Unpacking the Friends References in Leave the World Behind

Photo: Netflix

This piece contains spoilers about Leave the World Behind, including its ending.

In an early scene in Leave the World Behind, all four members of the Sandford family are crammed into an SUV, headed to a beautiful Airbnb on Long Island to enjoy a mini-vacation. They are technically together as a unit. But as Sam Esmail’s direction of the scene conveys, each of them is tethered to some device that prevents them from bonding with one another.

Amanda (Julia Roberts) gabs on a phone call with a colleague, her earbuds firmly in place. Clay (Ethan Hawke) is driving and rocking out to “Misled,� by Kool and the Gang. Their teenage son, Archie (Charlie Evans), plays video games on his phone. And lastly, their tween daughter, Rose (Farrah McKenzie), is glued to “The One Where the Stripper Cries,� an episode from the tenth and final season of Friends that’s streaming on her tablet. In a bit of foreshadowing of the societal breakdown we’re about to witness, Rose’s video starts buffering. Even her link to Friends is tenuous.

Netflix.

Netflix.

In the book from which this soon-to-turn-apocalyptic cautionary tale is adapted, author Rumaan Alam also makes reference to Friends. But Esmail, who wrote and directed Leave the World Behind, extends the sitcom’s presence in his version of the story, turning it into a running thread that plays a key role in the film’s conclusion and underlines how human beings crave escapism at the expense of embracing the actual present, a different way of “leaving the world behind.� The usage of Friends, which initially seems like a funny riff on how much Millennials and Gen-Zers love that show, turns out to have layers of meaning behind it that resonate even more because the film is being released in theaters and on Netflix at this particular point in 2023.

During a conversation for Vulture with Matt Zoller Seitz, Esmail discussed his decision to fold Friends further into this thriller about a pair of families — the Sandfords and the Scotts, G.H. (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter, Ruth (Myha’la Herrold), who own the Airbnb where the Sandfords are staying — who get thrust into survival mode when a blackout begins to look more and more like the start of a war.

“There’s a line that Ruth says to Amanda. She’s talking about Friends and describes it as nostalgic for a time that never existed,� Esmail said. “I think about that in terms of that show, because it is seeing things through rose-colored glasses, and sometimes we need that even though it was never true. But I also love that it messes with our memories, where we think, ‘Maybe it was that way back then, 30 years ago,’ even though deep down we know it wasn’t. All of that felt right for Rose’s journey.�

The world of Friends indeed existed in a carefully conceived bubble during its ten-year-run. It was set in a simpler, reductive version of New York City where mostly white and straight people lived in surprisingly affordable, large apartments and 9/11 never happened. When Rose spends hours binging entire seasons of the NBC sitcom, she’s creating a similar bubble for herself. That’s what watching Friends does. Its motion-smoothed version of Manhattan is a place you visit while the world burns so you can briefly forget that things are on fire. Rose even says as much herself during a conversation with Archie later in the film. When her brother asks why she cares so much about the people on the show, Rose responds: “They make me happy. I really need that right now.� It’s partly as simple as that: When Rose watches Friends, it feels like things are okay.

At the same time, Rose seems to see the characters on Friends as New Yorkers she actually knows. As Esmail explains: “She just wanted to grasp at something that felt pure to her, and she couldn’t get it with her family. In a way, these were her real friends.� That comes through in that opening scene in the car when Rose asks her dad if he can take her to the Friends coffee shop when they get back to the city. Clay corrects her: “I don’t think that’s real, honey. It’s just a set.�

He’s right, but he’s also wrong. The exterior of the main Friends apartment building, where Central Perk technically would have been located, is a Greenwich Village tourist attraction. Several years ago, there also was a pop-up version of Central Perk in New York City — also a tourist attraction — which may be what Rose has in mind. Or maybe she believes Central Perk actually exists. She does not respond to her dad, so we don’t know. But it’s clear that Friends means as much to her as anything in her actual life and that the lines between the two are blurry.

Leave the World Behind never outright says whether that’s a bad or a good thing, but it is more judgmental with regard to media consumption, Rose’s included.

