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Project Luminas's avatar

Hadn't considered the electric grid effect theory...movieweb.com theories are all plausible reads of the film. You're on the money attending to narratives - but my take is it was VERY coherent because every element presents a condensation of the social justice ideology narrative so that it's CRT meets Red Dawn: the chaos and nuclear bombs are not the tragic ending - Rose unwittingly succumbing to her mom's Whiteness delusion in the bunker is (Whiteness: capitalism makes white views unseen natural commodity).

The film depicts the Robin DiAngelo white fragility, CRT, and 1619 project criticism of US capitalism and democracy - it served white people to the point they are disturbed by marginalized people (lost father scared of Spanish-speaking woman warning him) and degraded Nature (polluted beaches, white people unnerved by nature's silence, animals etc.), and their only way to cope is consuming more fake food and media via ill-gotten wealth, like Rose, who gluts herself on junk food and keeps deluding herself via White media (Friends) in an ill-gotten rich prepper's bunker. Filled with capitalistic cultural appropriation no less, literally feeding off of the images of black people, native Americans, etc as comfort during their own constructed crisis (foreground in focus contains food brands that portrayed African American and Native American stereotypes: Aunt Jemima, Cream of Wheat, Indian Head White Corn Meal, Injun Orangd drink mix, Barilla pasta (ceo made homophobic remarks), Dixie Beer, & Trader Jose's Mexican Beer)). The stories white people tell themselves (Friends) are lies, just manufactured nostalgia for 'a time that never existed' (Baudrillard's simulacra, Plato's cave). Hence, white people 'Leave the World' (actual people and Earth). Tells how whiteness is an oppressive, alienating, capitalistic construction as Julia Roberts exits a store called Point Comfort.

Basically, the Robert's opening monologue shows she unknowingly hates people cuz her white society constructs her to be that way (internalize her oppressor role), which she gets by the end (sort of?). The white male dad is totally lost, afraid, in a vast landscape when all he needed to do was look thru trees to the city being attacked. Our enemy is not Iran, North Korea, Islamic terrorists - it's us white people and systemic racism. Rogue military exploited that delusion via Arabic pamphlets. The mass delusion the mom references - Lippmann's pseudo environment, Chomsky's manufactured consent, Marx's false consciousness etc. - misuses psychiatric terminology to Other white people culturally. Basically, maintaining whiteness is cultural suicide, but still comforts White people from the problems their dominant systemic narratives tell about themselves. The renting white family lives on top floor while black family who owns the house lives in basement (the oppressor/oppressed binary). Boats, planes, and deer/flamingos crash in on them, then the mom and black daughter turn primal and go crazy, yelling screaming like an exorcism - capitalism deludes and alienates them and their labor from their Nature. Whiteness benefits only white people even in self-created crises. Cynical take on race and market relations in this film.

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Myriad Mike's avatar

Ha ha, interesting, because I just published mine last night, albeit, a tad more scathing, and much less cerebral!

https://myriadmike.substack.com/p/movie-review-leave-the-world-behind

Cheers!

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