Lithium Magazine
  • Home
  • About
    • Editors
    • Writers
    • Artists
    • Photographers
  • Contact
    • Work With Us
  • Events
  • Shop
  • Read
    • Sex & Love
    • Culture & Entertainment
    • News & Politics
    • Life
    • Photography
Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
Followers
Followers
Lithium Magazine
Lithium Magazine
  • Home
  • About
    • Editors
    • Writers
    • Artists
    • Photographers
  • Contact
    • Work With Us
  • Events
  • Shop
  • Read
    • Sex & Love
    • Culture & Entertainment
    • News & Politics
    • Life
    • Photography
  • Culture & Entertainment

Ironic Cynicism Falls Flat in “Death to 2020”

  • February 1, 2021
  • No comments
  • 4 minute read
  • Katherine Williams

At first, Kathy Flowers was just a regular-soccer-mom-slash-Christian-girl-autumn-enthusiast living in the suburbs. She used Facebook and wasn’t sure if she could call people “Black,” and Dr. Fauci’s broadcasts were almost soothing to watch. But a quick dive into the internet brought her to a troll conspiracy documentary, and she soon became convinced that COVID-19 was created in a lab so that Bill Gates could turn humans into microchipped video game characters. It’s 2020, so why not, I guess.

Cristin Millioti’s character in the new Netflix special Death to 2020, written by the creators of Black Mirror, is a blandly amusing suburban mom archetype, one of many tropes that the film relies on. There’s the gig-economy millennial, the elitist historian, the White House PR rep, et cetera. All of these characters function as figures to point out the specific absurdities of 2020, and obviously there’s no shortage of those. Death to 2020 tries to embody the “it’s 2020 I guess” mentality, but ends up being an overly obvious recap of a year that, unless you never read a single headline, nobody really needed.

Kathy’s internet rabbit hole story is not an uncommon experience for real people who have found white-supremacist and conspiracy groups on platforms like 4chan and Reddit. But the rapid personality shift from nice, slightly racist white woman to delusional far-right conspiracist is one that dramatically oversimplifies the real dangers that the internet poses. “I read about it on Facebook” is a go-to line of hers that points to the growth of social media as a common news source for many Americans, but the mockumentary evades a more nuanced depiction of how people can quickly spiral out of control online. Critique of social media is a thread throughout Death to 2020, but it’s nothing that hasn’t been covered before. A funnier technology-centric moment is when the Silicon Valley tech CEO redefines violent political factions as groups across a “hate spectrum” and hopes to reduce the time it takes to radicalize people on social media from six months to five minutes. Whereas Kathy Flowers is obnoxiously exaggerated, the CEO is dead serious about his indiscriminate obsession with optimization, making the film get a little closer to quality satire. But regardless of anyone’s performance, Death to 2020 doesn’t handle the topic of social media with the chilling, mind-opening style that it deserves.

Leaving viewers wanting more becomes an unfortunate pattern throughout the film. Focusing on Tom Hanks testing positive for coronavirus, the plot shifts to news outlets’ glee over the “irresistible celebrity angle to an otherwise boring deadly pandemic.” But that’s where discussion of the media landscape ends; there’s no meaningful narrative about our addiction to constant entertainment aside from some quippy one-liners. Maybe that’s the point, but mostly viewers are left unsatisfied. Lisa Kudrow plays a Republican White House media spokeswoman who claims that conservative voices are being silenced despite her regular presence on Fox News, her YouTube channel, and her book. The delusionary unreality of conservative Trump loyalists is, again, so absurd that it often becomes a joke, but Kudrow’s character, like many of the others, are like SNL characters that flopped. Because of their overly obvious caricature, it’s hard to see Death to 2020 as anything other than a series of unnecessarily extended Twitter jokes. Satire should contribute something meaningful to the cultural narratives that are currently circulating, but Death to 2020 stays at the level of amusing-but-hollow pop-culture buzzwords.

