Don't Look Up and The Simpsons
*SPOILERS ABOUND*
Several commentators have picked up on the numerous similarities between Don’t Look Up and the Simpsons episode Bart’s Comet. Each story features a society discovering, via a professor and his young student, that an asteroid is heading directly for earth. In each case the asteroid will bring total oblivion unless the threatened society can take collective action to prevent it. Both feature hair-brained and unsuccessful attempts to destroy the asteroid, together with a hysteric media environment and incoherent, self-interested political responses. Each end with the central characters uniting to find a modicum of peace in the face of their impending doom.
These similarities are mildly amusing (although unsurprising to those familiar with the ‘Simpsons did it first’ meme). However, lurking hidden beneath these surface level comparisons are two fundamentally contrasting interpretations of how our society is equipped to act collectively in the face of an apocalyptic threat.
There is a Hobbesian flavour to Bart’s Comet. The townspeople’s reactions (including those of the ‘elites’) are driven by chaotic self-interest. No-one is wise, no-one is authoritative. The proposed solutions are ludicrous. Even Lisa, the audience surrogate who is so often the voice of common sense, has little of value to add. The crisis serves to shatter the carapace of organised society, exposing all of Springfield’s inhabitants to the brutal realities of the state of nature. Each and every character is left to desperately search for peace, necessarily crashing into one another in the process of doing so. It’s a reflection of the futility of the human condition, our utter inability to act collectively when our faith in Leviathon collapses. We, the viewer, take a distant role. We watch with interest, with amusement, but not with empathy.
Don’t Look Up is different. We aren’t a remote, impassive figure. We are Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence’s character). We know that the comet is real. We know what we need to do. Our character isn’t a source of mockery or ridicule. She is a prophet. In Bart’s Comet everyone is ridiculous. We get to sit back and watch the fun. In Don’t Look Up it’s only ‘them’ who are ridiculous. The MAGA types. The elites in the media and the presidential office. The tech bros. They are the funny ones – they are the idiots. And we, the viewer, are implicitly encouraged to take comfort in knowing that, despite how much they laugh at us now, when oblivion comes, we will not be them. We will be right.
Bart’s Comet’s comedy derives largely from the surreal, incoherent reactions of the doomed. There are a series of intricate jokes which take the premise at face value and mine the ludicrous reactions of a variety of characters for laughs. Don’t Look Up doesn’t really feature any proper ‘set-up, pay-off’ jokes. Its humour derives from the superiority we feel over the idiots. Rather than a network of interplaying characters interacting in carefully planned farcical situations, we have a series of conversations where good guy = serious, unfunny, bad guy = stupid, funny.
Despite Bart’s Comet ending with the comet burning up in the atmosphere, and Don’t Look Up ending with annihilation, in many ways Bart’s Comet is the more pessimistic piece. It casts doubt on society as a whole – even those who think they are superior reveal themselves as foolish and naïve, and ultimately it is down to luck whether humanity survives. Don’t Look Up is premised on the assumption that humanity can act, but that it depends on the ability of ‘us’, the knowledgeable elite, to reach out and build a consensus with the idiots and to avoid sacrificing our values in the process of doing so.
Which of these is a more effective premise for collective action is arguable. It is possible to interpret Bart’s Comet as anti-science – everyone’s an idiot and we’re all doomed anyway so why trust the experts. This is a dangerous foundation upon which to build any meaningful response to, say, climate change. But I think it’s more nuanced than this. I interpret the Simpsons’ message of ‘everyone is equally ridiculous’ as a significantly more powerful trigger for collective action than ‘this small section of the population is right and everyone who disagrees is a nutjob’.
Either way, I know which one is funnier.