Adam McKay – Our New Green Culture

Washington (GGM) Analysis | December 20, 2021, by Noreen Wise, Founder & CEO of Gallant Gold Media, and author

All true things said in jest, right? That was certainly my impression when I checked out Don’t Look Up on December 10, 2021. This timely film is an ink blot test, which becomes abundantly clear when scrolling through the majority of mainstream media reviews. You’ll quickly discover that most are nothing more than defensive ambushes against Adam McKay, (writer, producer and director of Don’t Look Up), and his star-studded cast, with the trademark fossil fuel maniacal thumbprint.

The truth hurts.

As a climate activist, my impression of McKay’s intrepid work was that it was masterfully written. A satirical mask covering the faces and behaviors of very real people. Picking up on the legitimacy behind each raw jab, I felt grateful to hear the facts spoken this way. It disarms and makes us much more open-minded to the next painful truth. It’s as though the script was written in code, and whoever can decipher will know how to proceed with climate action.

Heart of the matter. Don’t Look Up is a multi-dimensional, emotional roller-coaster filled with nuances. In addition to his unchained smack down of politicians and their short-term priorities, self-serving tech giants, and the soulless media, Adam McCay skillfully weaves in valuable advice throughout the film that we’d otherwise have to pay a lot of money when we visited a crisis manager or therapist.

Timothée Chalamet’s character, Yule, portrayed this aspect of the parody so admirably. The best line in Don’t Look UP wasn’t a slick diss, but rather Chalamet’s, “Dr. Mindy, can I be vulnerable in your car?”

In my humble opinion, allowing ourselves to admit to our vulnerability is the key takeaway. “Can I be vulnerable” is a pivotal question in this transformational film, and becomes Don’t Look Up’s valuable contribution to our global society. It’s the question that will lead to the majority of effective solutions required to successfully solve the climate crisis. Until we’re willing to expose ourselves to risks and rejections, making mistakes through trial and error, and taking big leaps, we won’t be able to stay below 1.5ºC.

Chalamet also models the benefit of having a personal spiritual substratum to help us deal with all the harsh unknowns.

Thankfully, Chalamet nails both of these critical concepts. We now have a mental image to work off of that reinforces how cool it is to be vulnerable and deep.

Adam McKay was first in line to expose his own vulnerability in taking the big leap of faith to create Don’t Look Up. As if on cue, the mainstream media’s shallow and acidic reaction to Don’t Look Up is WHY so many innovators with new ideas remain silent and refuse to act. By putting his own neck on the line, McKay has not only exposed, but he’s ruptured the barriers that restrain many innovators. What a brilliant and daring legacy McKay has bestowed on humanity at this critical juncture in our timeline, creating a path in the tangled wilderness for others to follow. Hopefully many of us will take the necessary risks after watching Don’t Look Up when it’s released on Netflix, December 24, 2021.

The remarkable cast of stars, promoting a powerful message to the public, urging us to open our eyes, “JUST LOOK UP,” and do the right thing to end global warming for humanity’s sake, is the equivalent of the music industry banding together and creating “We Are the World” to provide relief during the 1985 African famine.

Jennifer Lawrence’s flawless depiction of PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky embodies the classic hit-job women often experience when they have discoveries and make valuable contributions that organizational psychologist and Wharton professor Adam Grant posts about regularly on social media. “When men get mad, they’re commended as strong leaders. When women get angry, they’re condemned as aggressive bitches.” Or how about, “When men raise ideas, they’re respected as leaders. When women voice ideas, they’re often ignored.”

As thrilled as we are to have a female president, Janie Orlean, played by Meryl Streep, represents how a crisis would unfold under the leadership of a female Donald Trump (Marjorie Taylor Greene?!). LOL. All joking aside, the unfortunate reality is that power tends to warp good judgement, no matter what the gender. Nobel laureate Daniel Khaneman explains this ruinous flaw in his book Noise, A Flaw in Human Judgement.

On the other end of the spectrum is Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe, Rob Morgan, NASA’s head of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. Teddy models excellent leadership behavior in the film, providing viewers with a baseline of what real leadership looks like, which helps to underscore the deficiencies of President Orlean, ridiculous Peter Isherwell played by Mark Rylance, (I kept wondering if he was a heartless hologram), and General Themes, Paul Guilfoyle, who was apparently trying to make up for all the grifter defense contractors who deceptively invoice the military with padded bills like the $435 hammer. (Kate couldn’t get over that the General had charged them for what were supposed to be free snacks and water.)

As always, Jonah Hill was amazing. I wouldn’t have wanted him to play the President’s son, a male Ivanka, I mean Jason Orlean, any other way. I can’t help but wonder if Peter Brand in Moneyball, played by Johah Hill, and Peter’s genius idea, is the type of solution we need to uncover to solve the climate crisis. (Make sure to keep watching beyond the credits to see Jason’s P.S. to the world. Haha.)

I found that I was the one who laughed the most in the theater. I’m sure I was the one who cried the most, too. The majority in my millennial and Gen-Z audience seemed to be processing the significance of what the film was conveying and appeared too stunned to know what to do. We all seemed to be connecting with what Greta had warned us about. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.” And there Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) was, panicking. And suddenly, so were we. (I had to look this up, because I was so curious about how a star’s acting could actually make me feel an extreme emotion like panic. It’s called the chameleon effect. But seriously, see if you don’t physically feel “pit in your stomach” panicked when you watch Randall panic. Trust me, you will.)

I have to admit that I too was glad they cut Randall’s beard when they were preparing him for his whirlwind media blitz.

