America This Week, December 15th, 2023: "Leave This Movie Behind"
2023-12-15 00:30:30
Welcome to America This Week, with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn, the national news wrap-up so true, we recommend you stow all sharp objects before reading. <br/><br/><a href="https://www.racket.news/s/america-this-week?utm_medium=podcast">www.racket.news</a>
All right, welcome to American this week. I'm Matt Taibbi.
And I'm Walter Kerner.
Walter, how are you?
Well, I'll tell you what I'm not well, and I've got a little story about that. I was on the Greg Gutfeld show in New York City Monday night and performed wonderfully. I thought, then jetted back here to Las Vegas. And last night I got an email address that's on my Twitter account so people can contact me. And it was from a dentist in Canada who said, I watched you on the Greg Gutfeld show. And I looked at your lower left jaw and I think you have a fistula.
And I said, What the hell? He said, Yeah, I think you have an infection in your mouth that's draining to your lower left jaw and creating this bump that we call in dentistry a fistula. So not having any way to diagnose myself now, you know, and on a very busy schedule, I'm completely my world is completely rocked by this dentist's TV diagnosis.
Oh my god.
Yeah, so until I can get to a dentist, Matt, I'm living in a kind of free-floating anxiety. I can't think of a worse word than fistula, and I imagine that the condition itself, it is a bad thing. And the idea that I've just been living with it. Going on television, doing this podcast, you know, kissing my wife without noticing something that apparently can be diagnosed from hundreds of miles away, yeah, from television.
And I'm going on television again on Friday night on the Bill Maher Show and tonight when people see this Friday night. And I have no way to disguise this. So I guess I'll say to the makeup lady, Can you minimize the fistula on my left jaw?
Oh man, the joke has to go from there, though. You have to get a call from a different kind of specialist after that, right right, like, Walter, Hi, I'm a rheumatologist.
I live in South America.
Exactly.
I think you're suffering from a rare autoimmune condition.
I've decided, though, that this is the ultimate practical joke to play on people who are on television and are stupid enough to let their email be public.
Just call in and say, you know, I'm not sure. But that twitch in your left eye is consistent with a rapidly spreading brain tumor.
I think you've got to make a command decision pretty soon not to accept those phone calls.
Right?
So we decided to do something a little different. This week. There was a thing in the news about a movie that is, what's the word I guess you wouldn't really call it? Produced by the Obamas.
Oh, yeah, you would.
Would you call it? Do they have producer credits in this movie?
I didn't see the credits, but they have a production deal at Netflix and it was reported that this is one of their slate of movies. I don't think you can call them anything else but producers. They didn't write it, they didn't act in it.
I think they gave notes to the director. So just to set the stage. Here's the Daily Beast article from Wednesday. The Daily Beast. By the way, it's becoming an interesting publication. It's sort of like Fox News in reverse, but it's like a paranoid interpretation of Fox, which is pretty hard to do.
But a lot of what they do is they write about Fox News, so here's their take on this movie. Fox News loses its mind over Obama's quote. Anti-white Netflix film sub-headline Sowing Racial divide. Every single host who ranted about the supposed anti-white bigotry of Leave the World behind admitted to having not actually watched the movie, says Justin Barragona. Now then, the text is 14 years after then.
Fox News star Glenn Beck made headlines by calling Barack Obama a racist who has a deep-seated hatred for white people. The right-wing network is still warning its viewers that the ex-president is trying to indoctrinate Americans with his quote, Anti-white racism. To prove its point, this time around. The conservative cable giant is pointing to the post-apocalyptic film Leave the World Behind, which was produced by Obama's Higher Ground Productions and currently streaming on Netflix. Now and then it goes on and on, so this is a movie, it's a Netflix adaptation. A film adaptation of a recent bestseller from I Guess 2021 called Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam, a book the Obamas apparently loved. And they got this thing produced and got a star-studded cast with, Okay. So there's Mahershala Ali of Let's See True Detective fame. What's the other one that he was in with Viggo Mortensen, the Green?
Whatever, I can't remember anyway. Good actor, very good actor. Ethan Hawke, Julia Roberts. And then, almost as like a nod to, I guess, their movie-watching addiction. Kevin Bacon is in the movie and has kind of an important role. And then there are three people of indeterminate age who are supposedly kids, and I don't know Walter.
I love that you said. Supposedly kids, because young Hollywood actors, no matter how young, even if they're three, seem like very canny, completely sophisticated projects of ambitious parents who are pretending to be children.
Right, right, yeah, I mean, remember who framed Roger Rabbit? And they had the scene in the beginning with Roger and Baby Huey, or whatever it is. And they have a cut. And Baby Huey suddenly is speaking like, he's 55 years old and needs a stogie. That's how I feel about all the actors, right?
