I have had a bit of time to mull over Don't Look Up. Given the demographic of this site, this may not be the most useful place to post this, but honestly I just want to talk about it. This will contain spoilers. I also want to be clear that when I talk about the older generation here, I am talking about specific people, the older members of my family, not those generations as a whole.
This is a movie that will garner fundamentally different reactions from myself and the other younger members of my family (early 20s) and the older ones (mid 50s). It's not that the older ones don't get it - a lot of older people do. My older family members certainly think they do, and and be fair to them, they do what they can to help. They recycle. They buy ethically-sourced fruit.
But their emotional connection to this issue is just not there, compared to myself and my siblings and cousins. They don't understand that the comet is hitting right this minute, that it's been hitting for decades. Or rather, they understand this - but only academically.
The problem is that, for them, this is only ever going to be an academic issue. This will sound harsh, but, given where we are, most of my older family will live out the rest of their lives unaffected by this. They will see the impacts of climate change on the news and the TV screen, but even if they make it to the extreme upper limits of the human life span, the odds are this will never really touch them. It doesn't necessarily feel real for them, and that's not necessarily their fault.
We, the younger ones, don't have the luxury of that emotional distance. By the time our kids are in their 50s, it's likely that massive sections of this country will be underwater. And that's the least of it.
This has consequences for the way I think about this, compared to our older family members. At the moment, I think I probably will not have kids, and the environment is a large factor in that decision. I mentioned this to one of the older folk last year, and she was shocked.
"This doesn't have to factor into everything you do," she said. "You're allowed to make some choices for yourself."
This has stuck with me because, on the one hand, there's very little that I, individually, can do or not do to make a palpable difference to this situation. I am small, and the corporate and national responsibility for this problem is very, very large.
On the other hand, this does factor into everything I do, and everything I will do for the rest of my life. I don't have a choice in that. I wish I did.
To be clear, this is a post about my own family and my own emotional reaction to a film that hit pretty damn close to home. For my older family, this is just another film, with a nifty little metaphor. For me it's a suckerpunch, a deeply satirical and accurate reminder of exactly how the end of the world is going to go down. We knew this anyway, but it still hurts to see it so plainly depicted. I would love it, I really would, if Don't Look Up makes the difference it's so very clearly aiming to, but I'm not hopeful.
In this moment, we are at the section of the movie where the comet is already well and truly embedded in the seabed of the Pacific, and we're just waiting for the tidal waves to reach us.
We're at family dinner now.
