Don't Look Up

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0:00:04.1 Landry Ayres: Welcome to Pop & Locke. I’m Landry Ayres.

0:00:05.5 Aaron Powell: And I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:08.2 Landry Ayres: Well, boil my giblets and call me Chicken Little because my stars, the sky is falling. But fear not, because we have brought three wise friends to join us here for the end of the world, including research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Centre for Constitutional Studies and co-​host of Libertarianism.org’s own podcast, Free Thoughts, Trevor Burrus.

0:00:33.4 Trevor Burrus: Thanks for having me back.

0:00:34.8 Landry Ayres: Director of Cato’s project on emerging technologies, Matthew Feeney.

0:00:38.9 Matthew Feeney: Happy to be here.

0:00:40.7 Landry Ayres: And what’s this? Deputy managing editor at Reason and traitor, to me personally, Natalie Dowzicky.

0:00:49.8 Natalie Dowzicky: I’m back. [chuckle]

0:00:51.7 Aaron Powell: Thank you, thank you for having me on my first co-​hosting gig at Pop & Locke. It’s a little odd doing it with Natalie on the call, but I’ll try not to mess it up.

0:01:02.3 Landry Ayres: She’s watching.

0:01:03.2 Natalie Dowzicky: I’m totally judging your performance. [chuckle]

0:01:06.8 Aaron Powell: It seems like the biggest question people have had about Don’t Look Up, the one that sparked the most conversation, and so the one that I will use to spark our episode today is just what is this movie about in the first place?

0:01:21.8 Matthew Feeney: I think at first glance, it’s a pretty obvious commentary on science and politics, particularly with… As a sort of lesson about climate change seems to be like the obvious comparison, where there is a scientist have identified a obvious catastrophic event in the future, and the only thing that is halting sensible, well-​known mitigation efforts is stupid politicians. And the movie is about that, basically. And in this film, the catastrophe is not climate change, it’s a comet that scientists played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence have identified, and the stupid president played by Meryl Streep is unwilling to take it seriously and she’s more concerned with her poll numbers and events unfold accordingly.

0:02:21.6 Trevor Burrus: As Matthew said, there’s two things it’s about. One is the kind of hitting you in the face with a hammer of climate change analogy, which is… We can get more into whether that works as analogy for climate change or whether it works as analogy for COVID, but I think where it does work is a commentary on our current politics. So what it’s really about is… For me, the comparison is Armageddon, which I think is 1998, if I remember correctly, versus Don’t Look Up. And the way that we view our political systems and what we do in Armageddon versus the way we view our political systems in Don’t Look Up, ’cause in Armageddon it’s this massive, collaborative, let’s go beat the asteroid or comet, and in Don’t Look Up, it’s this divisive, schismatic, hatred-​filled, ignorance-​filled parable told by the film makers, which of course is self-​aggrandising toward the filmmakers themselves, and the people who realise what’s happening versus the people who don’t realise what’s happening. So it’s multiple levels of what it works on, but I think mostly it’s a commentary on our current political system, and that way it actually kind of works.

0:03:30.4 Natalie Dowzicky: I also think the response to the movie was on a bunch of different levels. So you could see people taking a very surface-​level and looking at it as kind of like hit you over the head, like Trevor was just saying, with their message. And I think the response to the movie is probably indicative… Or not indicative. I would say there was such a large response on both… Or from a variety of view points because of the cast. Feeney mentioned the big cast they were able to get. I’m still kind of shocked that they were able to get that many big names on a film like this, especially for like… I’m thinking, especially for the smaller parts too, like Timothee Chalamet’s, his part is basically pointless and very small. And it’s rare that you see big name actors like that in films that are more niche, I would say, like this, but I guess that was kind of… I think that’s what… The cast is why I think it got such a large response in general, honestly.

0:04:37.9 Aaron Powell: It does seem that in interviews, a lot of the cast members talked about how… Talked about this being a parable for climate change and how important it was to get people to wake up, and so I wonder if that played into, given the politics of Hollywood, its ability to attract these kind of people. It’s like, “You’re gonna appear in this movie with big name stars and a big name director talking about this important thing and making fun of the people that you wanna make fun of.” But I wanted to go a bit more into the what is this about in the climate change, because I think that’s gonna be unintentionally one of the most interesting things about the movie from kind of a meta perspective. So not from like what the movie thought it was trying to do or the discrete political satire, but just from the broader picture of it, because they have said… There’s the authors of the movie have said it’s about climate change, and we can ask ourselves if it…

0:05:34.6 Aaron Powell: When I was watching it, I thought it was more… It worked better as a COVID parable than a climate change parable, but they have said that, and if that’s the case, there are things about it that make it not work as a climate change movie. And the biggest one of those and the one that I think is the most interesting from the politics of climate change is the six-​month ticking clock to absolute destruction of it, because climate change, even in the most catastrophic versions of it that we hear about, would not be six months and we’re all dead. It would be some period of years and then things get worse and worse and worse. And…

0:06:21.9 Aaron Powell: And what that ends up doing is to some extent restating the critique of climate alarmism via the movie, which is that we keep getting told… Al Gore back in the ’90s doing it. We keep getting told that the world is going to end very soon because of climate change. Our cities are going to be under water in just a matter of years. We won’t be able to feed ourselves in just three years or so on and so forth. And those deadlines keep passing. And that doesn’t mean that it’s… That climate change isn’t happening, that it’s not dangerous or whatever. But the rhetoric around it has been precisely the kind of catastrophic talk that this movie is framed with. But the fact that that hasn’t happened is, I think, one of the main reasons that people are as nonchalant about the possibility of climate change as the movie criticizes the public for being in the film.

