Films reflect the times, places, and people that made them. In late-stage capitalist Hollywood, superhero movies reflect hyper-individualism, war movies reflect nationalism, horror movies reflect our fear of the other, and so on.
A genre that has become increasingly popular in recent years is the apocalypse movie. Examples from the last decade include The Hunger Games, This Is the End, Mad Max: Fury Road, A Quiet Place, and Don’t Look Up. Now we can add Leave the World Behind to that list.
Leave the World Behind has been streamed more than 100 million times on Netflix, making it the most watched Netflix film of December by a wide margin. The movie stars Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali, and Myha’la, was directed by Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot), and executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama. This last fact may seem surprising at first. The Obamas helped make a movie about the end of the world? It becomes less surprising once one has watched it. Leave the World Behind is a distillation of the apocalypse as imagined by a former liberal president of the American empire.
A liberal apocalypse
The central characters in this story are an advertising executive named Amanda (Julia Roberts), a media studies professor named Clay (Ethan Hawke), and a private equity analyst named G.H. (Mahershala Ali) who wind up stuck in G.H.’s luxurious rental home in Long Island with their respective children.
The world ends not with a bang, but a wifi outage.
First the internet goes out, then shrill noises pierce the air, and self-driving Teslas crash into one another — just as the Book of Revelation foretold.
Why is all this happening? In short, hackers. Beyond that, the movie is purposely vague on who’s behind the cyber attacks, or what their possible motive may be. As G.H. says in a conversation with Amanda:
“No one is pulling the strings… when events like this happen in the world, the best, even the most powerful people can hope for is a heads up.”
Later in the movie, G.H. and Clay pontificate on who is behind the cyberattacks with a survivalist named Danny (Kevin Bacon). The Koreans, Chinese, Iranians (Clay heard on NPR about their cyber capabilities), or some combination of all three are floated as possible candidates.
“We made a lot of enemies around the world. Maybe all this means is a few of them teamed up.” Danny says with a shrug.
This shrug is indicative of the movie’s disinterest in understanding the politics behind the apocalypse. Instead, the movie is more interested in finding the source of the collapse in the failures of human nature.
In what could be considered the central thesis of the film, ad executive Amanda confesses that:
“My whole job is to understand people well enough so that I know how to lie to them, so I can sell them things they don’t really want. And when you study people like that, when you really see the way they treat each other, well… Fuck. I did it to you and your dad, and I don’t even really know why. We fuck each other over all the time, without even realizing it. We fuck every living thing on this planet over and think it’ll be fine because we use paper straws and order the free range chicken. And the sick thing is, I think deep down we know we’re not fooling anyone. I think we know we’re living a lie. An agreed upon mass delusion to help us ignore and keep ignoring how awful we really are.”
This speech serves the two-fold purpose of absolving Amanda of her earlier racism against G.H. and his daughter Ruth (it’s not that she’s racist, she was just fucking them over, like we all do!), and it makes the latent cynicism at the heart of the movie visible. We’re all to blame and it’s all bullshit.
One is reminded of the so-called ‘realism’ within anti-capitalist author Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism. Amanda’s speech signifies her development into ‘authenticity’. She sees herself and the world as it really is, as an “unflinching [observer] who [refuses] to prettify the world”. That’s just the way the world is.
Cynicism masks true insights
The bait and switch here is the way that ‘realism’ naturalizes the bullshit of the capitalist world order. Why does America have so many enemies? Why is our society so fragile that it can be turned on its head by a wifi outage? Why is there no one at the wheel of our sinking ship? It’s not because capitalism is a system propelled by greed and individualism. No, it’s because of human nature. In other words, it’s people that are broken, not the system.
It makes complete sense that this movie was executive produced by the former president and first lady of the United States of America. Powerful liberals—like Amanda and the Obamas—have no interest or ability to interrogate the deep systemic causes behind the crises that are destroying our world.
In a recent interview with Pod Save America on Gaza, Barack Obama said that:
“If you want to solve the problem [in Gaza], then you have to take in the whole truth and you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree. I look at this and I think back, what could I have done during my presidency to move this forward? As hard as I tried—and I’ve got the scars to prove it—there’s a part of me that’s still saying, well, was there something else I could have done?”
Nobody’s hands are clean when it comes to Israel-Palestine, even the President of the United States! What does Obama think he could have done differently? Stop sending billions of dollars to the Israel Defense Forces? Put diplomatic pressure on the Israeli government to lift the blockade on Gaza? Unfortunately no. Instead he falls back into paternalistic liberal platitudes on the importance of reaching across the aisle:
“If you genuinely want to change this [ie. the genocide in Gaza], then you’ve gotta figure out how to speak to somebody on the other side and listen to them and understand what they are talking about and not dismiss it.”
Like Amanda, Obama confesses and absolves himself of his sins in the same breath. You have just as much blood on your hands as the president, maybe more since you won’t listen to your Zionist family member at thanksgiving!
Obama describes this as looking at the whole truth. He is a realist.
There is a scene midway through the film where Clay finds a hispanic woman on the side of the road. She pleads with him in Spanish for help. Clay tries for a minute or so to understand her, but as she becomes increasingly distraught, he rolls up the window and drives off. It is unclear how the audience is supposed to interpret this scene. It’s mentioned only once later in the film when Clay confesses his sin to Ruth. She changes the subject.
A better movie would have used this opportunity to explore why certain people are left behind in times of crisis. It would have interrogated who is left behind, who drives off, and why the driver has the car in the first place. But it is not this movie. This movie is a reflection of the people who made it: cynical, nihilist, and individualist.
Clay mentions off hand early in the film that one of his students explores, “how media serves as both an escape and a reflection. Which is a contradiction that she manages to reconcile.”
This contradiction is the bedrock of Leave the World Behind. A movie about the end of the world made by one of the people who has led us to the precipice of our own world’s collapse. Obama has managed to reconcile this contradiction. To paraphrase Amanda, he’s able to ignore how awful he really is.
Building a better world
As the working class, we are at the sharp end of this contradiction. Ignorance is bliss for the ruling class since it means rejecting responsibility, passing the buck, and continuing to benefit from a stacked deck. For the rest of us, ignoring how awful the world is means death. If we are to survive, we must reject the ruling class ideology of cynicism, nihilism, and individualism in favour of working class sincerity, hope, and solidarity.
We cannot leave the world behind, we must build a better one.
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