by Thom Hamer
Don’t Look Up is the movie of a generation. Grown up in an absurd media landscape, characterized by superficiality, irony, informational fragmentation and all those postmodern qualities, all the while being haunted by major catastrophes like climate change and terrorism, we are in search of something. What it is, we don’t really know, but we need to do something. Meanwhile, our institutions are still under the incompetent yoke of postmodernity. Adam McKay’s movie embodies this struggle, expressing climate change anxieties, amplified through the genre of dark comedy.
ATYPICAL DARK COMEDY
This is not dark comedy as we know it. Normally, the darkness is ridiculed, made frivolous, but not here. It isn’t anything like Seth Rogen’s This Is The End (2013), another dark comedy about the end of the world, one that is apocalyptic in a more biblical sense. There, the humor is in the slapstick fatalities, among other things. All in all, we don’t feel emotionally invested in the characters; we’re just having a laugh.
IRONY TURNED IN ON ITSELF
In Don’t Look Up, the contrary is the case. The gravity of the situation is maintained through the comical. How is that possible? It’s simple: our culture has become so anesthetized by the trivializing logic of mainstream media, social media included, that it has slowly rendered itself ridiculous, especially in the face of serious problems like climate change. It is an ironic sensibility turned in on itself.
By expressing sincerity and earnestness in the context of ironic media, Adam McKay manages to ironize the ironic itself. That’s post-irony par excellence; hence, a paradigmatic case of metamodernism.
This text was written by Thom Hamer, an existential philosopher and artist working in the United Kingdom. All rights reserved.
Thom Hamer 