“The success of ‘Don’t Look Up’ confirms La Fontaine’s lesson in ‘Le Pouvoir des fables'”

Tribune. Even climatologists, many are delighted with the worldwide success of Don’t Look Up. cosmic denial, by Adam McKay. This is a film that will perhaps succeed in causing the long-awaited shock of conscience, finally shaking our tragic and fatal helplessness in the face of the threat of climate change.

Annoyed comments are also heard. How, then, does it take a Netflix film to begin to “realize” what the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) repeat with ever greater precision? So it was necessary for the “narrative marketing” of the platforms to take matters into their own hands? To responsible democracy, we should substitute the sequins of a cast of millionaire stars, the only way to bait us?

The discourse of reason has failed

Note that the film also puts this in abyss. While the set of a successful television “prime” offers them the possibility of reaching the general public, the two scientists fail because they do not enter into the narrative modalities of the program, which are very codified (jokes telephoned between presenters, serialization of the life of celebrities, recovery of clashes from social networks). Ditto for the political storytelling, which seizes on their terrifying discovery of a comet rushing on the Earth only to exploit it without understanding it.

You just have to stand on the shoulders of those who came before us to put it all into perspective: the oldest literary genre in the world, the apologue, is there to help us. No one has shown this better than La Fontaine in The power of fables (1678).

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It begins as a letter to an ambassador, subtly suggesting a way to succeed in avoiding the war that threatens France at the time… By telling him an apologue, a fable within the fable being written. A historical anecdote will help the ambassador.

While Athens is in mortal danger, perhaps the Persians, a speaker rushes to the rostrum (in other words, the media scene of that time). Quickly, he launches into a declamatory speech to sound the alarm and convince: “We weren’t listening to him. » The discourse of reason has failed.

He then changes tactics, uses dramatic figures of speech of rhetoric to persuade. But the crowd is more distracted by children who fight (our “clashes” on the screens). Recourse to the emphasis of pathos does not yield more results.

Diversion of attention

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