Yeah, showbiz kids, they're on screen pretending to be nine, and then you can imagine them going off camera and bickering over their contract, you know?
Right, how old was Ralph Macchio when he made karate kid? It was some ridiculous age. It's one of those things that, like, you know,....
Older than what he was supposed to be 13 or whatever, or 14.
I mean, I feel like it was something like 29, or something like that, or 35.
I mean, he was like Brian Stelter age when he made that movie.
But okay, so the setup here is Obamas make movie and are deeply involved and are involved in not only the production. But, you know, they're giving notes to the director and it's a story they really like. And the movie gets made, it goes out on Netflix and it causes everybody to lose their minds. And Walter, we watched the movie.
Do you want to set it up? Do you want to give the frame of what this film is? There's a lot to say about this film, but why don't you give the overview?
Well, I mean, as far as story goes, it's pretty simple. Ethan Hawke, a media studies professor at NYU Perhaps I'm not sure what his....
City College, City College.
City College.
That's very important.
Right, you're right, it's the sort of it's the left wing college, it's the, you know,....
But he's also, he's struggling, he's not at that class level.
Well, that's true, he's not at NYU, he's at the College of People, or Columbia, yeah, or Columbia.
That's true.
Personally, I have no beef with the City College strata. I think it's wonderful to teach the people. But as part of this story, yeah, he's not quite, you know?....
I think they were making a point that he was not the guy in the tuxedo in the movie. But anyway, go ahead.
Right, right, right, right, right. So anyway, he and his wife, Julia Roberts. I'm not sure what she does. does she do anything?
Advertising, or she was in advertising.
She was in advertising or something. They decide that life in the city is harsh or boring, or anxious, and they're going to get away. So they go off to Long Island to rent a place to leave the world behind with their two kids. And there's that obligatory scene where the kids are in the backseat of the car as they drive out to the vacation spot. And the kids are oblivious and glum and spoiled, playing on their devices and so on.
Mom, I want more screen time.
Exactly exactly. And the parents have a terrible marriage. I mean, not terrible. there were worse marriages. But she's kind of constantly exasperated with him.
And it's like a TV commercial, you know, where she knows a little bit better than the hapless husband, right? You know? He's just very anxious and not competent in all kinds of basic ways.
It's a comic portrayal of a, you know, Dagwood and Blondie like, you know, relationship back when they called it. That where the man's kind of, you know, nervous and not that good at stuff anyway, right? They get, they get out there and and dude, I'm already forgetting because it's so vague, I'm not sure how.
And I'm not. How do they meet Mahershala and his?
He just shows up right at the house.
So there's a couple steps here.
They get to the house, it's gorgeous. They think about, oh my God, look at the high class booze they have here. But we can't touch. That's in the contract.
Right, and they're, they're having a great time. And then suddenly there's a knock on the door and and sort of developments, developments and racial tension, like immediately, right?
The knock on the door, he's black, OK, so, and this is where for me, this the script started going like, way off the rails really quickly. But but anyway, he shows up with his daughter. They give a long explanation to the sort of Mahershala Ali is standing there, and he's, he's just a an absolutely perfect specimen in a tuxedo.
Right, sort of exudes handsomeness and dignity, and his similarly, and wealth and wealth. He's, yeah, he is decked out head to toe, his is similarly perfect looking. Daughter is standing next to him and they start going into a dialogue about how.
They weren't sure whether to go in the knock in the front door or the side door, because, you know, we didn't know if. And then there's like an Ellipsis, where the unspoken sort of implication that you might be scared if you saw a black person at the window is is kind of left open. And so we decided to knock instead. And then they tell him that they're the owners of the house, and then there's like, developments, developments.
Will they let them in? The Malay won't let them in, as you say, it's a terrible marriage. Ethan Hawke is the indecisive, grappling would be well-meaning white guy.
And Julia Roberts is Karen, and she's immediately disapproving and distraught and distrusting, and she's just radiating microaggressions in every direction. Every time she looks or speaks to either of either the father or the daughter. And they're there, it's their house.
He owns it. And why did they come? Because the world has begun to go off the rails, there's been a cyber attack, a blackout.
And you know, an oil tanker is just washed up in the beach right there, near Sag Harbor, or wherever this really is.
And then things start going, then it starts to get really weird. I don't know how would you characterize it?
Really weird if you've never watched a movie about, you know, the apocalypse, but not so weird if you have. I mean, animals start acting funny, you know? There are things in the sky, glitches with electronics.
