'Don't look up' and the power of satire

Laughter is a political weapon, it serves to disobey authority.

One of the artistic manifestations of laughter is satire, and ruthless satire is what we find in the now famous film

by director Adam McKay.

Satire needs to be ruthless, carnival, snorting, dissonant.

The post-pandemic world is no longer rational.

Ideologies rave, presidents of government rave, capitalism raves.

The truth has become unintelligible.

That atmosphere of moral weightlessness is what

has been able to capture , where the dialogue of the deaf between science and politics is ridiculed, something that we have seen and continue to see in the pandemic.

Science also becomes grotesque when it becomes just another media spectacle.

The reality and the facts are unbearable if they are not metamorphosed into a

.

But

, it's just that, a movie, a fantasy that ignores something fundamental about the human heart, such as the ability to survive.

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What the success of 'Don't look up' explains about current cinema

If we defeat Nazism and if we expose Stalinism, it is very possible that we will be able to deviate the orbit of a comet, killer of planets, that comes after us, as the fiction of the film proposes. We are not dinosaurs. We will know how to deflect that bullet. There the film is wrong from an anthropological point of view, but that doesn't matter, the important thing is that it gets the fundamentals right: we are a civilization adrift and we are no longer tragic but grotesque. Luis Buñuel has defeated Ingmar Bergman. There is a defining moment in

And that's when the character played by Jennifer Lawrence affirms that those who rule us are not smarter than us. Not only are they not smarter than us, but they are almost certainly less so, that is the most dissolving point in this story. We believed that the exercise of power requires prior attitudes, such as intelligence, analytical capacity and responsibility.

The world that

is that of a planet that has expelled the humanities from its bosom (especially the teaching of philosophy) and has changed them through a frivolous use of social networks. A lot of fun at first, a sordid and banal ruin at the end. The movie has reminded me of a wonderful recent novel. I am thinking of

by David Trueba, who portrayed a society incapable of accepting the truth and, therefore, in need of being treated as a child to whom one must lie so that it is not scared or terrified. Film and novel resort to satire as a form of representation of that so liquid and weightless that happens to us as a society and that we do not know how to specify. Both in

and in

, the lives of the characters are devastatingly empty. An empty life is like a cancerous cell, it ends up narrating its emptiness to the next cell, until it forms an immense continent of darkness that leads us towards moral illness.

In the film, the president of the United States, an incredible Meryl Streep, who at the end of the film shows us her ass, goes beyond being a representation of Trump, as it has been wanted to see.

I believe that in that president there is room for all the presidents of the Earth.

Including the current Biden.

Including even ours, the one we have now and the one that will come later.

If we do not understand that, if we do not understand that our life moves with laughter and grotesque, we are not prepared for satire, because we are still believers, we are still obedient.

The carnival is back.

Laughing at everything is passion, it is catharsis, it is party, it is stainless freedom.

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