Consumer Apocalypse: WALL-E
WALL∙E
Andrew Stanton
Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, Fred Willard, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy, Sigourney Weaver
(Walt Disney Pictures; US theatrical: 27 Jun 2008 (General release); UK theatrical: 18 Jul 2008 (General release); 2008)
Trailer
Official Site
During the expected pre-release hoopla leading up to the ultra-Disney-sized opening for the newest bit of Pixar CGI twee, Wall-E, director/writer Andrew Stanton swore up and down that the film was not supposed to have any sort of environmental message. In interview after mind-numbing roundtable interview (those modern stations of the cross for the entertainment industry to atone for their success), Stanton made it clear that it was a story about one lonely robot falling in love with another robot. Stanton told MTV News that the film was supposed to be “science fiction” and not “science fact.” That is of course true (unless the Disney Wall-E toy robot turns out to be much more intelligent than anticipated). It’s also the kind of statement that a creative person is almost honor-bound to make; one doesn’t sit down at the keyboard or show up to the set (or animation equivalent thereof) every day in order to make a statement. One wants to craft a story.
But, given the unalterably bleak vision of the future that Wall-Econtains, Stanton’s disavowal doesn’t quite ring true. It’s not as though one can simply take the film’s backdrop of devastation and either take it or leave it, as you could for, say, a sci-fi action film where a totalitarian future is nothing more than the excuse necessary to give its characters cool shades and a burning need to utilize high-tech weaponry at the drop of a hat. In Wall-E, the love story between the two robots only exists because of the dystopian vision that surrounds them. The two are inseparable, which is as it should be. One mark of great narrative art is that the setting, characters, and plot mesh together into a cohesive storytelling mechanism. So while Stanton was most likely telling the truth when he said that there was no “message” in the film, that should not be taken to mean that one can either take or leave the film’s quite loud and damning indictment of consumerism. That critique is just as much a part of Wall-E as is the moment when the two robots first hold hands. To say otherwise would be like claiming that the organized crime elements of The Godfather are really secondary to the main story, and quite beside the point.
Wall-E unfolds some seven centuries from now, when the Earth has undergone complete environmental collapse, a sort of fatal and global toxic shock. The planet is all dirt-brown vistas and dead cities, and not a living creature to be seen; like what one could imagine the world in Soylent Green looking like a few decades hence. Wall-E is a robot who’s spent untold centuries puttering around a poisoned Earth, busily compacting the mounds of detritus left by a big-box-shopping culture and turning them into neat little cubes that he then stacks into futuristic obelisks of waste. There’s no end of work for him to do, because as the film’s mostly silent opening makes clear, the humans that blasted off from the planet in 2100 were a frighteningly wasteful lot with plenty in common with those of us watching the film from cushioned stadium seating.
Amidst the rickety skyscrapers and crumbling overpasses, the film splatters everywhere logos for the ubiquitous, 7/11-esque Buy N Large corporation, which, prior to the human race blasting off into outer space in their cruise liner of an ark, seemed to have become the one-stop private/public business/government omnientity in charge of essentially all human activity. There are signs of elephantine big box stores with square miles of parking, and holographic advertisements still flicker up in Wall-E’s determined path from time to time. The message is clear and all the better for its utter lack of subtlety: This is a planet destroyed by overconsumption, aided and abetted by a sickening web of consumer-industrial-complex propaganda, where passivity is purchased by shoveling as much junk food and unnecessary purchases into humanity’s maw. Too much stuff for too many people who don’t need that stuff results in ecosystem-shattering levels of pollution and garbage; Earth is killed by shopping.One of the perverse ironies of Wall-Eis that the surviving humans (there is no mention of what happened to all the people who couldn’t fit onto the admittedly huge Axiom cruiser) are then coddled into blob-like indolence by even more depraved levels of Barcolounger and Big Gulp-style creature comforts. Having been complicit in the destruction of the home planet, the human species on display in Wall-E is a swaddled band of babies, interested in little beyond the datascreens always plopped right in front of their jowly faces, much like the soulless entities inhabiting E.M. Forster’s prescient 1909 story “The Machine Stops.” It’s nearly impossible to behold these twin nightmares, the blasted Earth and the purgatorial shopper’s paradise of Axiom, and imagine that the film is anything but a clarion call warning of the environmental catastrophe to come. The fact that the robots at the film’s heart are more demonstrably human and brave than practically any of the homo sapiens lurching about, only proves the point more. This is not a species to be impressed by.
Another irony of Wall-E, and one that has rightly been widely noted in the blogsophere, is that the filmmakers participate quite avidly in the same consumerism that their film blasts away at with such heat. By dint of all the thousands upon thousands of plastic Wall-E and EVE toys that Disney will be trucking into the marketplace for this year and (they hope) many more to come, the Pixar boys become part and parcel of the same hypocrisy.
But, then, we all are, of course.
Comments
Wow… what a sunny review of a kids movie.
I think though, what the reviewer seems to have missed is that this is a story about a naive and selfless character, whos in love. The fun-poke at consumerism isn’t subtle, but also isn’t meant to be taken so seriously.
Comment by Mohammed Qureshi from Chicago, IL — June 30, 2008 @ 11:21 am
Wall-E is a magnificent movie, ostensibly introducing kids to the importance of environmentalism. Well, either that, or it’s about the demise of the late, great human race. I saw it on opening day, and the ticket booth was overflowing with free Wall-E watches for the kids in the audience. Isn’t this, I wondered, simply beginning consumerist brain-washing early with a colorful piece of cheap (in this case, free) plastic? The thought didn’t stop me from picking one up anyway for the kid in our family. Oddly enough, the movie describes life after the Earth has become too toxic to live on, thanks to equally greedy producers and consumers. Even more oddly, I couldn’t bring myself to blame Disney-Pixar for pushing the flashy plastic or myself for taking it, but instead found myself reflecting on my own split consciousness when it comes to consumerism and environmentalism.
