Maeve Higgins: Let's celebrate those creating successes on top of the heartbreak

Don’t Look Up reflects how a particular stratum of American society creates and reacts to climate chaos. It is one experience, one viewpoint, one story about how we face climate crises. There are many more, writes Maeve Higgins

Leonardo DiCaprio as Dr Randall Mindy and Jennifer Lawrence as Kate Dibiasky in the film 'Don't Look Up'. 

SPOILER ALERT: This piece mentions what happens at the end of the Netflix movie Don’t Look Up. Here it comes now: A small number of people in the US, politicians and tech billionaires, who supposedly own and control the most resources on the planet, fail to act against an existential threat to all life on Earth. There is a comet hurtling toward Earth, and despite repeated warnings and potential solutions offered by scientists, the comet hits, destroying all life.

The comet is an allegory for the climate crisis. The movie makers’ fear and rage about the climate crisis threatening Earth are channelled with creativity and humour. There are excellent jokes and set pieces. Don’t Look Up is beautiful and angry and full of amazing people at the top of their game doing great work.

It’s a satire about science and media and capitalism, at a time when satire about those huge interlocking topics has become ever more challenging to create.

It’s obvious why it’s become more difficult; Because our reality has become quite grotesque and close to parody itself. This movie is hilarious and very clever. Is it helpful? I doubt it.

You see, the stories we create and the stories we repeat often become real and become dominant and sometimes even become inevitable.

Movies are in line with Joan Didion’s devastating critique that we tell stories in order to live. We try to make sense of things, especially writers, by deciding which situations and images fit together to create a narrative.

We blunder into the wrong stories all the time in our effort to make sense of the world. Then, we stick to them, insisting they are authentic, pleading with others, or berating them when they don’t see it the way we see it.

Don’t Look Up reflects how a particular stratum of American society creates and reacts to climate chaos. It is one experience, one viewpoint, one story about how we face climate crises. There are many more.

We risk making a story defining by selecting and highlighting one. When one story is backed by the enormous star power and the vast resources of this movie and its distributor, along with the global dominance of American cultural products, there is a risk that we will come to believe that movie’s version of the truth.

At its core, this version is doom-laden and sees humanity as self-destructive. As the movie reaches its final, terrible last moment of annihilation, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Randall, asks a rhetorical question, his face awe-struck.

“We really did have everything, didn’t we?”

A local resident shows frustration as he holds an empty water hose during an attempt to extinguish forest fires approaching the village of Pefki on Evia (Euboea) island, Greece. The fires were seen as a consequence of our global climate change, a crisis that was used as an allegory of an incoming comet in the movie 'Don't Look Up' Picture: ANGELOS TZORTZINIS/AFP via Getty Images) 

We still do have everything, or at least enough. And while we do, we must be sure to tell other stories, stories with the courage to imagine a world that doesn’t burn, stories told with equal power, ferocity, and care.

I’m delighted the movie exists and grateful for the conversations it started within my own multi-generational family over the holidays. I worry that too many of those conversations went a little like this: “Oh, this is all true/we are behaving insanely/we should have listened.”

This reaction has got me thinking again about things I’ve been thinking about for many years through my work in comedy and climate, and migration.

I have constant questions about how best to join the dots for myself and others to take solid action in the fight for a safe future. This movie features scientists desperate to warn the world about the coming danger.

Several climate scientists and climate journalists have watched the movie and felt it resonate deeply — they have publicly confirmed that they, too, feel like nobody is listening to them.

And in a circular motion, Adam McKay, the writer and director of Don’t Look Up, is then sharing the scientists’ takes on social media and on it goes. But the thing is, most of us listen to scientists, and we understand them.

Despite the growing political divisions and the wildly anti-science stance a minority takes, most US people now accept that human-caused global warming is real, and we know that it’s already here.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes that scientists are well trusted by wider society. Of course, many of us feel the threat up close and personal now, too, floods and fires threaten our homes, not to mention more and worse tornadoes and hurricanes.

From what I can see, unlike the movie, many people truly do want to know what to do; they want to understand how to help and what actions to take. In many cases worthy of a hundred Hollywood movies, ordinary people have long worked together with their communities and either started or joined the battle against global warming and the people who profit from it.

 A giant globe hangs from the ceiling as delegates attend on day one of the Cop26 United Nations Climate Change Conference. Despite lofty rhetoric from the event, most left Glasgow with the impression of another lost opportunity for the planet.  Picture:  Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)

The good fight

In August of last year, Tara Houska tweeted: “15 days ago, I was shot by police with rubber bullets, mace, pepper balls paid for by Enbridge. I heard shouts, cries, and gasping coughing, punctuated by the sound of munitions firing and a huge drill out of a sci-fi movie boring thru the river we were there to protect.”

Canadian oil giant Enbridge was approved for its Line 3 project in 2018, and that is when Houska founded the Giniw Collective, an “indigenous women, 2-Spirit led resistance to protect the Earth”.

She and other activists have been living in the woods close to the site in Minnesota on and off since then, trying to stop the drilling and protect their water and wild rice.

Although they make up less than 5% of the world’s population, indigenous people protect 80% of our planet’s biodiversity. What a story that is.

In press interviews around the movie, director Adam McKay wears his heart on his sleeve. Like many of us, he is desperately concerned with the future of humanity and wants to find a way to help make it better. He makes movies, is a storyteller, and spoke to a reporter from Fast Company; he talked about his longing to make a movie about the climate crisis.

“And then the biggest of all the big stories, without exaggeration, empirically, the collapse of the livable atmosphere while we sit on our hands kind of getting knocked around by our distraction culture. So I think what allowed me to do comedy with [Don’t Look Up] was that I was going to do comedy about what it feels like to be alive right now.”

And he did so with huge success.

Don’t Look Up is a comedy about what it feels like to be alive right now for some of us. Others are fighting and organising and leading, they are all around the world, and they come from all walks of life. They are working with whatever and whomever they can to save a livable planet for future generations. They are creating successes, big and small, on top of the heartbreak.

That’s who I want to hear about, that’s who I want to answer the question: How does it feel to be alive right now? We need to know that story too.