0:07:23.6 Landry Ayres: I think it’s really interesting that you bring up both this in response to sort of the cast and the intent and the death of the author, because Adam McKay, the writer and director and producer of this film, actually credits his sort of climate awakening to An Inconvenient Truth very much specifically. Before this, he was making Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, sort of classic, canonical…

0:07:53.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Don’t forget The Big Short. Don’t forget The Big Short.

0:07:55.3 Landry Ayres: Well, but that is… What’s interesting is that is also after this sort of awakening when he wants to make very politically and sort of culturally conscious films, rather than The Other Guys or The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, all films that I highly enjoy and think are very funny in their own right, and are very special to sort of my comedic incubation. But he sees this film, An Inconvenient Truth, and it sort of wakes him up, and he sees this and thinks like, I want to make movies that are going to actually move people in a certain direction, and with a very specific heavy-​handed intent. And I think that’s a lot of what this sort of critique of the film has been reduced to in broad strokes is that it’s… Its heavy-​handedness. And to me, you could paint it that way, but I don’t think it’s… It’s attempting to be heavy-​handed, but in doing so, it ends up being kind of middling. There were a lot of people that loved it. It is now, as of today, the second most watched Netflix film of all time, second only to Red Notice, which it seems impossible to me. I don’t know how that worked. I don’t know how many people watched that movie.

0:09:13.6 Natalie Dowzicky: That film was not very good. Just putting it out there. [chuckle]

0:09:16.3 Landry Ayres: I don’t get it. Stay tuned for next episode of Pop & Locke on Red Notice. And then there’s other one… Critically it was panned because of this heavy-​handedness. But it really just sort of goes down the middle, and wants to be about climate change, but ends up being more about broad strokes politics than it is, because they’ve limited themselves with this asteroid metaphor that they’ve come on, which is… It just… Like Aaron was saying, the ticking clock does not mirror the same cultural baggage that sort of pins down climate change in the same way, because there are a lot of unknowns in that issue.

0:10:00.2 Landry Ayres: But I think specifically Adam McKay had said after he was writing this movie, Inconvenient Truth woke him up, but he said that his intent was… This is a quote, he says, “My sweaty fever dream of a situation would be specifically Joe Manchin sitting down with his family and thinking, Let’s watch this. It’s supposed to be a comedy. My kids like Leonardo DiCaprio. My grandkids like Ariana Grande. And then the ending comes, and his dream is that for one second, Joe Manchin feels it in his bones, for just one second.” So the casting is not only a draw for people, but it is specifically one of the ways that he wanted to draw people in with this film, and sort of create this subtle turn, but it’s really not subtle at all, especially when you think about the kinda person that Leonardo DiCaprio is with his sort of environmentalist background and wanting to save animals and all things like that, it… The characters in it are a draw for people. That was intentional, but…

0:11:09.8 Landry Ayres: And I do wanna say, I wanna push back. I think Timothée Chalamet, I think old Timmy C is one of the better characters in this. His sort of odd confession of faith that he gives to Jennifer Lawrence and the prayer that he leads to the family is a shockingly earnest and heart-​warming moment about living in the moment and appreciating what we have. Which is odd, considering the thrust of the movie to me was a very broad strokes, like, “Wake up people, we need to act on climate change, but in a conspicuous conservation kind of way.” There wasn’t a clear direction of what we need to do, other than the people in power, the powers that be are trying to limit you. But then the people who are framed as the wise people are the ones who just accept their fate and are appreciative in the moment and sit down and have a nice family dinner together. It’s not the people who go out and actually do something about this catastrophic event that is apparently coming inevitably.

0:12:17.8 Matthew Feeney: Well, going on to the… The point of the cast I think is interesting because I didn’t watch this movie even knowing much of what it was about. So I was kinda bored and I was watching Netflix, and the cast stands out. And you think, Okay. So DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Timothée Chalamet, and also probably the best living actor, Mark Rylance is in it, Jonah Hill, Cate Blanchett. So it’s a great cast. And while watching it, I just remember thinking, Something’s just not clicking. I just didn’t know… I don’t recall laughing. And then, actually, my sort of awakening was realizing, after I’d finished the film, that it was directed by the guy who really, really thinks Will Ferrell is hilarious, and then it all made sense, because I just find the humor there…

0:13:06.6 Matthew Feeney: It didn’t really work as a comedy, which is funny because you do have great examples of comedies about catastrophic, horrible things. Like Dr. Strangelove being a great example of, perhaps, this genre. But even in serious fiction, something that definitely should be a pop mark episode is the Sci-​fi trilogy, The Three-​Body Problem, which is about this… We know this thing’s happening in 400 years, and we can’t advance our technology, so what do we do? So part of me thought that it sort of failed as, at least, as at least a comedy, and the attempted commentary was just too overdone to be taken seriously. But maybe that’s just a Will Ferrell-​shaped hole in my head that needs filling. I just don’t really, really get it.

