WALLL-EEE
You'll be hearing squeals about Wall-E, the robot, all summer because it's charming. But while the robots can be engaging, cynical people made the movie Wall-E, I thought, as I watched the human-like characters. The flubbery-blubbery adult animations loll about their space station, moving about by pushing buttons on their giant motorized recliners with attached TVs. "Blue is the new red", they announce, changing their outfits in unison with a click of a button.
Earth is uninhabitable, so these "people" are confined to an enormous space station. Previous generations overwhelmed Earth with the detritus of consumer products, so back on their planet of origin, a lone robot branded "Wall-E" industriously compacts and arranges into tall neat piles the rubble that's the only thing remaining on the planet.
Up in space, contented to recline prone while motoring from nowhere to nowhere, the adults blink alert when abrupt change shakes their routine -- staring at TV. They're not going to waddle upright anytime soon in this dystopia, but once disrupted from their monotonous marbling, TV watching, liquid slurping existence, they're forced to adapt. "I didn't know we had a track" the teletubbie-looking beings exclaim, "I didn't know we had a pool", another says.
A Movie For All
The movie makes multiple appeals to different audiences. It appeals to environmentalists and those who think corporations are running amok. Then for the opposite interpretation libertarians say the relentless advertising in the space craft represents big government. Something for Everyone. That such conflicts coexist is not disconcerting, rather masterly and apropos. The movie's disparate themes fit the time. We are, after all a world of conflicting impulses, aware of nutrition but fat, worried about the environment but cavalier with garbage, safety conscious but reckless. We're tremendously cynical, but the less people beliEve it seems, the more talk-show hosts run segments titled "This I beliEve!"
At the end of the Bush II era we see politicians abruptly tacking from the very positions they took to garner favor in the president's administration. Bush staffers who haven't yet fled the ship sound the predictable rat-a-tat battle cries about Scot McClellan being "disloyal" -- despite his unwavering loyalty to the Bush legacy. How well Scot learned the necessity of knowing the supply and demand curves that support a dynamic personal brand. How easily the press-secretary joins the ranks of celebrities who famously ply the media's short attention span, who depend on botox and thick foundation to cover-up any true expression that might distract from their carefully crafted person-as-product placement. How ably he regards the camera while delivering a straight-faced market tested message of the moment, and how surely he will grab the gold ring (His book now sits on the NYT best seller list).
And so McClellan and McCain and Obama follow along in the Bush wake, tacking here, tch-tching there, many messages each day, carefully measured out, tested, and contradictory. It's a regatta of self-regarding personal loyalty just in time for summer. Now comes Wall-E the movie, with it's multiple personalities, so in sync.
A Kiddie Flick, A Chick Flick, and A Geek Flick Too
We happened to go to the early Evening show of Wall-E, forgetting that it would be a kids' bazaar. Of course then we listened to the same 3-4 year old childrens' commentary that we described a few years ago in "March On Penguins". The kids cried, laughed, and asked for explanations, which served to heighten our appreciation of the movie's different appeals. The adults (in two rows, bringing up the average age in the theater by 25 years or so) followed the adult themes and the subtle and unsubtle humor. To the 3 and 4 year olds, Wall-E probably looked like Saturday morning TV.
The movie favors robots over humans, and flips the more cautious 2001: A Space Odyssey" on its head. Wall-E celebrates technology not humans. In 2001 the humans, in the end, outwitted the computer gone amok. In Wall-E, select computers hold the wisdom of the world, while the humans have lost their senses. Some say the movie is a warning to us, that the message reviles consumerism.
As the movie celebrates technology though, it celebrates consumerism. It celebrates it through Eve, the slick shiny clean, blue-eyed robot-babe, with a quick trigger arm that smites perceived enemies with slick weaponry. Despite mechanical deftness, Eve is a machine both tender and wise. The movie celebrates consumerism through Wall-E, the completely resilient, unrealistic product that survives the catastrophic mendacity (we're led to assume) which led to the planet's destruction. Wall-E is stalwart -- matter-a-factly hoisting a downed blubbery person back onto their rolling cart to the alarm of the space system's bureaucratic robots. Wall-E the robot is the antithesis of a robot, tender and smitten by Eve.
If the movie is a warning about throw away gadgetry, the discarded Rubik's Cube, the lighters and lightbulbs that Wall-E collects, it's also a celebration of the slick shiny clean gadget each one of those outdated toys once was. Wall-E's longevity is a quaint myth. The robot has outlasted Every appliance, computer, car and gadget anyone in the Western world currently owns. Eve is his slick upgrade that would put Wall-E in today's real world, in the dump. And Wall-E pines for Eve as people pine for a new iPod, a new MacBook Air.
In the end the movie returns to early caveman civilization. It's only a cartoon, but if the audience chooses it can take home some message -- perhaps that humans will consume until consuming forces them start over from scratch, or that consumerism decimates life, or that the human quest for convenience is suicidal. Of course the adults in the audience will realize that nothing is so simple, there is no warning to be heeded from the movie just as there is no solution.
There is no time when the population of the world is satisfied with the rate of dEvelopment, resource utilization, or production of consumer products. We may not really need a Rubrik's Cube or an upgraded appliance. But do people in rural Africa or Asia think that the world has enough stuff now? There will always be people who want newly manufactured products, better technology solutions, tastier food, and more markets to sell to. The conundrum is in the continuum.
And Where are We, On the Continuum?
The movie "Up The Yangtze", is not Wall-E, but there's a common thread. In Up The Yangtze, the Chinese government forces a family to move from their home, a shack along the river that will be flooded by the huge project to dam the waterway for electricity. To many people the poor family's self-reliant river-front existence would look as dystopian as Wall-E's lonely, robotical organizing quest on ravaged Earth. Their move to a new place off the riverbank, with some furniture and electricity could be seen as an improvement. But this means that their daughter needs to work instead of going to college in order to pay for the family's basic necessities like food, which they once grew themselves. And of course such progress means chopping down the trees and damming the river.
Wall-E's message is necessarily simplistic, it is a children's movie, after all. Every person and country is in a different place on the continuum when environmental failure happens. Maybe they live in New York, it the midst of the epic consumerism that resembles the post-habitable world that Wall-E tools around in. Or perhaps the live in the types of places that 3/4 of the world inhabits, a desolate hut with not enough food to eat. Who's says I can't have an upgrade? All the fair sentiments that drive the market, that make Eve look slick are our environmental undoing.
Perhaps Wall-E is a vehicle for a nervous society's worries about the environment, or perhaps the movie is no more than a collection ideas that leave computer geeks feeling cozy -- humans are stupid, computers that utter something no more threatening that beeps are my friends. Whatever your interpretation -- or not -- Wall-E is great entertainment. Do see it. I see merchandising opportunities. And a sequel.
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