Leave the World Behind

Leave the deer behind. They're smelly and very bad tippers.
dir: Sam Esmail
2023
When I hear the words “Leave the World Behind” of course, having come of age in the 1990s, the first thing I think of isn’t the book that this Netflix film is based on, by Rumaan Alam. It is the legendary song by Ride off their second album Going Blank Again, being Leave Them All Behind, which would have been a way better title.
The arguable pinnacle of the shoegaze genre of music, the song and the album were so great in fact, so much of a magnum opus that the band never again achieved anything close to as good, degenerating into acrimony, jealousy, and one of them going over to Oasis after killing time as sub-standard The Black Crowes sound-alikes. The “Britpop” era of the 90s meant everyone thought they should sound like Primal Scream trying to sound like the Rolling Stones all over again.
But that song… my gods, it’s at least up there with the best of My Bloody Valentine, or peak Swervedriver, Slowdive or The Jesus & Mary Chain.
What’s that got to do with this film, you ask? Well, nothing, to be honest.
I just wanted to talk about how much I loved that song, and the shoegaze era, is all.
And they don’t even use it on the soundtrack, which is even more of a shame.
Yet again, in talking about one thing, I am going to talk about a completely different thing. Back when Steven Spielberg made War of the Worlds, an updated Americanisation of the H.G. Wells classic, the point wasn’t to mock the audience by having Tom Cruise playing a blue-collar regular joe, even if it really felt like that, and that they were taking the piss at our expense.
No, no, I assure you, Mr Spielberg is too self-serious for that. The whole point of the film was how little it would take before regular, decent, hard-working Americans turned on each other and started shooting / eating each other. Based on that very pessimistic flick, it would take about half an hour after an alien invasion before Americans started whipping out their guns.