Wall-E, Coming Soon to a Landfill Near You
“The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real.” - Jean Baudrillard
In the future, Earth is strewn pole-to-pole with obsolete Macintosh computer equipment and discarded plastic merchandise based on Pixar and Disney movies.
Compacting and stacking the junk into neat piles is Wall-E, a goggle-eyed robot with a disgusting pet cockroach that will not die no matter how many times he gets run over by Wall-E or blasted with rocket exhaust.
Into this harrowing nightmare of computer waste and decay floats Eva, a glossy robot and twin sister to the Apple wireless mouse.
Eva explores the wasteland, searching for some sign of organic life besides roaches. She works on behalf of humankind which now lives somewhere deep in outer space ever since the Earth became over-nastified with souvenir plastic cups from the Tiki Room and discarded G3 clamshell iBooks.
The humans themselves are grotesquely fat and spend the majority of their time sipping oversized fizzy drinks and lounging by a massive swimming pool, the entire scene reminiscent of a typical weekend at the Disneyland Hotel.
When Wall-E sees Eva, he immediately falls in love with her smooth lines and iPod-style features and stalks her for the rest of the film. Although the visual style of the movie represents yet another leap forward in animation sophistication for Pixar, the love-at-first-sight desire line that propels Wall-E forward is strictly Steamboat Willie.
In its closing chapter, Wall-E does battle against a relentless platoon of uptight robots (with fun and welcome references to 2001: A Space Odyssey) and returns the humans safely to Earth where they apparently plan to do a better job putting their PVC toys in the green bin the next time around.
Wall-E is a thoroughly entertaining and creative if not particularly intelligent robot love story (on that latter point, I will admit I don’t quite fit the target demographic). The film is also a tangle of mixed messages regarding the environment.
In a modern day world where Arrowhead sells itself as “eco-friendly” based on the shape of their water bottles and Chevron abandons oil rigs in the name of building reef habitat, Wall-E fits squarely within the zeitgeist of confusing corporate messages about the environment. While Wall-E the film seems to imply that consumer waste is bad, the Wall-E merchandising team would love you to fill your house with their cheap plastic toys.
To be fair, corporations do have a critical role to play in resolving environmental problems and helping shape a green future for the planet, but at what point does a movie like Wall-E — co-created by one of the planet’s most emblematic producers of plastic junk, the Disney Corporation, along with computer industry icon Pixar with its strong ties to Apple and that company’s debatable environmental record (not to mention the computer industry as a whole) — veer from environmentalism to opportunism and possibly even greenwash?
Perhaps one needs look no further than the toy section of your favorite big box store.
Related posts:
- Uncooling the SUV
- If There’s a Problem Just Nuke It
- Space Junk: Star Wars the Experience
- Self Destruction and Self-Promotion: Corporate Branding in Recent Cinema
- SUV Smashes Subcompact then Tips Over Killing Mom and Thirteen Children: Final Thoughts on Cronenberg’s Crash
I dig your angle, as it is very in vogue to ride the green train to exploitation central.
well-said, pinko tree-hugging Little Man. too bad for you that I, Steve Jobs, operate on a different moral plane than you. Got Mac? Oh, I thought so…
god, you guys are such haters. can’t you just enjoy a movie about a robot and so what if you buy the toy at least you have a toy that reminds people to recycle it when you are done. the fat people in the chairs look like my parents, haha, but they missed the whole point of the movie which is to recycle and work out at ballys.