Let’s try to read the movie Don’t Look Up
by Adam McMay (Netflix), as a reflection on communication: in the emergency news and social networks go crazy
Let’s try to read the movie Don’t Look Up
by Adam McMay (Netflix), as a reflection on communication, leaving aside the satirical vein that, in the catastrophic plot, tries to muffle the apocalyptic tones. Thus, Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), an obscure Michigan astronomer, discovers thanks to the intuition of a doctoral student, Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), a huge comet like Everest that is about to hit the earth and destroy it. Humanity has six months to save itself. For political reasons, however, the first news is given by the awkward prof. Mindy in a talk in the morning, “The Daily Rip”, hosted by two journalists (she is Cate Blanchett) who make lightness their expression. It is enough that the message ends up in the wrong context for a sensational derailment of meaning to take place, which social networks immediately take over, through incompetent comments, posts, tweets, memes, various delusions.
Will “scientific” news resist the new phenomenon of “collective participation”? As the comet advances inexorably, hysteria takes hold of everyone: rationality collides with emotionality, science with deniers, common sense against the cult of the algorithm: some shout “vaccinate!” (sorry, I was wrong), they shout “Look up!”, look up at that one, be vigilant; the others instead invite us to look away from the imminent danger: «Don’t look up!». Even the White House (the president is played by a dazed Meryl Streep) is a prisoner between these two fires. Faced with such a global and disastrous unforeseen event, communication overflows with ambushes and contradictions.
Especially in dangerous situations, it suffers from “structural asymmetry” of the actors involved: each has his say convinced that he is on the right side. Hence the radicalization and the impossibility of convincing the other.
December 27, 2021 (change December 28, 2021 | 15:09)
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