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  • No, ‘Leave the World Behind’ and ‘Civil War’ Aren’t Happening Before Your Eyes

    No, ‘Leave the World Behind’ and ‘Civil War’ Aren’t Happening Before Your Eyes

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    Several people are typing, and they’re all saying Netflix’s Leave the World Behind is wildly prescient. The movie, directed by Sam Esmail, opens on a world where communication has been knocked out following a cyberattack. And earlier this week, when nearly all of Meta’s platforms—Facebook, Instagram, Threads—went down, people took to (other) social media platforms to post and hand-wring about the apocalypse.

    Most of the posts, per usual, were jokes: wry observations to help soothe the agita that comes with being alive when everything feels unstable. “Another dry run for Leave the World Behind,” wrote one X user. “I fear we are moving close to a Leave the World Behind scenario,” wrote another. “These tech glitches are increasingly [sic] with regularity.”

    But there was also a more conspiratorial undercurrent. For those who don’t know, Leave the World Behind was produced by Barack and Michelle Obama through their company Higher Ground Productions. Ever since the movie’s release, a conspiracy theory has persisted online that the film is somehow a warning about the widespread disorder to come.

    This same thread emerged late last month when an AT&T network outage wreaked havoc on US cellular networks. “The predictive programming of the Obama’s [sic] movie, Leave the World Behind, is becoming a little too real right now,” one user wrote on X. “I wouldn’t put it past our own federal government to institute a terrorist or cyber attack, just to blame it on foreign countries like China and Russia.”

    Odds are that nothing of the sort happened. Leave the World Behind is based on a 2020 book by Rumaan Alam and, according to the film’s director Sam Esmail, the former US president came on as a production partner only after the script was pretty much done. “I would just say [the conspiracy theorists] are pretty wrong in terms of his signaling,” he told Collider. “It had nothing to do with that.”

    Not that facts have ever gotten in the way of an online conspiracy before. Case in point, this week’s big trailer drop: Civil War. When the first trailer for Alex Garland’s next film dropped in December, online right-wing pundits speculated that it was also predictive programming, something meant to prepare the populace for events already planned by those in power. When the new trailer dropped this week, people on Reddit and elsewhere seemed to be fretting that the film will become, as The Hollywood Reporter put it, “MAGA fantasy fuel.”

    Ultimately, reactions like these to Leave the World Behind and Civil War merely serve as proof that they’re effective as works of fiction. They’re not part of some psyop to placate the public—they’re reactions to a political era that is fraught at best. Comfort is not a prerequisite for good filmmaking; movies are supposed to be unsettling sometimes. Concerns about a movie being too real are just signs that the filmmakers have tapped in to the collective psyche. Rather than think that Esmail or Garland—or Obama, for that matter—are trying to send some warning, perhaps consider the circumstances for why you’re worried that they might.



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  • ‘Dune: Part Two’ Fulfills the Prophecy of ‘Dune’

    ‘Dune: Part Two’ Fulfills the Prophecy of ‘Dune’

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    The second part of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation, efficiently titled Dune: Part Two, contains a single line that is as much about fans of Frank Herbert’s book as it is about its protagonist, Paul Atreides. It’s delivered by Chani, Paul’s concubine in Herbert’s novel and equal/skeptic in Villeneuve’s meticulously crafted reimagining. “You want to control people?” Chani says, rhetorically. “Tell them a messiah will come. They’ll wait. For centuries.”

    Dune acolytes didn’t have to wait for centuries, but the anticipation for a well-executed, faithful adaptation of Herbert’s 1965 book is the stuff of legend. Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky tried and failed to make the film in the 1970s. David Lynch made one in the ’80s that’s a camp classic but struggles to stay coherent. Sprawling and intricate, Dune’s pages carry an all-but-unfilmable weight. Unfilmable to anyone but Villeneuve.

    Except, in Villeneueve’s eyes, Paul isn’t a messiah. That’s the trick. Dune: Part Two fulfills the prophecy of what Dune can be rather than what it was. For years, the Dune novel has been treated, by directors, and many readers, as a hero’s journey—the quest of a young man in a strange land who saves the people of the resource-rich planet Arrakis, the Fremen, from foreign rule while working out some Freudian issues along the way. Swap in Luke for Paul and Darth Vader for Baron Harkonnen and it’s Star Wars all the way down (though Dune did it first). No tension, just a blink of internal struggle, and then Paul—the messiah, the Lisan al Gaib—rides to the rescue on the back of a sandworm.

