Is Don’t Look Up an Ironic Masterpiece?
"I apologize for such a long letter. I didn't have time to write a short one."
My intention is to write essays of around 1,500 words, though my first two attempts have run closer to 2,500. I fear this may be a trend. Moreover, in both cases I ended up with a few hundred extra words culled from early drafts. That’s not a problem. I love cutting words. It’s part of the process. But in some cases, I’m forced to abandon ideas with which I’m not yet done .
In the essay on Don’t Look Up, I wanted to deal with some of the claims I’ve seen suggesting that the movie is, in fact, great because it encapsulates the very things it is critiquing.
This is an interesting idea. I’m not quite ready to buy it, but it is worth further exploration. Below are some scattered thoughts on the topic.
1.
I once watched half of a movie called Bully, only half because I couldn’t make it through the whole.
Bully was directed by Larry Clark, who first came to some renown based on Tulsa a book of black and white photos documenting teenagers “having sex, shooting up drugs, and playing with guns.”1 Clark’s focus on these themes continued in his film debut, Kids, which was met with instant notoriety and led to an impressive directing career that today includes nine feature films.
It’s New York setting, the fact that it birthed the careers of Chloe Sevigny, Rosario Dawson and screenwriter Harmony Korine, and its release closely coinciding with one of the high points of mainstream AIDS hysteria all contributed to making Kids a phenomenon. That phenomenon may be more interesting than the movie itself is, which has aged better as artifact than as art.
Bully was Clark’s third movie. It tells the story of a group of listless Florida teenagers who plot to kill one of their friends. I don’t remember much about the movie except that I found it a bit boring and pointless, so I stopped watching. It later occurred to me that the only reason I kept watching as long as I did was the numerous scenes of young, attractive people having sex. At that moment I wondered if that had not been the whole point of the movie. Perhaps the heady mix of teenage ennui and unchecked sexuality that took these kids down an utterly pointless and self-destructive path was best captured in a tedious film that itself feels listless and a bit self-destructive to watch.
Some have accused Clark of being exploitive. I don’t have a strong opinion on this, but I understand the accusation. Clark’s films often feel uninterested in their characters, more interested in eliciting an audience reaction.
I’m not ready to call Bully a good movie, but there is a truth in Clark’s work. Youth and sex are their own ends. Neither needs much outside justification, as evidenced by how often one or the other can lead directly to avoidable danger. Sometimes it’s enough just to point the camera and let the audience watch. That said, if you want to see these themes explored in a much more interesting and visually compelling way, I suggest that you watch American Honey, a movie that is more artfully shot than either Kids or Bully, and whose danger is palpable in ways that Clark never quite pulls off. Just look at how beautiful the trailer is:
Whatever we think about Bully or Larry Clark, the question remains. Are there ironic masterpieces?
This one question is actually two questions (at least). The first is whether the artist overtly intends their work to be a form of ironic commentary. The second question is whether the intention even matters. I will return to these, but first I want to say a few more things about Don’t Look Up.
2.
It would be hard to make a bad movie given Adam McKay’s skill as a director and Don’t Look Up’s stellar cast, all of whom give very good performances. Leonardo DiCaprio is great as a reluctant media heartthrob, a kind of funhouse mirror version of his own reality. Jennifer Lawrence is pitch perfect, if one note.2 Rob Morgan is a steadying presence at the center of the surrounding madness and the rest of the supporting cast do a great job, as well.
While Meryl Streep may indeed be The Goat, I thought Jonah Hill had the standout performance. Streep’s performance as President Orlean is fine, but Donald Trump is himself such a living, breathing deconstruction of everything wrong with America that he is almost impossible to parody.
Hill plays what can most succinctly be described as the President’s fuckboy son and Chief of Staff. And he shines in all his character’s Richard Mille-wearing, Birkin bag-carrying, mommy-obsessed affectations. His character, with its overarching fecklessness may be the soul of the movie. Consider these lines, delivered in front of a crowd of rabid Trump Orlean supporters:
There’s three types of American people: There are you, the working class. Us, the cool rich. And then them.
Hill has more than one of these perfect moments, including is a good short scene in the latter part of the movie when destruction appears imminent and everything is falling apart in real time. Hill’s character decides to say a prayer:
I’ve been noticing a lot of prayers for people and… I commend that. But I also want to give a prayer… for stuff… There's dope stuff, like material stuff, like sick apartments and watches, and cars, um, and clothes and shit that could all go away and I don't wanna see that stuff go away. So I'm gonna say a prayer for that stuff. Amen.
It is a good scene, made better by the quiet desperation of Hill’s performance. But I think it could have been a great scene.
In the previous essay, I referenced Dr. Strangelove as a useful measure for considering satirical films. What I appreciated during a recent re-watch of Dr. Strangelove is how much time the movie allows its characters to reveal themselves. It is on those revelations, that even the most absurd characters end up only one or two steps shy of persuasive. Consider Sterling Hayden’s monologue about why he put the world on the path to nuclear war.
