Don’t look up! – a cheap political satire or a brilliant mockumentary? – part 2

The end of 2021 was marked by vivid discussions around political satire. Whether you liked it or not, Don’t look up! is one of the most debated movies of all time. However, is this truly important from a political point of view? Does it allow us to advance and really use the critique to come up with better solutions to our problems? How come the elites are providing us with a critique of what, for them, is a very profitable status-quo? Is this movie seriously attacking the power structures or is this just a way to groom us for the disasters that probably await us?
How about the message? It seems that all we can hope for is to die with dignity, not the bright future that we all aspire to! We cannot look up to the elites, hoping that they will lead us to progress. We have to look around us to find the people that we want to have with us when we hopelessly die!
A famous quote says that ‘the capitalists will sell us the rope we hang them with.’ Is this movie the capitalist exploitation of the critique of capitalism, or is it a wake-up call meant to tell us – what exactly? That there is nothing we can hope for?
Some of the least discussed, yet most important, themes related to Don’t look up! relate to the way the PR industry has acted for decades now, making the movie more of a documentary than a satire. For decades, the PR industry used the book of propaganda and alternative facts, written by the tobacco industry as early as 1953, and did things that would make this movie seem more optimistic than the reality itself.
If you want to find out more about these topics and others, join us On the Barricades! Maria Cernat and Boyan Stanislavski are talking to Frank Myonk, the Barricade’s art director in the second part of the discussion. Frank is a graphic designer and a filmmaker, and he joined the hosts of the show to offer his take on this very interesting movie and also to discuss the reactions it created in Romania and Poland.

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