    Dune: Part Two, picking up where 2021’s Dune left off, buffs out the white-savior sheen of that telling of the story. Instead it presents Paul (Timothée Chalamet) as a guy aware that his hero status is just the result of decades of myth-building by his mother, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and the Bene Gesserit (basically, space witches). They’ve been promising the Fremen a savior for years, and when Paul arrives and Stilgar (Javier Bardem) starts yammering on about prophecies fulfilled, Lisan al Gaib whispers to his mom, “Look how your Bene Gesserit propaganda has taken root.”

    Jessica’s role, like the one of Chani (Zendaya), has far more dimensions in Dune (the movies) than it did in Dune (the book). Villeneuve told me this deepening of womens’ perspectives would happen back before he even released the first installment. He wanted equality between the genders, and for Harkonnen to not be a caricature, like Ursula on a way-worse power trip. “The book is probably a masterpiece,” he said when I spoke to him in 2021, “but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect.” Its heteronormative patriarchal shortcomings provided space for him to explore. Chani now fills the role of warrior who refuses to bow to her boyfriend and doesn’t buy the messiah bullshit. Paul, as my colleague Jason Kehe so succinctly put it when connecting the dots between Dune and Burning Man celebrants, goes “into the desert, becomes a messiah, and ends up a goddamn monster.”

    The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.

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  • Why TikTok Is So Obsessed With a Mysteriously Pregnant Stingray

    Why TikTok Is So Obsessed With a Mysteriously Pregnant Stingray

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    Charlotte is the TikTok generation’s Virgin Mary. Only she’s not human, and she’s carrying up to four messiahs.

    For a brief moment, some wondered aloud whether Charlotte, a round stingray about the size of a serving platter, might have been knocked up by a shark. She has been in a tank in Hendersonville, North Carolina, separated from males of her species, for eight years. After her caretakers at the Aquarium and Shark Lab found out she was pregnant and expecting up to four pups, they speculated the bite marks they noticed on her might be a sign that she’d mated with one of the male white-spotted bamboo sharks in her tank.

    “I saw this story pop up and my first thought was, ‘That didn’t happen,’” says Dave Ebert, an expert on sharks and rays at the California Academy of Sciences.

    The more likely reason for Charlotte’s immaculate conception is something known as parthenogenesis, a process by which an organism essentially impregnates itself. While more common in plants and invertebrates, it does happen occasionally in elasmobranchs like Charlotte, especially in captivity.

    While the whole ray-shark mating thing initially caught the eye of social media, it was the doing-it-on-her-own aspect of Charlotte’s story that really commanded attention. She’s due to have her pups any day now (Team Ecco, the educational organization that runs the Aquarium and Shark Lab, has been updating its Facebook page regularly), but the meme “Stingray Jesus” has already been born.

    For obvious reasons, the internet loves this shit. It’s mystery, plus science, plus potentially horny sea creatures all in one story. Also, “Stingray Jesus” sounds cool, like a band on an episode of The Simpsons. In one TikTok, Kayla Gratzer, a restaurant manager in Eugene, Oregon, says Charlotte potentially mating with a shark has “queen energy.” Her video has more than 11 million views. Amanda, a TikTokker in Glasgow who posts under the handle @continentalbreakfast, noted, “My girl just spent her best years girl-bossin’ and pursuing her career until she decided the time was right.” Her post has more than 1.4 million views. Charlotte has inspired tattoo designs, and churchy-looking illustrations set to the song “Angel” by Sarah McLachlan. Everyone, it seems, is Team Charlotte.

    Gratzer says she never expected “a silly video I filmed while scratching a $2 [lottery ticket] would gain so much traction,” but adds that she’s really grateful when the news gives people something lighthearted to discuss on TikTok: “It’s a dream.” Considering the other news of the past week, though, Charlotte’s story has a different timbre.

    On Tuesday, Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled that destruction of a frozen embryo could make someone liable for wrongful death. Critics of the move claim it could have a chilling effect on people seeking in vitro fertilization (IVF), and the state’s largest hospital is already putting a hold on such treatments following the court’s decision. As another TikTok trend took off last week—dances to Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ’Em”—some on the platform used the song to champion reproductive rights. “Plan Bey,” in this case, means handing a pregnant person a credit card while Beyoncé sings, “This ain’t Texas”—a reference to the fact that the Lone Star State has enacted some of the strictest abortion laws on the books since the fall of Roe v. Wade.



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  • Live TV Is the New Streaming

    Live TV Is the New Streaming

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    “Biggest audience since the moon landing.” That was the headline when Nielsen released viewership numbers for Super Bowl 2024. About 123.7 million people in the US watched the game, more than any other game since Nielsen started keeping track and, yes, close to the 125 to 150 million people in the US who watched the moon landing in July 1969. Despite the scores of streaming options and other things to watch, people still tuned in to watch live—to see the Kansas City Chiefs win in overtime, to see Taylor Swift, to watch Usher, to see Martin Scorsese’s alien-invasion ad, to catch the new Deadpool & Wolverine trailer.

