Pixar’s Wall-E, directed and co-written by Andrew
Stanton (A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo) is an
environmentalist parable which borrows liberally from the
portentousness futurism of 2001: A Space Odyssey and
various post-apocalyptic yarns of yesteryear such as Planet of
the Apes and Soylent Green. Like them, too, the movie
looks upon the adventures of the human race in a post-terrestrial
world as if its authors were not part of it, as if they were
telling the story of some other planet and some other species — a
breed of “consumerist” beings who can only buy stuff and consume
stuff and throw stuff away and get fat. People, in short, are
disgusting. Machines are all right. Animals are all right, though
the only one left appears to be a solitary cockroach. Likewise
plants, though there’s only one of those too. Otherwise the earth
is deserted, save for the mountains of human detritus, now some
eight centuries old.
Of course, misanthropy is common both to postmodernism and
environmentalism, so there should be no surprise in the fact that
Wall-E looks upon the human race with such condescension.
The people of the movie, all that remain of earth’s population,
tour the universe endlessly on an immense cruise liner, all their
needs attended to by electronic servants. How and why they have
managed to keep reproducing while lounger-bound is a mystery. They
say that fat people are up in arms about the film’s depiction of
humankind of the future as dirigible-shaped couch-potatoes so
accustomed to their hover-loungers and electronic entertainments
that they have all but ceased to be ambulatory, but the insult is
to all of us. Or all except for the nerds by whom and for whom this
film was made, who presumably find it more natural to identify
themselves with a machine than with their fellow organic life
forms.
The machine is the eponymous Wall-E, an anthropoid
trash-compactor. He and his sidekick, the mercifully unspeaking
cockroach, are the only animate beings, organic or inorganic, left
to keep company with earth’s derelict buildings and the mountains
of trash that Wall-E has piled up. Wall-E, which stands for Waste
Allocation Load Lifter — Earth Class — is repeatedly shown
trembling with fear at the approach of frequent dust storms or the
thunderous arrival of the space probe that brings a new robot, EVE
(Extra-Terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), to see if any vegetation
is yet capable of growing on the poisoned planet. Wall-E also
trembles at the approach of the sleek, egg-like Eve, but for a
different reason. Does it, then, have a central nervous system?
This would be rather excessive circuitry, as it might seem, for a
piece of metal designed to squash trash into cubes and pile them
up. But of course you will see that I am being disingenuous. It is
instantly apparent that Wall-E lives in an animist world, like the
Germanic tribes who dreamed up a similarly solitary hero like
Siegfried, who could talk to the birds.
As always, animist assumptions land us in philosophical and
spiritual difficulties, or at least they would do if it weren’t for
the exemption claimed by the silliness of both postmodernism and
environmentalism from being measured by ordinary yardsticks. The
film is set sometime after the year 2775, which is the year in
which the current Captain (Jeff Garlin) assumed command of the
space cruise ship Axiom, on which what remains of the human race at
that date resides. As the crew and passengers are said to be
approaching their 700th anniversary on the spaceship, this means
that they must have left earth only a few decades from now, at a
time when Earth is said to have become uninhabitable. It is also
said that no probe seeking organic life on Earth has ever returned
with a positive result before, which means that all organic life
must have been eradicated from the earth before the end of the
present century.
Not even the extreme environmental alarmists are predicting that
organic life — which may be ornery but still seems pretty
tenacious as of even date — will give up the struggle so easily.
Also, in 700 years, I think there would be much less remaining of
the signs of human habitation on a deserted earth than we are shown
in the movie, where the relatively fresh look of the trash that the
title character collects suggests that the human race decamped only
a week or two ago. Is it possible that a Zippo lighter more than
700 years old could still be so charged with lighter fluid that it
fires up at the first spin of its still-spinning little wheel?
Wall-E puts himself to sleep at night by watching an ancient VHS
cassette of Hello, Dolly! But if it makes sense that a
trash collector, even a robotic one, should become a nostalgist —
and being nostalgic for Dolly! is being nostalgic for
nostalgia — what are all those porcine couch-dwellers, our
multi-great grandchildren, watching in their electronic cocoons
light-years away from their ancestral planet? We are not told.
The good thing about Wall-E is that an incipient revolt
by the Axiom’s on-board computers, deliberately meant to call to
mind that of 2001: A Space Odyssey, inspires the human
beings to struggle to their tiny little feet and waddle back to a
newly reinhabitable earth. A machine may be our savior, but at
least we are saved — and saved, in part, by romance. This is not
only the odd-couple romance of Wall-E as messy Oscar and the
gleaming Eve, like the rest of her kind from the spaceship, as
endlessly fussy Felix, nor the happy memory of musical comedy
attributed to a lonely robot picking up trash on a deserted planet.
For that is itself the old romance of Robinson Crusoe, and
of the utopian dream of beginning the world over again. The dream
must be a familiar one to nerds with megalomaniacal tendencies.
Now, to judge by Wall-E and its success, it is becoming a
dream for all mankind.
