#The Unsettling True Story and the Real People That Inspired Don’t Look Up
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“#The Unsettling True Story and the Real People That Inspired Don’t Look Up”
<span class="mx-1">And a look at that asteroid heading for Earth right now (seriously).</span>
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<span class="sf-entry-flag sf-entry-flag-creditline">Netflix</span>
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By Will DiGravio · Published on December 9th, 2021
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<em>Real Stories is a column about the true stories behind movies and TV shows. It’s that simple. This installment focuses on the realities and uncanny true story underpinning Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up. </em>
Don’t Look Up, from writer-director Adam McKay (Anchorman, The Big Short) is not quite based on real events. But our insane reality certainly sits at the center of the movie. The plot follows two scientists, played by Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio, who try to warn government officials and then the general public of an incoming asteroid that will destroy the planet.
The project began as an allegory for climate change, a huge concern for both McKay and DiCaprio. As explained in a recent profile in Vanity Fair:
The road to McKay’s latest movie began a decade ago, then McKay read a U.N. report in 2018 outlining the scientific consensus on climate change—and freaked out. “I couldn’t sleep for two nights after I read it,” he says. “I had one of those moments where I went from, ‘Hey, we gotta fucking take care of this, this is crazy,’ to ‘Holy shit. It’s happening now. It’s not 80 years from now, it’s now.’”
But, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the general chaos of our times, Don’t Look Up became more about the ways in which we as a society are fundamentally broken. Our society, McKay says, can no longer come to a consensus about anything. From the Vanity Fair article:
Within a month of production, the pandemic hit, and the world went into lockdown, followed by the harrowing presidential election, followed by the January 6 insurrection. The news kept italicizing the message of the movie. “I swear to you, I did not want ‘Don’t Look Up’ to be this topical,” McKay says. “I had to make it a little crazier. That was the big change. I think reality outflanked us.”
And so, this edition of Real Stories will look at the true events and people that inspired the story of Don’t Look Up. Oh, and there’s also an asteroid about to pass very close to Earth in the next couple of days. We’ll tell you about that, too.
No One Listens
Adam McKay has shown in his recent work that he is interested in systems. The Big Short uses the Great Recession to think about the failures of the financial system. Vice depicts the life of Dick Cheney to understand the federal bureaucracy and the erosion of public trust in government.
With Don’t Look Up, McKay turns his satirical sites on the mainstream media, indicting them for ignoring the climate crisis and focusing on more sensational topics. We need to look no further than McKay’s Twitter profile to understand his concern about climate change. “Climate Emergency is NOW,” it reads.
Cables news media figures as a central antagonist in Don’t Look Up. Just as McKay mocks politicians of both parties via the character of President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep), he also critiques all three major cable news outlets: Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. According to one recent study, 2020 saw the shortest amount of time dedicated to the climate crisis on the nightly and Sunday news shows since 2016.
Rather than pick the low-hanging fruit of Fox News, McKay’s main spoof in the movie is of Morning Joe, the popular MSNBC program. The show that we see in the movie, The Daily Rip, is hosted by Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett) and Jack Bremmer (Tyler Perry). The former, Vanity Fair notes, is “as close to [Morning Joe co-host] Mika Brzezinski as one could get without being an impersonation.”
McKay’s indictment of the media extends to other venerated institutions, including the New York Times, which he also spoofs in the movie. His problem with the paper, he told Vanity Fair, is the way they treat the climate crisis like any other story:
Then again, if you’re a top editor at the paper, McKay ventures, “are you really going to go into a meeting and go like, ‘Hey guys, I think we should put a headline that says, ‘We’re fucked.’”