"Leave the World Behind" Dramatizes Post-Internet Problems
The new post-apocalyptic movie on Netflix offers apt observations about our dependence on the Internet
Back in the Cold War, we used to get nuclear-apocalypse movies speculating on what it would be like to be an Ordinary Joe who vacations at a beach house, only to learn that WW3 had commenced. Always in these scenarios, Joe’s life changes instantly: it’s off to find the canned goods and shotguns!
These days, we don’t have good end-of-the-world scenarios for film, not ones that seem remotely plausible to me.
Except maybe one. “Leave the World Behind,” the new movie debuting on Netflix December 8, has deployed that one to good effect: What if the Internet somehow shut off throughout the United States, including satellites?
The story is told from the perspective of a white upper-middle class nuclear family, the Sanfords, who decide to spontaneously vacation one day at a luxurious remote beach house. While at the beach, they witness an oil tanker mindlessly run straight into the beach. That’s odd! But they don’t panic yet.
Then two people shows up at their door, a father and daughter who claim to own the house. They want to come in and spend the night.
The gotcha catch is they are African-American, while the Sanfords are white NPR liberals. The paranoia for Mrs. Sanford (Julia Roberts) runs pretty high, so she distrusts them intensely. Her husband (Ethan Hawke), feeling open-minded or guilty, would let them in. That’s an initial setup that had me thinking of the recent Parasite and Barbarian.
The father-daughter pair (the Scotts, played by Mahershala Ali and Myha’la) have come from NYC, and they have a few secrets they won’t reveal. The Sanfords, as well, don’t tell them about the oil freighter. Yet together, they talk about the Internet being strangely down. And then the TV flashes one of those creepy national emergency signals.
Oddly, the characters don’t panic still, even though we know they should. They don’t realize what scenario they are in.
Writer-director Sam Esmail, however, clearly signals what they are in: one of those plausible post-apocalyptic films of yore, the kind where the characters need to find the canned goods and shotguns, pronto.
“Leave the World Behind” plays with modern people’s tech-dependence and their seeming lack of being able to discern what immanent reality is happening to them. For long stretches, the Sanfords and Scotts needlessly snark at and distrust each other, some kind of play on upper-class white and upper-class black mistrust. Meanwhile, the Sanfords’ younger daughter is deeply disappointed that she can’t watch “Friends” anymore. She hasn’t seen the last episode, called “The Last One.” With the Internet down, she can’t stream it. A subplot takes her on a quest to find it.
Neither family seems to know what to do, and they barely are able to patch together a plausible theory for what might’ve happened in the wider world. At times they are even in denial, repeating the phrase “everything will be alright.” Obviously, they can’t know anything because all communication is down. That effectively leaves them helpless.
They don’t have the right amount of paranoia either, one of Esmail’s main points in the TV series he created and wrote for, Mr. Robot. Often they have too much paranoia when they need none, and they certainly don’t have enough to let them recognize an end-of-the-world event when it’s happening. Esmail amps up his dramas’ paranoia to the highest possible levels. World-shattering conspiracies that destroy life as we know it?
Absolutely, he says, and you’d better prep for it!
Even when some kind of high-pitched noise erupts, perhaps some kind of EMP or microwave weapon going off in the atmosphere, the Sanfords and Scotts still aren’t sure what to think or do. Then it happens again, and they still aren’t sure again. So they drink more wine and listen to Mr. Scott’s huge record collection, dancing drunk and smoking pot together.
The movie’s point here seems to be that Internet dependence paralyzes these people’s ability to deal with reality. As well, the movie routinely brings up and criticizes “media.” Hawke’s character is a Media Studies professor who will, eventually, admit to others that in a post-apocalyptic world such a person is “a useless man.” His daughter, so bound up in “Friends,” asks her dad to take her to visit the coffee shop where the show was shot. He replies that it’s not real. Does she or any other character care about what’s real though?
They will, if the apocalyptic event that shut down the Internet is real. And it is.
Now, on that, I find this movie becomes more implausible as it goes. There’s an odd obsession that Esmail has with depicting deer wandering into backyards and staring at people. At one point, briefly a radio program says that “animal migration patterns have been interrupted.” Funny they could know that, since the Event happened just twenty-four hours ago, and yet all of a sudden they are noticing animals migrating differently? That would seem to be the least of these people’s concerns, what with the shutdown of the banking systems and food supply networks.
But deer staring at people in backyards it is. And so Julia Roberts and Myha’la have a showdown with a CGI family of deer in a scene that should have never made it into a feature film, unless it was supposed to be laughed at, which it certainly is not. I still laughed.
Worse, the movie definitively answers the question of what exactly is the Event that took down the Internet.
That’s a massive mistake: you leave that ambiguous for good reasons. When the movie revealed what happened, I also laughed at that. It’s an extreme implausibility based on a political delusion that is as far from reality as possible — and remember: the movie’s goal is to show us the ultimate true reality that can kill us all, potentially.
Also, the movie does not self-reflect at all on its own media condemnation. It chides upper-class people for being too media-saturated, while itself being the kind of media it would mock. That means the moralistic smugness here is execrably myopic. It’s too bad we’ve sailed past self-reflective post-modernism, as this movie needs a dose of it in order to reduce its own pointedness. The movie has no reflection on the fact that it itself is dependent on Internet streaming, being a Netflix film.
Yet I enjoyed the movie, sucker as I am for post-apocalyptic fare.
Despite a lot of needless languishing in the second act, the first act’s setup is compelling. The acting is often strong, as is the case with anything Ali is in. The movie repeatedly shows us awesome, harrowing shots of automated vehicles crashing into oblivion. There’s a great moment where a fleet of white Teslas, automated and dependent on the Internet as they are, wantonly crash into each other while the Sanfords dodge them.
Esmail’s direction, often dynamic to the point of being wild, shows great promise. His writing less so. He’s got a Wellesian vision, the Orson kind, often creating elaborate tracking shots that travel through doors and up through house floors. I don’t recall a camera being turned sideways, ninety degrees, as much as it is in this film, literalizing that everything in this post-apocalyptic nightmare is off-kilter.
For awhile, maybe an hour after the film, I was quite paranoid. I looked at my family, who seemed comfortable, and wondered if they were aware of the nasty, plausible What-Ifs. I thought about whether I needed some more canned goods.
No, I thought, I’ll just die if this crazy technologically-dependent world dies somehow, someway.
And to think: I’ve never seen the final episode of “Friends”!