Peppy and I watched Leave the World Behind on Saturday night. I don't want to spoil the movie for anyone, but I have some thoughts. So don't read this if you haven't seen the movie or you plan to see it. I'm really going to just throw all my comments in a post and it will probably be more rambling than normal.
The movie started like many end of the world movies begin, and I honestly kept asking myself if I had seen this movie before. I knew it had only recently been released, but my brain kept telling me, "Deanna you've already seen this." I guess there's only so many ways you can set up a movie, but I think this was intentional. You get comfortable because you think you've seen this a million times before. Then you see the entire family driving to their vacation, all while in their own realities plugged into their own devices. The adults don't seem to really know their children at all. The daughter seems to only live off of dead pop culture.
At one point there was a shot where the kids' shirts say "Obey" and "NASA in the same scene. There was an oil tanker called "White Lion" that crashed on the shore. White Lion was the first transatlantic slave ship that we are taught about. White Jesus. Someone on reddit said in a following scene the clock read 16:19 which was the year the slave ship arrived. I have enjoyed reading some of these posts, because people have noticed so much symbolism that I didn't pick up on.
I thought the way the movie ended with Rose in the underground bunker watching the last episode of Friends spoke volumes. First of all, it totally gave off "series finale" vibes. This is it fam, we're wrapping up the last season here. It also made me feel like the evil overlords in all of this were saying "See, we will still be in charge if we have to start all of this over. The remnant will be conditioned by your old pop culture. They will be reminiscent for a time that never even existed. Until you break free, you will always be enslaved to our worldly shenanigans." Rose could have chosen to bring her family food (she heard them when they were calling to her and thought she was lost,) but instead she chose herself and her imaginary friends who she said she cares about and make her happy. So Rose chooses the artificial over real people. After all, her brother did previously tell her that no one really cares what she thinks anyway.
Did you know that the last massive solar flare that could have caused a worldwide grid failure was in the early 1800s? We are kind of on schedule for another one, and this is something that the powers that be do not discuss. Every single year there is a 20% chance of a solar flare that could cause a total grid blackout and this is hidden from us because, you know, people get horrified. Peppy said, "these movies never talk about what happens after the blackout." That is also intentional. The movie blamed the blackouts on terrorists banning together, so if a huge solar flare does happen, humanity will still be ignorant and will blame it on other nations. Another way for Satan to keep people enslaved to this narrative instead of looking outside themselves.
Kind of like They Cloned Tyrone, this movie was also dropping little truth nuggets left and right. I told Peppy I would like to watch it again and just take bullet point notes. But I won't, because it was a very long movie and I did fall asleep once.
Barak Obama was an advisor for this movie, which I thought was pretty interesting. The racism aspect felt very forced. I do know people like Julia Roberts's character exist, just like Ethan Hawk's big baby man. "I am a modern day man who is addicted to his phone and now that it doesn't work I am worthless." There was no irony when he said that. He just looked pathetic and I think that was the point.
"Hello pathetic movie audience who do not know how to do anything with their hands and have become total idiots who rely on their cellphones for everything."
Clearly a not-so-hidden message of the movie was white people = ignorant bigot. But I guess another point is that people will continue to argue and fight over the trivial things even as the world is obviously burning down around them. Our tiny problems are more important to us than humanity as a whole. We are so self-obsessed that we often don't see those around us hurting because we are more consumed with our own problems.
The movie gave us a huge tip- don't own an EV, but we already knew that, right? I never thought about them being programmed to block off interstate exits though.
And the whole FRIENDS tie in was a huge reminder of how they are constantly pulling the strings to tell us what we should like, what our thoughts and opinions should be. Popular culture is really one of the most idiotic things on earth. Why in the world should an entity tell us what we should like/dislike just to fit in? It reinforced that this fantasy they have given us is absolute theater. In the very beginning of the movie when Rose asks her dad to visit the coffee shop from FRIENDS (sorry, only ever saw the last episode, so I can't remember what it was called. Talk about providence.) Anyway, her dad says, "I don't think that's even a real place." We end up worshiping and idolizing people and places that never even existed. Our idols aren't evil real. We worship the created instead of the Creator.
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