“This administration has lost it’s f-ing mind and we are all going to die!” bellows a vein popping Leonard DiCaprio. Don’t Look Up (2021) captures the dangerous emotional crosscurrents when human nature is confronted with existential terror. Astronomers — Dr. Randall Mindy (DiCaprio) and Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), his doctoral student — discover a comet on a direct collision course with Earth. They carry their findings to the White House and what follows is not a disaster film, but a savage psychological and sociological portrait of America’s collective response to existential threat. The public becomes divided – those who can “look up” and those who cannot.

In their quest to educate and inform the government and the world, astronomers Mindy and Dibiasky tango with sex, power, denial, distraction, and defensive grandiosity. We have the opportunity, if we can muster our own courage, to consider the psychodynamics inherent in facing looming catastrophe.

Please note: Participants are requested to watch the film before arriving. The session will be structured around guided clinical discussion rather than summary, with facilitators and invited discussants drawing out the film’s psychoanalytic architecture in dialogue with the group.

Please note:

Participants are requested to watch the film before arriving. The session will be structured around guided clinical discussion rather than summary, with facilitators and invited discussants drawing out the film’s psychoanalytic architecture in dialogue with the group.