WALLL-EEE
You'll be hearing squeals about Wall-E the robot all summer because it's a charming movie and robots can be engaging. But a bunch of very cynical people made Wall-E, I thought, watching the characters. The flubbery-blubbery adult animations loll about their space station and move 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 consumer products and now a lone robot branded "Wall-E" industriously compacts and arranges the detritus into tall neat piles the rubble -- all that's left of the planet.
Up in space, the adult characters blink alert when abrupt change shakes their routine of TV staring and reclined motoring from nowhere to nowhere. They're not going to waddle upright anytime soon in this dystopia. They finally bob alert after being disrupted from their monotonous marbling, TV watching, liquid slurping existence. "I didn't know we had a [running] track" the teletubbie-looking being exclaims, "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, as well as those who think corporations are running amok. Libertarians say the relentless advertising in the space craft represents big government. The potential for such conflicting interpretations to coexist is masterly and apropos. We are, after all a world of conflicting impulses, aware of nutrition but fat, worried about the environment but ardent polluters, 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!"
Nobody believes. At the end of the Bush II era we see politicians abruptly tack away from positions they took to win a place of power. We shrug. Bush staffers who haven't yet fled the ship grumble that Scot McClellan being "disloyal". Pure theatre. Look at his unwavering loyalty to the Bush legacy. Look 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). McClellan and McCain and Obama all follow along in the Bush wake, tacking here, tch-tching there, many messages each day, carefully measured out, tested, and contradictory, but true to personal brand adhesion measured by spectator feedback. Now comes Wall-E the movie, with a message for everyone and so in sync with the time.
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. To the 3 and 4 year olds, Wall-E probably looked like Saturday morning TV and the same free-for-all questioning occured. 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.
The movie favors robots over humans, flipping 2001: A Space Odyssey" on its head. In Space Odyssey, 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.
The movie celebrates technology 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. The robot has outlasted every appliance, computer, car and gadget anyone in the Western world currently owns -- longevity that is a quaint myth. Wall-E represents the antithesis of a robot, even before it becomes tenderly smitten by Eve.
If the movie may be a warning about throw away gadgetry with its discarded Rubik's Cube, lighters, and lightbulbs, it is simultaneously a celebration of the slick shiny clean gadget each one of those outdated toys once was.
Eve is Wall-E's slick upgrade that would put the Wall-E of today's new gadget world in the dump. Wall-E pines for Eve as people pine for a new iPod, a new MacBook Air. Some say the movie is a warning to us, that the message reviles consumerism. But I think that the movie 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 incongruously a machine that is soft, gentle and wise.
In the end the movie returns to early caveman civilization. It's only a cartoon, but if the audience chooses it can take home the message 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 ever 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. Western world may not really need a Rubrik's Cube or an upgraded appliance. But do people in rural Africa or Asia have enough stuff just because we do? 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, damming the river and forcing families out of their homes and livelihoods.
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, some desolate hut with not enough food to eat. In that case, who says they 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.
