Don’t Look Down

Abstract

Say the words out loud: alpha—delta—omicron. Add whatever variant(s) have emerged since this article's deadline. Greek-alphabet letters, recited like a chant, singsong, may sound like a nursery rhyme. "Ring around the Rosie," perhaps: the song about the London plague of 1665, or 1347, or perhaps earlier or later, or somewhere else, its words recorded, they say, in 1881.All fall down indeed. In the world of cinema in early 2022, it was the film festivals that were falling down. Rotterdam was the first to cancel. Then, Palm Springs. Sundance was still holding on, with determined signals of a physical presence along with an expanded online platform, until just two weeks before showtime when omicron exploded and the in-person Utah festival folded: online only it would have to be. The Berlinale moved its market online but confirmed its intention to hold in-person screenings (at press time anyway).Suddenly, the hopeful summer of live festivals (Telluride!) was a distant memory, the anxious autumn (New York!) a faraway treasure, though the Saudis managed to stage a cultural splash, the Red Sea International Festival, in December. Back home, grounded, film curators without live audiences, filmmakers with closed sets, distributors with few outlets, professors with no students in classrooms, grounded scholars without a conference bar, Oscar voters with home screens and laptops—and this editor, with a new digital projector—all sought a route out of despair. Often that was a screening, temporarily acceptable with the aid of vaccination proofs or rapid tests, but more likely it was online, with "content" that algorithms and menus offered. By January, movie theaters were still open, but I knew few people over the age of forty willing to enter them.Into this moment blasted . . . not a comet, but a movie about one (and yes, "comet" shares its first two letters with that other five-letter word dominating all life on earth). Don't Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021) is lucky, as "a new-school streaming entity, blessed with optimal COVID-surge timing. Millions who were interested a month ago to see something in a theater now, once again, find themselves back on the couch."1Based on a story McKay developed with journalist David Sirota, it was conceived before but shot during pandemic times, and released just in time for Christmas by Paramount and Netflix. Ah, if only good intentions were everything. This is a movie ostensibly about politics, science, and climate change that comes closer than most to communicating the full horrors of twenty-first century feudalism, corruption, greed, and ignorance (but not, incidentally, climate change) yet is undermined by its splashy multiplex-focused stylistic choices. Even Forbes took notice of the disparity between scientist appreciation and film-critic deprecation.2Any impulse to praise is canceled out by McKay's decision to script the sleazy corrupt president as a woman (Meryl Streep, no less). This colossal misstep throws the entire enterprise into the "ha ha, just kidding" wastebasket. Was it Bernie backer McKay's final revenge against Hillary or a botched attempt to imagine Ivanka there? Either way, to assign the classic misogynist and corrupt traits of Trumpian alpha males to a female character was an insulting misfire.Leonardo DiCaprio is convincing as a nerdy professor happy to sell out for celebrity and glamour (making me curious about the script changes he supposedly demanded). Jennifer Lawrence is spectacular as the whistleblower undone by her own discovery. Rob Morgan, however, is handed the thankless role of NASA's Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe, a Black man so divorced from community and selfhood that he is never seen in the company of Black family or friends or partner, and chooses to see the world end cosseted in whiteness in Lansing, Michigan.3Don't Look Up is a film trapped between political ambitions and genre fidelity. McKay just can't help himself: given the choice, he opts for the easy laugh every time. With one exception. Mark Rylance's character, Peter Isherwell, the gazillionaire head of the tech company BASH, is one part Elon Musk, one part Mark Zuckerberg, one part Peter Thiel, with a dash of Jared Kushner thrown in for good measure. This fascist figure is a thoroughly chilling embodiment of today's technofuturist overlords and deserves to be reincarnated immediately in a future McKay script aimed squarely at technocrats' control of human lives. Watching the film in the midst of the Elizabeth Holmes trial (again, with a woman standing in for the unprosecuted but equally corrupt male royalty of Silicon Valley) lent it extra frisson.A CNN headline interrupted: "The COVID-19 Case Surge Is Altering Daily Life across the US. Things Will Likely Get Worse, Experts Warn." I was still trying to write this editorial. Back