We Really Had It All, Didn’t We?: ‘Don’t Look Up’ is About the Era of Singularities
Have you noticed that many of the interpretations of the film Don’t Look Up are literalist? The collapse of metaphor implies that one can do nothing but read literally. We can find examples of this most obviously in the popular public reaction to comedians in the United States: increasingly, as Bill Burr notes, jokes are taken as direct political statements. This loss of the function of metaphor seems characteristic of generalized foreclosure: we’ve all gone mad!
There is another sense in which a film might be read literally, that is, according to the letter. A difference presents itself: literal interpretations impute a meaning that it presumes was already there, presupposed; and interpretations of the letter, that is, interpretations which isolate a real that is at stake in the twenty first century. To read in the latter Lacanian sense does not at all imply an interpretation that aims at meaning. Rather, there is a place where meaning falls, and where, in the hole that was left behind, something singular might be discovered.
The singular is discovered in the hole of what used to be universal, of what used to be ‘for all.’ Put another way, the singular is in the hole of the missing symbolic Other, an Other which governed, ostensibly, intersubjective relations.
This is precisely what is most at stake in the film Don’t Look Up. One cannot help but be moved by the two main characters. We learn about them slowly, from within the chamber of their isolated scientific activities. First, there is the relentless female doctoral student who endlessly enjoys her life on her own terms, and, second, there is a troubled male professor whose traumas are solved one pill at a time. The troubles that they confront have nothing to do with any obstacles that are presented to them, but rather from the very fact that there do not seem to be obstacles.
It is clear that two of them bond around the belief that science could offer them a ‘for all,’ a means of relating to one another, and, moreover, the rest of the world. Thus, the discovery, finally verbalized at the end of the film, is about the opacity of jouissance: “we really had it all.” This is a statement concerning the positive jouissance that pervades the experiences of the characters throughout the film. It is a statement that gives expression to the era of singularities (see my forthcoming book Singularities: Psychoanalytic Sociology for a Strange Time).
Thus, the film is not about climate change, or about science communication. It is not about the end of the world. It is about the end of the conception of “the world,” in the Heideggerian sense: there is no overarching social bond, ‘for all,’ within which the fantasy of intersubjective communication or relationships are possible. Instead, we confront the wall of language, and this implies, as Eric Laurent has put it: a new principle of segregation. The film allows us to approach the terror of realizing that one cannot get beyond the brick wall that separates us from one another: though we seem to share a room, a bedroom, a classroom, a country, etc, we nonetheless scream in isolation.
When the overarching social bond — what Lacanians refer to as the field of the Other — falls then the one emerges all alone, without a world within which to imagine himself understood or understandable. We are either crazy or else the others are crazy: we question the contours of our own reality in order to discover that nothing makes sense, jouissance, modes of jouissance, prevail. This is the price we pay for the revelation of the big secret of psychoanalysis, that ‘the big Other doesn’t exist.’ We inhabit the field of the ones-all-alone, which, as Lacan put it, is worse.
We are in a lonely era, and we cannot entertain the fantasy anymore that science would return us to the ‘for all’ Oedipal social world. Science will not offer us the overarching framework within which we might return to a semblance of peace. The ending of the film demonstrates that this fantasy cannot be sustained: the hole inevitably swallows us, our lonely singular tribes, time stops as we fall into infinity, … and there is nothing anymore available to hold it all together.
The film is therefore too optimistic when what we require today is a new pessimism: we must be prepared to see the worst of our current situation since today, within the era of singularities, the war runs very deep and exists at every scale (e.g., psychological, interpersonal/familiar, institutional, cultural, etc). In the worst of situations we smash our heads against the walls, projecting our own inhumanity onto others, and we do so with the best of intentions.
That they will not listen to you, do not understand you — though, for you, it is a matter of life and death — necessitates that we begin to see the inhumanity that exists already inside of ourselves. Instead of holding hands with our tribe while the hole devours us, we must learn to hold hands around the hole itself.
I would like to thank Mark Gerard Murphey for conversations relating to this film.
