In Paul Feig’s romantic comedy Last Christmas, jaded Londoner Kate (Emilia Clarke) notices a handsome stranger, Tom (Henry Golding), outside the Christmas-themed shop where she works. “Look up,” he tells her.

She follows Tom’s gaze … and spots a peregrine falcon on a high ledge. However, she immediately cops an eyeful of bird shit – just as she later stumbles into a pile of rubbish while looking up at a delightful old shop sign. So far, so screwball.

Critics have well and truly looked down on Tom’s whimsical, chin-lifting philosophy, branding it “naggingly repetitive”, “so very annoying” and “too hokey for anything but aspiring meteorologists”.

But here’s the thing: people don’t look up.

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Recently, I managed to strain my neck and shoulder muscles by reading a magazine on the couch. Most of the ameliorative stretching exercises I found on YouTube blamed excessive desk work or smartphone use for such injuries. Slouching, it seems, is the quintessential posture of modernity.

We are the rough beast that slouches towards Bethlehem, turning a blank and pitiless gaze upon our devices. It’s a downwards look that feels powerful. We identify with the superheroes vigilantly perching atop skyscrapers, capes billowing. From a bird’s-eye view we watch peregrine falcons raise their chicks. Videogames let us create and destroy entire civilisations from above.

By contrast, pre-modern people viewed the world from below. The word “humble” originates from a Latin phrase meaning “on the ground”. Many cultures have venerated high places as the uncanny domain of gods and magic; shrewd or ambitious individuals could borrow some of this power via an alpine pilgrimage, quest, retreat or campaign.

The Romantic philosophers, poets and artists understood the sublime subversion of looking up

Looking down from above cemented a king’s divine sovereignty, legitimised a sage’s insights and lent authority to a religious leader’s moral pronouncements. From the 14th century onwards, the words “survey”, “supervise” and “surveillance” emerged into English to describe forms of downward-gazing power. And the word “humble” took on a new connotation: “of low birth, rank or station”.

As a kid, I loved the Dr Seuss book The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, in which the eponymous peasant boy is ordered to remove his hat in King Derwin’s presence, only for a new hat to pop magically on to his head. The story playfully contrasts the power the king derives from gazing down on his subjects from the royal palace with Bartholomew’s inverse gaze from his humble cottage: “It was a mighty view, but it made Bartholomew Cubbins feel mighty small.”

Fortresses have always occupied hills as strategic defence but they also symbolise institutional power. Looking up at the castle or abbey that dominated your skyline reminded you that the mighty, and the Almighty, were watching. Both religious and civic spaces crowd the horizon and command the upward gaze, provoking respect for institutions by making viewers feel small.

But since Copernicus, humankind has questioned what we’re really looking up to. The more we have scrutinised the heavens, the more indifferent the universe has seemed. So we’ve refined technologies that turn our conquering gaze down, down, down. Telescopes, microscopes, balloons, aeroplanes and satellites have enabled new ways to understand our world and govern social relations.

Aerial photography grants us the god-like experience of surveying an environment instantly, rather than within the limits of human sight lines. Helicopter or drone footage swoops us through built environments like an angel or superhero.

We no longer identify with the “little people” looking up but with the powerful people looking down. It’s a forced perspective. We’re still surveilled but this time, by the glowing lozenges we cradle in our palms, the ones that keep our heads bowed and shoulders aching.

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Progress is often framed as self-evidently virtuous, in contrast with conservative stasis. But in 1940, as the world consumed itself in war, despair gripped the German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin. He imagined history through the gaze of a melancholy angel caught in widening gyres, impelled inexorably into the future while staring helplessly at the wreckage of the past.

However, the Romantic philosophers, poets and artists understood the sublime subversion of looking up. During the rapidly industrialising 18th and 19th centuries, they sought profound thrills in primal experiences of nature. They reimagined the upward gaze as an escape into another dimension of feeling – away from the relentless forward momentum of modernity.

Last Christmas is deeply corny, but it gets this. It’s a Brexit movie. And for Tom, looking up is a defiant everyday act of agency: a magical reprieve from an anxious world whose heart cannot hold.