home in California, climate change continued to gain momentum. "Many Stinson Beach Homes Could Be Flooded amid Rising Seas within a Decade. Would Building Dunes Save Them?" read another headline.4 Dan Fruchtman, the owner of an A-frame on the beach, was quoted as saying, "The Earth is so fragile. It's a shame what we've done to it." McKay, though, never really addresses climate change; instead, his film is lodged squarely in the "disaster movie" genre of The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame, 1972) or the sci-fi hybrid Escape from New York (John Carpenter, 1981), with its villains updated and the whole world implicated.The theme of an uninhabitable earth, though, summons memories of another film: Bong Joon Ho's Snowpiercer (2013), about a world rendered uninhabitable by a botched climate experiment, leaving the remains of humanity to circle the globe in a perpetual-motion train divided by class. Based in part on the graphic novel Le Transperceneige (1982), by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand, and Jean-Marc Rochette, Snowpiercer was reborn as an ongoing episodic series (TNT, 2020–). I first saw the film in New York City at a private screening organized by Tilda Swinton. She was trying to drum up support for Bong Joon Ho's vision as the film was being held hostage by its distributor, the Weinstein Company, where Harvey was demanding cuts. Ah, history.It's worth remembering that in the movie theaters of yesteryear there was once Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006), a chilling parable of infertility and global collapse—set, alarmingly, in 2027, now just five years away. And playing right now on a streaming platform near you is Station Eleven, the phenomenal new series based on Emily St. John Mandel's eponymous book that eerily imagined a world wiped out by a viral epidemic, its feral survivors roaming the earth years later. Yes, it could be a moment for dystopian viewing—for a public with a strong stomach and steady nerves. Soylent Green, anyone?In December 2021, Film Quarterly presented a webinar saluting the Pacific Film Archive on its fiftieth anniversary; it turned at one point to the question of in-person screenings for nontheatrical as well as first-run, after a year of streaming platforms custom-built for this sector. MoMA's Rajendra Roy reported on the museum's reopening of its theaters, acknowledging his surprise that the audience was substantially younger.5 He observed that older patrons were more reluctant to return to the risk of in-person gatherings. I wonder, too, whether younger cineastes have become more motivated to engage in communal activity—in classic establishment locations, no less—than they had been in prepandemic times. And if that summer/fall exuberance would survive omicron winter.Traditional distributors—that is, those without wholly owned production/streaming monopolies—greeted the new year with a seemingly contrarian decision.6 They decided to turn the clock back and restore the theatrical window (forty-five days, most often) and permit hopefully lucrative ticket sales to run their course in advance of online availability.7 Wonder how that will go. The studios' calculation was perhaps a reactive move following Scarlett Johansson's widely reported courtroom success (reportedly a $40 million settlement) after she sued Disney for releasing Black Widow (Cate Shortland, 2021) online on Disney+ on the same date it opened in theaters. And notice that it was the star who sued, not the director; presumably, it was her lucrative contract tied to theatrical revenues that was shredded by the day-and-date move. The studio calculations will undoubtedly shape-shift again over the course of 2022.As platforms evolve, it's always important to remember that the classic ones are still in existence and bear scrutiny. Public television, for instance. Way back in March 2021, the very month that lockdown started, fifteen filmmaker members of the Beyond Inclusion collective together with more than one hundred thirty cosignatories, including Stanley Nelson, Laura Poitras, Yance Ford, and other prominent figures from across the documentary field, sent an open letter to PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) demanding diversity.8 The letter in particular called out the system's cozy funding relationship with Ken Burns, to whom PBS has funneled substantial sums of money (for more than two hundred hours of PBS programming over forty years) far beyond anything that has been awarded to projects by filmmakers of color, long consigned to far more modest levels of support.9 PBS defended Ken Burns, and Ken Burns defended PBS, and they all agreed they could do better.Not so simple, PBS! Data, please! Filmmaker Grace Lee, one of the Beyond Inclusion signatories, teamed up with reporter-filmmaker Akintunde Ahmad to launch a podcast with a purpose: