Open City vs. Leave the World Behind
The dichotomy between Teju Cole’s novel, Open City, and the dystopian movie, Leave the World Behind, may not be evident to anyone. Serendipitously, I was mid-way through Mr. Cole’s musings of long walks through Manhattan when I watched Julia Roberts and Myha’la Herrold grasp hands as they watch that same island burn. Thus forged — for me — a connection between the two stories.
A bit of background.
Netflix’s current blockbuster, Leave the World Behind has big-time Hollywood pedigree. Based on Rumann Alam’s 2020 novel by the same name, it stars Julia Roberts, an asset to any movie; supported by Mahershala Ali, who has a pair of Academy Awards; and Ethan Hawke, a go-to guy when one needs a sensitive male. There’s also a cameo by Kevin Bacon, who shows up in every third movie I’ve ever seen, yet never seems rote. More importantly, Leave the World Behind has Executive Producer cred of Michelle and Barrack Obama. I wanted to see it, if for no other reason than to gauge the temperature of middle-brow liberalism.
Open City comes fresh from the brain of one man. Teju Cole was raised in Nigeria, and moved to the US in 1992. A photographer, essayist, and novelist, he was the Photography Critic for The New York Times Magazine and is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard. I can imagine this brilliant dabbler will not be long weighed down by a such a bloated title, and will move on to other creative pursuits.
The first important thing to know about Leave the World Behind is: you don’t like anyone. Julia Roberts portrays a word that begins with a B that I don’t spell out in print. Everyone’s a little bit racist, regardless of their skin shade. Even gentle, genial Ethan Hawke leaves deserving people in the dust at the side of the road. Call me trite, but I’m always challenged by films, plays, or books with no redeeming characters.
The first important thing to know about Open City is: nothing happens. But we don’t care because Julius, our first-person narrator, is such excellent company on his endless walks through Manhattan (as well as during his dreary winter visit to Brussels). Julius’ meanderings are physical manifestations of our brains: constantly atwitter with important and trivial observation. He meets interesting people who show up later — or not. He discourses with equal import on Middle East politics, architecture, bed bugs, and losing his bank card. For all that the book slights plot, it embraces life. Julius may be numb from the break-up with his girlfriend and his estrangement from his mother. Without doubt, he is mildly depressed. But he is very much in this world, trying, with the limited capacities of any human being, to connect. I was simultaneously in his head and rambling through my own parallel experiences triggered by his musings.
Like any dystopian movie, Leave the World Behind has oodles of plot. At least it ought to. Lots of things happen: freighters wash up on public beaches; flamingos dance in a Long Island pool; Autopilot Teslas crash into one another. But the actual plot is annoyingly vague. The world is coming to an end. But how, and why, and by whom? Arabs, perhaps. Or Koreans,. Or Chinese. Most likely, the enemy is us, since we’re the greedy imbeciles who’ve created an unjust world where only two values prevail: money and mean-spiritedness. Stuck in a cabin in a wood with a young Black woman she abhors, Julia Roberts delivers a truly wonderful monologue on how terrible humans can be. But to what end?
Like any novel in which we’re aligned with our protagonist, when the truly terrible is revealed, we sting. No spoiler here, but there’s a passage at the 90% point of Open City that made me shutter, put the book down and contemplate for a few days whether to proceed.
Even though I disliked everyone in Leave the World Behind, I watched until the end. Ditto, I competed Open City.
Leave the World Behind ends with a tapestry of ambiguous threads. We don’t really know what happens to anyone. Which is fine, because we don’t really care for any of them anyway: just roll the credits, please.
Open City ends with a long treatise on composer Gustav Mahler’s preoccupation with death, and the curious case of birds impaled by the Status of Liberty’s crown. We never know whether the accusations hurled at our hero are true, whether he agrees with them, or even acknowledges them. What we do know is that his strolls in search of life turn into speculations of death. Truly, the accusation hit their mark.
I came away so disappointed by Leave the World Behind I wondered if perhaps I’d become just as jaded and narrow as the characters in the movie. Until I realized, nah, it’s just not a very good movie. Whereas Open City left me feeling hollow in the best possible sense. As if the past traumas that blunted Julius’s search for life, for meaning, for connection, are nested in me.
