Don’t Look Up (2021): Hiding Truth in Plain Sight
Reviews on my Facebook feed were coming in hot and heavy about Don’t Look Up.
This film is about two astronomers. Dr. Randall Mindy played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Dibiasky played by Jennifer Lawrence. They find a comet that is on a crash course for Earth.
The doctors try to tell the public about the comet but the media and the president are trying to minimize their research about the comet. During the announcement, the main characters suddenly go through some changes but I will focus on Dr. Mindy’s.
Dr. Mindy snaps on the set, ranting about how the media wants to overlook how devastating the comet will be. He further rants on how not everything needs to be happy all the time and we need to be able to have hard conversations with each other. Check out this clip on YouTube.
Don’t Look Up, Or In
He alludes to the fact that we, as a culture, don’t like to talk about hard things. Or even just being honest with each other. Dr. Mindy ends up sleeping with the female newscaster, cheating on his wife. The writers did an excellent job with this, showing how he, too, doesn’t talk about how he is unhappy in his marriage.
In addition to the media minimizing and discrediting the researchers’ work, the president does also. The president and her staff are distracted by her re-election campaign.
During a presidential speech, she was told the comet is visible. Then a citizen attending the speech, looks up in the sky and sees the comet and says “That’s the comet. They lied to us.” coming to the conclusion that the president has been lying the whole time in order get reelected.
For more insights into therapeutic themes in movies and TV, check out my podcast, Watch This with Eli here on my website or wherever you find your favorite podcasts!
A major theme in Don’t Look Up is suppression of unresolved problems.
Whether it is trauma, withholding feelings about a spouse, or any form of hesitant disclosure. The comet represents those unresolved issues that are not dealt with slowly creeping to the surface.
We are constantly looking for distractions instead of facing our problems head on. Dr. Mindy gets distracted with having sex with the newscaster, the public gets distracted by the media and the president’s reelection campaign.
If our problems are not dealt with, they could potentially cause catastrophic harm to our lives.
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