Viewers Like Us, its title a riff on public television's own motto.10 In seven episodes that ran from September to the end of December 2021, with Lee as executive producer along with co–executive producers Ken Ikeda of the Association of Independents in Radio and Joaquin Alvarado of Studiotobe, the podcast offered up testimonies from a range of social actors with a stake in public television's future and a commitment to the principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion.11 Their podcast question hung in the air, unanswered: "Why is PBS so white and how exactly did it designate Ken Burns as America's Storyteller?"12Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Paris, where this text was written, cinemas were still open. They flourished all through fall and early winter 2021, their marquees and posters providing a welcome sense of normalcy; with omicron rates rising by the day, though, it was becoming harder to see how that could continue. Posh screening invitations continued to pile up, restaurant reservations were still being made, but a dampening of spirits was undeniable, even out in the streets, as I tested the crowds like an anxious flâneuse who is out of practice.As cinema events began to feel risky, and with more in-person cancellations being announced, I found myself drawn instead to the presence of films in other spaces: exhibited in museums, installed in galleries, with lots of air and space, high ceilings, and (hopefully) less dense crowds. Major shows beckoned with their alternative modes of viewing and public display.13First up was the promising Enfin le cinéma! Arts, images et spectacles en France (1833–1907) (Cinema at last! Arts, pictures, and shows in France [1833–1907]) at the Musée d'Orsay, organized in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), France's National Center for Cinema and Moving Images (CNC), Gaumont, and Pathé, and curated by Dominique Païni, former Pompidou director and former head of the Cinémathèque française (who reportedly oversaw its move to the dismal Frank Gehry building in Bercy on his watch). With gallery after gallery in the immense Orsay filled with paintings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the didactic exhibition sought to retrace the origins of cinema and the mutuality of influence between painting, photography, and cinema. Infuriatingly, however, the fascination was entirely with the precinematic materials; the many screens hung throughout the galleries, stamped in the corner with the telltale "L" for Lumière, were left not only uncontextualized but entirely unidentified and bereft of texts.The public, absent any curatorial assistance, was presumably expected to make its own leap of imagination to link the images on the walls to those on the screens, or else to buy the giant catalogue when exiting through the gift shop to figure out the details ex post facto. True, anyone patient enough to stand in front of any one screen long enough for the digital loop to come full circle (not that long, of course, with those early Lumières) would be rewarded when finally the title appeared and a date flashed by, but that was it: no context, no history, no linkages to the images surrounding the screens. I was dismayed that an exhibition ostensibly dedicated to uncovering cinema's beginnings would turn the medium itself into mere decoration.Off, then, to the newly reopened Musée Carnavalet, dedicated to the history of the city of Paris, where a new exhibition commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Marcel Proust was under way. It was a natural location: the Carnavalet had long been a pilgrimage site for Proustians because of its gallery containing the furnishings of his actual bedroom, complete with the (posthumously revealed as gay) author's actual bed. Now, like Orsay's, its exhibition sought to re-create yesteryear—here, the times of Proust (1871–1922) by definition also a fabled era of Paris.Where the Orsay texts were promulgating a philosophy of visual influences, Carnavalet was content to offer up artifacts and facts, photographs and maps, filling in the one extraordinary life. For cinephiles, Proust is a sort of origin text, his writing having inspired Volker Schlöndorff's Un amour de Swann (Swann in Love, 1984), Raúl Ruiz's Le temps retrouvé (Time Regained, 1999), and Chantal Akerman's La captive (The Captive, 2000).14 Madeleines, indeed. And, freed of any purity impulses, the exhibition included archival footage, again on hanging screens, along with monitors that intrigued with period interviews, such as one of Jean Cocteau talking about Proust, clips from films, and a wealth of information and reflection. I was happier, and just as edified.Ten blocks away, the Marian Goodman Gallery was completely given over to installations by Chantal Akerman. The multiple-screen From the Other Side—an epic installation