Anyone with an interest in the cultural and political decline of the contemporary US should see ‘Leave the World Behind’

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.

The plot of the film – a middle class Brooklyn family holiday in a mansion on Long Island, only to be caught up in a series of cataclysms that are gradually revealed to be part of an unfolding elite political coup – could only take place in a post-Trumpian America.

In fact, the film eerily reflects a prediction made by the astute conservative political commentator P. J. O’Rourke shortly before he died in 2022.

O’Rourke despised Donald Trump and regarded him as a buffoon, but realised that his political significance lay in the fact that he was a crude and inept harbinger of an America that could easily come to be ruled by a competent elite dictatorship.

O’Rourke’s insight into Trump is, in fact, the central theme of Leave the World Behind – the film is about a successful coup, of which Trump was the harbinger, that a culturally and politically disintegrating America is unable to comprehend, let alone resist.

The January 6 riots were a crude insurrection fomented by Trump in order to prevent Vice President Mike Pence from certifying the 2020 election result. The riots were not an attempted coup – and Trump, as O’Rourke recognised, has more in common with the farcical 19th century French politician General Boulanger (whose attempt to overthrow the Third Republic in 1889 failed) than with a Hitler or Mussolini. 

Leave the World Behind depicts a successful modern political coup – qualitatively different from fascist coups – carried out by global elites. 

The coup’s genesis is revealed in an exchange between the owner of the mansion, a wealthy black funds manager played by Mahershala Ali, and the misanthropic wife of the Brooklyn family, played by Roberts, who have rented his palatial residence on Long Island. 

“Leave the World Behind” by Sam Esmail, 2023.

  Netflix Studios

As the family’s holiday is disrupted by a series of catastrophes – their technological devices cease to work; an oil tanker runs aground on the beach where they are swimming; airplanes fall from the sky; leaflets falsely suggesting that foreign invasions are occurring are dropped from drones; and hundreds of self-driving Teslas crash into each other, blocking highways – Ali tells Roberts about a conversation that he had recently with one of his wealthy clients with links to the defense department and arms manufacturers. 

The client recently moved his considerable fortune offshore and told Ali in some detail how easy it would be to stage a coup in advanced Western societies.

First, the populace would be isolated by disabling all their technological devices. Havoc would then be created by spreading disinformation amongst the populace. Finally, internal fighting would break out, and society would collapse as a result of its own internal divisions and political apathy. 

As the catastrophes pile up around them, Ali and Roberts realise that this is precisely what is happening – and that they are powerless to do anything about it.    

Shades of C. Wright Mills’ ‘power elite’ and Eisenhower’s ‘military-industrial complex’ in a modern, more frighteningly totalitarian guise – save the elites behind the successful coup that engulfs America in the film are global elites, a reflection of the fact that the world economy is now a truly globalised one.

The themes of cultural decadence and dependence upon technology are depicted in graphic detail in the film. The scene involving the out-of-control Teslas is both prophetic and horrifying. 

Roberts and Ali understand what is happening only because Ali has a close connection to the elites that are staging the coup. No one else in the film – including Roberts’ genial academic husband, played by Ethan Hawke, has any notion of what is occurring. 

The real horror at the heart of the film, however, arises from the depiction of the main characters’ millennial teenage children.

“Leave the World Behind” by Sam Esmail, 2023.

  Netflix Studios

The three children are portrayed as mindless victims of a completely worthless popular culture that deprives them of any understanding of themselves or the society in which they live.

They are completely dependent upon technology, and immersed in a vacuous celebrity culture that is utterly divorced from reality. Even their relations with their parents are meaningless and perfunctory.

Roberts’ teenage son spends his time masturbating and taking salacious pictures of Ali’s daughter as she sunbathes in a bikini by the swimming pool. She in turn tries to sexually entice the middle-aged Hawke in Lolita-like fashion.

Roberts’ and Hawke’s young daughter is obsessed with the television program ‘Friends’, and the only affection that she is capable of is fixated upon the characters of that mindless soap opera.

The film ends with Roberts’ and Hawke’s daughter breaking into a nearby mansion and gorging herself on junk food – as, in the distance, New York is subjected to a nuclear attack, apparently perpetrated by rogue elements in the military.

As the nuclear cloud spreads, she gains entry to a fallout shelter in the basement of the house and compulsively watches the final episode of Friends – completely oblivious to what is happening outside and her own fate.

The film ends with her grinning and gazing narcissistically and moronically at the television screen. 

In interviews since the film was released last month, Esmail and Roberts have attempted to place a positive spin on the film – by suggesting that the other characters may have also eventually found their way to the fallout shelter.

Given the relentlessly pessimistic tenor of the film, however, this is surely beside the point. As D. H. Lawrence once said. “Always trust the tale, never trust the teller.”

Leave the World Behind is an extraordinary and compelling film. Anyone with an interest in the cultural and political decline of contemporary America should make the effort to see it.