Behind the Curve: A Trip Down the Flat-Earth Rabbit Hole
From time to time, I like to have a snerk at the flat earth crowd. People who refuse to believe thousands of years’ worth of collected evidence, including ships dipping below horizons and airplane flight paths, fascinate and amuse me. It’s amazing to watch grown human beings flatly* deny that the planet is a globe, when there are many simple experiments they could do their own selves to prove that their flat earth hypothesis is pining for the fjords.
We’ve learned from Alfred Russell Wallace that you shouldn’t try to wager with a flat earth fanatic, because they’ll never accept plain scientific evidence. We watched a flat earth enthusiast attempt to prove the world is a pancake by launching himself in a steam-powered rocket ship. And we read a surprisingly good book on the history of flat earth beliefs.
So of course, when the documentary Behind the Curve popped up on Netflix, I had to watch it. That title! That subject matter! I’d heard it went too easy on flat earth beliefs, but I wanted to give it a fair chance.
I’m glad that I did. And if you want to see a master course in subtle digs, I commend it to your attention. I promise you’ll never see a green button the same way again after watching this documentary.
If you want to come at the experience fresh, put this review down and go watch Behind the Curve on Netflix right now (you can also rent or buy it on Amazon Prime if you haven’t got Netflix). If you’re okay with spoilers, proceed!
Behind the Curve doesn’t waste much time outright debunking the flat-earth conspiracy mongering of “stars” Mark Sargent and Patricia Steere. If you wanted to put blinkers on and steadfastly refuse to look, you could walk away thinking the documentary offered sympathy and support to their cause. But by the end, if you’ve paid attention, you’ll realize you’ve just watched the filmmakers quietly and empathetically hand them all the rope they need to strangle their own arguments. The title gives the game away: the flat earthers may think there’s a massive conspiracy to hide the planet’s true shape, but in reality, they’re just falling behind the curve.
Director Daniel J. Clark and editor Nick Andert do a subtle and marvelous job juxtaposing elements. They let the flat earth believers present their case, and then cut to bits that disprove them.
The most arresting example of this is when they follow Mark and Patricia to the NASA Space Center in Houston. The camera lingers lovingly on Patricia’s GPS as it navigates them there. GPS, of course, is designed to deal with the fact that the Earth is a geoid. Navigation in general takes into account that we live on a lumpy sphere. Ha ha ha whoops.
So there they are, tittering their way through the exhibits, pointing to stuff that proves yes proves that NASA’s definitely faking everything! Evidence: the Angry Birds in Space display, the huge moon photograph that doesn’t look like the moon**, an astronaut manikin has a broken watch strap. They’re ecstatic when the Orion capsule simulator won’t launch no matter how energetically Mark taps the screen. As they depart, gleefully listing all of these sins, the camera lingers lovingly on the console between the seats, zooming in on the huge green button marked START.
Once you have seen this storytelling device, you can’t unsee it. The documentarians put it to excellent good use throughout the documentary. Sometimes it’s more pointed, like when they show Mark explaining that you could watch commercial flights for days and never see a non-stop flight from the Southern hemisphere, then cut to Caltech astrophysicist Hannalore Gerling-Dunsmore, who opens her laptop and finds one first try. Sometimes it’s more subtle, like the montage of Chris Pontius building flat earth models while Real Estate’s “Horizon” plays. And sometimes, it’s a wink and a laugh, like transitioning from flat-earth fundagelical Christian Nathan Thompson saying flat earth believers don’t live in Mom’s basement to Mark, who may not be a basement dweller but still lives with his mom.
For most of the film, they bounce between pontificating flat earthers and actual scientists patiently explaining why those hypotheses don’t hunt, and it’s not only entertaining but informative. A gallery of physicists, astronauts, astronomers, science teachers, science writers, and psychologists explain why flat earthers are flat-out wrong, why they fall for such easily falsifiable beliefs, why they’re not good for society, and how we might be able to reach a few of them. They all do a marvelous job.
But the best debunkers in the entire documentary are the flat earthers themselves.
There’s a chef’s-kiss moment where Mark admits there are no actual scientists in the flat earth movement. (There might be a few he doesn’t know about, but they aren’t Galileos by any means.)
Bob Knodel describes how his flat earth group bought a $20,000 laser gyroscope to prove the earth isn’t rotating, only to fire the dang thing up and have it promptly prove the earth is, in fact, rotating. They’re still trying to find a way to get it to tell them what they want to hear.
And the pièce de résistance at the end is when a group of flat earthers finish setting up their experiment on along, flat canal in California. They have their boards set up at intervals, with holes punched out at carefully calibrated heights. If the Earth is flat, they’ll be able to shine a light straight through. They turn on the light, and at the other end… darkness.
By their own experiment, the Earth is proved to be a globe. And here the documentary ends, with stunned flat earthers wondering how the heck it all went so wrong.
Alfred Russell Wallace, who ran basically the same experiment on a British canal over a hundred years ago, could’ve told them what to expect. Not that they’ll accept the plain results of their own experiment any more than Wallace’s antagonists did.
Flat earthers, it seems, will always be with us. But hopefully this documentary, with its gentle humor, its empathy, and its willingness to let flat earthers take center stage with their evidence, only to prove themselves fools, will catch a few vulnerable folks before they fall down the rabbit hole.
In conclusion: watch this documentary. And do your utmost to get critical thinking taught in schools!
*Pun absolutely intended
** It looks exactly like the moon
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