from thefreeonline on 26 Dec, 2023 19:37 by Home Culture
Anyone with an interest in the cultural and political decline of the contemporary US should see ‘Leave the World Behind’
‘Leave the World Behind’ by Sam Esmail, 2023. © Netflix Studios
These days, Hollywood produces endless quantities of cultural dross – superhero franchise epics that Martin Scorsese has said have nothing to do with cinema at all; boring, lengthy, reverential biopics (‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘Maestro’); and the crude #metoo propaganda of the ‘Barbie’ movie.
Yet last month a remarkable American film was released that stands out for its political realism and insight.
The film is ‘Leave the World Behind’ – a dystopian political tract directed, written, and produced by Sam Esmail, and based on a novel by Rumaan Alam published in 2020.
The movie features Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Kevin Bacon – three Hollywood stars of note – and their involvement in such an iconoclastic film is not only surprising, but very much to their credit.
Esmail was born in New Jersey. His parents were Egyptian immigrants. Alam was born in Washington, to parents who emigrated to America from Bangladesh. It is surely their immigrant backgrounds that account for the film’s unique and critical perspective on contemporary America.
Esmail and Alam’s ‘outsider’ status allows them to see America in a way that is now virtually impossible within mainstream Hollywood.
Leave the World Behind is not easily categorised – thematically, it is similar to the 2022 European film ‘Triangle of Sadness’, but it is much more politically sophisticated. The film also harks back to the science fiction films that Hollywood churned out with monotonous regularly in the 1950s and 60s.
That entire film genre was, of course, the ideological product of the Cold War.
In science fiction films of that era, the irrational fear of an imminent Russian invasion was cinematically transformed into attacks by aliens from remote galaxies – and a powerful, liberal-democratic America was pictured as being threatened by these sinister forces from without.
Inevitably in these films, after a stirring heroic conflict, a victorious America prevailed over those malevolent alien forces that had sought to destroy the home of liberty and the land of the free.
Now that a weakened America is seeking to wage a recalibrated Cold War – against China as well as Russia – it is hardly surprising that an American film should echo the science fiction films of the Cold War era, albeit in a radically different form and with more realistic content.
Leave the World Behind is firmly based in current American political reality – no need to resort to fictitious aliens, as the threat the global elites pose to liberal democracy in America is all too apparent – and the film resolutely refuses to provide the bogus solace that was an integral ideological component of the science fiction films of the 1950s and 60s. 
“Leave the World Behind” by Sam Esmail, 2023. © Netflix Studios
The film is bleakly pessimistic – a reflection of America’s dramatic decline as a world power since the 1960s, as well as its current state of acute internal cultural and political disintegration.
This is perfectly understandable – no intelligent and politically aware contemporary American filmmaker could embrace the complacent optimism that characterised America in the 1950s and 60s.
Continue reading “‘Leave the World Behind’ predicts the perfect American apocalypse”
The Free 