JOLTING DIS-ENGAGED PEOPLE...this feels like a justifiable response to current politics

Intro: Critics panned Don’t Look Up as ‘shrill’, but it was superb – and caught outlandish reality

OK and that could indicate that the public has a relatively higher tolerance for angry, broad, insulting [ etc ] material, at least when this feels like a justifiable response to current politics.

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PAUSE: Implicit in the professional objections to this film – it is “angry”, “smug”, “sad”, “shrill”, “condescending”, “scattergun”, “disastrous”, “insensitive”, “unfunny”, “depressing”, “heavy handed” but also “toothless” – is the proposal that, if McKay wanted to jolt disengaged people into noticing, even talking about, collective complacency on global warming, some sort of gentler, more immersive approach could have been more effective.

Lighten up the satire?

That’s a tall order when life is out-crazying the most vivid fiction

(Image credit: Meryl Streep as President Janie Orlean in Don't Look Up. Photograph: Niko Tavernise/AP)

 

Catherine Bennett

the Guardian

 

"In 1944, George Orwell got a letter from TS Eliot, a director at Faber, rejecting his political satire, Animal Farm. There were several reasons.

First, it was not the right time. Also, said the creator of The Waste Land, “the effect is simply one of negation”. The poet took issue, too, with the wholesale disrespecting of pigs, since they were logically the “best qualified to run the farm”, being the cleverest. “What was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public spirited pigs.”

So, if some leading film critics watching Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up (currently most-watched on Netflix) have hankered for a less satirical kind of satire, they are in distinguished company. TS Eliot might well have agreed with these reviewers that McKay’s savaging of a society too corrupt and deluded to save itself from an urgent threat to life on Earth, in the film’s case, a comet, could have been more cheerfully done. For instance, echoing Eliot on pigs, some of the more cartoonish leads could have been made more relatable.

How about humanising lead villain Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance being mesmerising), a creepy tech billionaire who, absurdly, intends to live forever?

Meanwhile, McKay’s US president, the preposterous Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) has appointed her dreadful son chief of staff.

Why can’t these grievous weirdos with their silly dialogue be more like, say, Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk?

Even the obscure scientists (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) attempting to convince an irresponsible leader and a clicks-obsessed media that the Earth truly is in danger, should, it’s been suggested, have been awarded intriguing personal journeys that would offset the more apocalyptic content. Implicit in the professional objections to this film – it is “angry”, “smug”, “sad”, “shrill”, “condescending”, “scattergun”, “disastrous”, “insensitive”, “unfunny”, “depressing”, “heavy handed” but also “toothless” – is the proposal that, if McKay wanted to jolt disengaged people into noticing, even talking about, collective complacency on global warming, some sort of gentler, more immersive approach could have been more effective. 

How would that work? 

[...] “It was already a crazy script but I would say reality out-crazied us by like 10 to 15%,” McKay said. “Well done, reality.”

It’s largely because of this routine out-crazying by the usual suspects that satire became the subject of repeated obituaries. But given the professional bollocking administered to McKay’s death-defying production it could also be that old-school, Swiftian satire – that is, not nice and not nuanced – has itself dwindled in appeal. . ."

IMMERSE YOURSELF MORE: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/01/lighten-up-satire-tall-order-life-out-crazying-even-science-fiction