Monday, June 30, 2008

WALL-E

Posted by Zach in News

Last week Portland went to see WALL-E.  Jamin asked me to write up something about it.  I don’t have a review per se, but I wanted to examine a couple ideas in the film.  Obviously, if you haven’t seen it, this contains spoilers.

First let me say that it’s indisputably good.  It’s worthy of every superlative tossed its way.  Pixar has created a culture where the creative and technical staffs engage in a lions and lambs hoedown.  This yields amazing benefits, but in many ways it’s old news.  Pixar’s storytelling prowess is also old news.  What is beginning to be news, I think, is the ideological ambition of their films.

This is yet another way Pixar sets itself apart.  Most animation studios make didactic sometimes technically complicated movies that repeat a simple lesson way out on the edges of the uncontroversial.  These films continually strike the audience with a padded ideological bat.  You know it’s happening, but it doesn’t mean much.  Whack!  Be nice.  Whack!  Teamwork is important.  Whack!  Bullies are unpleasant people.  Whack!  Good things come in small packages.  Whack!  Beauty is only skin deep.  The thoughts are shallow, and they’re always communicated with the gravity and self-importance of an elementary school guidance counselor.  By contrast, Pixar has deepened the lasting worth of their films by creating works of cultural excellence that are both ethical and rational … and sort of deep, right?

Look at The Incredibles.  It surprised us by displaying the romance of the family unit.  It also shockingly embraced achievement.  “If everybody’s special nobody is,” is quite different from the more orthodox guidance counselor thought, “everybody’s special.” Not only that, but Mr. and Mrs. Incredible had superpowers that were, dare I say, complimentarian?  They balanced domesticity and adventure to the benefit of their children.  From this film the possibility emerged that movies might be able to do something other than spout tired maxims or glamorize dysfunction.

Ratatouille is even more complex than The Incredibles.  The film tackles culture, criticism, and the contamination of marketing.  Ratatouille boldly argues that when pressed, one should pursue commercial success through excellence rather than pursue excellence through commercial success.  The film makers must speak from conviction because nobody who holds commercial success as a top priority would do a rats-in-the-kitchen-film with a title that nobody can spell.

While none of Pixar’s films are shallow, WALL-E marks a definite pattern in ideological complexity.  The film shows a consumerist culture run amok.  The planet is in shambles.  Towers of trash eclipse man’s greatest architectural achievements.  While mankind enjoys a life of perpetual vacation, WALL-E, the trash compacting robot, cleans up the planet the best he can.  Meanwhile, he falls in love with a robot sent to recover plant life.  Somehow in his exile, WALL-E has replaced the mechanical notion of fragmentation and alienation with a human-style preference for relationship.  Through a series of events WALL-E is reintroduced to humanity.  Unfortunately, the humans are the willing dependents of technology.  WALL-E’s singular desire for co-present “human” interaction spreads, and finally the humans take some civic responsibility and return to earth ready to plant some trees.

The first notion the film invites us to examine is the contrast between the collector and the consumer.  WALL-E lives in a literal world of disposables.  Still, amidst the trash, he collects the remnants of an absent culture: video tapes, trinkets, lighters, Christmas tree lights.  The contrast between one who treasures culture and one who consumes it couldn’t be more explicit, and the film falls squarely in favor of those who treasure it.  Elizabeth Eisenstein authored a two-volume study about the cultural dimensions of the printing press.  When asked how she came to have such passion for the project, she remarked that her interest began in sixth grade.  That year her teacher told the class that the printing press was the greatest invention since human speech.  That was the last time in her educational experience that Elizabeth heard about it.  It was a conspicuous silence.  Her eventual research was driven by the need to unpack her sixth-grade teacher’s assertion and by the desire to treasure an idea largely discarded.  If society is to examine itself in the bigger mirror of history, then Eisenstein’s respect for the old needs to trump US Weekly’s lust for the new.  In his open source commencement speech, Neil Postman argues that tradition, social restraint, and continuity are to be valued because the thread that binds civilized society is fragile.  The “cult of the new” cuts us off from history and robs us of the insight of the past.  WALL-E, the collector, urges us to embrace our cultural past as an expression of personhood and as an anchor to our larger context.