At first, Joe Keery’s depiction of the gig-economy millennial seems to offer a moment of real humor. Before the pandemic, he worked as a mixologist and gender-neutral gender reveal party DJ, but then turned to roles as a reaction YouTuber and digital life coach, the sort of vaguely progressive jobs that make you think, is that a real thing? You can make all the arguments you want for his role as an indication of the economic conditions that have forced young workers to take on multiple “gig” roles, but ultimately, he’s just pretentious and obnoxious. Incorporating words like “mansplain” and “ally” into conversation, he reminds viewers of all the woke white men obsessed with their own faux leftism. But once he says how much he loves creating streaming content because there’s “so much material all year” (cut to him describing pandemic-era Wuhan as “shittifying”), viewers are reminded once again that they are watching a movie and that Keery’s character isn’t real. In scene after scene, subtlety is what Death to 2020 needs.

The mockumentary received mixed reviews, with many critics bored by its tired humor and lack of imagination. Given Black Mirror’s popularity and creative ability to diagnose social ills, Death to 2020 was definitely disappointing. An actual Black Mirror episode would have probably been much more interesting; Death to 2020 is so focused on real events that it becomes closer to a talk show recap than satire. Poking fun at the insanity of 2020 is entertaining, sure, but it doesn’t offer genuine cultural insight into the dystopia that reality has become. Much of the special consisted of simple, surface-level jokes that attempted to cover politics, technology, media, economics, and entertainment from a year that just ended. That’s likely part of the problem—the special treats conspiracy-theorizing, internet absorption, political chaos, and the disintegration of reality as laughably disturbing glitches. But now it’s 2021, and as Trump supporters storm the Capitol in the name of white supremacy, it seems like reality has only gotten worse. Satire might help us distance ourselves from the past year’s events, but right now, we need to look at those events up close. The chaos, violence, and injustice of 2020 will continue in the future unless we take legitimate, unironic steps to make the world better. Entertainment is soothing, but the time for blissful ignorance is long gone.

 

By Katherine Williams

Related Topics
  • film
  • films
  • Katherine Williams
  • movie reviews
  • movies
  • PARTY
Previous Article
  • News & Politics

The Impossibilities of Joe Biden’s COVID-Riddled America

  • January 31, 2021
  • Kenneth Kim
View Post
Next Article
  • Life

Understanding Body Neutrality with Therapist Ashlee Bennett

  • February 2, 2021
  • Madeleine Burgess
View Post
You May Also Like
View Post
  • Culture & Entertainment

What’s the Point of “Fake Accounts”?

