Media politics - never looking up

 By Zeinab Hassan

   The new work of Adam McKay, author of "Vice" and "The Big Short", is not as much fun and comedic, but much more angry.

   Graduate student Kate (Jennifer Lawrence) is working on her doctoral thesis when she notices an unknown space object on astronomical instruments. It turns out that a huge comet flies directly to Earth - and if nothing is done, then it will kill all life on the planet with a 99.7% probability. Enlisting the support of NASA, scientists go to meet the president (Meryl Streep), but she is more interested in dealing with political scandals than with a global threat. People simply ignore the news in the press, and when the government nevertheless begins to act, the ideas are, frankly, idiotic.

   In recent years, Adam McKay has made films in a very specific way: he took an important but difficult topic for the average viewer - like the financial crisis (The Big Short) or the mechanisms of the White House (Vice) - and explained it in simple words, with humorous infographics and other postmodern jokes that are usually devoted to long boring documentaries.

In Don't Look Up, he seems to follow the same style on the surface: semi-documentary, biting dialogue, sudden stock footage and pop-up captions that seem to break the fabric of the film and bring the conversation to reality. But the events are now fictitious, a kind of fantasy on a topic that is understandable to absolutely any layman: a caustic satire on pandemic reality, in which the government ignores obvious threats, and people are looking for conspiracy plots where everything is actually transparent.

   If earlier McKay's dramatic foppishness was justified by the heaviness of the material, now it looks somewhat foreign: as if they are trying too hard to explain to you what you knew before the start of the picture. Yes, the government won't lift a finger until it's backed up against a wall. Yes, the mainstream media is trying to make any news "comfortable" and do not want to scare people, even when it is absolutely necessary. Pop stars are empty shells, military men are pompous idiots, multibillionaires like Musk are not the saviors of humanity at all, but megalomaniac sociopaths. Conservatives and liberals only know how to swear on the Internet and make memes, they are not enough for anything else.  Not to mention that the film has a big problem with the latter: “Don't Look Up” in one footage demonstrates how the actions of the characters affect the global network, and it is clear that the author does not understand the culture of the Internet at all.

   For two hours, "Don't Look Up" throws truisms at the viewer, builds an exaggerated portrait of a post-COVID (or pre-meteorite) society, where all familiar attributes are twisted to the maximum. Sometimes it's funny, almost always terribly ridiculous - but very rarely smart. Here's the trick: this time, the director doesn't seem to be trying to be smart. His main weapon now is a captivating, sincere anger at everyone he so persistently ridicules. Politicians, businessmen, ordinary people, even liberal Hollywood, just looking for an excuse to create a new blockbuster on a topical issues. And not to forget, media - that has huge powers but carelessly putting it away under the control of politicians and businessmen, ignoring the whole importance of itself!

And so we find that the media’s political agenda-setting power mainly stems from news coverage of domestic issues. News on Europeanized issues have no impact at all on the more substantial parliamentary agendas that may initiate decision-making processes.

   Actually the author shows a humanity that should not survive - and we, as a spectator, are surprised to catch ourself thinking that we are also rooting for a comet.

"Do not look up" by its very existence says a lot about our world. Because how much did you have to bring an author like Adam McKay - a man obviously not stupid and sensitive to what is happening around - to drop all the formalities and make the movie so straightforward in its message? As if he was just tired of explaining something and realized his own impotence in front of the viewer, and therefore decided to simply kill humanity to hell, finally showing all his hopeless stupidity in bright colors.

   Nevertheless, the author is very clear that the power of the news media to set a nation’s agenda, to focus public attention on a few key public issues, is an immense and well-documented influence. Not only do people acquire factual information about public affairs from the news media, readers and viewers also learn how much importance to attach to a topic on the basis of the emphasis placed on it in the news. 

So, if we understand that media is influential in setting the public agenda, we also must understand the various devices media uses to "report" or more specifically, "frame" the news. Media framing analysis goes beyond identifying which issues are important to think about, and explores the parameters of the discussion itself—the words, symbols, overall content, and tone used to frame the topic.

   More to say, the uneven intonation of the film mirrors the mood of the characters well - the whole film is running in circles and desperately trying to prove something to someone, either falling into painful apathy, or losing their way due to fallen popularity, they still come to humility with the world and themselves in the end. The lyrical, almost religious finale is strongly knocked out of everything that was in the picture before, and at the same time it feels the only correct one. And for this particular film, and, apparently, for humanity in general.