That we live in strange times is clear. That we ourselves are becoming stranger and stranger is also clear. Our reality is buzzing and bursting at the seams. We respond to this in two ways that are more closely related than they appear: with a massive derealization of reality and with an intense “realization,” a reification of certain fictions.

It’s been a long time since a product of so-called mass culture has nailed this double logic as well as Adam McKay’s Netflix hit Don’t Look Up (2021). The film brilliantly exposes the prevailing reaction to the current situation where, in many ways, reality is falling apart and disappearing under our feet. Don’t Look Up is a comedy or satire that cuts very effectively into the affective charge and pomposity of the present, the flood of words and images that no longer touch any real—this, in turn, is the flip side of the direct reification of words, the perception of words as our only reality and the reduction of words to their “literal” meaning.

The plot is familiar: the film transposes the climate crisis and our (non)response to it into the figure of a giant comet approaching the Earth, crashing into and destroying it in a very near future, which can be calculated with high precision. The film immediately sparked controversy. Critics from CNN, the Guardian, the New Yorker and many other media outlets accused it of one crucial flaw: “In its efforts to champion its cause, the film only alienates those who most need to be moved by its message.” The phrase comes from a CNN review, but similar statements can be found in other reviews. The point is symptomatic in many ways, including the bizarrely paternalistic attitude toward the ordinary “little people” whom the film should win to its cause but instead alienates. In this same vein the film is also accused of being condescending and scornful. But what could be more condescending and patronizing than what these critics are implying, which is “I get the point, but ordinary people will not understand it because the movie does not reach out (or down?) to them.” Well, people thought otherwise and the opposite happened: the film did indeed alienate many sophisticated cultural critics, but it was a huge and unexpected success with “ordinary people.” There is a saying that reality is often more implausible than fiction. And you could say that Don’t Look Up demonstrates exactly that point extraordinarily well. But it also demonstrates that reality can be more comical and more hilarious than the most hilarious comedy: the “grotesque exaggeration” that the film is also accused of is actually our “normal,” everyday reality. We notice its grotesqueness only when we see it reproduced on the screen. And the more we laugh, the drier our laughter becomes. This is because, for all its unsubtle exaggeration and caricature, the film also rings too true, our reality is an unsubtle exaggeration and caricature of itself. Contrary to the opinion that the film would be more credible if it did not exaggerate and caricature so much, I think the opposite is the case: for all its exaggeration, the film barely keeps up with reality. That is what accounts for its credibility, and “the people” seem to have understood that very well.

Something else interesting happened. The critically trashed Netflix blockbuster about climate change was enthusiastically welcomed—by climate scientists! It’s quite funny, because it’s rare for science and “popular opinion” to come together in this way. But it’s not so strange when you consider that what the film so effectively portrays are feelings of frustration and powerlessness—something that both “the people” and climate scientists can easily relate to. It portrays powerlessness in the face of the derealization and theft of reality, a reality that most of us can only participate in as bystanders, having no real power to change or affect. The film has been accused, among other things, of being “blunt” and lacking subtlety, but again, what could be more blunt than our reality in which the threat of extinction does not move us at all? We domesticate “the end of the world” before it happens, and in this way we both derealize it and ensure that it will actually happen. Because the end of the world is not a fantasy. However, the fantasy of the end of the world (e.g., by depicting it from an external, bird’s eye view) is one of the ways in which we derealize the real end. I would argue that Don’t Look Up is not just another doomsday fantasy, of which there have been many in recent years. Rather, it is a film about our current collective fantasy being crashed by the reality of the end. Or, to put it another way, the film shows that the much-needed “collective response” to major crises exists today only as a formation of the unconscious.

Some critics have also claimed that the film lacks wit or is only marginally funny, especially when it takes on deniers and conspiracy theorists. One of Don’t Look Up’s greatest qualities, however, is precisely that it does not put conspiracy theorists at the center o