My dilemma, I’ve concluded, is that the human brain is separated into districts, like a city. We celebrate the attractions like museums, poetry readings, and organic farmers’ markets. We try to stay out of the seamy places when we can … but, of course, they’re always well populated, regardless of their absence from the city’s travel brochures. The same principle (one hand denying what the other hand is doing) is probably what’s produced an ostensibly environmental kids’ movie keeping intimate company with a plastic watch shipped from China to theaters across America, packed in non-recyclable plastic, and powered by a non-rechargeable battery. Obviously this was Marketing’s bright idea, and the writers, animators, and actors working on the film had different things to accomplish.
Did I mention that I once worked (briefly) in advertising and marketing? I can appreciate those who master the psychology of promotion, those who possess the cleverness to catch an eye. I admit it: Wall-e (the movie and the watch) are me. I’m human and I’m fragmented. I have solar panels on the roof and 27 T-shirts in a single drawer. I drive a Prius and watch a humongous-screen TV. I grow organic fruits and vegetables in the backyard and am as lustful to possess the next new and shiny thing as any bowerbird.
As I was contemplating all of this, it struck me that part of the problem is one of our human assets: neoteny. The dictionary defines neoteny as the retention in adulthood of features from an earlier phase of the life cycle. We’re all kids at heart, some of us more so than others. According to this theory, we’ve risen higher than dogs because you can teach an old human new tricks. Along with this life-long adaptability, we seem to have maintained a life-long fascination with flash and sparkle. And, like kids, we keep assuming someone must be out there whose job it is to take care of our needs, so the concept of “something for nothing” (some would call it entitlement) doesn’t strike us as absurd. We see something attractive and we want it … now. Neoteny obviously has its good points (it keeps us learning and discovering), but other animals’ strategy is to play when young and then—after they’ve got control of their bodies and learned what works and doesn’t work for survival—settle down to a predictable cycle of procreation, finding food, and keeping out of the rain.
So why do human adults read something called Playboy, assure ourselves we’re still young at heart, get facelifts and boob jobs, and hide gray hair with dye? As in Greek tragedy, our fatal flaw is the hubris that accompanies our superior position. We’ve got a giant brain based on neoteny, which assures us that we can play and be entertained forever. Peter Pan is alive and well and living inside our heads. So is Ebenezer Scrooge, that fearful miser whose life is all about hoarding money and subjugating others. Scrooge says, “Global warming—what global warming? Go away, don’t bother me.” Pan says, “Let’s have a parade to prevent global warming with a float that looks like a big thermometer, and we’ll all wear sexy, new clothes colored environmental green.”
Frankly, I’ve decided it’s high time to get Scrooge and Pan back on speaking terms so my brain can stop being an adversarial system and start accomplishing something. Wishful thinking will not eliminate the parts of myself I’d rather relegate to cover of darkness or delivery in brown-paper bags.
This insight has had multiple inspirations—the state of the world, the Wall-E watch, and my mother. She’s now living in an Alzheimer’s facility, and, to help pay for it, my inner Scrooge has stopped spending money on non-necessities. (Obviously, watching Wall-E was a necessity for Pan.) Try it some time. It’s a little like dropping heroin cold-turkey, or so it seems. But until I can accomplish this, I remain part of the problem, despite all my good intentions.
After the World Trade Center disaster, we were all advised to purchase more in order to keep the economy strong. That used to be a plausible thing to say, didn’t it? If Wall-E turns out to be about the demise of humanity, it will be because we keep saying things like this. If, on the other hand, it’s about a sea change in consumerism, it will be because our brains are still plastic enough to learn a new response. That’s the kind of plastic that doesn’t deserve to end up on the garbage-heap of evolution.
Comment by Dian Duchin Reed from Soquel, CA — June 30, 2008 @ 7:05 pm
Good review, and I disagree with the poster who implied that its totally a kids movie. Though, if it were we could look at some of the plot lines of classics (such as Snow White?) with their perhaps underlying but undoubtedly present moral messages and adult themes. (Looking again, even Bambi starts with a murder.) The reviewer DID actually forget to mention the cutesy love story, and perhaps feels that comments about the animation are unnecessary, but I think that a lot of people will feel the same way when reflecting on the movie. Myself, I went with my son and I said to myself afterward that I was glad he enjoyed a movie that touched upon the very grave issue called for lack of a better single word, consumerism.
Comment by dictionary from HI — July 1, 2008 @ 1:41 pm
Given the message of the film, I guess it’s safe to assume that the studio will forgo selling all the children’s toys that typically follow a release like this? It would be pretty inconsistent to saturate our delicate Earth with literally tons of useless children’s toys, right?
Whoops.
Comment by Matt from Los Angeles — July 2, 2008 @ 6:48 pm
Yeah, and I heard that there’s a gorge in Colorado where we could dump all of the waste in the U.S. and still have room to spare. Let’s lighten up a little Pixar. Conservation= Yes. Envronmentalist preaching = No.
Comment by KNAB from NY — July 3, 2008 @ 6:26 am
Nice review! Movie seems to be very creative and absorbing.
Comment by Andrew Brown from USA — July 20, 2008 @ 2:44 pm