    Maybe live TV isn’t dead after all.

    It is, of course, easy to chalk this up to the event being, well, the Super Bowl, which is still the single most popular US sporting event of the year. Also of note: A billion-plus people watch events like the World Cup globally. Still, the Big Game wasn’t the only thing people tuned in for this week. On Monday, Jon Stewart reclaimed his place at The Daily Show desk and brought in 1.9 million viewers—the most the show has seen since 2018. It’s an election year, and as Alison Herman wrote in Variety, “anyone who has living memories of the War on Terror is powerless to resist Stewart’s particular blend of cynicism and moral righteousness.” Or, maybe after seeing Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian president Vladimir Putin, they’re just longing for the days when Stewart would go on CNN to call Carlson a “dick” on Crossfire.

    While this may seem like a yearning for the days of more appointment television and setting our VCR to tape My So-Called Life, and it is, there’s something else at play. There is a malaise associated with streaming these days, when scrolling through the endless libraries of “Eh, OK, Sure” TV on Netflix or Hulu doesn’t feel all that different from the mindless channel-surfing people did in the ’90s while they were waiting for Friends to start. With streamers raising prices and adding commercials, maybe the urgency of watching something as it’s happening has the juice to bring people back to broadcast.

    Streamers certainly think so. In a quest to get more subscribers, one of their biggest plays has been to secure the rights to live sports. Apple TV+ has baseball and soccer, Amazon Prime Video has Thursday Night Football, Netflix just landed WWE wrestling. Hulu and Disney+ can be bundled with ESPN. Outside of sports, Max has the CNN live feed. Netflix just hosted the Screen Actors Guild Awards. The Oscars will air on ABC on March 10, but you can also watch them on Hulu or YouTube TV.

    All of which to say, even if live TV is making a comeback, it’s a comeback buoyed by streaming. One of the reasons, beyond Taylor Swift and Usher, that lots of people tuned in to the Super Bowl was that, in addition to CBS, the game also aired on Nickelodeon, where it was hosted by SpongeBob SquarePants and Patrick Star. (I’m told it was fun to watch on edibles.) The game also streamed on Paramount+, and although some viewers reported glitchiness early in the game, the easy access across multiple platforms boosted the game’s viewership numbers. HBO’s current Sunday Night Sad show True Detective: Night Country has surpassed the first season in total viewers. A lot of them watch the show when it airs on Sunday, and a big chunk watch on Max. Nearly a million people—930,000—watched Stewart’s return to The Daily Show; some 6 million more have watched his return monologue on YouTube.

    The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.

    For years we’ve been debating whether the watercooler show is over. Was Game of Thrones the end? Has Last of Us revived that zombie concept? I remain on the fence. There’s far more niche programming for niche interests than seemingly ever before, but global sporting events and world news events will always capture the public’s attention in a way viral moments can’t. People watching the Super Bowl still knew the Chiefs won in overtime before they saw it on X.

    On Wednesday, my phone buzzed with an alert from The New York Times. Something awful had happened during the Chiefs’ victory celebration in Kansas City. Later, I learned that one person, a popular local radio DJ, had been killed, and more than 20 others were injured, in a mass shooting at the event. But I didn’t learn that by diving further into my phone. I turned on MSNBC.

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  • Taylor Swift Will Define Super Bowl 2024 Just by Showing Up

    Taylor Swift Will Define Super Bowl 2024 Just by Showing Up

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    Over the past two weeks, Taylor Swift has made headlines dozens of times. Only one, maybe two of those instances have been because of something she actually did. Her music getting removed from TikTok? That was a disagreement between Universal Music Group and the app itself. Her songs getting boosted illegally? That was pirates. Explicit deepfakes of Swift? Blame 4chan. Conspiracy theories that Swift is a psyop? Those come from right-wing commentators. Swift winning Grammys and announcing a new album, The Tortured Poets Department? That news Swift actually broke herself. Taylor Swift is the attention economy’s Tasmanian devil and all anyone can do is try to watch without getting dizzy.

    On Sunday, that Tasmanian devil is probably going to Super Bowl LVIII.

