Don’t Look Askance

Abstract

The paper is a discussion of film expressions of environmental emotions, in particular of eco-anger. It discusses several distinctions within the notion of anger (in particular that of honour-related vs. justice-related anger) and argues that eco-anger can take accordingly varied forms. As an expression of honour-related eco-anger, the film Don’t Look Up and its cinematic tools are analysed. This film is contrasted with justice-related forms of eco-anger (as embodied in the movement of Fridays for Future), and, further, with Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. While Melancholia has (probably) no authorial environmentalist intention, its plot (strongly reminiscent of that of Don’t Look Up) invites environmentalist readings: as a lucidly pessimist film, fully free of any condescension or a tendency to take artistic vengeance on the deniers of the upcoming catastrophe.

Keywords:

• Environmental Emotions
• Anger
• Cinema
• Lucid Pessimism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Kriss A. Kevorkian, “Environmental Grief,” in Non-Death Loss and Grief, ed. Darcy L. Harris (New York: Routledge, 2019), 216–26.

2 Caroline Hickman et al., “Climate Anxiety in Children and Young People and Their Beliefs about Government Responses to Climate Change: A Global Survey,” The Lancet Planetary Health 5 (2021): E863–73.

3 See C. S. Lewis, “A Grief Observed,” in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 647–88.

4 Harris, Non-Death Loss and Grief.

5 Dan Festa and Darcy L. Harris, “Living in a Liminal Space: The Experience of Caring for a Spouse with Alzheimer’s Disease,” in Harris, Non-Death Loss and Grief, 91–100.

6 Sheldon Solomon, “Mourning in Trump’s America: An Existential Account of Political Grief,” in Harris, Non-Death Loss and Grief, 61–71.

7 See e.g. Laura Candiotto, “Loving the Earth by Loving a Place: A Situated Approach to the Love of Nature,” Constructive Foundations 17 (2022): 179–89.

8 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), § 40.

9 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Sarah Richmond (New York: Washington Square Press, 2018), 66.

10 Matthew Ratcliffe, Grief Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023). Ratcliffe argues that grief involves both the particular loss and a disruption in the overall sense that the world makes for the grieving person.

11 See my article “Who Should Have Children? (Us?) When Should We Have Children? (Now?),” SATS 23 (2022): 55–74.

12 An overview can be found in Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, eds., Ecocinema Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2012) or in a more recent collection with an “urban” focus: Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann, eds., Ecocinema in the City (New York: Routledge, 2019). Pietari Kääpä and Tommy Gustafsson, eds., Transnational Ecocinema (Bristol: Intellect, 2013) offer an expanded, less Western-centred focus.

13 As testified by many works framing the surge in climate anxiety as a matter of mental health; see François Bourque and Ashlee Cunsolo Willox, “Climate Change: The Next Challenge for Public Mental Health?,” International Review of Psychiatry 26 (2014): 415–422; or Ashlee Cunsolo Willox and Neville Ellis, “Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to Climate Change-Related Loss,” Nature Climate Change 8 (2018): 275–81.

14 Based on her previous systematic exploration of “trauma”; see E. Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016).

15 E. Ann Kaplan, “Taking Stock at a Perilous Moment,” Afterimage 47 (2020): 21–27, see p. 23.

16 Leaving aside the booming business (academic included) of anger management, where the therapeutic framing comes naturally.

17 Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2018), 1378a29–31.

18 Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

19 Peter F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Routledge, 2008), 1–28.

20 See Robert Solomon, “Emotions and Choice,” The Review of Metaphysics 27 (1973): 20–41.

21 That much is argued persuasively by Laura Silva; see e.g. “Anger and Its Desires,” European Journal of Philosophy 29 (2021): 1115–1135; “Is Anger a Hostile Emotion?,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology (2021), https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00557-2

22 Lucius Annaeus Seneca, “On Anger,” in Anger, Mercy, Revenge, trans. Robert A. Kaster and Martha Nussbaum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 2.3b.

23 See Samantha K. Stanley et al., “From Anger to Action: Differential Impacts of Eco-anxiety, Eco-depression, and Eco-anger on Climate Action and Wellbeing,” The Journal of Climate Change and Health 1 (2021): 100003.

24 e.g. Bennett W. Helm, “Emotions as Evaluative Feelings,” Emotion Review 1 (2009): 248–55.

25 Seneca, “On Anger,” 9.1–2.

26 See Jochen Kleres and Åsa Wettergren, “Fear, Hope, Anger, and Guilt in Climate Activism,” Social Movement Studies 16 (2017): 507–19; Stanley et al., “From Anger to Action.”

27 As mentioned by Maria Ojala in her overview of various forms of environmental hope, though mostly (but not always) positive and proactive: “Hope and Climate Change: The Importance of Hope for Environmental Engagement among Young People,” Environmental Education Research 18 (2012), 625–42; see also Kleres and Wettergren, “Fear, Hope, Anger, and Guilt in Climate Activism,” 512, 515. In most discussions, though, hope is seen as indispensably important in environmental mobilisation; many of these accounts rely on Jonathan Lear’s notion of “radical hope,” see Tom Whyman, Infinitely Full of Hope (London: Repeater Books, 2021), or Diana Stuart, “Radical Hope: Truth, Virtue, and Hope for What Is Left in Extinction Rebellion,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 33 (2020): 487–504.