  • March 1, 2021
  • Katherine Williams
View Post
  • Culture & Entertainment

Oops!… We Did It Again: Why We Get Off on Women’s Pain

  • February 28, 2021
  • Tamara Jones
View Post
  • Culture & Entertainment

“Whole Lotta Red”: A Feverish and Avant-Garde End to 2020

  • February 28, 2021
  • Kaiya Shunyata
View Post
  • Culture & Entertainment

Blind Worship and the Films of Quentin Tarantino

  • February 27, 2021
  • Kaiya Shunyata
View Post
  • Culture & Entertainment

Why You Should Reject Music Elitism

  • February 26, 2021
  • Ellie Greenberg
View Post
  • Culture & Entertainment

Middle School Ends, But “Pen15” Is Forever 

  • February 26, 2021
  • Jadie Stillwell
View Post
  • Culture & Entertainment

How TV About Getting Lost Taught Me About Survival

  • February 25, 2021
  • Alex Eichenstein
View Post
  • Culture & Entertainment

An Ode to Garage Bands and Punk Shows Past

  • February 25, 2021
  • Sheena Holt

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Featured Posts
  • 1
    How the Left Is Becoming Reactionary
    • March 4, 2021
  • 2
    Sexual Empowerment or Reckless Endangerment?
    • March 2, 2021
  • 3
    What’s the Point of “Fake Accounts”?
    • March 1, 2021
  • 4
    Oops!… We Did It Again: Why We Get Off on Women’s Pain
    • February 28, 2021
  • 5
    “Whole Lotta Red”: A Feverish and Avant-Garde End to 2020
    • February 28, 2021
Recent Posts
  • Blind Worship and the Films of Quentin Tarantino
    • February 27, 2021
  • Why You Should Reject Music Elitism
    • February 26, 2021
  • Middle School Ends, But “Pen15” Is Forever 
    • February 26, 2021
Categories
  • Culture & Entertainment (141)
  • Fashion & Beauty (31)
  • Life (133)
  • News & Politics (70)
  • Photography (63)
  • Sex & Love (68)
Search
Instagram
The left is becoming reactionary. Blame it on the proliferation of liberalism or whatever, but you can’t deny that a lot of leftists today constantly moralize, seeing personal flaws as akin to structural ones. Instead of politics of reaction, we should be practicing politics of actions. As @kosherwhitewine writes, “Instead of treating leftism like an inclusive club, we must treat it as it’s meant to be—as a collective banner under which we march toward the liberation of all people. We don’t break each other down; we build each other up, standing together, fighting together.” Read about it on Lithium now 🗣
OnlyFans, selling worn underwear, sex work—are these acts of sexual empowerment or reckless endangerment? As Modesty Sanchez writes, “Because OnlyFans creators are portrayed as entrepreneurs taking control of their image and brand, the role that the platform itself plays is often obscured and dismissed, especially since the company prefers to hide behind the feminist, sex-positive glow emanating from the sex workers that have flocked to the site.” Often, the dangers of online and IRL sex work are simply swept to the side while corporate exploitation is covered up by a girl boss narrative. Read the latest on Lithium now ⚡️
What’s the point of “Fake Accounts”? Written by Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts is a perfect addition to the list of much-overhyped millennial reading: Normal People, Bad Feminist, How to Do Nothing, etc. And if Oyler wasn’t such a harsh critic of that specific literary circle, this novel would just be another pretty well-written, unmoving book. But Oyler has gone after too many media darlings like Sally Rooney, Jia Tolentino and Roxane Gay in open takedowns that center on her distaste for moralizing, self-absorbed, digital-first writing. Read Lithium writer @katwilliiams take on this book, live on the site now 📚
Britney Spears, Tessica Brown “Gorilla Glue Girl,” and trauma porn all have something in common—they are representations of our fascination with women’s pain. In @tamaravjones’s latest piece for Lithium, she points out that “It’s up to readers to support better journalism and think about the consequences before sharing their unfiltered hot takes on social media. Britney Spears’ legal battle will continue and inevitably, someone else will take Tessica Brown’s spot as the internet’s main character, and I can only hope that we manage to break this cycle before someone else gets hurt.” Live on Lithium now 💫
Playboi Carti’s newest album Whole Lotta Red is the rapper’s ARTPOP. While it’s different from a lot of the rap dominating the Billboard 100, Carti does something a lot of mainstream acts are afraid to do: experiment. Lithium writer @kaiya.shunyata dives deep into Whole Lotta Red and discusses how the album, like Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP, is a fantastic work of exploration and departure from the rap that mostly dominated 2020. Read about it now 🎧
When you’re first getting into film, you tend to hear the same names repeated over and over again: Fincher, Scorsese, and, most of all, Tarantino. But when @kaiya.shunyata rewatched his directorial debut Reservoir Dogs, she couldn’t help but think of his mistreatment of actresses (notably, Uma Thurman), his use of the N-word in films, sprinkled in like a garnish he and his fans can’t live without, and decades of controversies. She writes, “It’s become impossible to ignore the way Tarantino has been worshipped, while simultaneously not changing the things for which he’s been criticized.” Read about it on Lithium now 🎬
Middle school sux. Hulu’s Pen15 follows thirteen-year-old best friends Maya and Anna as they tackle an endless seventh-grade year. From day one, they face humiliations that only strike when you are thirteen, like bad haircuts and periods. But Pen15 sets itself apart from all the other middle school dramas by not only having good stories and actors, but drawing attention to the fact that even performing thirteen is a complex thing. Read about it now on Lithium, written by Jade Stillwell 📚
We’re all culprits in contributing to the shame and embarrassment that have become synonymous with listening to specific artists. Rex Orange County has become the unofficial pinnacle of a wannabe-indie girl who’s a regular Urban Outfitters patron. A Smiths fan is egotistical and decidedly unable to get laid. Bon Iver attracts the coffee shop connoisseur with a God complex. @elliergreenberg’s latest is all about why you should reject music elitism— this one is a must-read. Live on Lithium now 🎵
@holt.sheena’s latest piece is an ode to garage bands and punk shows past. She writes, “I loved every part of it—the moshing (which I observed, perplexed, from the sidelines), the music, the sense of belonging.” Read her latest piece on Lithium now 🎸

Input your search keywords and press Enter.