    The “probably” in that sentence is also something of a news item. Two weeks ago, after the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Baltimore Ravens and secured their place in the Big Game, fans immediately checked Swift’s Eras Tour schedule—only to find she’ll be in Tokyo the night before her boyfriend, Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, hits the turf. After much fretting, and an assist from The West Wing, fans rested assured that she could make it. Further assuaging fears, the Japanese Embassy in Washington, DC, posted on X that “despite the 12-hour flight and 17-hour time difference, the Embassy can confidently Speak Now to say that if she departs Tokyo in the evening after her concert, she should comfortably arrive in Las Vegas before the Super Bowl.” This also made news.

    Now, I’m writing about it. This is wild. It’s turning the American tradition of beers, burgers, and the Bowl into a pop culture and political lightning rod. The collision of flag-waving football energy and Swift’s brand of celebrity feminism are causing a cultural confluence not seen since Super Bowl 50 in 2016, when Beyoncé performed “Formation” and conservatives decried Coldplay’s halftime show for promoting the gay agenda. Except Swift isn’t even performing. If there’s a terrible storm between Tokyo and Las Vegas she might not even make it. If she shows up and belches, the internet will look into it; Google search interest for “watch necklace” all but quadrupled based on her Grammys accessory. Imagine what a little gas could do.

    Swift’s mere presence at Chiefs games has been bringing huge viewership spikes to NFL broadcasts this season. Last year’s Super Bowl, which featured an iconic performance by Rihanna, was viewed by a colossal 115 million people, according to Nielsen. Swift’s attendance—or even the idea that she might attend—at LVIII could put viewership even higher. Even though the game is already the US’s most-watched sporting event of the year, having Swift involved significantly impacts the event’s cultural cache.

    “The Super Bowl is already such a major US pop culture event. It’s already a mix of people who like the NFL, which is a big audience, and then you’ve got the people who are more interested in the ads than the game,” says Charles R. Taylor, a marketing professor at Villanova University. “Now you add this Taylor Swift Effect on top of that and it’s going to be record-breaking.”

    This, in turn, is why Swift often finds herself in the crosshairs of conspiracy theorists and AI deepfake makers. Celebrity is a black hole for eyeballs, pulling in all the attention it can get. Swift’s brand, which has evolved in both mainstream media and social media simultaneously, is unlike anything before it. Swift now dominates TikTok and Instagram, just like she did Tumblr a decade ago. Awareness of Swift knows no borders, so anyone seeking attention—deepfakers, podcast pundits—gets more mileage out of using her name and image than any other.



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  • Apple’s Vision Pro Is Trying to Solve a Nearly Unsolvable Problem

    Apple’s Vision Pro Is Trying to Solve a Nearly Unsolvable Problem

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    Netflix didn’t come to play. Neither did YouTube. Following the Apple Vision Pro’s big preorder rollout two weeks ago, news slowly started to trickle out that neither of those video services would have native apps on Apple’s new spatial computing device. Netflix’s co-CEO, Greg Peters, went on a podcast and wondered aloud if the Vision Pro was even “relevant to most of our members.” Ouch.

    In fairness, the concept of spending $3,500 for souped up snorkeling goggles in which to watch Netflix isn’t a relevant expense for a lot of people. The Apple Vision Pro might be “magic, until it’s not” or maybe “bulky and weird,” but even if it’s the perfect device of the future (future perfect?), it still probably isn’t the best place for the thing Peters sells: hours-long movies and series people want to binge-watch.

    The reluctance of Netflix and YouTube to go all-in on the Vision Pro actually highlights a problem that’s plagued virtual reality and mixed reality—specifically the former—for a long time: Watching long-form video in a headset sucks. James Cameron might find using one to be “religious,” but those who study headsets advise against keeping one on for the length of Avatar.

    Mixed reality “shouldn’t be used for hours at a time. Its strength has always been in its ability to provide us with special experiences, not with unending engagement,” says Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, which just published a paper on the psychological implications of using mixed-reality devices with pass-through video technology like the Vision Pro’s. “MR is a special and intense medium.”

    Emphasis on the intense. Believe me when I say that I initially found the idea of a piece of technology that could sit on my face and envelop me in fantastical worlds to be thrilling. Almost 10 years ago to the day, while at the Sundance Film Festival, I tried my first VR film experience and marveled at the possibilities. Theoretically, at some point, Mark Zuckerberg did too. Then he dropped a cool $2 billion on Oculus and set a path to lead us all into the metaverse.

    The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.

    But that part where people just chill in their headsets has always felt just out of reach. For years after that Sundance festival in 2014, I wrote about virtual-reality films. Oculus, after being acquired by Facebook, launched a filmmaking wing called Story Studio and made an animated short so good it made me cry. The idea of VR filmmaking became a hot topic at film festivals. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu won a special Oscar for a VR experience. Henry, that movie that got me teary, got an Emmy. Still, the highlights had run times that were shorter than the delivery time on a pizza.

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