“Don’t Look Up” in 2025: Predictive Precisions and Ongoing Omissions
Yule: “I don’t know, I’m starting to think that all this ‘end of the world’ stuff is bullshit.”
Kate Dibiasky: “It’s not. It’s definitely happening. I’ve seen it.”
–Don’t Look Up (2021)
“I’m curious to hear what it’s been like for you in this industry dominated by white dudes.”
–Yessenia Fuentes to Mary Annaïse Heglar (2021)
Environmental violence is always political. In the United States, it is justified with the mythical, shiny rhetoric of technological progress and economic benefit, or the promise that extraction (of uranium, or fossil fuels, or rare earth minerals, or gold, to name but a few) will benefit local communities. An Executive Order, “Declaring a National Energy Emergency,” signed on January 20, 2025 by the aspiring autocrat currently holding the presidency of the United States, insists precisely that what he termed (in the inaugural address) a “drill baby drill” approach “would create jobs and economic prosperity forgotten in the present economy.”
Given everything going on in the US, I have been thinking (again) about the 2021 film, Don’t Look Up. There’s a cast of memorably dire characters, led by the corrupt, narcissistic president. There’s the antisocial, performative CEO of BASH electronics, a techno-utopian with interplanetary aspirations—and major government contracts. The film also depicts beleaguered scientists; an amorphous concerned populace; popularizing activist pop stars; and feckless politicians allied with profit-oriented technocrats. The political order is supported by a vocal, sycophantic public fixated on cults of personality and blinded by the myth of freedom through neoliberal economic doctrines and the premise of never-ending extraction. Literary scholar Elizabeth DeLoughrey, refracting Fredric Jameson, notes that “modern allegory often directs our attention to narratives of progress, authority, and development as myth.” And when it was released in 2021, Don’t Look Up felt like an absurdist, speculative, technocratic allegory.
But in 2025, the allegory of the story is much closer to reality than I had imagined possible.
In the film, the neoliberal technocrats win the day by compromising the presidency, sundering international relations, and guaranteeing the destruction of humanity and all life on earth in pursuit of further advancing an extractive economy that will further enrich billionaires. The overlap with the present day is blatant, right down to the extractive-ejaculative techno-utopian / techno-authoritarian fallacy, the current collusion between the highest levels of US government and egomaniacal self-interested technocratic delusion.
Clearly, given the current state of things, Don’t Look Up’s satiric allegory is also … accurate prediction.
One of my errors, I see with the brittle clarity of retrospect, is that I had glossed over a primary maxim of scholars of religion: myth is often precisely that which people hold to be most true. I just didn’t think it would get to that point, really, where a man set on colonizing Mars with his myriad government space contracts (not the film-version CEO of BASH electronics, but the actual present-day CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and more) would be granted, for example, easy access to, and control over, all federal payroll data and other radically confidential information. Or that press conferences in the Oval Office, for example, would include those unelected non-officials.
But there are several things that Don’t Look Up glossed over and current reality does too—in ethically irresponsible and ecologically perilous ways. First are the local realities of extraction. Second is the question of whose narrative is elevated, seen, heard, and lauded in the fight for collective futures.
Despite the ecomodernist yet energy-recidivistic flair of the current Trump administration’s energy policy, the reality of pollution and extractivisms—and in the United States specifically, extractive capitalism—by no means leads to those imagined, shiny outcomes of jobs and profit for all. This has been evident for centuries for Native American communities that have been debilitated by racism and US government policy, their lands and relationships expropriated by colonialism, genocide, and land theft. In the present day, contexts of extraction dramatically amplify already-massive epidemics of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and gender minorities (which are now, apparently, nonexistent per the skewed definition of sex/gender in another January 20, 2025 executive order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”). What is distinctive about this particular moment is the collusion of tech moguls (the aptly-nicknamed Broligarchy) with Christian nationalism in the time of the 47th President of the United States. This feels (and is) catastrophic to many people: those directly affected as well as those working on the collective labors of climate justice, human rights, immigration, and interwoven solidarity movements.
What is new is that mainstream white populations are perceiving this moment as a threat to established ecological and political formations of life.