Stewardship is another large focus of the movie.  The ecological preoccupation of the film doesn’t find much common ground with environmentalist activists.  These activists protest that separation from the animal kingdom is an act of hubris.  The best thing, they suggest, is to isolate yourself from your fellow humans, apologize to the planet, and feed yourself to a bear.  At the very least strip off your clothes and commence some pagan planet worship!  WALL-E suggests that ecological carelessness is not a manifestation of humanity, but an erosion of it.  Stewardship is a Christian idea that begins in Genesis with the very first Man.  In fact, Man’s call to have dominion over creation is something that happens before the fall, and his ethical relationship to the planet is penultimate to his relationship to God.  Furthermore, conservation is a human distinctive–something that sets one apart from the rest of the created order.  When humans struggle even by the sweat of their brow to reap the planet’s resources, they abide by the mandate to have dominion.  At the end of WALL-E, when the pudgy folks plant trees, they don’t to it to repent for their humanity, but to assert their humanity.  I can’t help but admire the boldness of the film to appropriate environmentalist issues and place them in a sounder context.

The film’s most pervasive argument is leveled against technology.  To be precise it’s not really a wholesale argument against technology, but rather an argument against the abdication of our responsibility to be human.  Neil Postman (I’m quoting Postman a lot because I feel that WALL-E owes a great debt to his writings) begins his book Amusing Ourselves to Death with a contrast between 1984 and Brave New World.  In 1984 an external power robs us of our freedom by force.  In Brave New World we give up our freedom voluntarily for the sake of convenience.  In 1984 ignorance spreads because books are burned.  In Brave New World ignorance spreads because no one wants to read.  While we guarded against Orwell’s vision of the future, we got sucker-punched by Huxley’s.  It’s not the fist that keeps us from standing, but the recliner, and WALL-E agrees that the Utopia, not the totalitarian regime, will rob us of our humanity.  It was Max Frisch who said, “Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.”  The metaphor plays out beautifully.  The folks on board the ship move about in hovering lazy boys ignorant of themselves and one another.  Their eyes are instead fixed upon a holographic (internet?) screen.  They interact with people, but only indirectly, like text messaging teenagers.  The robotic tyrant of the ship is a literal steering wheel.  This image could have been the cover of Technopoly.  The robot’s shape gives the appearance of service, but in reality it exercises authority.  In WALL-E, as in much of life, man worships the golden robotic calf.

Postman again:

“…[A]t some point it becomes far from asinine to speak of the god of Technology–in the sense that people believe technology works, that they rely on it, that it makes promises, that they are bereft when denied access to it, that they are delighted when they are in its presence, that for most people it works in mysterious ways, that they condemn people who speak against it, that they stand in awe of it, and that, in the born-again mode, they will alter their lifestyles, their schedules, their habits, and their relationships to accommodate it. If this be not a form of religious belief, what is?” The captain disposes of the robotic steward literally, but he does it metaphorically when he stands up on his own feet and switches the steering wheel from auto pilot to manual.  This is the film’s effective climax, and I can’t help but think that if he were alive, Neil Postman would cheer.

Now, I know the objection.  Isn’t WALL-E just another way to hijack human interaction?  People sit silently next to strangers in the multiplex with candy and buckets of drink.  Isn’t this just another way for humans to grow into big babies?  I don’t disagree that the multiplex is not generally a great market place of ideas.  In fact, the previews that ran before WALL-E belonged to movies on the fast track to the Wal-Mart five-dollar bin.  They’re disposable.  Still, WALL-E possesses two robots who break through a stiff technological barrier in order to directly relate to one another.   This story has in turn provoked thought, reflection, and conversation in a way that I can only think helps us be more human.

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