Don’t Look Up Climate Change

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DC Field	Value
dc.identifier	ECF_article_15270
dc.title	Don’t Look Up Climate Change. Dooming Boomers, Nihilistic Teenagers and Underfunded Scientists Against/For the World
dc.contributor.author	Gruber Georg
dc.publisher	Edizioni Ca’ Foscari - Venice University Press, Fondazione Università Ca’ Foscari
dc.type	Research Article
dc.language.iso	en
dc.identifier.uri	http://edizionicafoscari.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/english-literature/2023/10/dont-look-up-climate-change/
dc.description.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.
dc.relation.ispartof	English Literature
dc.relation.ispartof	Vol. 10 \| December 2023
dc.issued	2024-02-06
dc.dateAccepted	2023-11-25
dc.dateSubmitted	2023-09-15
dc.identifier.issn
dc.identifier.eissn	2420-823X
dc.rights	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.identifier.doi	10.30687/EL/2420-823X/2023/10/004
dc.peer-review	yes
dc.subject	Allegorical satire
dc.subject	Climate crisis communication
dc.subject	Climate crisis in film
dc.subject	Don’t Look Up
dc.subject	Ecocriticism
dc.subject	Popular culture

Research Article
open access peer reviewed

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

Keywords: Climate crisis communication • Popular culture • Ecocriticism • Don’t Look Up • Allegorical satire • Climate crisis in film

permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/EL/2420-823X/2023/10/004

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.

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