Current Affairs8 Feb 2025

How "Don't Look Up" Explains Our Times (w/ Adam McKay)

This episode originally aired on December 30, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Adam McKay is a writer and film director who has made some of the most successful comedy films of our century, including Anchorman (No. 6 on Time Out's top 100 comedy films of all time), Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, and The Other Guys. In the last decade, his more dramatic and political films like Vice and The Big Short have attracted critical acclaim and been nominated for multiple Academy Awards. He joins us today to discuss the film he released in 2021, Don't Look Up, a satirical look at the climate catastrophe that uses the analogy of an approaching deadly comet to expose how the media, corporations, and the political system are incapable of addressing a major crisis. When Don't Look Up came out, it quickly became one of the most popular movies in Netflix's history, but many critics assailed it as "heavy-handed." In Current Affairs, Nathan wrote an article arguing that these critics were missing much of the penetrating leftist analysis that makes the film a remarkably astute piece of satirical fiction.

Today Adam joins to talk about Don't Look Up: what the film was saying about our world, what Adam hopes the audience gets out of it, what critics didn't get, and why the film should get us talking about the climate crisis itself rather than just analyzing the film.

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