What if Winston Smith was a real man who rewrote 1984?
What if Bernard Marx was a real man who rewrote Brave New World?
What if the Obama character in ‘Love in the Ruins’ was a real Obama who rewrote ‘Love in the Ruins’?
It happened. Obama, of course, didn’t write it, but his corporate flunkies did. According to this reviewer, ‘Leave the World Behind’ is meant to be a realistic apocalypse.
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In this reading, the film is a political allegory that inadvertently reveals the gaping chasm between the existential concerns of almost everyone in the world, and the deepest fears of our global ruling elites.
I will not repeat the plot of the movie, which is summarized elsewhere. Suffice it to say that it involves a mega-rich black family and an upper-middle-class white family who come together in an apocalyptic scenario – No Internet or cell phone service! Attacking Teslas! Herds of menacing deer! – and try to figure out what’s going on.
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The title is especially apt, since Walker Percy in 1971 was focusing on the elite desire to Leave The World Behind.
Percy’s Barack and Michelle were black elites who treated the Percy protagonist with airy aristocratic disdain as they floated around in their Toyota electric car.
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Before the bus comes, a new orange Toyota stops to give me a lift. It is Colley Wilkes. He and his wife Fran are on their way to Honey Island for the Christmas bird count. A pair of binoculars and a camera with a telephoto lens lie on the Sunday Times between them. Fran sits around catercornered, legs crossed, to see me.
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In the Obama rewrite:
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The next scene – the most simultaneously pivotal and boring in the entire movie – occurs in the inside of Obama/Ali’s car, as it leaves Danny’s house, with the white father and son as passengers. The camera focuses on Danny’s scruffy gun-toting image framed in the driver’s window, then shifts the focus to the driver’s flawless face.
This is when Obama/Ali tells the white guys, and the audience, what’s really going on.
Hilariously, he refers again to his defense contractor billionaire buddy: “Because my primary client works in the defense sector, I spend a lot of time studying the cost-benefit analysis of military campaigns,” he soberly explains. Wow. Sounds super serious, yet utterly absurd at the same time.
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Polistra's Mill 