Like some of you, I spent one cold winter night watching Adam McKay’s latest film “Don’t Look Up.” Over the course of two and a half hours, McKay criticizes growing populist hysteria, COVID deniers and inaction surrounding climate change through a metaphor: a comet headed straight for Earth.
With no regard for storytelling and proper pacing, McKay issues commentaries on topics ranging from rich Pentagon officials’ petty greed to the everlasting elitism in government and from nepotism in cabinet selections to the god-complexes of Elon Musk-types and so much more. He even manages to highlight the perverted dynamic of the professor getting credit for the student’s work.
The film fits in a lot of narratives and meta-commentaries to suggest our fixation on everything and nothing and fallibility toward inaction are precisely what will endanger us when natural disaster strikes. Within those commentaries, though, I constantly found issues with one that permeated the entire film: Meryl Streep’s character President Orlean.
Representation in film matters. In film, seeing a woman break the glass ceiling is a radical form of normalizing potential in our current society. For that matter, I was personally excited to see Meryl Streep in the trailers. And, I must add, her performance steals the show as always. Her character, though, is less exciting.
As opposed to the competent Selina Meyer in “Veep,” Orlean’s presidential character does far more harm for representation than good. President Orlean is presented as an airy, self-absorbed official who nominates her intolerable child to an astoundingly powerful political position.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s meant to. McKay is obvious in his parallels to our former president. However, much of Donald Trump’s dull-wittedness can be boiled down to toxic masculinity. An obsession with public perception and a tendency to take action only when deemed politically beneficial were at the crux of his regime. For Trump, who was obsessed with being perceived as a tough guy, these were male traits. For some reason, McKay manipulated them into female stereotypes.
It’s sexist. As Orlean nominates male pornstars she’s attracted to to the Supreme Court and makes sexual comments on the faux-hero astronaut’s body after a political rally, McKay propagandizes actual male historical incompetence into a symptom of femininity. Trump actually nominated still-accused sexual abuser Brett Kavanaugh and a severely unqualified Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. The consequence is that the viewer’s perspective on growing populism and MAGA/QAnon-like hysteria in the film, which is a clear parallel to what actually exists, is now distorted by the perception that a woman did this.
Representation in film matters. We still have not seen a woman lead this country, and I’m confident that anyone who does overcome the patriarchy’s obstacles will be far more qualified and competent than what we’ve seen in the past. That is precisely why McKay’s president is agonizing to watch in a film’s mockery of our current political climate. The mess we are in was fostered by men in power, but McKay places the blame on a woman so he can slip in a few cheap jokes.
McKay’s film visualizes the destruction of humanity with a comet to simplify his message: Do something before it is too late. That is why he shows the Elon Musk archetype as a failure at the end, and why Leonardo DiCaprio’s character leaves the political sphere after sensing imminent doom. “Don’t Look Up” is intended to make us uncomfortable and inspire us to take action as the characters do. But the film has consequences, and portraying female ineptitude as its catalyst is damaging. It fosters fear surrounding women in power and a visualization of false dangers. If McKay wanted to do the right thing, he would have shown who really created the mess: men.