Hayden’s character, General Jack D. Ripper (yes, that’s his name), is batshit crazy. So much so, that “precious bodily fluids” has become an epithet for batshit crazy beliefs. But because Ripper is batshit, Kubrick doesn’t have to tell you. What’s more, he starts off sounding coherent, if deranged, but then slowly veers off into the absurd. That brief arc is what makes the scene so good.3
Let’s return to Hill’s prayer to stuff. He could have started off by referencing basic necessities, food, clothing, shelter. He could have then moved on to the class of middle-class conveniences. And then, he could have ended up at “sick apartments and watches…” I think that would have been a much better scene, as it would have subverted the audience’s expectations, if only for a moment, before showing how an appreciation for the basic comforts in life can quickly escalate into an unhealthy desire for luxury and status. Not only would that have been a much better scene aesthetically, but it would have been a much more insightful critique of what stops us from taking stronger action on climate change.
Some of this comes down to pacing. Contemporary movies have faster cuts, leaving less room for these kinds of compelling monologues. But I think there’s more to it. Don’t Look Up doesn’t allow itself to have moments like this, because it’s written as a polemic.
3.
In the previous essay, I also mentioned The Big Short, which is a much better Adam McKay film, though it does have one major flaw. That movie goes to great pains to paint a picture of the financial crisis as resulting from an overarching greed and an inability to manage risk up and down the financial ladder. From the mortgage brokers originating home loans to the banks packaging and selling those loans to the investment banks creating CDOs and synthetic CDOs to the institutional investors buying all of those products, they were all incentivized not to look to closely, so most of them never did.
This disbursal of blame throughout the system is one of the reasons the movie work so well. But The Big Short is sentimental. It has to be. The movie’s protagonists become incredibly wealthy from a horrible event. Like every film, it has to strive for some kind of moral center.
In the original book, author Michael Lewis references a phrase used by Michael Burry to describe the wider problem. Burry calls it “the extension of credit by instrument.” What he means is that, in the absence of a real increase in middle class buying power, the financial markets cooked up a bunch of instruments that allowed people to buy more house than they could otherwise afford.
The movie never uses this phrase. Instead, its main character delivers a number of jeremiads about the poor taking the blame for the financial crisis and being its ultimate victims. We don’t need to get too much into the accuracy of this view. It is enough to notice how it differs from Burry’s more nuanced take.
The Big Short needs working-class innocence given the culpability of the protagonists. Don’t Look Up holds a similar view, that the median American is an empty vessel who can be poured full of this or that ideology, can be led towards either salvation or damnation based on whom they choose to believe. It’s not exactly true. But it is a true representation of how the chattering classes thinks. After all, what is Hollywood if not “the cool rich?”
4.
I don’t know whether there are ironic masterpieces. I can only begin to grasp towards an answer.
There are certainly moments in Don’t Look Up that reach a kind of meta-level sublimity. The line about the “cool rich” is one. And when Jennifer Lawrence looks into the camera and shrilly screams, “we’re all going to die,” it does seems like an avatar for the whole movie.
The second part of the question, about intentions, is equally elusive. From what I can tell, McKay was trying to make a straight-forward parody and any ironic, meta-level commentary is unintentional. How much does that matter?
If you engage with the field of literary criticism, you will encounter the issue of authorial intent, which grapples with how much a work of art is an explicit representation of the author and how much it ought to be evaluated independently, as its own thing. These discussions are all very interesting, if somewhat … self-indulgent. They tend to get absorbed into larger debates over which methodological approach to criticism is superior.
Lucky for me that I am not an academic. I don’t have to deal with any of those ideological/methodological turf battles. I can simply have a view. And my view is that yes, a work of art is a thing-in-itself that ought to be evaluated on its place in the world. But, part of that evaluation should be a consideration what the artist was trying to do and how successful he or she was.
Authorial intent is part of the story, but it’s not the whole story.
So no, I don’t really believe in ironic masterpieces, at least not in the sense being currently considered. The flaws of Don’t Look Up are exactly that, flaws. Though, they may be instructive flaws.
What I do believe is that culture is topography and art is part of the landscape. Art exists as both a part of the world and as apart from the world. This is a paradox, but great art manages to occupy both of those positions at once in a way that helps to resolves that paradox, if only for a moment.
Works like Bully and Don’t Look Up do the opposite. They trigger an uncanny valley effect in that hey resemble the world they depict but are off in small details. They seem kind of true, but also kind of artificial. They heighten the paradox.
All that said, even art that is not great can be OK. It can serve as a useful reminder that it is up to us to negotiate the author’s intent with the independent reality of the creation. It us up to us to contextualize. That’s what it means to be a viewer, to be a reader, to be a consumer of the myriad of content that assails us daily.
It is also a reminder that some works of art give us the space to contextualize, while others crowd us with forced meaning. If I have anything interesting to say in this essay, it is perhaps that we should try harder to detach from the latter and seek more of the former.
The character, not Lawrence. Anyone who has seen Winter’s Bone knows what kind of performance she can give.
The arc is helped along by Peter Sellers, who plays Royal Air Force Captain Mandrake, the character who confronts Ripper. There is something perfect about how Seller’s self-effacing British stoicism contrasts Sterling Hayden’s hard-boiled demeanor.
For an Ironic Masterpiece, one could do worse than to look at Skyfall, a movie plotted by Television Writers, who know what they are doing, in terms of irony -- "what are we doing with this type of spy, after the Cold War is over?" and in terms of pacing and penny-pinching.
A masterpiece, indeed, for an action movie.