In physics, the three-body problem is ugly. When you have one or two objects exerting gravity on a body, it moves in a predictable pattern. Add a third and its chaos.
In 2024, the three-body problem in media is that every piece of art has a creator, a consumer and politics. So when Netflix’s sci-fi series 3 Body Problem debuted on March 21, anti-woke crusaders such as VCs Marc Andreessen and Andrew Chen only made it one scene in before posting that it was a cri de coeur to end the far-left agenda. Two days after the show dropped, Chen, a VC at a16z, posted on X, “The opening scene just punches you in the face. IRL cancel culture driven by high school and college students. Science and academia becoming politicized. Tearing down the past. Etc.” A day later, his boss Andreessen posted similar thoughts.
The scene they’re referring to takes place in China in 1966, where a crowd of frothing Maoists cheer on the lethal beating of a professor who refuses to refute scientific facts because they were discovered in the West.
To Republican political operative and entrepreneur George Sarantopoulos, this brutal scene seemed so similar to U.S. college students currently canceling conservative professors that he posted the scene to X with the comment: “We cannot allow history to repeat itself in America.” It’s gotten nearly 700,000 views.
“We’re seeing a culture revolution on social media. So what would it take to go to physicality? Not much, at this point,” he says. Sarantopoulos, it turns out, hasn’t actually seen the show past the first scene, which someone sent him. But he has read the book. And it scared the bejeezus out of his Republican soul. The scene of a professor in a dunce cap on his knees forced to admit he was wrong, Sarantopoulos says, seems a lot like college campuses today. “The far left is very into humiliating and ostracizing people. I can’t imagine under Franco’s government they’d do that. They’d just kill you. There’s this extra step.”
Although most of the comments below Sarantopoulos’ post were supportive (“coming soon to a lockdown near you”), he did receive pushback. “I got personal attacks. Like, ‘Of course this guy would have this opinion, because of the way he looks.’ I’m 50. You’re not going to hurt with me a comment about being overweight. My wife is hot and she’s 11 years younger so I don’t give two shits,” Sarantopoulos explains. His hot wife, he says, has parents who lived through the Cultural Revolution, so he’s particularly concerned about American leftist authoritarianism. And, also, seemingly, hotness.
The three-body problem spit out chaos, yet again, when my liberal wife saw the scene. For her, it was a clear warning against the anti-science MAGA maniacs who ban books, claim vaccines don’t work, and take away abortion rights.
My friend Michael Green, who co-wrote Blue Eye Samurai, Blade Runner 2049 and Logan, also interpreted the politics of 3 Body Problem as a progressive work. “As brilliantly as they landed that opening sequence, the overt politics comes from the scene in which the alien species seeking our destruction confidently promises to succeed by ‘killing your science.’ This idea from the book, highlighted artfully onscreen, is the sharpest commentary: To fight science is to fight survival.”
Rob Long, one of the few Republican screenwriters, wasn’t surprised at the disparate reactions. Long, a former showrunner for Cheers who writes a column for The National Review and co-founded the conservative podcast company Ricochet, saw how one could easily compare the scene “to the screaming undergraduates on the Yale campus or the inflamed law students at Yale (again!) Law School.” Long, in case you missed it, went to Yale.
“And it’s the terror in the eyes of Ketanji Brown Jackson when she was asked what a woman is and realized that the answer she would have given one year before is no longer acceptable. For some conservatives, the Cultural Revolution is everything happening in the culture right now, while we censor and purge and redefine words and rewrite the past — pronouns, race, climate, cancellation, all of it. That scene, for some conservatives, is today, now.”
But Long also argues that, for him — a Republican who is not a Trump fan — the first scene of 3 Body Problem is also conservatives being kicked out of the party for saying Jan. 6 was not a protest. Or free-market economists claiming that huge tariffs are great policy now that Trump wants them. “For some of us, we see that scene and it’s Mike Pence in the dunce cap, mumbling the truth about 2020 while the mob demands his head.”
Back in 2020, when Netflix announced their plans to make 3 Body Problem, it wasn’t a Republican darling. Five Republican senators co-wrote a letter to Netflix asking them to reconsider making it, after the novelist Liu, in a New Yorker profile, defended China’s brutal treatment of Uyghurs.
Also making the new conservative interpretation dubious is that it was not intended by the people who made the show, Game of Thrones co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who are very much not conservatives. According to Open Secrets, Benioff has donated very extensively to only Democratic candidates (though not as extensively as his second cousin Marc Benioff). He and Weiss directed Leslie Jones’ 2020 Netflix comedy special; Jones had become a liberal hero after surviving a harassment campaign orchestrated by far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. Benioff and Weiss even asked Barack Obama to cameo in 3 Body Problem. (He sent a note saying he should save his help for a real alien invasion.”) And Benioff explicitly told The Hollywood Reporter, “This isn’t a commentary on cancel culture.”
Although he says he leans right, Thomas Petersen, the CEO of the artificial intelligence company Faktory, doesn’t see the first scene as a critique of the left. He’s a 3 Body-head, having not only read the novels but watched all 30 episodes of the original Chinese series on Amazon. “It’s not a critique of the left,” he says. He knows this because, as he posted on X, he finds the whole show to be a woke disaster, far inferior to the Chinese series. “The rest of the show follows all the DEI stuff. The casting is out of the DEI book,” he says.
Cultural critics have argued that the end of network television has fueled partisanship because we’re demographically siloed into our own algorithmically curated shows. But it turns out that even in the rare instances when we watch the same shows, we’re not seeing the same thing.
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