Respect Our Society…Or Else

Over the weekend, Leave the World Behind shot straight to the top of the Netflix charts. Similar to 2021’s Don’t Look Up, Leave the World Behind enjoys the dubious distinction of being a movie people could have seen in theaters for the past two weeks, but apparently no one bothered to. Leave the World Behind is a title that intrigued people less because of any kind of traditional marketing and more because the trailer you watch when it idles on Netflix is oddly compelling. An oil tanker is slowly moving its way to the beach toward a vacationing family. Does it ever actually get to the beach? You have to watch the movie to find out. Well-played, Netflix.

Another similarity to Don’t Look Up is political messaging in a mundane apocalyptic context. Bear in mind that this is more of a vague promise than something we ever actually see on-screen for about four-fifths of the movie. The Obamas prominently appear in the opening credits as producers, begging the question, why did the Obamas think Leave the World Behind was such an important work of literature that we needed a feature length version? What explanation could there be for all the weird stuff that we’re supposed to take as practical knowledge for our everyday lives?

From here on out this review is just going to be spoilers and, believe me, you’re better off for that. Leave the World Behind is a devious film in that it’s just barely mysterious and intriguing enough that you want some kind of explanation, no matter how obvious it becomes that the explanation is going to be incredibly stupid. And that explanation is…some kind of superweapon that preys on people’s disagreements. In New York, leaflets reading Death to America in Arabic attack people. In California, the leaflets appear to come from North Korea. But wherever the leaflets come from, they confuse people into thinking they’re under attack by something.

This explains so little you might think I’m being facetious to which I can only say- disbelieve me and watch Leave the World Behind anyway at your own risk. The closest thing we get to an alternate explanation is Kevin Bacon as a doomsday prepper bribed with hard currency, that thing doomsday preppers definitely believe will be useful to them in the post-apocalypse. He also somewhat confusingly believes in Havana Syndrome and Russian/Cuban brain melting lasers. I describe this as confusing because while people consider this crank science today, it wasn’t in the long-ago time of 2020 when the novel on which the movie is based originally came out, so I have no idea if this was supposed to qualify as an actual explanation for why the kid’s teeth fall out, or why the deer are swarming, or why self-driving Tesla cars are trying to escape to the expressway.

A big part of what makes Leave the World Behind such an effective draw is that there are few clear clues what the story is actually about, there’s just more and more weird shaggy-dog mysteries that never go anywhere. Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke are a middle-aged professional couple who might be having marital problems or maybe they’re just bored, which is why Julia Roberts impulsively books a vacation house on Long Island. Their kids are obnoxious in such wildly different ways it’s hard to tell which one you should like less. Sure, the son is a jerk, but the daughter is obsessed with Friends. And rather than discuss in any kind of detail what caused the apocalypse or how to recover afterwards, the film ends on the girl finally getting closure on the series finale of Friends through the use of a DVD stash in a bunker.

If this scene intended to be critical of media escapism, the film rather badly undermines it by the fact that none of the adult characters can think of much to do except snipe at each other for petty social reasons. Never mind caring about the outside world, they barely even seem to care about friends or family. Which they might or might not actually have.

In a more clever film I may have thought this was part of the point, that the story is about how our culture’s collective narcissism makes it impossible for us to respond to any form of real crisis. The problem with this approach is that this kind of messaging, absent any kind of more useful materialist analysis, is the exact same kind of navel-gazing collective narcissism. Indeed, Leave the World Behind manages to end at pretty much the exact point any more interesting story would begin. And it never meaningfully engages the flaws of its characters. We, as a society, are self-destructing because we can’t get along with each other although we, as individuals, are also making mostly logical immediate personal decisions in response to this self-destruction.

There isn’t anything to actually critique if the film just presents the main characters as random bystanders and outside observers. There isn’t even any kind of clue as to what might have more immediately caused the crisis than just the existence of some kind of dastardly high-tech plan of sowing digital dissension. Which in a way, is what makes the Obama producing credit that proudly opens Leave the World Behind so startlingly appropriate. Barack Obama was once the most powerful man in the world. He was going to change our lives for the better. And then he just…didn’t do that. He only infrequently reminds us that he’s even still alive because he helps bankroll media projects like this, or sends out a tweet lecturing us to respect society more.

In a way that’s all Leave the World Behind really is, a two and a half hour tweet about how we need to respect society more. Every new plot twist proves an effective distraction for how the movie did nothing with the last plot twist. It just sticks us with a long series of pointless, mildly frightening anecdotes until finally getting into a petty argument with Kevin Bacon about whether or not conspiracy theories are real before just giving up and deciding to watch a TV show instead.

The movie embodies politics as spectator sport, trying to satisfy us with pat but confusing explanations for disjointed and supposedly contextless events. Leave the World Behind can be kind of scary on pure music and visual design. But the real frightening subtext is the idea that people who clearly think of themselves as the best and brightest of our society believe that they know nothing. Not in the Socratic sense of humility and broader knowledge, mind you, but just literally believing that there’s nothing worth knowing and that we just need to hold together society as we know it with positive thoughts.