Given this nation’s unreckoned (and now, again, forcibly whitewashed) legacies of enslavement, the ongoing burdens on African-American communities are also predictable, dramatic, and unconscionable: environmental racism leads to placement of petroleum refineries (see Cancer Alley in Louisiana) or toxic waste dumps in minority communities (see the work of Robert Bullard, Benjamin Chavis, and others in the famous “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States” report by the United Church of Christ from 1987; see also its 2017 update). Winona LaDuke, Dorceta Taylor, and many other scholars and advocates have been recording the data and making the case for decades. There are documentaries and testimonies, books and protests. Decolonial and Indigenous scholars, knowledge-keepers, social theorists, and advocates point out that the destruction of worlds—social, cultural, environmental, economic, political, bodily—is part of the premise and function of coloniality, of empire, of extractive capitalism. Apocalypse or catastrophe, viewed with this insight, are neither new nor singular, as Kyle Whyte has pointed out in his critiques of climate narratives as “crisis epistemology.” Mary Annaïse Heglar identifies the colonial tendency as “existential exceptionalism.”
Whyte, Heglar, and many other scholars and advocates point out that for populations and communities colonized (enslaved, racialized, subject to genocide), this moment right now is precedented. This means that despite the rhetoric that this is an unprecedented crisis, there are in fact precursors. This is true even if (and as) this particular moment is distinctive; even if (and as) cultures of whiteness / white supremacy in the rich minority world are now recognizing it as such, perhaps for the first time; even if (and as) the future of democratic projects in the US and elsewhere totters on a precarious precipice.
It matters a great deal whose stories we recount, and whose version of events, values, and goals feature in those stories. And that brings us back to Don’t Look Up. Whose version of events is featured in Don’t Look Up and the other stories that dominant white society tells ourselves? It’s a crucial question to ask, even—and perhaps especially—about stories that we love.
Personally, as a white woman and professor with a particularly dry Euro-American sense of humor, I loved much of Don’t Look Up. I laughed with tired recognition at Kate Dibiansky’s incredulity at being ripped off in the White House by a military general, or her disgust that talk-show hosts would fail to understand the world-ending data. The consistency of Dibiasky’s literal eye rolls is more than metaphor for all of the absurdities that smart women wielding facts must bear in a profit-preferential patriarchal polity. I can relate.
In Don’t Look Up as in many mainstream hits, the white male nonetheless becomes the revered and praised storyteller, whose creative productions are facilitated and promoted over others. This is a question for the film’s protagonists and for creator Adam McKay, as well as for the many other white creators—especially men—who have access to major platforms and the confidence to pitch those stories as if their version is going to be definitive and record-breaking (which, by virtue of institutional habits and cultural norms, it often is). As Shelley Streeby points out in Imagining the Future of Climate Change, the themes and complications of planetary dynamics, climate changes, more-than-human forces, and neoliberal social formations have been named and engaged for decades in speculative fiction by writers of color, and notably, by women+. Think Octavia Butler, NK Jemisin, Ursula K. Le Guin. And the imagination of alternative economies and communities is narrated in the streets of protest and the venues of intersectional advocacy, mutual aid, and more. This kind of narrative is far more reciprocal and collective than the stories being told from most big streaming hits, or from today’s US executive branch.
And, despite its predictive potency, Don’t Look Up does little to suggest ways forward in the particular context of climate colonialism and environmental violence. For guides on how to live better amidst and after catastrophe, there are a lot of communities telling truer stories that have been—and are being—always told and ever remade, at least for those who are willing to listen.
Why not centralize broader, deeper, better voices? Whose allegory is it anyway?
I still hope that the whole planet won’t explode, even though US democracy may blow up (or more likely, be eviscerated from within while Congress redefines complicity). The questions of moral courage are plainly put at present. There are many whose wisdom deserves far more mainstream attention.
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Christiana Zenner is Associate Professor of Theology, Science, and Ethics at Fordham University in New York City. An anti-colonial, intersectional feminist working at the nexus of theology, religious studies, and environmental sciences, Dr. Zenner is the author of Just Water: Theology, Ethics, and Fresh Water Crises (rev. ed. 2018) and co-editor of two volumes on bioethics and sustainability.
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Photo credits: “Illustration of Earth (left) and asteroid Eros (right), with a starry space background.” © NASA. Public Domain.