Sadly, the double ending (plus Jason’s P.S.) made sense. Most of us speculated as much on social media when Jeff Bezos lifted-off for his test flight to outer space this past summer while in the middle of unprecedented heatwaves and out of control wildfires.

As I exited the theater, and in the days that have followed, I couldn’t help but imagine a different kind of outcome for our real climate crisis. The kind of ending that becomes a new beginning with millions, and billions of us following the lead of Leonardo DiCaprio in the Revenant, clawing our way back to our original paradisiacal earth, this after being left for dead along the edge of a cliff by the extreme capitalists and billionaires who are busy trying to profit off our planet’s death spiral just the way Mark Rylance did in Don’t Look Up.

Leonardo DiCaprio has been a global leader and environmentalist supporting biodiversity and rewilding the world since 1998, particularly for marginalized groups, such as the Waorani People of the Amazon and the ICCN in Virunga National Park. DiCaprio’s philanthropy aligns with Sir David Attenborough, Johan Rockström, Jane Goodall and multiple others who are urgently promoting rewilding.

So yes, imagining the better conclusion that Sir David Attenborough spoke of at COP26 in November 2021 when he said, “If working apart we are a force powerful enough to destabilize our planet, surely working together we are powerful enough to save it.” Attenborough went on to assure his audience in Glasgow, “In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed a terrible decline. In yours, you could and should witness a wonderful recovery.”

That’s the brilliance of Don’t Look Up. The craftsmanship of subliminally showing us what we don’t want to have happen within the next decade, which opens our eyes to the natural path leading in the opposite direction.

Whether it’s Dr. Randall Mindy, Hugh Glass from the Revenant, or the real Leonardo DiCaprio of Appian Way Productions and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, Don’t Look Up adeptly inspires viewers to reach for a better path forward. (Note to self, it’s rather extraordinary that one actor can play the two dissimilar roles of Dr. Randall Mindy and Hugh Glass to such excellence. Looking forward to seeing what DiCaprio does with Jim Jones.)

And although we may have panicked when Randall panicked, we don’t have to calmly accept annihilation the way Randall, Kate, Teddy, Yule and Randall’s wife and two sons did. Rather, let’s Hugh Glass ourselves and reach and stretch and claw our way back to civilization by rewilding our local communities so that we can have the happily ever after outcome the majority of us want so desperately.

“We really did have everything, didn’t we? I mean when you think about it…”

Yes, Dr. Mindy, we really did. Let’s get it back while we still have time.

Don’t Look Up is the entertainment world’s Code Red for Humanity. An urgent warning for those who may have missed the 2021 IPCC Report Report, or forgot to read the Paris Agreement. We only have a few short years to stay below 1.5ºC. We must return to the Garden of Eden. Let’s reach this blissful destination within the next ten years, rather than 22,740 years.❃

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Groundbreaking YA book series for all ages. Gripping modern day nail-biter with Machiavellian villains, but also a tale that opens our eyes to the brutal war going on beneath our feet that controls our destiny, despite our obliviousness to this potentially civilization-destroying threat.

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Vice

Reviewed by REGGIE WOLTZ

Like director Adam McKay’s The Big Short, the 2015 film that explained the housing market crash of 2007, Vice is a black comedy about a tragedy. McKay’s new film focuses on the backstory of Dick Cheney’s ascension from sloppy drunk ne’er-do-well to the heavy-breathing, heart-challenged Darth Vader behind the George W. Bush presidency.

The title alludes to “vice” in at least two of its meanings: as in the president’s back up and as in pure evil. This, I think, is one indication of how hard McKay is trying.

Comedy, say the scientists of the art, equals tragedy plus time. In the case of The Big Short, released almost eight years after the events satirized (and after the economy had rebounded), enough time had passed. Vice hits screens almost 18 years after Cheney was elected, yet it feels like a case of tragedy plus not enough time. Or, as comedians put it, too soon.

It’s not that the film is entirely misbegotten. The virtuoso performances of Christian Bale as Cheney, Amy Adams as his wife Lynne and Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush are nuanced and wryly funny. I laughed at the actors’ sharp caricatures of Dick and Lynne Cheney as the Macbeths of the millennium. Here is a Washington power couple who use the 9/11 attacks to further consolidate their base of power—while embodying Henry Kissinger’s maxim that power is a great aphrodisiac.

I laughed at a scene in which Cheney, already depicted as an expert angler, reels in Dubya by feigning reluctance, agreeing to be his running mate if it’s not just a symbolic job. “I’ll handle the mundane things,” Cheney pretends to concede, in his ghostlike whisper. Mundane things like “bureaucracy, military, energy and foreign policy.” At the time, Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, which provides services to oilfields around the world. The film’s indictment of Cheney as the type of politician who led not in the public interest but in his own self-interest is clear in a subtitle informing the audience that Halliburton stock rose by 500 percent when, after 9/11, Cheney advocated war in the Middle East.

Given the present partisan chasm, though, it feels nihilistic to laugh at a movie that so puckishly delights in further polarizing Republicans and Democrats. I don’t hate Vice. That filmmakers such as Oliver Stone and McKay are creating American histories means that audiences can learn the stories behind the stories of U.S. political leadership. That said, these histories are drenched in political recycling of old and new contentions keeping the aisle from ever being bridged.

Vice is not a comedy that many can laugh at during the tenure of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. It tries to capitalize on the current climate, yet is only falters because of its complexity. It can be rejected by both sides: one that will point out how far it went to make its point and the other that will think it didn’t go far enough.

The movie, however, does purvey one image that is hard to shake. It’s an exterior shot of a woman playing golf while behind her, on the horizon, is a huge fire about to swallow the back nine. I agree with McKay on this: America has no problem taking it easy as the nation burns.