0:13:53.0 Trevor Burrus: No, it it doesn’t work as a comedy, I think, at all. There’s a few… Some of the satire points are quite, I think, interesting. Especially the way it incorporates the way our conversations are run by social media is done fairly interestingly. But to Aaron’s question and to his point about the climate change analogy, it is exactly what is sort of intolerable about this movie. But I didn’t hate it, but I spent a lot of time grimacing in different ways. And when you take the cast, you take Leonardo di Caprio and, as Landry said, we know where he sits on these things, and I assume Jennifer Lawrence too. Aaron and I have talked about this for 20 years. One of the biggest problems that people have in the political sphere of personal problems is that other people don’t care about their values. That they value something like the environment or guns or something like this, and other people don’t value it in the same way. And so you have to try and figure out how to get someone else to value your values. And there’s various ways you can do this. You can say, I really think that all… Think about architectural preservation, historical preservation. I have a very high premium, myself, on preserving historical monuments, preserving historical sites, and other people don’t have the same level of that premium.

0:15:18.6 Trevor Burrus: So I have to try and convince them, “Hey, we should preserve the Gettysburg battlefield or something like this.” But if you come to something like environmentalism where you just really love nature or you love animals… And some people don’t love them as much, so you have to figure out how to get them to love them as much. And one way people do this, is they postulate the existence of a catastrophe. They say, “If you don’t love this… If people didn’t love this as much as I do, there will be something that is horrible that happens.” And so, if you don’t like the environment as much as me, we will have an apocalypse. An environmental apocalypse. And so you should love… You should have the same values as me, because of this catastrophe.

0:16:01.4 Trevor Burrus: And this is something that it comes up a lot, but it’s… The biggest one is environmentalism, because for people who are very, very into the environment, other people aren’t into the environment enough for them. So if you postulate an end-​time scenario, you can try to move that sort of goal. You can move people toward sharing your values. And I think that’s what most of this movie is about, is the director, Leonardo di Caprio, everyone involved with it, trying to get people to care as much about something as they do, when actually there’s just a bunch of different trade-​offs involved in what we do with the environment. But this pretends that there are no trade-​offs. A catastrophe says, no trade-​offs. That’s when a catastrophe comes in, it says, “There’s either the end-​times… ”

0:16:43.2 Trevor Burrus: So Christians will do this, too. Either everyone becomes Christian and we all die in God’s judgment, or there’s no trade-​off. That’s it. Those are the two choices. And in this movie, it’s that sort of simplicity of that world view that really kind of, as I said before, it hits you over the head, makes you… Should make you roll your eyes a bit and see the point of this movie. I did not know that, as Landry said, that An Inconvenient Truth was his awakening. But it makes sense because that’s where revelation comes from. You say, “Okay, the end-​times are coming. We have to do something and everyone has to be on the same page.” And that’s what this movie is fundamentally trying to do.

0:17:26.4 Aaron Powell: What happens then if we effectively de-​contextualize it from that background or that part of the conversation? Because that’s what I found myself doing when I was watching it. It’s like I didn’t go into it knowing that it was explicitly being made about climate change. I suspected that that was a big part of it, but the COVID parable also seemed to work in a lot of ways. But what I found myself doing while watching it was instead thinking, “If we effectively Death-​of-​the-​Author this, take out the intent of the people behind it, the people making it, and so on, and look at it less as what is the particular catastrophic thing that they are trying to beat us over the head with their political message about… And instead see it as a satire or an examination of how politicians, industry and the general public might respond to the news that, unless we do something, the world’s going to end in six months and the struggles of actually trying to do something.

0:18:29.7 Aaron Powell: There, I thought it was a much more effective movie, and was not… I mean, it was satire, but it didn’t feel, in that regard, preachy or heavy-​handed. And in fact had a lot of, I think, libertarian themes. As our friend Christopher Hudson on Twitter pointed out, all of the bad guys in the movie are either the politicians, the government employees, the dumb political media or politically connected businessman. Right? It’s all that nexus of politics is everything was the cause of the ultimate demise of the world. Which is quite a libertarian message. And, too, I thought that it had an interesting perspective on the way the general public responded. Because the movie wants you to be mad at all of the ordinary people who either kind of went on with their lives in all their normal-​ness or Silicon tours or whatever, and either didn’t get worked up about it or were kind of…

0:19:45.0 Aaron Powell: Didn’t say like, “Well, I need to change everything that I’m doing right now about this.” That there was more of just either the fact that the world is gonna end in six months doesn’t fit into my broader narrative of how things are, and so I’m just not going to process it, and I’m just gonna continue on. Or, I am just going to keep living the way I’m living because there’s not anything I can actually do about this in the moment. It’s like, as me, as you know, a random person. And so there was kind of an acceptance and a not… “We’re not gonna run around screaming,” which I think is also… That’s probably how a lot of people would respond to something like this. And I don’t know that it is necessarily the wrong response, versus I don’t know if there’ll be a better response if everyone was just… Spent six months rending their garments, and being depressed, and totally not enjoying the little bit of time that they had left.

