled the finest actors and figures of our generation, all of whom are genuinely trying their best to mine the satirical comedy and pathos from every scenario (and it’s worth noting that DiCaprio has been ringing the climate change bell for almost two decades now and putting his money where his mouth is). But all the script really gives them is the same tired beats again and again and again, all with the repetitive joke that we’re all too distracted with our own bullshit to care. It’s as if we’re all just unaware and ignorant of the grave danger we are in, which is all a not so subtle implication that this is also the core problem with climate change. And so, if you just had that awareness and were informed then you would care and be angry and it would fix everything!

Let’s be very clear. The climate crisis is something where half the nation very much is furious and screaming, but those screams are falling on deaf ears of the hollow men and leaders who rig a capitalist system. It’s about rich people who won’t really be affected by the coming onslaught. And then there’s the everyday people who don’t care because they’re part of a very hyper-active republican disinformation machine. To his credit, McKay understands this, too. And just like Vice, he frequently swipes at the real machine that causes this. But rather than truly focus on this, and rather than lay out the rallying call of dismantling it, for him, it always comes back to the perceived ignorance of people not caring. The films final doomsday codas about how we were too busy caring about *checks notes* dieting!?!? And paying attention to pop culture?!? To me, it is the absolutely fundamental misunderstanding of our youth’s expression of depression. Because they mostly all care. And they ARE actually doing something about it.

Because they implicitly understand that yelling at democrat leaders and RT’ing articles on twitter is going to do very little. Instead, the core of everything they are behind is the complete shift of structural capitalism that causes all these problems in the first place. They recognize a complete top to bottom failure (that McKay does to) and rather than yelling at those in power to fix themselves, it promotes the full-brunt approach of supporting local DSA leaders, education, and fostering ideas that reshape society. It’s honestly been one of the most inspiring things I’ve seen in the last few years. Something that’s shaken my own malaise and gotten me involved in so many local ways. And when it comes to the sense of humor that goes with it? You have to look at the Tik Tok memes of “take the day off, it’s the apocalypse!” and not frame it as ignorance or ennui, but instead commiseration and rejection of the system that’s trying to use them.

But instead of understanding any of this, I kept feeling like the film was looking down its nose on all these people, often reaching for all these strawman targets, whether it was social media or Webby Awards, or anything that feels like it gives some solace in a messed up world. Even the focus on President Meryl’s jewelry felt like a weird thing to harp on? What does that really have to do with this? It even treats Cate Blanchett’s genuine suicidal linclinations of “tell me we’re all going to die!” as a joke instead of understanding the root of that instinct in any meaningful, psychological way. Every opportunity to get more into the more nuanced idea of HOW we’re dealing with the apocalypse is trounced when the film comes back again and again to surface-level audience blaming.

Which brings us to McKay’s tweet. Because I honestly wasn’t going to write anything about this movie, but it was really the following words that express the same exact audience disdain so clearly. He wrote: “Loving all the heated debate about our movie. But if you don’t have at least a small ember of anxiety about the climate collapsing (or the US teetering) I’m not sure Don’t Look Up makes any sense. It’s like a robot viewing a love story. “WHy ArE thEir FacEs so cLoSe ToGether?””

This is, quite frankly, a really shitty thing to say.

Not only is a complete disregard for the earnest, helpful motive behind the criticism, it then forces your hand in multiple ways. First, it forces you to be like “wait one goddamn minute,” and talk about the ways you actually do care and fight. Why, I run a zero waste fridge! I barely use my car! I spend time promoting food sustainability education that directly impacts, blah blah blah! It’s like, yeah, bud. I have a TON of anxiety about the climate crisis and it impacts how I live and I think there are healthier ways of framing the fight. But it doesn’t matter because the film is not actually interested in that. It’s interested in screaming into megaphones about doomsday and making you do it right alongside the film. And if you don’t do it, the tweet’s implication is that you are a robot who doesn’t care. Which just automatically puts you on defensive heels.

The second problem it forces is the conversation itself. Because to even waste time arguing about the movie in face of the message itself, is to belie the message itself. Which, again, forces another rote binary that disregards what we’re really saying in response to the film. Which just creates an impasse where there should be none. The film is accusing us of looking only one inch in front of our face, but we would argue the film is doing the same thing. Because it is offering the same, tired, fatalist doomsday notions and hammering that this is all about awareness when really it’s about taking that anger and finding solutions to dismantling the systems that cause this. To wit, there was a post by @shoshone.socialist about doomsday thinking that really hit me hard and characterizes the problem so clearly:

“They think it is the end. And it pisses me off… How dare you people come here, destroy everything, and say it’s over, it’s the end of the world, and then try to act like I did something to the climate, like I was the one pushing for shooting a bunch of chemicals into the air and dumping crap in the rivers and over hunting animals. It is not too late to do something and white people especially, quit acting like it's over. It’s not over… There is always something we can be doing. Don’t say it’s over til it’s over.”

These words inspire the rallying call of action more than anything else possible. But the film, instead of grappling with that sentiment in the final earth-destroying moments, takes a different tact. For all the genuine sentiment of that scene, when they face the literal apocalypse the one thing they offer is a “I’m glad WE tried” pat on the back, all before the film goes back to the criticism of the same dieting / “don’t forget to like and subscribe” strawman. In short, it feels like it’s way more interested in “I told you so” than something more transformative. And so, I ask, what does this achieve? Does it make the watcher go, “well damn, he got me!” and plough and render the soul, making it capable of change? I really don’t think so. But I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there's nuance I'm not giving enough credit to. Maybe I understand that a coalition is not a monolith and maybe we don’t have to have the same goals and methodologies in how to best evoke the narrative of climate change. And maybe the anger of this film is a net good and will spur some people on. But I just worry for all the resources that went into making it, that it won’t. And that it will come off as smug to the very people it's trying to inspire. I mean, I didn’t even laugh once. Is that part of it? And so the thing I really feel in the end is this sense of sadness. Because again, this man made some of my favorite movies ever. And I can’t help but worry about the film’s weirdly myopic discourse, especially given one final biting irony.

While watching I realized that McKay’s new production company is called “Hyperobject Industries” and it feels so odd given that Don’t Look Up seems to fundamentally miss the point of the Hyperobject discourse. The term, beautifully explained in Laura Hudson’s article on the subject, highlights how complicated modern problems are and how little we can emotionally comprehend the nature of those complex systems (like Covid, Climate change, etc). In that, it characterizes how little “awareness” and treating things as simple good / bad binaries helps in dealing with those problems. You can’t yell at them. You can’t offer simple solutions. The key is creating a complex systemic change to counter it. At the root of which is compassion for people not understanding the complexity of a given thing (which McKay actually did empathetically in The Big Short). In essence you are always asking the fundamental question of “how do you get people to care about X?” So how is it supposed to help when, for all it’s moral posturing, Don’t Look Up doesn’t really doesn’t seem to care about you at all?

<3HULK