You know, they mount, and that's. The movie becomes a bunch of people sitting around drinking wine inside a huge, rented, you know, Long island house, trying to puzzle out what's happening. You know, and having their theories and so on. While the tensions, the alleged tensions in the relationship, which I guess have to do with race, supposedly at first kind of come to the surface. And they have a series of encounter sessions, which pretty easily resolve all the tensions by the end of the movie. And you can't imagine they're that hard to resolve. Because Mahershala and his daughter and the white couple are all solidly upper middle class in some way, despite Ethan not pulling his potential income at City College.
They're all the same class, they all have the same background, there's a lot of....
Sort of, except there's clear class envy.
There's a clear dose of envy in the Julia Roberts movie.
Mahershala is a financier who makes tons of dough and even, we find out, is in contact with kind of world moving oligarchs or something.
An evil cabal.
Yeah, haha, because when that's brought up, we're meant to laugh at the thought that there are any conspiracies in the world. Because the whole movie is this kind of troll to the conspiracy minded viewer.
You know, it's constantly dropping hints about sort of dark forces. The girl wears a I think it's her, I think it's her. Where's it?
Where's an Obey t-shirt with an image that looks like a kind of evil Obama in it? And there are all these strange easter eggs, you know, designed to make the Qanon viewer, you know, sit up and start consulting his book of Masonic Symbolism to see, you know.
And that's all on purpose, you know that pulling the leg of those people. I mean, I don't want to skip ahead in this story. But, you know, one of its intellectual conclusions is that no one is running the show, that there is no, you know, cabal in charge of our destiny. But it's all a kind of the world, just this kind of accidental, power, mad, turbulent shit show that we can only survive by understanding each other. Or something, hanging out and....
Except there's no gun.
Well, and along the way, there's a lot of dumb sexual tension. Like the teenage Ethan and Julia's teenage boy is caught, you know, gawking at Mahershala's daughter as she wears a swimsuit, you know?
Let's just clarify the four main characters are Karen, Sad, White Man, Barack Obama, and Malia.
Right, right, right, right, right.
So the son is caught checking out Malia's ass, and you know, she's hot in the movie, right, right, yeah, so there's that moment and then Julia.
Sorry, Karen, who again says all the things that you never actually hear people say but are like, textbook. Robin DIANGELo No nose, you know?
Barack mentions that he's on the board of the Philharmonic. And she goes off to talk to a sad white husband in another room and says, The board of the Philharmonic, please, you know? And then she's like, You know, Rose is right down the hall. What if he sneaks in?
So it's preposterous that someone of Julia's class married to a professor living in, you know, Manhattan, or wherever maybe they live in Brooklyn. I can't remember.
Park Slope They live in Park Slope.
That's park slope, that's right, would be such a fountain of boo-boos and racial, you know?
Racial awkwardness stereotypes like, Has she never heard NPR once in her park slope life? I mean.
I don't. She's a she's a totally a total postulate as a character, she just exists to get in those microaggressions so she can learn later.
Not only can she learn, so she can learn to dance, because when a white person learns to dance.
I mean, really, dance with a black guy to jazz in a big house late at night. Oh my God, that's when everything changes, people loosen up.
They realize, Yeah, the ice melts down there.
It's like the ice melts, you know?
They didn't, they didn't play. We are family or, you know, or something like that, which they would usually do in a scene like that.
But boy did I see that scene coming from.
Oh my god, yeah, I was actually we should have been texting because I was, because I was, I was thinking we should. Like, as soon as she, she has the whole blow up at the beginning about how I don't trust him. And and you know, he's like, you could. You could start taking bets right then and there about when the the you know, she, she, she falls for him.
Well, you know, because in in this kind of, in this kind of movie, which Fox took way too seriously, by the way. I mean, because the idea that it's about hating white people or something or whatever is ridiculous. I mean, it is kind of about hating white people. But not from the perspective of race, just because they're, they're stupid and annoying.
Um, but it's, it's, it's a, it's a port. What the supposedly sort of positive self portrait of white people, or, but, you know, that's inadvertently or unintentionally, horrifically negative. But right, right, what they're focusing on, this other line.
Yeah, but, but it's negative, in the old Hollywood condescending way. That has nothing to do with race. You know, they're just, you know, they're neurotic and they, you know, bitchy and spoiled. And and they need their attitude adjusted. Just in general, and that's the movie, it's about an attitude adjustment. While the apocalypse is apparently going on outside, sort of juicing the the motives. I mean, if the world wasn't ending, you know, would they get so close?
And would they have these evenings dancing to jazz, you know? Maybe not, because it's suggested that the need to understand each other is brought about by the dependency, interdependency caused by, you know, the fact, the world is.
