🫣🙃😏 Hypocritique 🫣🙃😏

The title of Adam McKay’s excellent film “Don’t Look Up” refers to the passion for ignorance. It means “just stick to your beliefs and don’t check what is really going on.”

But if it’s an allegory for the climate crisis (as it’s being advertised) then the title might also be saying “don’t look up (in the literature)” since the relevant knowledge about the climate is written not in the stars but in the scientific literature.

On first approach, it is tempting to pose “ignorant people” against the scientists-supposed-to-know. In this version, the literature as the signifier announces what is already known to be true and the passion for ignorance is a coward for fleeing from this true knowledge.

But the essential element in the literature is not the signifier but the letter, which means: “to look up” is not merely to see the truth but to confront the unknown. In this version, the passion for ignorance is in alliance with the subject-supposed-to-know, which now refers to the manager (president and CEO) instead of the scientist.

When the scientist is defined by the letter instead of the signifier, (s)he can no longer be at home in truth, because (s)he is at the real limit of truth, i.e. (s)he confronts the symptom.

But the symptom is precisely what opposes the scientist; namely, the passion for ignorance in alliance with the subject-supposed-to-know, together constituting the signifier of the lack in the Other. So ignorance is not the enemy of the scientist, it rather constitutes and organizes his/her topic and field.

If the scientist is to face the unknown at the horizon, (s)he cannot rely on the impostures of “being in the know” and “being in the right”; instead, (s)he has to own up the ignorance that (s)he faces as his/her own unknowing.

This is why the title “Don’t Look Up” also gives a positive vibe, and it would be inaccurate to name the film “Just Look Up!” If the scientist wants to “see the light”, scanning the stars in the sky is not enough, (s)he also has to look down and confront the symptom.

When Kate looks at the stars with her lover, she cannot help but continue wondering why the general charged them for free snacks in the White House. While looking up to the stars, she is actually looking down at the symptom, and this proves that she is a true scientist. This is the true meaning of the film’s title.

This little anecdote is crucial because it formulates the relation between the mamilla and the phallus. Free snacks in the White House stands for the mamilla of abundance and fertility. The general stands for the phallus that controls and exploits the mamilla.

The general’s “original sin” that is so disturbing for Kate is that he is both ungrateful to the mamilla and contemptuous against all gratitude for the mamilla. For him, every resource on the Earth (and on the comet) can be relentlessly “milked like a cow”. But this “managerial” phallic attitude can only “manage” to shoot itself in the foot because it undermines the social function of phallus as such.

The common denominator of all “criticism” expressed by the ignorant characters is that it’s always an ungrateful grievance against the “bad mother”, e.g. when the scientists speak, people automatically complain that they are not pleasing enough.

The ignorant criticism always echoes a common demand to be pleased by the mamilla, but it’s an unsatable hyperegoic demand tainted by mamilla envy. This is why the final prayer before dinner is so important, it is the only effective antidote against this symptom of mamilla envy embodied by the ungrateful general.

The prayer scene gives a final twist to the title: You don’t need to look up and check (God, sun, mamilla) because you are already aware of your gratitude for it. But this awareness does not amount to a positive knowledge, it’s just a transitory ground and a relative support for one’s confrontation with the symptom.

(Turkish)

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

See “The Artemis of Ephesus: Being Seized by Mamilla Envy and Being Turned into a Data Breast of the Virtual Lord”, “Make Gratitude Cool Again”, “The Conning of Reason Brought About The Hyperego”, “Phallus is the Fulcrum of Society, Precarization Castrates the Fulcrum and Abolishes Everyone”, “From hypo-critical reason to hippo-queery-tickle reason: Just a dream → A just dream → Adjust dream”, “The Marxist Suture and the Ruling Class of Ungrateful Jerks: The hearty laughter for bringing lambs to the slaughter”