“Don’t Look Up” Shows Our Damaged Relationship-Making Ability

Adam McKay’s wicked satire about contemporary society is unrelenting. And it is funny. There is hardly time to process one sharp comment on an aspect of modern life before another aspect is being set on fire.

But the moment that hit me most sharply is the scene where scientist Randall Bindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) wakes up in bed next to broadcaster Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchette). Following sex, it is time for the “get to know you” part of the “relationship.” Already the normal process of a romantic relationship (this is neither romantic nor a relationship) is inverted.

That’s not very interesting in itself, but what passes as “getting to know you” is very interesting. Randall points out that all he knows about Brie is what she does for a living and what restaurants she likes.

Brie shares first: her background (with a focus on the source of her wealth and privilege), her academic degrees, her ability to speak four languages, places she’s traveled. It’s a profile on a dating website, or just a social media website. It’s a persona more than a person, and there’s no personal sharing involved.

Randall then tells Brie about his working-class beginnings and shares that the family dog died two years ago and he cried more than he ever has in his whole life. Brie’s response? She starts scrolling on her phone and asks: “Where should we go for dinner?”

If this is Randall Bindy’s dating profile, he is very bad at it. He doesn’t know how to do it. Maybe it is because he is a married man with two sons and, presumably, a new family dog. When Randall has participated in this kind of game, it has been to forge relationship. And forging relationships is very different than making a match.

There is another way of looking at it, too. The story of crying over the dog might be the kind of “line” used to pick up women in a former time. Show you’re sensitive, emotional, and have experienced pain. Women love that, don’t they? Maybe not today’s women. Maybe not the kind of women who have sex first and ask questions later, if at all. I don’t want to make it seem like this is a new thing. When did our descent into insensitivity, our inability to have a form available for forging new relationships, begin?

But social media, online dating, the ways we make ourselves less real, including to ourselves, feels new. The online world is populated by personas and avatars. The sex is less and less interesting, the way Bindy and Bree’s crotch grabbing and groping of each other in the hallway and hotel room is completely uninteresting. In some ways, all sex in film and on t.v. feels pro forma now, a trope. As has long been said, a Jane Austen touch on the wrist or view of the nape of one’s neck is more erotic than what passes for sex in today’s media.

Bindy struggles throughout the film. He is caught up in fame, which makes of him a liar and a betrayer of his core principles and relationships. What turns him around? The tech guru tells him that the algorithm predicts he will die alone. What could be worse? In the end, in the film’s most beautiful and hopeful moment, the Bindy family and friends make dinner and eat together. It is The Big Chill. It is downright sacramental. And Randall is able to do it only because of a deep and lasting foundation of relationship.