0:20:46.4 Natalie Dowzicky: And I think that’s why I didn’t… Like we were saying earlier, the allegory for the long-​term threat of climate change just doesn’t work because it doesn’t have… I don’t know if they’re trying to inspire change and like… Yeah, if you’re gonna know the… If you know the world is ending in six months because of some comet, are you gonna like, “Okay, yes, now I’m gonna participate in Meatless Mondays because we’re like… ” That’s not gonna… It’s not gonna do anything. And so I guess while I was watching, and which no one else has brought up yet, I was thinking of other movies that I knew of… That I know of, that are about the end of the world. So I was thinking of 2012, when everyone had that panic, and then there was like… That movie had the large flood and everything gets frozen. War of the Worlds, obviously that’s aliens, it’s a little different. I Am Legend, that one’s more closer to disease, pandemic-​type thing, with weird creatures that are bringing in them.

0:21:45.6 Natalie Dowzicky: But I thought in that category, Don’t Look Up, kind of, is a better movie compared to… For if it’s an end of the world movie, not, like Aaron was saying, not contextualized within the larger climate change narrative, because I think it was probably the most realistic as to how people would react. Because in the other movies like 2012, War of the Worlds, I am Legend, there’s large unrest, especially, in War of the Worlds. Obviously, with aliens it’s different. But people start migrating far away to see to if they can get away from the aliens.

0:22:27.8 Natalie Dowzicky: I just don’t think, in this context, for an end of the world movie, it makes more sense than for a larger allegory about climate change. And now for a pandemic movie which… They filmed this prior to COVID-19, I think it actually works kind of well. But I think they probably just got lucky with that. Honestly, McKay could have easily changed his messaging being like, “Oh yeah, this is about pandemic,” and I probably… I wouldn’t have questioned it. I would have thought it was totally, totally on point.

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0:23:01.7 Trevor Burrus: Well, aside from that scientific certainty, Aaron’s question, made me think about this. There’s something about asteroids, comets, that is scientifically certain. Like we can do the orbital calculations and say, “We do that all the time when we send a spacecraft to Uranus or something.” Right? “At 2:00 PM on August 14th, it will arrive there.” But aside from that scenario, what would be the kind of situation where there would be someone talking about a possible apocalypse, and trying to convince people of this. And Natalie’s point that the pandemic is a good example. I know that people have been talking about the possibility of a pandemic for a while. There was that story that came out about George Bush, who read some book, I think maybe John Barry’s The Great Influenza book. And Bush became very scared of the fact that a pandemic will happen and we’re not preparing for it.

0:23:55.8 Trevor Burrus: And so how people respond to that. One that strikes me would be, since I’m here in Colorado right now, the Yellowstone Caldera Volcano, which could blow at any time. So if you imagine some scientist who figures out with 75% accuracy that this will blow sometime in the next six months, and then tries to convince everyone about it. So if we take some scenario where someone is trying to say, to ring the bell, and say, “This is very likely, and we should be preparing more than we are.” The asteroid is not that way. That’s why it works so, sort of, simplistically in this narrative.

0:24:32.1 Matthew Feeney: Well, also a crucial difference between an asteroid and COVID is, or any pandemic, is that overcoming the pandemic is in large parts going to be a result of billions of ordinary people taking vaccines, not being stupid, and adhering to common sense, regulations. Whereas, if there’s an asteroid coming to Earth, it doesn’t matter if five billion people don’t even believe it exists, as long as a few thousand people who have the resources and knowledge are smart about it, they could solve it. You might wonder, is a… [chuckle] Is a planet of five billion people, stupid enough not to see the comet coming, worth saving? But that’s it. The whole point there is that as long as the educated elites know what they’re doing, you could actually stave off an asteroid, or a comet, hitting without any input, or any ordinary person on the ground having to do anything. And it’s similar with climate change actually. Like it’s closer to an asteroid than the pandemic, which is… A lot of people, politically, their dream is, that elite, just like seizing control and just telling everyone, “This is what we’re doing now. Okay? You’re not gonna eat as much meat, and you’re not gonna drive those cars, and you’re not gonna fly.”

0:25:47.8 Matthew Feeney: I mean, that’s just the way it’s gonna be. But that was a difference that struck me because, like Aaron, while watching the movie, I was trying to disentangle it from my policy brain. I was like, “Okay, I should just try and enjoy this as a sort of disaster film and… ” But then it got into a whole thing of mining asteroids, which made the movie even worse, and… Anyway, that’s a whole different conversation. But yeah.

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0:26:12.7 Aaron Powell: One thing that struck me watching this movie was how US-​centric it was. It was like giant monster movies or a lot of disaster movies where this thing that’s like a threat to everybody is basically only seems to be happening in one country, and it’s up to that one country’s government to fix it, and outside of the scene towards the end, the relatively minor scene of, oh, the Russian and some other companies tried this and it messed up, we get… Basically no other country seems involved in this movie. There’s talk of buying mineral rights and things, but no other country seems involved, it seems to be entirely the US. The US’s plan initially… The one that we’re led to believe would have worked is not incredibly complicated, other countries have rockets and nukes and whatever.

0:27:08.2 Aaron Powell: And so looking at this as like, what would actually happen? I would be very surprised if things actually played out that way, where everyone’s like, “Yeah, there’s this idiot president in America and they’re messing up or they might not do anything, but it’s not like we can do anything”. And so it was just that hyper US-​focused was an interesting read through it, but I think it also plays into part of the climate change debate, because one of the points, there’s always this, the Western countries need to radically reduce their CO2 output to save this, but the counterpoint to that is that, this is not… You can’t solve climate change by the US cutting its emissions because it’s a global issue and lots of countries and a lot of the emissions are coming from other countries and so on, and so it has to be a global thing, but this seemed to play into that narrative of like, this is up to us, rich Westerners to save the world.

