Discourses Of Greenwashing and Climate Delay In Don't Look Up (2021) and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022): A Comparative Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This study compares how manipulative environmental rhetoric is constructed in Don't Look Up (2021) and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022). It distinguishes greenwashing, understood as communication that creates overly positive beliefs about environmental performance, from adjacent discourses of climate delay and media trivialisation. Using a qualitative comparative case study, the analysis integrates van Dijk's sociocognitive Critical Discourse Analysis, Fairclough's three-dimensional model, Lyon and Montgomery's greenwashing framework, and visual semiotics. The reporting corpus comprises six focal sequences selected from the two films and examined through dialogue, scene context, visual design, and relations of power. Don't Look Up primarily depicts institutional climate-delay discourse through bureaucratic temporisation and entertainment framing; its BASH extraction narrative moves into greenwashing when a profit-driven, high-risk intervention is branded as responsible technological rescue. Glass Onion presents clearer corporate greenwashing through selective disclosure, unsupported clean-energy claims, symbolic sustainability, and the suppression of known safety risks. The comparison shows that environmental manipulation operates through different but connected institutional and corporate arrangements. The study contributes an operational distinction between greenwashing and climate delay in film discourse and demonstrates how lexical choices, visual prestige, and control over public communication can reduce accountability. The findings support critical environmental media literacy while recognising that the analysis is interpretive and limited to a small purposive corpus