After a Hollywood film starring Leonardo DiCaprio put an obscure Thai island beach on the global tourism map in 2000, the beach was overwhelmed by so many visitors over the next eighteen years that the Thai government closed it entirely in 2018 to let it heal — and the film studio was later ordered to help pay for the restoration

After a Hollywood film starring Leonardo DiCaprio put an obscure Thai island beach on the global tourism map in 2000, the beach was overwhelmed by so many visitors over the next eighteen years that the Thai government closed it entirely in 2018 to let it heal — and the film studio was later ordered to help pay for the restoration

The most idyllic-looking beach in Southeast Asia was destroyed by the movie that made it famous, and then destroyed again by the tourists that the movie brought. The specific mechanism by which Alex Garland’s 1996 novel — a substantially cynical fictional treatment of the backpacker culture of the 1990s, whose central thematic argument was that any pristine paradise discovered by Western travellers would inevitably be destroyed by the arrival of…