0:28:04.3 Trevor Burrus: Well, I think it’s an artifact, mostly of film making industry. All I would say to that is Godzilla always attacks Tokyo and no one else in the world ever seems to care, but where do they make those movies?

0:28:16.8 Matthew Feeney: Yeah, you do think that the nuclear powers would engage in some degree of cooperation if this was a real issue, but then of course, you have this multi-​billionaire played by Mark Rylance who’s an eccentric guy who comes up with the idea of, “Let’s not blow the comet up, we can mine it.” We sort of added in another bit of political commentary that greed is what’s really gonna kill us, right? It’s not just political incompetence from politicians, it’s greed from the private sector, and that’s just another added layer. But I have my own policy reasons why I think that doesn’t make any sense, and happy to get into that, but it’s true that Asteroids have a lot of really valuable minerals in them, and there’s trillions and trillions of dollars worth of minerals flying around in the solar system. Whether it pass the cost-​benefit analysis, to actually fly up, set up mining and do it, and then to bring stuff back to earth is a very different question, I don’t think it comes close to passing the cost-​benefit analysis there. For future solar system, like exploration, you can argue that it’s good to have, I don’t know, little bases on select asteroids where people can… I don’t know, 3D print new tools and things and you can build missions along the way, but as far as like mining stuff in space and bringing it back to Earth, that’s just… Yeah, a little silly.

0:29:50.0 Aaron Powell: But, that wasn’t… If I remember correctly, their plan wasn’t to mine stuff in space, right. It was to blow it up into pieces that when they fell, wouldn’t do much damage and then gather them up on the earth and mine them there.

0:30:03.1 Matthew Feeney: That’s definitely true. I worry how many people afterwards are Googling mining asteroids and getting into it, because this has been a big… Again, it’s my bias, sitting from what I’ve read and see everyday, but this is something that comes up every few months that yeah, maybe we should be mining asteroids.

0:30:20.6 Aaron Powell: But I do wanna pick up on that, that business angle of it, because it does play this really important role and the idea and this is the… I said it wasn’t a comedy, like one line where I did laugh out loud is when she tries to go back to her… When Jennifer Lawrence character tries to go back to her parents’ house and they have locked the door and they say, her mom says, “Your dad and I are for the jobs the comet will provide.”

0:30:46.6 Trevor Burrus: Did you laugh or cringe, ’cause I cringed heavily at that.

[laughter]

0:30:51.1 Aaron Powell: I laughed. I thought it was a funny line.

0:30:51.9 Natalie Dowzicky: A little of both.

0:30:52.1 Aaron Powell: But, that idea that… It’s not clear whether the movie accepts this or if just the businessman and then kind of the politicians that are in his pocket accepted, but that, that if we got trillions of dollars of… Let’s bracket the conversation of whether this plan would work, but like if we suddenly had trillions of dollars of rare-​earth minerals and other things that go into our electronics, that would potentially decrease the cost of our electronics because more minerals would… They’d be cheaper, it would bring down the cost because we’d have a over-​abundance of these minerals. That doesn’t mean that it would be worth trillions of dollars, because the reason these minerals are worth so much is the scarcity of them, and this would be… They weren’t talking about creating artificial scarcity in this, the way that say like De Beers does with diamonds, but when they’re selling it to the people, it is like… And the businessman, the Mark Rylance character talks about it this way, that like this will bring so much wealth that it will end world hunger, it’ll end basically all poverty.

0:31:57.2 Aaron Powell: And I think this is kind of a common idea that the reason people are poor is lack of raw materials, that the reason poverty exists in the world is because we don’t have enough stuff we can pull out of the ground, and if we just had more resources, we would be richer, and that connection is not really the case that… That’s not the reason that people are poor. It’s usually mis-​allocation of resources or limits on people putting resources to better use, whether that’s infrastructure or government preventing it or so on, but it seemed to get the notion of like poverty and how to fix it wrong. And it seemed odd that like a businessman, I mean businessmen, there are lots of businessmen with lots of crazy ideas who don’t understand how economics works or other things, but… It seemed unlikely that someone who knew that much about it would think this would be the thing that would solve world hunger.

0:33:00.3 Landry Ayres: I think I kind of took that mostly as intentional, or at least not an oversight on the filmmaker’s part. To me, it reads very much like a sort of, not intentional, but a common critique that we see of neo-​liberalism in general, and big business and government being in bed together in a sort of antagonistic or maniacal way. And that’s even reflected in Jennifer Lawrence’s character. They’re mostly talking about the politicians, but at this point, the sort of business Bash, I think is what the company is called, Mark Rylance’s character has founded and heads it. Jennifer Lawrence says to these kids as they’re sort of partying around a trash fire that the truth is way more depressing than the sort of conspiracy theories that they’re spinning up about trying to bring Chileans across the border. The truth is that they’re not even smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them credit for, which struck me as odd because… Sure, we see some of them being dumb, and we see the Meryl Streep character and Jonah Hill, and they’re obviously lampooning specifically the Trump administration and things like that. It’s pretty blatant, but then they show her with Bill Clinton to sort of throw a bone to people and say, “We’re not acknowledging which party they’re gonna be,” even though we all kind of know what they’re trying to represent there.