After the whole family witnesses a massive ship crash into a beach, the first sign that things are about to go off the rails, Amanda remarks, “The kids seem to have completely gotten over it like it was something they saw on a show. Now they’re on to the next episode.� She finds it odd and sad. But one could also view their responses as evidence of resilience. At their young ages, they’ve seen a lot of scary things in the real world that their parents never had to experience in their childhoods — school shootings, global pandemics, insurrection attempts. They have been trained by life to go “on to the next episode.� It’s the only way for them to live.

That’s why it’s so fitting that in the final scene of the movie, Rose discovers an underground bunker in a neighbor’s house that’s stocked with everything one could need to survive an apocalyptic event: an abundance of snacks and canned goods, exercise equipment, and shelves filled with DVDs, including, yes, the final season of Friends, which she immediately pops into the DVD player. Now she can finally watch the last episode, something she was about to do when the wifi and power went out.

At this exact moment, Manhattan seems to be exploding, which Amanda and Ruth witness. An emergency broadcast feed in the bunker says, “The White House and other major cities are under attack from rogue armed forces.� The government is on the verge of collapse. Yet here is Rose, choosing to spend whatever fleeting moments she may still have finding out whether Ross and Rachel end up together. It’s a cynical beat that rings true of what a self-absorbed tween might do in this situation and amplifies the dissonance between the Friends version of New York and what is happening in Leave the World Behind New York. Hearing the Rembrandts sing, “So no one told you life was gonna be this way� at the height of a massive national emergency is darkly hilarious.

Then there’s the context that late 2023 brings to all of these Friends allusions. Leave the World Behind landed on Netflix six weeks after the death of Matthew Perry, whose memory looms especially large over any discussion of Friends these days. Of course, Esmail and everyone else involved with this movie did not realize Perry’s loss would be felt in conjunction with its rollout. But that fact accidentally adds extra emotional punch.

Just as 9/11 did not exist in the world of Friends, Perry’s death does not exist in Leave the World Behind. When Rose says to her brother, “If there’s any hope left in this fucked-up world, I want to at least find out how things turn out for them,� she means the six principal Friends characters. But knowing that things didn’t turn out the way anyone would have hoped for Perry makes that line hurt in a way that Esmail could not have anticipated.

That aforementioned conversation between Ruth and Amanda, in which Ruth notes that Friends is almost “nostalgic for a time that never existed,� also hits a little differently because of Perry’s passing. When Ruth says this, Amanda looks at her with condescension, presumably because Amanda does not appreciate being told what the 1990s were like by someone who did not live through them. (These two also just do not get along.) But that glance carries extra weight because Roberts — who famously guest-starred in a widely watched episode of Friends and dated Perry — is the one responsible for it.

Ruth, a young Black woman who no doubt recognizes that almost no one on Friends looks like her, is right to say the world Friends depicts isn’t accurate. But Roberts is evidence that some version of the Friends era did exist, even if the Manhattan it depicted was more fantasy than reality. It’s understandable for Amanda to balk at the implication that the show does not matter and that her daughter is foolish for watching it, but it’s especially understandable because Amanda happens to be Julia Roberts.

The film does not tell us what Rose does after she finishes watching “The Last One.� Leave the World Behind does not provide the sort of resolution that Rose craves, and presumably receives, from her favorite TV show because that’s not how life usually works.

What the movie does leave us with is the knowledge that, at a moment of crisis when disastrous circumstances are multiplying and there’s still no good explanation for them, Rose prioritizes her own hunger for closure. She gets to watch Monica, Rachel, Ross, Chandler, Joey and Phoebe walk out of that famously spacious apartment for the last time with their arms around each other, while she sits alone in a bunker that she may never be able to leave, at least not for a long time. This may seem like a petty, silly, vapid choice to make. That’s what the movie seems to want us to think.

But Rose, the first one in her family to sense approaching danger after observing that ship and, later, all those deer, may be more in touch with her own needs than anyone else in Leave the World Behind. She already knows the world is about to go to total shit, and once her family, G.H., and Ruth show up at the bunker — which they presumably will — she won’t be able to just sit and watch this episode, uninterrupted. So she seizes the opportunity to view it, because it makes her happy and she really needs that right now. Tomorrow is never promised to any of us, and in Rose’s mind, that means you’ve got to connect with your Friends while you still can.