I can’t say how telling it is. But there’s a sociologically and culturally interesting schism currently on display over the Netflix movie, “Don’t Look Up.” Maybe you’ve seen it. Maybe you thought it was hilarious. Or important. Or heavy-handed. Or so unspeakably dull you turned it off 10 minutes after Leonardo Di Caprio and Jennifer Lawrence discover a Mt. Everest-size comet heading straight for Earth.

Movies, like music and fashion and every other damn thing you can think of comes with a lot of subjectivity. “Consider the source” is usually the best you can say about someone calling “Transformers 4” “really cool” and “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “unbelievably dull, except for the monkeys at the beginning.”

“Don’t Look Up”, is a star-packed satire of modern America’s utter inability to take anything seriously. Not even to the point of uniting long enough to deflect our own doom. Released Christmas Eve, it has not just dropped a cleaver between the usual tribes. It has also divided a majority of critics from a generally pretty bright chunk of the audience.

Because it is ambitious, and energetic and full of ideas and more than a little angry, it is also illuminating the short-comings of another sub-set of modern America.

The film is the latest from Adam McKay, a guy with a very long list of producing and directing credits, including “Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby”, HBO’s “Succession”, “The Big Short”, “Vice” (the Dick Cheney story) and the two “Anchorman” movies. McKay is as Ron Burgundy would say, “kind of a big deal.”

So big that Cate Blanchett, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Ariana Grande, Timothee Chalamet, Tyler Perry and Meryl Streep, (as the Trumpier-than-Trump POTUS) and a dozen others signed on at fees significantly below their starring rates.

With the mere mention of that list of names, the MAGA crowd is already on its hind legs howling about “liberal Hollywood elites”.

Hence you get this from The National Review: “Don’t Look Up is Netflix’s evasive, misstated excuse for political satire that fails very badly because writer-director Adam McKay doesn’t grasp his own political prejudices. Unlike Jude, McKay has no real sense of humor, just sophomoric ridicule. He brazenly broadcasts the entitled sense of obnoxiousness encouraged in Hollywood or Broadway environs, where liberalism has turned into progressivism. And as essayist David Horowitz observed, “inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” [The guy’s quoting David Horowitz with a straight face. Jeeezus.]

And then there’s the far-from-Hollywood-and-only-dreaming-I-was-elites, like me, who find it hilarious. And not just the Streep White House. Where characters can’t focus on doomsday because of bad polling over (and looming mid-terms) over a lunk-headed Supreme Court candidate revealed as a one-time porn actor (with whom POTUS once canoodled). That’s funny. But better, richer and even more relevant is the dead-on, can’t be over-stated satire of a culture so addled by entertaining itself it has lost the ability to find seriousness in anything that doesn’t deliver celebrity-scented sex appeal, charm and, you know, constant distraction from “all that ugly stuff out there.”

Beyond the salaried critics who have given it a low 55% score on Rotten Tomatoes, most complaining about “lack of focus”, “heavy-handedness”, “too long” and how it is “aggressively mean-spirited and smug”, there’s the social media backlash, (ironically a constant target of the movie.)

Here’s a hot take from a local PR guy: “Just watched the worst movie we have seen in five years. Make it 10. It’s on Netflix and is called ‘Don’t Look Up’. Everyone in its all-star cast should be embarrassed. Storyline, acting, concept all awful. Total waste of time!”

And these responses from his “friends.”

“It was a weird one… that presidential role played by Streep turned me off and tuned me out. I can’t believe an HOFer like her signed off on this.” [Who remembers The Orange God King calling Streep “overrated”?]

“Yep, it’s a total satire & sad whim of Hollywood’s elite directed at a young audience. Several of my educated & arts-cultured friends under 40 loved it.”

And this from someone who obviously had no trouble identifying with the film’s fattest targets, “What, you didn’t like a bunch of Hollywood snobs telling us how stupid we are?!?”

Now, as I say, people disagree about everything … all the time … (another point McKay plays with.) But the need to jump out and get on record … about a movie … is interesting and kinda goads me into the following conjecture.

Among all our tribes, there is the one I refer to as the Traditionalists. They’re a significant bunch.

In my experience over lo these many years this crowd works its way into respected institutions because they have some talent. But primarily, they clean up well, show up and do exactly the job they were hired to do. Soon upon arrival they burrow into the bureaucracy and usually flourish … because they, like their institution, they respect and never seriously question the status quo.

“Challenging” equals trouble.

Basic fact of life here: institutional movie critics are expected to be in step with the institution’s audience. Those who regularly wet their pants over obscure Bulgarian dramas are usually not hired to begin with, and certainly find themselves in a difficult place, newsroom-wise, if they can’t get on board with the latest “Spiderman Returns for the Fourteenth Time” re-boot.

Other Traditionalists include people who have respected the norms of American commerce, especially of the media-manipulation variety, where the status quo sells things to each other, again something McKay ridicules with exuberant relish. “Don’t Look Up” is an almost wall-to-wall mockery of The Great American Shill. The arena where people are products and ideas are interchangeable frostings.

My bet with “Don’t Look Up” — which I’m not saying competes with “Citizen Kane”, “The Seventh Seal” or “2001” in terms of art, (although there’s a heavy dose of “Dr. Strangelove” at play here) — is that it is one of those cultural artifacts that will grow in popular estimation as the months and years go by.

I.e. “cult status.” (We can sell that!)

‘Don’t Look Up” is the sort of thing Traditional minds may never accept as anything but “terrible”. But it I strongly suspect so many others appreciate it they’ll turn it into a cultural touchstone. A “classic.” Thereby, long after first blush, embarrassing those refusing to see the sad comedy of the world around them.