0:34:35.3 Landry Ayres: But the way that they function and sort of pull the wool over a lot of people’s eyes, ’cause we don’t see that much of the public of normal people. It’s a lot of closed door meetings. We’ll see media, you see the people in the bar, you see the family on occasion, but we’re not getting really accurate depictions of what the public is thinking. We’re seeing stock footage, and so I think that the antagonists, the politicians and the business people come across as much more slick than they might be intending. Because you can tell the movie, and especially in marketing and stuff, I think it wanted to be more like an Iannucci film, it wanted to be a little more Veep-​like, a little more in the thick of it.

0:35:27.3 Landry Ayres: And they talk about how a lot of these scenes, the dialogue was heavily improvised, Jonah Hill, who actually does, I think a very, very good job in this movie, he’s very funny, they’re making stuff up, but the editing in particular really tightens things up and polishes them, and sort of takes the rough edges off of the improvised feel of it, and makes everyone come across as much more sort of conniving and successful, even if they’re dumb. So they might be not as smart as those people are giving them credit for, but they are smart enough to pull the wool over people’s eyes and get the power that they want, which sort of I think does mirror the critique of neo-​liberalism that we see pretty commonly these days.

0:36:21.4 Natalie Dowzicky: There’s something Landry and I was talking about in terms of characterization before this, that the depiction of some of the characters just seems like off. So the business leader, I’m blanking on what his character name is, but the owner of Bash. His characterization or in the way he talked, and the way he walked around the room, and even just certain mannerisms just really bothered me. And I don’t know if it was like they’re just trying to exaggerate that or if that was the intent, because I’m sure he’s trying, he’s this supposed to be this zen, billionaire character, but honestly, the depiction is just bothersome to watch.

0:37:09.4 Natalie Dowzicky: The way he was talking was really annoying, just annoying. And I don’t think that was necessarily the intent of that, I don’t know if anyone else noticed that. And then the other character that I think they, was just kind of odd was the whole thing with the general and buying snacks. I was laughing just because it was like, I was like, ’cause I was thinking about like, “Oh, there’s no free lunch.” That whole bit but at the same time, I was like, “What is this adding to the movie?” and then Jennifer Lawrence brings it back up like, “Why would he do that?” It was just like another thing, I was like, this just seems like odd placement, or maybe there was more there before and it got cut out, but there…

0:37:54.7 Landry Ayres: I don’t know how it would get cut out. This movie was already almost three hours long.

0:37:57.3 Natalie Dowzicky: I know.

0:37:58.3 Trevor Burrus: I think that’s the big part of this with that he’s obviously on the spectrum, and it’s very ham-​fisted, the Peter issue, while I think of the name of the character. It’s extremely ham-​fisted how much he’s portrayed to be on the spectrum, and I think that’s a big part. It’s fine, it’s satire, but…

0:38:16.5 Natalie Dowzicky: I did not realize that at all.

0:38:18.5 Landry Ayres: I didn’t think about it either, but it makes sense when you say it. I sort of imagined him as sort of almost like, maybe he was an older, like the portrayal was like he was an older CEO that perhaps was like in the early stages of dementia.

0:38:31.5 Trevor Burrus: Oh no, no, he’s just a Silicon Valley dude who’s on the spectrum.

0:38:34.5 Landry Ayres: I guess.

0:38:36.5 Trevor Burrus: That’s why they make him so weird.

0:38:38.5 Matthew Feeney: The reason it fails, I think is, it’s not Rylance’s fault, it’s just bad writing and direction.

0:38:45.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, I agree.

0:38:46.5 Matthew Feeney: The character seems to be like, the character seems to be, “Let’s get Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel together, and see if we can make a character that represents everything that Adam McKay hates about Silicon Valley.” And it just doesn’t really work because those three people, you might not like them, but they are separate and they have separate personalities and flaws and ideas. And, it’s okay for our character to be unbelievable in a comedy, but they have to make sense within the universe they’re in, and that was, I think, a character, where there was just failure there.

0:39:23.0 Trevor Burrus: Well, the analogy would be…

0:39:24.5 Matthew Feeney: I mean the main…

0:39:25.5 Trevor Burrus: Would be a character in Silicon Valley, the character who’s the angel investor. So that’s a much better portrayal of someone who is more realistic in that Silicon Valley startup sphere than the writing of Mark Rylance’s character.

0:39:40.8 Matthew Feeney: Yeah, because there’s that whole, there is that stereotype of Silicon Valley people being very socially awkward. They kind of have a creepy obsession with people’s lives and surveillance capitalism, and they get high up just because they have weird outlandish ideas that will never work, it’s all sort of… It makes sense within the context of the movie, I suppose. But it didn’t quite work, I will say, ’cause I know I’ve been very critical, but I thought DiCaprio did a good job of being a kind of bemused academic, who is suddenly thrown into an environment where he’s famous, but no one is listening to him, which is probably not a great place to be. But I think part of the failure of the film is that the characters that you’re supposed to really not like, like the President, like the Rylance character, just un-​particularly believable even within the comedic universe that McKay built.