Yeah, so it's, it's the big chill. Except there are no, there's no psychological revelation, there's no, there's no interesting dialogue. It's just a bunch of cliche exchanges between online caricatures that don't really exist. And maybe Barack Obama, that might actually be what Barack Obama is really like, I don't know.
But Mahershala, it does emerge unscathed from the entire movie. I mean, he comes in confident, well spoken, as Joe Biden might say, clean and did say of Obama. And incredibly well dressed, with great taste in music and a killer house. And he basically holds his own through the whole movie. He admits to a little, I don't know, heartache during the dancing scene, when he and Julia almost kiss.
Right right, yeah, yeah.
Just have them kiss, come on, you know, were they afraid of, you know?
Have them kiss. They should have gone off in the other room and torn it up. Don't you think that would have made the movie at least a little interesting?
But in a strange way, the movie stops there, with a kind of 1950s, you know, modesty around, you know, the prospect of interracial romance, you know, just go for it. That would have gotten Fox News, you know, rolling, maybe, right?
But the funny thing is, you know, if I'm producing-.
Bark like a dog, right?
That's where they should have gone.
Yeah, yeah, unexplored possibilities, you know? And Ethan Hawke then should walk in on them and probably say, Excuse me, he should have not. No, he, because he's that-.
He would have sat down and watched.
Tried to understand?
Right, right, right, yeah, yeah.
Well, thanked the dude, you know, said like, I haven't seen her this relaxed in years.
Because all she does is tell him how much of a pussy she thinks he is. You know, right, right, why are you so nonplussed about this? Like, you know, and he's constantly sort of cringing, he's physically terrified of his wife.
There's physical tension there, but no sexual tension between the married couple, which maybe is realistic, who knows?
But they have strange moments where, like, Mahershala's daughter is sitting with Ethan Hawke, and then, apropos of nothing, she says, Have you ever fucked a student?
Right, well, that's, yeah, so her role is to be, so she's the Greta Thunberg. Is that how you pronounce that person's name?
Thunberg.
THUNBERG Whatever. She's the know-it-all, I mean, she's older, but she's the know-it-all youth or young person who's got it all worked out. And says blatantly inappropriate things all the time. But she has a right to, because, like, it's her world and we're just living in it, right? She just says. While Karen is constantly saying racially inappropriate things and they reflect poorly on her, the Ruth Ruth character who is, you know, is saying all these things. That are clear provocations. But we're supposed to congratulate her for being so bold as to do it.
So, for instance, there's a moment where she talks about where she's asked what she does for a living, and she's like, Yeah, you know, I'm just getting my shit together. You know, I don't want to rush into a career. And then, you know, find myself stuck and then quit, and then, you know, then I'll, you know, wait around. And then I'll be too old to reenter the workforce, you know what I mean like? She looks right at Julia Roberts, basically telling her, like, You know what, you know what I mean by too old to reenter the workforce.
And it's just like, one thing like that after the other.
She's saucy and precocious. Okay, you know, if I'm writing the script, I would say Ruth, you know what age? saucy and precocious.
Oh my god.
There was another precocious Zoomer or whatever.
Right, exactly exactly. There's a scene where she and Julia Roberts are sitting by the pool, and Julia Roberts says, Are you going to go in? or somebody says, Are you going to go in?
And Julia Roberts says, No, and then you and Ruth says, No, I'm not going to go in, and Julia Roberts says, Why? Because of your hair? I mean, it's like, straight out of, it's straight out of a Robin DiAngelo book.
Right?
She sounds like, here's Julia Roberts, supposedly from Park Slope, acting like some kind of grandma in a Flannery O'Connor story, right? I mean, it's such a setup. And you know, the other thing is that the thing is, the movie is generationally overdetermined, every character represents a generation.
And the kids to me, who were thoroughly annoying, which is one of my problems with Hollywood.
Utterly charmless, yeah.
Kids are always annoying in these movies, you know, you know, that they are on like a break from Beverly Hills High, and they have like a tutor off the set or something. And so I see, I see their real lives shining through. But, you know, their job is always to sort of tweak the adults, and they do that here.
And we've forgotten about the young male character, the son of Julia Ethan, who is just some kind of hapless, hormonal, you know, awkward teenage boy.
Easily dispensed with and barely present in the story. I mean, he doesn't solve any mysteries, he doesn't, he doesn't really have an arc.
So the only moment where you connect with him is where he's staring at Malia's ass. It's the Judge Reinhold scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Except they don't even make it more interesting than that, right, right? And then nothing ever happens.
It should have gone into slow motion at that point, right? gone into slow motion and then a song.
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