Rumaan Alam’s novel Leave the World Behind (2020) was well reviewed when it came out. It has also been turned into a Netflix movie, directed by Sam Esmail (best-know for the award-winning television series Mr. Robot) and starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali, and Myha’la, among others. This post is mostly about the novel, but it also considers what goes on in the film. The film brings out much of what is the problem with the novel, and with the entire sub-genre of climate fiction that can be called the “New-Weird, first-stage-of-the-apocalypse climate-emergency narrative” (or something much less awkward – ideas are welcome).
In Alam’s novel, a well-off white family has rented a nice house on Long Island for an impromptu vacation. Just when they have settled in, an older, black couple arrives, claiming to be the owners of the house and explaining that they had to come back home because there is a blackout in the city. This arrival makes the white family uncomfortable, but it soon becomes apparent that something is fundamentally wrong not just with the city, but with ecology in general. The weather turns excessively warm, thousands of deer run past the house, bats fall from the sky, in the South, towns are flooded, in Philadelphia, all children in the neonatal intensive care unit die when the power goes out, and, back at the house, Archie, one of the white family’s children, is bitten by a tick, his teeth fall out, and he vomits blood. When a noise “big enough to alter forever their working definitions of noise” descend from the sky, it is clear to the characters that “Something is … happening”.
This is a story about a sudden and inexplicable emergency. The world is falling apart, and an apocalypse of some sort is arriving. However, just like in Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World (2018) – a novel that was also recently turned into a film by M. Night Shyalaman – the reader cannot understand why the apocalypse is arriving. Because the characters of the story are affluent, concerned with the market, and utterly flummoxed by the development (especially the white family), the novel furtively suggests first that affluence and privilege might have helped to produce the crisis, and secondly that privilege fails to provide shelter in a world where modernity is collapsing. But this does not really amount to an explanation, and it does not recognize the fact that the affluent are, in fact, far more resilient than those in precarious states when apocalypses arrive and things get dicey.
While Leave the World Behind is a creepy and engrossing read, it is also (and again like The Cabin at the End of the World), a pedestrian piece of climate fiction, at least if we want climate fiction to be something more than simply stories where climate change appears in the guise of warm weather, itinerant deer, dying bats or aggressive, tick-born diseases. To the extent that Leave the World Behind is climate fiction, it is so merely because it employs ecology (animals, insects, the weather, sound) to conjure a suddenly uncomfortable and weird atmosphere. The novel works because the writing is good, but when Esmail tries to adapt the story into a film, the limitations of the original become plain. There are a lot of images and sounds (the deer, an oil tanker that ploughs through a beach, airplanes crashing, the sound again, hundreds of white, wrecked, self-driving Teslas), but very little to see; a horror film full of weird and shocking violence but without a villain or even a discernible cause.
This begs the question: what stories need to be told if there is, as Leave the World Behind obliquely argues but does not theorize, a climate emergency? If the world is moving towards a number of tipping points that will make parts of the world uninhabitable, that will flood others and permanently alter the global climate, as a number of science reports are arguing:, shouldn’t (climate) fiction participate in the effort to explain why this is actually happening. Leave the World Behind does not provide any such assistance. It leaves its readers (or the viewers of the film) as nonplussed and confused as the characters of the story. In the film version, Julia Robert’s character Amanda (the wife of the white, nuclear family) keeps repeating the phrase: “What the fuck?” It is perhaps a good question, but if it isn’t answered, how can the emergency be averted?
For those who want to answer Amanda/Robert’s question – who want to tell the story of how the climate crisis has come about and who are interested in exploring ways in which it can be prevented – it is impossible to escape food and eating. Members of the EAT Lancet commission makes this precise point when they write that:
Civilisation is in crisis. We can no longer feed our population a healthy diet while balancing planetary resources. […] The dominant diets that the world has been producing and eating for the past 50 years are no longer nutritionally optimal, are a major contributor to climate change, and are accelerating erosion of natural biodiversity. Unless there is a comprehensive shift in how the world eats, there is no likelihood of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—with food and nutrition cutting across all 17 SDGs—or of meeting the Paris Agreement on climate change.
Former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Christiana Figueres expands on the connection between food and climate change in the following way:
The climate crisis, the nature crisis, the inequality crisis, the food crisis all share the same deep root: extractivism based on extrinsic principles. This extractivism does not only deplete the planet – the very soil of the Earth itself – it also depletes our human souls.
If you elide this situation, I’m not sure you are actually writing climate fiction. The problem with Leave the World Behind is that it constantly obfuscates the reason for the unfolding crisis. Terrible things are happening but the reader cannot understand why. A terrorist attack? A Russian invasion? But if so, how come all the deer and the extreme type of Lyme disease that causes the son’s teeth to fall out and his body to shut down? In the film, the obfuscation is taken to another level. At times, it seems certain that a sinister, international agency is at work. At others, the characters are explicitly told that “No-one is in control. No-one is pulling the strings.” This makes no one and everyone the problem.
The EAT-Lancet commission and much other research that focuses the capitalist food/world system makes better sense out of the ongoing crisis. The effects of socio-ecological breakdown may well seem weird to those who experience it, but it really is not. The way food is grown, produced, harvested, refined, transported, marketed, communicated, sold, consumed and (in many cases) wasted is a major driver of both social and ecological breakdown. This is not a mysterious process. It is a project involving clearly identifiable actors (companies, governments and consumers) most located in the Global North. To Leave the World Behind is not to enter the apocalypse, but rather to somehow unthink this simple, clearly discernible and salient fact.