0:40:41.0 Natalie Dowzicky: I also wanted to mention too that I guess when they were making this film, no billionaires had been to space yet, so I think the ending is a little bit funny that it was like, “Okay, the billionaires are gonna send like… They’re gonna save their friends and take them to space,” and so I thought that was kind of cute and I also, I read more about the ending, apparently there was like five or six different ways McKay wanted to end the film, and one of them didn’t involve Meryl… Spoiler alert, didn’t involve Meryl Streep dying, but apparently Meryl Streep was insistent on, she wanted to know how she died, whether it was shown in the film or not, because it was gonna help her portray her character. But that was one of my favorite parts at the end was, was how she got eaten by that… I forget what they’re called in the movie but like…

0:41:32.2 Landry Ayres: The Bronteroc.

0:41:33.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. ‘Cause there was just like… I was like, “Okay, if you’re gonna have to end this movie,” that’s again, two and a half hours too long. I thought that was an appropriate ending.

0:41:42.9 Landry Ayres: There’s a part of me that didn’t wanna see it though, maybe if it was off-​screen, I would have been more okay with it. But Mark Rylance’s character, he wasn’t… He didn’t have a lot of laugh lines, he wasn’t like the pure comedic character for most of the film, but when he drops the line, when they are asking about how they died and they say, “You get eaten by a Bronteroc.” We didn’t even know what that means. That was one of the big laugh lines for me in the entire movie, and I would have loved if they would have never acknowledged it ever again. And then when they get to the other planet and it’s sort of this Jurassic World type of thing, I knew exactly what was coming. And so I can see what people would appreciate that, but for me, it kind of ruined the random, purely distilled sort of absurdity of Rylance’s line earlier in the film, which I don’t know. That’s just me though. I see it why people liked it.

0:42:35.8 Landry Ayres: Jonah Hills ending, when he says “Like and subscribe,” and he’s the last person on Earth…

0:42:41.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh my gosh. Okay, that was good.

0:42:42.3 Landry Ayres: That’s good.

0:42:42.5 Natalie Dowzicky: That was good.

0:42:43.5 Landry Ayres: And was improvised. So good one Jonah Hill.

0:42:46.5 Aaron Powell: I’m gonna talk about him and his character, and I think what he represents in terms of satirising the American political landscape, because I think one thing that this movie picked up on and did a good job of portraying… And it’s one of the things that has confounded me the most about… Well, maybe not the most, but it is one of the things that has confounded me a lot about the modern Trump movement is how much he to a great extent, his mother, you get some of it, but he’s the vessel for it. How much absolute disdain there is by that family for the people who make up their base, that they have no… They don’t think highly of these people, they’re simply using them for either a grift or for attention.

0:43:36.4 Aaron Powell: I mean that was Trump’s thing, is all that really motivates Trump is getting attention and praise and his base was a source of that, which is why he likes the rallies, and they had a rally in this movie, and it’s always confused me how both obvious that is, and how much the base doesn’t seem to recognize that, and I thought that’s where that line about the three kinds of people and like the cool rich, which also I think had a lot of truth to it, in how the Trumpist base thinks about the fact that it’s a populist movement of the working class against the elites headed up by a family that lives in like a gold-​plated penthouse.

0:44:21.6 Trevor Burrus: Well, there’s disdain across the board in the political sphere though. I mean you’re right about Trump but I think a lot of people who get into politics have some sort of belief in themselves that, “A, people don’t understand what’s important. B, I understand what’s important. And C, I can do this. And then D, The way I do this is by convincing people who are not as good as me that I am the thing that can help them.” I think there’s just a ton of disdain that just comes with being a politician. It’s like one of the reasons why if I were gonna have a constitutional amendment, it would be, “You can’t be President if you wanna be President,” ’cause that there’s just something really, really bad about people who want to be President and what that says about how they think of themselves, and that’s true, obviously of Trump, but I think it’s just as true of Hillary Clinton.

0:45:07.9 Landry Ayres: Well, and that’s interesting ’cause there was no portrayal of any opposition in the movie as well, like we know now that there is a sort of constant election cycle, but there is no time when someone is not campaigning. We see this in the rallies that they portray, but just as well, there are gonna be other people who are gonna be talking to the media and making speeches, and there’s legislature that is going on where people are going to be standing up and trying to sort of put on a face and get media attention and we get none of that. We got the populist movement of the people… The Just-​look-​uppers versus the Don’t-​look-​uppers, but we don’t get any one other than academics and appointed government people, experts in their field, so it is kind of one-​sided in the portrayal of political elites and the way that they are sort of manipulating people, because that does exist on both sides, as much as we wanna… Certainly, I have my own beliefs about which one does it more than the other, but I think it would be a large misrepresentation to say that, that doesn’t happen, no matter at the party that you’re supporting.

[music]

0:46:27.3 Trevor Burrus: I have a question, and I know we’re running out of time, but may be a good way of… In the context of COVID and everything, how do we feel about capital T, capital S The Science and what this movie says about The Science?

