(Credit: Netflix)

In the midst of one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, a movie hit Netflix that seemed to sum up exactly what was going on. Don’t Look Up, the all-star cast of which is headed by Leonardo DiCaprio and Meryl Streep, was a rare case of big Hollywood players challenging our entire political and economic system.

The film savagely skewers the inaction, distraction and proactive deception practiced by establishment politicians, the mainstream media and corporate elites in the face of existential crises facing our species. Its plot-driver is a gigantic comet threatening to destroy the planet, but this was a thinly-veiled metaphor for the climate crisis and Covid-19. And no depiction of how criminally misled we are is more brutal than in the person of Janie Orlean, a vain, arrogant and stupendously inept President of the United States whose portrayal by Streep is dialled up to 11.

Orlean’s proposed strategy for dealing with a gigantic comet heading straight for earth, with its trajectory guaranteed to cause an unprecedented global disaster, is to “Sit tight, and assess.” Publicly, she spends months trying to deny the comet’s existence, instructing people not to look up as the movie title alludes to.

Aside from her own self-image, she’s also enamoured with a tunnel-visioned, misanthropic tech billionaire who funds her political campaigns. She belatedly contracts his company BASH to build a spacecraft aimed at stopping (and, which is their first priority, mining) the comet, only for them to botch it, condemning the whole of humanity to death.

A world leader – specifically a US president – trying to deny the existence of an impending worldwide catastrophe before employing a do-nothing approach to solving it? Doling out bogus contracts for safeguarding humanity to their super-rich friends via corrupt, backdoor handshakes? Prioritising mining profits and protectionist measures over human lives and international cooperation?

It’s hardly a stretch for us to imagine which world leaders Streep’s character is based on, or which president(s) she’s lampooning. Maybe there are too many to count, but a few of them were at the forefront of spectacularly and horrendously mismanaging the Covid-19 crisis.

So, who are they?

The incumbent POTUS at the time the movie was being scripted was one Donald J Trump, for example. Who like Orlean has his own branded books and suffered a sex scandal before, during and after being in office. And how about UK Prime Minister at the time Boris Johnson for crony contracts for equipment that fails to protect humanity? When it comes to disaster denying, add former Brazil president Jair Bolsonaro to Messrs Trump and Johnson.

But director Adam McKay insists that the inspiration for Orlean was even more general than these obvious targets. For example, while discussing a scene in which Orlean holds a obscenely overblown press conference in front of artillery guns on a battleship, he told Screen Daily, “We’ve seen a lot of presidents do those bizarre, manicured speeches in front of symbols.”

“This is a rich American tradition,” he explained, “dating from that moment when America decided to stop living in reality and everything became a photo op. And it goes across the red/blue divide.” And it’s not just Republicans and Democrat leaders on the wrong end of this scene. “Tony Blair was a fan of them as well.”

More broadly, then, Orlean is a caricature of so many establishment politicians who swindle a living off bluff and bluster, only to leave ordinary people high and dry when the chips are down.

At least the movie president gets her comeuppance in the movie’s epilogue, when she and a small group of top-tier politicians and businesspeople land on a foreign planet. But not before they’ve left the rest of the world to die, from a catastrophe which could have been avoided with competent and altruistic world leaders at the helm. No wonder the film was so popular.