Turkeys clucking up and drowning in a rainstorm is an urban legend. But maybe that’s why President Orlean, played by Meryl Streep, told her flock not to look up in the new movie, Don’t Look Up. Maybe she figured that if she didn’t, most of them (us) were as confused* as turkeys, waiting to drown in a meteor shower. We might just spend our days looking up searching for that one in a zillion monster rocks zooming toward us with a wide grin and a sign on it: HEADED TO EARTH, OUTTA MY WAY! instead of looking around at the real disasters of climate change.
If the movie wasn’t intended as an allegorical black comedy, the conversation between Prez Orlean, with a filterless Pall Mall Skinny dangling out of the corner of her mouth, and her minions (us), could have gone something like this,
“You naughty* turkeys, don’t waste your time looking up OR down, instead, look around. If you do, I’ll tell you what you might see, but probably not. You’d see a million winter grassland fires in Colorado, a million winter tornadoes in Kentucky, a million Sequoias burning in California, a million flooded subway tunnels in New York City, a million levees breached in New Orleans, a million koalas burning in Australia.”
We ask, in unison, “All because of an asteroid?”
“Nope, not in a zillion years,” the Prez sez.
“Coincidence?” we ask.
“Nope,” the Prez sez, again.
“Humans?” we ask.
“Righteo, ole chaps,” the Prez sez, and again.
“Whaaaaa?” we’d say. “Humans? How?” Pretending to be the sharpest tool in the shed, like Professor Mindy, played by Leonard DiCaprio, she continues,
“We humans changed the climate, but we might as well have been struck by an asteroid. Maybe it would wake us up if we weren’t all going to die,” Prez Orlean sez once again, taking a shallow, fake inhale, drag on her filterless, Pall Mall Skinnys.
Don’t Look Up contains, in my estimation, a teachable moment not fully exploited. The allegorical blackish humor meteor-climate change and “Crisis of Democracy” messages has Prez Orlean masquerading as a female Prez T** to make her naughty* point. She advises us to not look up just as Prez T** advise(d) us to do all kinds of insane and dangerous things like taking bleach injections followed by wrapping ourselves in a Confederate flag before dying. These are the black humor subjects in the movie and obvious, but the fact that they are strongly connected isn’t so readily apparent.
I have a well-educated friend who maintains the democracy crisis is much more imminent than the climate change crisis. Perhaps, but I think they are closely linked and therefore might be addressed simultaneously.
Meteors, climate change, dinosaurs and the democracy crisis are all connected by truth. Currently the acceptance of facts and truths has fallen on hard times. People can’t seem to distinguish facts and what’s true and what’s not, from their opinions and beliefs. The once bedrock ground floor of truth, particularly scientific and historic, is turning to sand and the stone house is becoming a house of cards. We may believe that man and dinosaurs strolled down the Boise Greenbelt together or that the climate change has always been a big deal, but most people in their “heart of hearts” know both are BS. I think. If they don’t, they are living on Primrose Lane. At least they believe in dinosaurs and meteors. I think.
The story of a giant meteor strike causing dinosaur extinction is true,andthey have been scientifically linked for about 40 years. Sixty-six million years ago, Chicxulub, a huge mother of a meteor slammed Earth just north the Yucatan Peninsula and created cataclysmic monster tsunamis, swamping coastlines and creating firestorms that likely raged across the entire globe. Chicxulub was estimated to be comparable to billions of Hiroshima A-bombs. The impact blasted large amounts of dust and vaporized rock into the air, which, along with the soot from all those fires, blocked the sun, destroying the vegetation. The dinosaurs that fed on that vegetation and the dinosaurs that fed on those dinosaurs became all extinct within a few thousand years, as was most all life, signaling the end of the Mesozoic. The Age of the Dinosaurs came to an end because of a meteor and ultimately, climate change.
People love scary science fiction and dinosaur movies, (e.g., Jurassic Park, Star Wars, The War of the Worlds). Pairing the two, e.g. Jurassic Wars would make an even more appealing and exciting movie. This has been done but as documentaries, which are not usually watched by the average wage earner, or even the sub-average wage earner, which represent a large segment of the ‘Merikan society.
I think Don’t Look Up could have capitalized on this relationship much more than they did and perhaps people would see how the importance of truth is critical to survival. Linking that to the death of democracy seems a stretch but not impossible because if people realize that Trump is to the death of democracy as meteors were to dinosaurs, maybe it will sink in. The big difference is that dinosaurs had zero control over their own extinction. To the best of my knowledge, if we knowingly ignore that fact that we do have control over our own fate, we would be the first species to intentionally self-destruct. Clucking up and drowning and having foot fetishes are fun hobbies but we need to focus on surviving climate change and that means focusing on the world around us.
* I previously used two politically incorrect terms, but the Snoop Id and then the Dumb Ball societies got on my case, so I decided to be politically correct this time. In past years, before I joined the Near Octogenarian Society, I was brash and insensitive. Not no mow. (Sorry, Lawnmower’s Inc.)
** Approved by Mr. T.