0:46:46.1 Aaron Powell: I think that gets back to the point that I made about the catastrophe, and being told that the world ends, and the particular nature of the asteroid, because what we get at the beginning, that opening scene where he’s doing the overall dynamics calculations on the board, and then they get a bunch of people confirming it. The thing about an asteroid coming at the Earth is more so than the other disasters we’re told about in our daily lives, that is one where like The Science is almost entirely just math. And it’s like, here is the thing, we know it’s there, we know the direction and speed, so we can know with as close to absolute certainty as you can reasonably get that it will hit us and we can know that it hitting us will be bad, it is a thing where there’s…

0:47:37.0 Aaron Powell: Compared to climate change or a pandemic or whatever else, there is as little ambiguity as you could possibly get. And so within the context of the disaster of the movie saying, we should believe The Science and we get the scenes where there are, like early on, we’ve checked it with all of these other scientists and there is absolute consensus, and they’ve double-​checked and all of that. Where that is a situation where trusting The Science is the perfectly rational thing to do and it would be… And you absolutely should do it, ’cause there’s no wiggle room. But the issue is that, if the movie is a parable about other things, I think the movie is representative of a view, that in areas, whether it’s climate science or epidemiology or whatever, The Science looks the same as it did there, when in fact, it very much does not.

0:48:34.6 Landry Ayres: And there’s also a delineation between who is doing The Science that is very, very clearly what they’re trying to imply, there’s… We have these scholars who have a giant telescope, they’re in contact with NASA, they obviously are reputable. He is a tenured professor at Michigan State. I don’t know if Michigan State actually has a really, really great astronomy department… No, knock on Michigan State… They could.

0:48:58.7 Trevor Burrus: There was a lot of crapping on Michigan State, in the movie though. [chuckle]

0:49:02.5 Landry Ayres: Right, and that’s what’s interesting is because they’re like, “Oh, Michigan State la la la la la,” but then they’re like, “But we got our people from Yale, Princeton, Harvard. Have you heard of it?” Suddenly it becomes legitimized when that is checked and then it becomes even more celebrated, but with an antagonistic veil and coding when it’s run by Bash, so you have… And you can raise certainly valid questions about the nature of peer review that they bring up, like people need to be evaluating this from multiple sides, but it also is coded very much like privately funded research, bad. And even so, research that has been checked only by Ivy Leagues, like really elite institutions is valid, but still kind of sneeringly so.

0:49:54.0 Landry Ayres: But Michigan State, publicly funded universities, their research is good and unbiased and completely trustworthy, when in reality, all of those organizations are working amongst each other all the time. Like Google, and Facebook, and AT&T, are not just doing research totally in-​house themselves or with Ivy Leagues, they are funding public universities to do this research all the time across the country. So creating like good and bad, it’s easy for a storytelling device, but it’s not accurate, and it’s kind of frustrating because you could have a really nuanced discussion about The Science, but it doesn’t fit well into this movie.

0:50:37.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Honestly, what was more interesting to me is how they portrayed how we consume The Science. So the really interesting part to me was the little bit with… It’s Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett, they’re hosting a daily… What I suspect is a daily news show, and the first guest on is Ariana Grande and she’s going through this break up and…

0:51:03.9 Landry Ayres: With Kid Cudi, that’s Kid Cudi. [chuckle]

0:51:04.7 Natalie Dowzicky: With Kid Cudi… Yeah, and that’s clearly the more important part of the show, or the part of the show that’s gonna get them the most clicks, or whatever, to the news casters, and then they bring on Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, and it’s more like, just like a blip in their show it’s like, “Oh yeah, we discovered this cool new thing, and back to Ariana Grande.” And I thought that was oddly kind of on point, [chuckle] just from the way our media works today, it’s kind of getting you… They’re feeding you a lot of the stuff that’s like the most grabby or attention-​seeking, and whether that’s with Kim K or that’s with Ariana Grande, doesn’t really necessarily matter to me, and then they’ll have an actually important bit of news and they just kind of gloss over it, so I thought that also was interesting, that that depiction came from Hollywood, so it was like almost them admitting that the media doesn’t give you what it should, which I thought was pretty interesting.

0:52:10.1 Matthew Feeney: Trevor’s question reminds me of something that we all deal with in the policy think tank world, which is the scientist raising something like a is ops problem for policy, even if you’re accept, and I think we have very good reasons to believe science on climate change and everything else, is you can’t get to and therefore X from a climate change fact, and then you’re getting into the policy questions of trade-​offs. Now with a species ending comet, you can argue like, okay, well, the trade-​off is the end of the species, which we can rank is pretty bad. But climate change and COVID, I think are slightly different, because even people who accept all of The Science can still dramatically disagree about what trade-​offs are worth it, because you can believe that COVID is a highly contagious disease that kills people but you might say, “But I think spending a million dollars per saved life, isn’t worth it,” or you could…

0:53:14.6 Matthew Feeney: In climate change, you could say, “Well, the ideal number of polluted rivers in the world is not zero.” It’s all going to be a matter of trade-​offs, and I think part of the appeal of it being a comet or an asteroid is, is you do get to a… No, let’s this just assume the end of the species completely, very, very soon, because the film doesn’t allow for these rather nuanced and more difficult policy questions of what trade-​offs are acceptable.

[music]

0:53:43.9 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening, as always, the best way to get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter, you can find us at the handle @PopnLockePod. That’s Pop, the letter N, Locke with an E, like the philosopher, Pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen, and please rate and review us if you like the show. We look forward to unravelling your favorite show or movie, next time. Pop & Locke is a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org, it’s produced by me, Landry Ayres, and is co-​hosted by myself and our Director and Editor, Aaron Ross Powell. To learn more, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.