Behind the Curve

Behind the Curve is an examination of the growing community of people who fervently believe the earth is flat. While the film doesn’t support their cause, it doesn’t ridicule them either, and I had hoped its genuine curiosity might shed some light on the nature of conspiracist thinking. In speaking with psychologists and other scientists, it does offer cursory explanations of how confirmation bias and logical fallacies factor into the intractability of misbegotten beliefs. But in all the time it spends with the believers, it fails to ask the most obvious question of all: How did we get here? Social media’s democratization of misinformation isn’t addressed, and barely any background is offered on the flat earthers the film follows, most of whom are also antivaxxers, 9/11 truthers, etc. No inquiry is made into their mental health, nor the influence their upbringing and life experiences may have had on their incredibly skewed critical faculties. It’s a real missed opportunity.