![]() ![]() In a mid-credits sequence, chainsmoking President Orlean ( Meryl Streep) and baby-voiced, uncanny-valley-looking billionaire tech mogul Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) escape the planetary apocalypse on a space ship outfitted for the super-rich. According to director McKay in a new interview with Variety, the film’s final moments were actually wrought out of the actors’ improv. Endless social media debates over the movie’s quality or scientific accuracy - it’s about a comet on a planet-annihilating collision course toward Earth - aside, viewers who stayed for the comedy’s mid- and post-credits scenes were in for some wild surprises. Community, not rugged individualism, is the only answer as cataclysm comes for us.Editor’s Note: The following story contains spoilers for the ending of “ Don’t Look Up.”Īdam McKay’s cosmic end-times satire “Don’t Look Up” quickly became the most-viewed original movie on Netflix over the holiday weekend. He runs from pleasure - his seat on Peter’s Ark - and towards the pain of watching the world end.īut he’s not alone. But because, in the end, he defies his inner “field mouse,” trained by Happy Meal culture to always avoid discomfort, no matter the cost. Mindy’s death is the only prediction that doesn’t come true. On its face, "Don’t Look Up" does appear to be preaching to the choir.īut maybe that’s because the “choir,” those of us who think we’re motivated by “high, ethical beliefs” like Mindy while still finding endless ways to justify or cooperate with a system that wants to kill us, are singing the song of capitalism in a different key.ĭr. Mindy, before revealing that BASH’s algorithm knows he’s going to die alone.īut what he’s describing is a feature, not a glitch.Ĭigarettes or booze, Happy Meals or happy news shows, likes or subscribes brand culture doesn’t care, any addiction will do, as long as it feeds our collective appetite for pleasure > pain, which keeps the wheels of capitalism turning. ![]() You think you’re motivated by beliefs, high ethical beliefs. The people watching and celebrating this film, the ones who already agree that something’s rotten in the state of Denmark, need this message the most.īecause we, too, have bought a branded lie - that Sir Bezermuskjob is the problem (or anti-vaxxers or climate change deniers or Trump or Fox News or, or, or…) not the capitalism they rode in on. In the reviews of “Don’t Look Up,” I’ve read again and again how “the people who need this movie, won’t watch it” but I disagree. Sound familiar? Branding trumps science by spinning facts into “controversy.” If science had historically been dedicated to the making of new facts, the industry campaign now sought to develop specific strategies to “unmake” a scientific fact.” - Allan M. It moved aggressively into a new domain, the production of scientific knowledge, not for purposes of research and development but, rather, to undo what was now known: that cigarette smoking caused lethal disease. “The tobacco industry's program to engineer the science relating to the harms caused by cigarettes marked a watershed in the history of the industry. Brandt, PhD wrote in a 2012 article for the American Journal of Public Health entitled, “Inventing Conflicts of Interest: A History of Tobacco Industry Tactics.” This moment is both foreshadowing for the film’s ending and a callback - to tobacco makers like Philip Morris, who sponsored study upon study in the 1950s-90s, confusing consumers about the perils of smoking “to undermine and distort the emerging science,” as Allan M. The president smugly smoking is a smoking gun. Isherwell may feign surprise when he’s alerted to news about the coming cataclysm, but make no mistake, he allows the scientists to be branded as its discoverers, because the truth is bad for business. Randall Mindy and Kate Dibiasky didn’t discover the comet. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence’s characters, Dr. Sure, he’s the poster Boy Boss for compassionless capitalism, but he had a large team of the world’s leading scientists and technologists helping him develop the algorithm that would predict their own demise to 96.5% accuracy. “Life, without the stress of living,” was a warning disguised as a slick slogan.īASH used branding to lull the world into a false sense of security, so it could bleed them dry before literally bleeding them dry.īut Isherwell wasn’t alone in this. But what makes that scene all the more ominous is that, by the end of the film, we know that Isherwell had the data to predict exactly how the children of the world would die. This is almost too real to be satire, as anyone who’s ever had a Happy Meal, and then returned to McDonald’s in adulthood - against their better judgment - because it inexplicably tastes like childhood, can attest. ![]()
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