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Don’t Look Up: Comedy as a spark for climate action

A thinly veiled parable of the climate crisis and government failure to act, the disaster comedy is the second-most watched Netflix original film in the streaming platform’s history — and the most-watched ever over a single week.

Don’t Look Up: Comedy as a spark for climate action
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We’re trying to tell you that the whole planet is about to be destroyed,” Ph.D student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) tells morning TV presenters in the film Don’t Look Up. When one of the hosts, played by Cate Blanchett, retorts that they “keep the bad news light,” the scientist who has identified a comet headed for Earth yells “we are all gonna die!” Meanwhile, populist politicians and social media influencers are telling the world: “Don’t look up.”

A thinly veiled parable of the climate crisis and government failure to act, the disaster comedy is the second-most watched Netflix original film in the streaming platform’s history — and the most-watched ever over a single week. The film has divided critics and public opinion. But it has inspired broad discussion, not only about the climate crisis, but the best way to communicate its urgency as the 2030 deadline for rapid emissions cuts nears. For George Marshall, founder of UK-based climate communications think tank Climate Outreach, the star-studded satire raises climate crisis consciousness with a unique analogy that transcends our preconceptions on the issue.

“It’s a film that is clearly about climate change that isn’t about climate change,” he said. “We know from a whole range of research that if you talk about climate change without triggering people’s existing assumptions and prejudices about it [then] people can deal with it.”

He describes a “moral complexity” around climate change and who is responsible for it that limits public engagement with the issue —a phenomenon Marshall refers to as “collective silence” in his book, “Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change.” This reticence also relates to the rise of climate denial and more polarised opinions on the issue, which one study argues can be traced, in part, to social identity.

But the satirical, overblown metaphor of a comet heading to Earth “gives it a clarity,” said Marshall of the challenge of communicating the growing scientific consensus on global heating. “It’s a really clever vehicle.”

DiCaprio who plays the film’s more reserved astronomer, is one of Hollywood’s most vocal climate activists. But until now, he had never found the right big screen vehicle to advocate about his climate concerns.

“I think we all looked at this as an incredibly unique gift,” he said about the film written and directed by Adam McKay, who also helmed the The Big Short, a film about the events that led to the 2008 global economic crisis. “We’d been wanting to get the message out there about the climate crisis and Adam really cracked the code with creating this narrative,” he said.

DiCaprio also wanted to make scientists the central figures in the film. “I wanted to tip my hat to people who devote their lives to this issue, who know what they’re talking about,” he said.

Climate scientist Peter Kalmus has been vocal in the media about his appreciation of the film, writing that it “captures the madness I see every day.” Having been “screaming into the void for 15 years and being largely ignored,” Kalmus, who works for NASA, said the film made him feel “like I had been seen.” But key to focusing attention on science was not the presentation of voluminous climate research but an outrageous comedic scenario.

This article was provided by Deutsche Welle

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