adapted from her film De l'autre côté (From the Other Side, 2002), her look at the Mexican border and the harsh life of migrants, filmed two decades before their lives and crossings got significantly worse—filled two rooms with monitors, then extended into another room with a single and singular projection: A Voice in the Desert, an excerpt which Akerman had refilmed during the shoot in a desert projection. Upstairs, more modestly in terms of scope, Je, tu, il, elle, l'installation (2007) presented a three-screen redeployment of her film made more than thirty years earlier, when she was in her early twenties, Je tu il elle (1974). With its three sequential chapters now lined up simultaneously, the impossible innocence and youth of the young Chantal filled the screen.Free of the didacticism and explanations of the two museums, the visitor here could wander, immersed in the multiplicity of images and shifts of scale, like a flâneuse in the gallery space itself. Later in January, there was a conference on Akerman: "The Affective Interiors of Chantal Akerman: Aesthetic Passages - Films and Installations," organized by the Cinema and Audiovisual Studies Research Institute (IRCAV, at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3). Just over six years since Akerman's death, her work is more alive than ever.At press time, a wonderful volume arrived in the post. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's delirious fever dream of a film, Memoria (2021), starring Tilda Swinton, has been commemorated with a gorgeous art book of the same name, edited by Giovanni Machini Camia and Annabel Brady-Brown, published by Berlin's Fireflies Press. A compendium of photographs and documents related to the film's production, from early sketchbooks and notes to the shooting script and an interview with Swinton, its editors describe it as "a work of curation." I would call it an archive. A remarkable record of Weerasethakul's working methods over the two years of the film's development and through its production, it reveals (among hundreds of other details) that Swinton's character Jessica, a woman adrift in Bogotá and the was conceived as a character out of Jacques I With A to the year the of the to an Film Quarterly sought to at a December The of the month of year and first of this one the and words have this time, a of to and the one of all for Jean knew in New York City in the when she was out and on the and and she up all the of the that never one to in the corner and And she to engage with film, a at the and the films of the moment in a New York where cinema and where the new young cinema was to life. was else like there never will the of filmmaker a and of the of through the of cultural his of to an of vision and conceived in conjunction with its own shows how on a collective that and with the establishment of the even at in the work and at her own to that are by into the a he the of film history to their and earlier in of a to the of even a the of today's he instead a for the through of It's and The a of and of for a of the of influence and the into to bear on the over the years to the of his films with the political history of itself. The era of La that is always as the of but it out that has never been all that far away. the into the and that has open to a space for the of the the of the two with filmmakers at very of their one in the and one in as they on their early the anniversary of the film Is (1982), a with the from to he to not only the of for an but also a of the of itself. It was there that the young filmmaker at the as his students for the he was is drawn into memories long a time for an early cinema and a city still full of from Paris, as a on the of the film director in the for (2006), her of the Lawrence but with films to her before and up the for a sort of an online platform that she to With she her her at the film La and the it her early with the and her into the episodic world with Le to of as to films and filmmakers in at a time of in film and at the of against and the of to that run to With he that move beyond to the of the out and to call for the of a more for in 2021) a from to it a moment in documentary that more of its audience than and . . . more of than just their that such as de and for beyond as a documentary up from a film and new to the of the and the history of in a range of from to to she the of genre and the of And that may well have made a in the first the with about his new around the In the that of global and the of and that its around the not on screens but in physical the movie as to communicating not incidentally, book with a by on and for up a of edited that a new era in cinema The Cinema and the of Cinema and and A to Cinema The that are for their of David and David the and in Film up The of and with and also a book of with this look at in this same though, that she be far away.