28 Nussbaum, Anger and Resentment, 28ff; see also Silva, “Anger and Its Desires,” sect. 4.

29 Maya Crockett, “Stop Telling Greta Thunberg to Smile: She Has Every Right to Be Angry,” Stylist, 24 September 2019, https://www.stylist.co.uk/visible-women/greta-thunberg-climate-change-activist-sexist-stereotype-women-nice/303511 (accessed 10 April 2022).

30 As discussed in Cogley’s analysis of virtuous vs. vicious anger: Zac Cogley, “A Study of Virtuous and Vicious Anger,” in Virtues and Their Vices, ed. Kevin Timpe and Craig A. Boyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 199–224.

31 Don’t Look Up. Directed by Adam McKay. Los Angeles: Hyperobject Industries/Bluegrass Films, 2021.

32 See Donna Lu, “‘It Parodies Our Inaction’: Don’t Look Up, an Allegory of the Climate Crisis, Lauded by Activist,” The Guardian, 30 December 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/30/it-parodies-our-inaction-dont-look-up-an-allegory-of-the-climate-crisis-lauded-by-activists (accessed 10 April 2022).

33 See David Vetter, “Why Sneering Critics Dislike Netflix’s ‘Don’t Look Up,’ But Climate Scientists Love It,” Forbes, 28 December 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2021/12/28/why-sneering-critics-dislike-netflixs-dont-look-up-but-climate-scientists-love-it/?sh=8349ee62ee87 (accessed 10 April 2022).

34 Quoted by Joanna Psaros, “Don’t Look Up (2021) Netflix Movie Review – This Lukewarm Satire Ultimately Disappoints,” The Review Geek, 6 January 2022, https://www.thereviewgeek.com/dontlookup-moviereview/ (accessed 10 April 2022).

35 Colin J. Davis and Stephan Lewandowsky, “Thinking about Climate Change: Look Up and Look Around!,” Thinking & Reasoning 28 (2022): 321–6.

36 Ibid., 323.

37 Peter Isackson, “The Real Message of Adam McKay’s ‘Don’t Look Up,’” Fair Observer, 18 January 2022, https://www.fairobserver.com/region/north_america/peter-isackson-dont-look-up-reviews-adam-mckay-leonardo-dicaprio-hollywood-film-news-84394/ (accessed 10 April 2022).

38 Jerry Goodenough, “Introduction I: A Philosopher Goes to Cinema,” in Film as Philosophy, ed. Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1–28, see pp. 12, 23; see also Ondřej Beran, Examples and Their Role in Our Thinking (New York: Routledge, 2021), chap. 3.3.

39 See the Czech-language review mentioning the pandemic but not the climate crisis: https://film.moviezone.cz/k-zemi-hled/recenze (accessed 10 April 2022).

40 As argued by Allison Wall, “Film Review: Don’t Look Up – A Masterclass In Autistic Ableism,” The Art of Autism, 17 January 2022, https://the-art-of-autism.com/film-review-dont-look-up-a-masterclass-in-autistic-ableism/ (accessed 10 April 2022).

41 In his discussion of the “excess and abuse” of anger, which he diagnoses as “resolute bent of mind, not to be [ever?] convinced or set right,” Butler remarks, without further elaboration, that “[i]n this there is doubtless a great mixture of pride.” Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd., 1914), 129.

42 George Monbiot, “Watching Don’t Look Up Made Me See my Whole Life of Campaigning Flash before Me,” The Guardian, 4 January 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/04/dont-look-up-life-of-campaigning (accessed 10 April 2022).

43 Melancholia. Directed by Lars von Trier. Copenhagen: Zentropa Entertainments, and co-producers, 2011.

44 See Robert Sinnerbrink, “Anatomy of Melancholia,” Angelaki 19 (2014): 111–26; or the texts gathered in Bonnie Honig and Lori J. Marso, eds., Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), see Part VI.

45 Tom Matts and Aidan Tynan, “The Melancholy of Extinction,” Media/Culture Journal 15 (2012): 3, https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/491 (accessed 10 April 2022); Rupert Read, A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment (New York: Routledge, 2019), chap. 4.

46 Notably, Slavoj Žižek interprets the film in exactly this respect as “profoundly optimistic.” Slavoj Žižek, “The Optimism of Melancholia” (video), Big Think, 26 June 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUIjoYDKETM (accessed 10 April 2022).

47 See Renee Lertzman, Environmental Melancholia (New York: Routledge, 2015), and the position of chapters 6 and 7 in the architecture of the book (a book about melancholia).

48 Von Trier is not afraid of sex and nudity (violent or malicious forms included) in his films. Justine is shown naked twice, in very different ways: first, in a naturalistic setting, as the pitiable wreck in need of care; then, in a highly stylised setting, as reclining in the night forest and bathing happily in the light of Melancholia. Read (A Film-Philosophy, 95n14) characterises the latter scene as an “otherwise-weak ‘soft-porn’” that needs to be vindicated by less-than-evident interpretations of the film; and, as with most criticisms of von Trier, this one, too, is at least partly true. Yet the scenes highlight the development inherent to the central character.

49 Matts and Tynan, “The Melancholy of Extinction.”

50 Read, A Film-Philosophy, 89.

51 Notably, though, a similar affectionate scene of a family dinner at the end of Don’t Look Up sticks out incongruously like a healthy thumb out of a sore body.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grant no. 22-15446S of the Czech Science Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Ondřej Beran

ONDŘEJ BERAN is based at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value (Dept. of Philosophy and Religious Studies), University of Pardubice. He writes about various topics. His recent publications include Examples and Their Role in Our Thinking (Routledge 2021) and Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein (co-edited with Salla Aldrin Salskov and Nora Hämäläinen; Springer 2022).