A PROPAGANDA FILM PRODUCED BY THE OBAMAS WARNING AMERICANS THAT THINGS WILL NEVER BE THE SAME IN THEIR DYING EMPIRE

Movie review: Leave the World Behind (2023)

"America is the original version of modernity… America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.” – Jean Baudrillard, America (1988)

Baudrillard’s critique of America is a scathing examination of a society that exists in a perpetual present. A country without a history, indifferent to origins, and rooted only in its hyperreal now. This perfectly encapsulates the atmosphere in Leave the World Behind, a film that visualizes America's crumbling self-image in the face of external threats and internal decay.

In Sam Esmail’s apocalyptic thriller, America’s modernity, so proudly projected, begins to fall apart—not with bombs or foreign invaders, but with misinformation, technological failure, and psychological collapse. America in the film isn’t destroyed by a traditional enemy. It's undone by its own illusions of invulnerability.

The film is an American fever dream, one punctuated by the image of red leaflets raining down with a bold proclamation: “Death to America.” These leaflets, though written in Farsi, Korean, or Chinese, are an attack not just on the American state, but on the myth of its eternal dominance. Cue the paranoia.

This gets me to thinking: Is this film a reflection of genuine fear or a government-funded piece of propaganda to stir the pot? (After all, the Obamas produced it.)

Baudrillard might argue that it doesn’t matter anymore because America’s apocalyptic fears are part of the cultural script, as artificial as the simulations of normalcy its citizens cling to. The leaflets in the film are just one more layer of the spectacle, an incendiary symbol that exploits latent xenophobia and nationalistic anxieties about America’s decline. The ambiguity of the leaflets' origins, their ominous "Death to America" slogan, teases the audience’s own biases.

Is it China, Iran, or Korea orchestrating this chaos? The film wants Americans to jump to conclusions, stoking those fears of foreign invasion, while it lets these assumptions spiral into oblivion.

Leave the World Behind mirrors the very real sense of American fragility in the face of technological reliance, global insecurity, and the specter of foreign enemies. The drone-dropped leaflets proclaiming the country’s doom tap into America's post-9/11 paranoia about enemies hidden in plain sight (or in code), manipulating the national psyche with ease. It's pure theater, a Baudrillardian hyperreal spectacle that hints at the implosion of the American psyche more than it does at any real enemy.

Let's look at what isn't shown. The film never truly gives us an enemy. There is no villain—only the characters' fractured interpretations of the apocalyptic events around them, much like the fragmented ways America consumes narratives about its own decline. The citizens in the film, and in reality, become headless chickens, as Esmail admits. This cinematic coup d'état doesn’t need a real enemy. The uncertainty does the job better than any physical force could. The coup is as conceptual as it is physical, playing directly into modern fears of invisible, intangible threats.

In Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Baudrillard warned us about the collapse of distinctions between the real and the simulated. What’s more terrifying than the collapse of America’s digital infrastructure, planes falling from the sky, and self-driving Teslas piling up is not the destruction itself, but the feeling that this was bound to happen. The false sense of security is as brittle as the society propped up by endless surveillance, digital dependencies, and, yes, Hollywood myths about American resilience.

But what if this movie is more than just a critique? Could it be state-sponsored fearmongering, feeding into the same old narrative of us versus them? Obama’s fingerprints are all over the production, which raises the question: is this film not just a dark allegory but a message from the liberal elite warning Americans to rally behind the flag before it’s too late?

The real horror, perhaps, is that Americans are already brainwashed, locked into the loop of America’s paranoia about its demise. The apocalyptic imagery is the fetishization of American decline, a symbolic death that mirrors Baudrillard’s claim that America has always been living in its own death throes—an empire whose time has already passed but hasn’t yet realized it.

In the end, Leave the World Behind is about the ghosts of empire—the slow, inevitable deterioration of a society that has always lived in its own simulation. By the time the Teslas have piled up and the planes have crashed, we realize that the only enemy was American exceptionalism itself.

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