Hollywood disaster movies: what they signal about science

“Look up…get your head out of your ass
Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists”

Those aren’t lyrics you’d expect to hear from the normally saccharine pop star Ariana Grande, who sings them in the recent hit movie Don’t Look Up (which we reviewed in January). A comet roughly 9 km in size is heading straight towards Earth and the words come in response to the strangely uninterested reaction of politicians, media and many members of the public to the imminent planet-ending event.

The comet was discovered by astronomy PhD student Kate Dibiasky (played by Jennifer Lawrence) and her supervisor Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio). But most people – including the US president Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) – don’t accept the two scientists’ knowledge. Despite the duo’s best efforts, reactions range from attempts to turn a profit to outright denial. Those in power are so misled that humans take no effective action. The collision occurs and (spoiler alert) disasters ensue.

Things are different in the much older movie Deep Impact (1998). After scientists say that an 11 km comet is heading our way, the US president listens, relays the news to citizens, and they trust him and the scientists. (As I said, the movie was made a long time ago.) Partially successful measures are taken, including a crew of astronauts sacrificing themselves to blow up the bulk of the comet. While the collision happens, much of humanity survives.

Asteroid and comet movies have some common threads. The bad news appears first as numbers; the scientists interpret the data, and their message passes intact to the public.

There’s a different twist in Seeking a Friend For the End of the World (2012), another comet-collision disaster movie. This time the comet is 112 km wide and nobody questions its truth. But some people riot, others turn criminal, while a few kill themselves. The protagonists, played by Steve Carell and Keira Knightley, are reflective about their fate, with no illusions there’s a future.

Their honest and genuine reactions reminded me of Nietzsche’s beautiful image of what happens just before the departure of an emigrant ship. The passengers and those they are leaving behind, he wrote, “have more than ever to say to one another, the hour presses, the ocean with its lonely silence waits impatiently behind all the noise”. If looming death can’t make humans candid and heartfelt, nothing can.

Processing disaster

These three films are just a small selection of the dozens of planetary disaster movies that can be streamed online. You can take your pick from countless others, where existential threats stretch from comets, asteroids, aliens and other space-based dangers to home-grown hazards too, including pandemics, zombies and nuclear weapons.

Asteroid and comet movies have some common threads. The bad news generally appears first as simply numbers: co-ordinates, orbits, trajectory predictions. The scientists then interpret the data, informing people in authority, who tell the public. What’s interesting, though, is that the scientists’ message – that there’s a likely impending catastrophe – passes intact all the way down the line to the public. That happens even though it’s progressively transformed for the consumption of each audience along the way.

My favourite way of describing this process is with the physics phrase “impedance matching”. It describes what you need to do to send a signal from a low-impedance region to one with high impedance. If you want to lose as little of the signal as possible, you have to step it gradually down. It’s what happens when you blow into a trumpet. Pressure pulses from your mouth (low impedance) can be heard in the open air (high impedance) only because the instrument’s horn gradually modifies those pulses as they travel outwards.

Don’t Look Up is all about what you could call “impedance mismatching”.

Don’t Look Up is different – and more interesting. Conspicuously and entertainingly revised for the current reception of existential threats like climate change and pandemics, it’s all about what you could call “impedance mismatching”. It starts conventionally enough. After DiCaprio and Lawrence have plotted their comet’s co-ordinates and concluded it’ll collide with Earth in six months with a 99.87% probability, they tell a NASA official, who tells the US president.

But the twist is that she appears more worried about the impending mid-term elections than about the Earth being destroyed, deciding she is going to “sit tight and assess”. The president digs in even more strongly when a charismatic businessman promises to alter the collision to deliver $32 trillion worth of rare minerals.

Trying to bypass the president, the two scientists decide to spread the news on a TV talk show, but find that its motto is “We keep the bad news light”. DiCaprio is told to “Keep it simple. No math.” To which he replies, “It’s all math.” Lawrence is ignored on camera when she’s calm, and ridiculed when she’s passionate. The TV host calls her “the yelling lady” and says she needs “media training”.

Political realities, media practices and vested interests create the substantial load that produces an impedance mismatch. In that media-saturated and politically permeated world, science is only one voice – and not one that can be easily understood. The signal is all but lost, leaving a grisly truth. If the world were somehow saved, it would only be because Ariana Grande’s celebrity, not scientific authority, was strong enough to make people “look up”.

The critical point

The morning after I saw Don’t Look Up, the front page of the New York Times carried two science-related stories. One was about the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most expensive space-based observatory ever, which appeared to be widely welcomed. The other was about a protest against the wearing face of masks by people opposed to scientifically recommended mandates.

It seems we need little impedance matching when the science poses no danger and the public is enthusiastic, as with the JWST. But the impedance can be strong when there are serious lifestyle or existential costs at play. It might sound like an exaggeration but impedance mismatch is a much greater threat to our planet than comets and asteroids could ever be.