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Don’t Look Up Climate Change

Dooming Boomers, Nihilistic Teenagers and Underfunded Scientists Against/For the World

Georg Gruber    University of Graz, Austria    

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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.

Published
Feb. 6, 2024
Accepted
Nov. 25, 2023
Submitted
Sept. 15, 2023
Language
EN

Keywords: Climate crisis communicationClimate crisis in filmAllegorical satireEcocriticismPopular cultureDon’t Look Up

Copyright: © 2023 Georg Gruber. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.