Does it take looking at a meteorite to feel like one day it could all end? Don't look up (Adam McKay, 2021) Netflix's latest buzz-worthy film offers a catharsis of the pandemic - yes, the tireless pandemic - that has that end-of-the-world feel. The virus meteorite fell in 2020 and we are still living its effects because as the memes say, we are living new seasons.
Alien invasions are also good for putting the audience in #NosVamosAMorir mode. In Screenwriting classes, when I ask my students what movies they remember about the end of the world, apropos Don't look up, the first one that comes to mind is Roland Emmerich's 2012 (2009), but immediately the memory is corrected with childhood favorite Chicken Little (Mark Dindal, 2005). Roberto was a child when he saw the sky fall in the “alien attack” that did not seek to destroy the world, but to retrieve a tender baby flame with three eyes. For Martha it is also her favorite, she cried when they burned her old year (monicker) of this chick, one year end.
I asked myself the same question and had an inner journey. I went through my 13 years, when I saw Independence Day (also by Emmerich, but in 1996), a time when you paid the ticket to see happy endings, with a Will Smith relieving dramatic tensions. Then I remembered once I had a date and saw The day after tomorrow (also by Emmerich, 2004), the only thing I can remember is that I fell asleep because of the excess of special effects and the endless chatter of the man who accompanied me. I came back to reality when Jorge told me "Armageddon, miss! (Michael Bay, 1998). How could I forget Steve Tyler's metal voice, Lyv Tyler's hand, on the screen without a signal after losing communication with his father, who preferred to immolate himself in the flames of a spaceship to save the world, his daughter and her boyfriend.
Isn't losing a parent another end of the world? A piece of my world ended in 2019 when I lost my father. From Truffaut's 400 Blows to Spielberg's ET, the absence of the father is one of the narrative leitmotifs of greater connection with the audience, because the feeling of orphanhood has no age, nor time. In Don't Look Up it is decisive for Kate Dibiasky when, upon returning home, behind a closed door her parents answer “we agree with the jobs the comet is going to create” and then she must leave. But scientist Randall Mindy does not abandon her in this quixotic paradigm of dreaming of the impossible.
The image acts on the viewer, a participant full of emotions, of active mind and psyche (Aumont, 1992). It is not the purpose of these letters to say whether Don't look up is good or bad. We are talking about how audiovisual production weaves memories, how a set of images is able to awaken them, to connect us, to make the throat feel empty, breathless.
Be it art cinema or canguil. Images that have the capacity to transcend. The narrative of films about the end of the world -and other disasters- today gives priority to special affections. Catharsis is no longer given by the special defects of seeing buildings fall, but is a collage, just as memories appear, sudden and impertinent. More than 100 years ago Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Einsenstein already knew this. This juxtaposition of images called montage is the creator of a semantic narrative, with a purpose beyond that of showing: to generate sensations in the spectator.
The freeze-frame sequences in Don't look up have that effect. For those of us who have seen Melancholia (Lars Von Trier, 2011), the parallel is inevitable. At both the beginning and end, Melancholia features several slow-motion shots of Justine (Kirsten Dunst) as she has visions of the planet crashing into the world as she and her family try to save themselves. The effect of that bewilderment was also applied by Ingmar Bergman in Persona (1966), which begins with a collage of dissimilar images that leave a bewildered viewer ready to see the mental collision of two women who seem as one. And love as a backdrop. That search for companionship for the moment of disaster, capable of destroying and mending relationships, is the approach of Seeking a friend for the end of the world (Lorene Scafaria, 2012), disagreements that Don't look up also explores.
The charm of the image lies in the possibility that its representation derives in the substitution of reality as in fact it is achieved with simulations (Tolentino, 2018). And through neuroscience it is possible to analyze how artistic creation and the viewer's perceptions are interrelated within the human brain, in which the sensitivity and imagination of the artist is decisive to convey emotions and feelings to the public (Contreras and Gasea, 2016).
I watched Don't look up with Darwin, my husband. -What do you want to do when the world ends? -Try to save us, he said. -Well, but I want us to have dinner too, I replied.
It's not just videos from a movie or series. Content creators are able to create memories that inhabit us when we travel to the center of the earth.
Sylvia Poveda Benites
Journalist and M.A. in Creative Writing
Lecturer at the Faculty of Communication Sciences UEES
