Don’t Look Up Climate Change
Dooming Boomers, Nihilistic Teenagers and Underfunded Scientists Against/For the World
abstract
Representations of the global climate crisis have permeated popular culture for over half a decade. We passively watch the environmental crisis unfold in entertainment media as the ecological collapse continues to forge on, seemingly inexorably. Adam McKay’s satirical apocalypse film Don’t Look Up (2021) delineates generational differences in social/political activism and non‑activism, participation in social media discussions about climate change, blaming others and taking responsibility for the climate emergency. This article shows that the film’s allegorical climate apocalypse represents a satire of intergenerational (climate) crisis communication, misinformation, and denial in contemporary US‑American news, popular media, and political discourse. The movie achieves this through intergenerational ideas and values and a satirical allegory that represents the climate crisis in various discursive fields.
Keywords: Allegorical satire • Climate crisis communication • Ecocriticism • Climate crisis in film • Don’t Look Up • Popular culture