There is a deep message embedded in the charming new Pixar film, 'Wall-E', writes Breda O'Brien.
THERE'S AN old joke that circulates in various versions on the internet. My favourite concerns a British ship in the Atlantic. A lookout reports a light bearing on the starboard bow and it appears that the ship is in danger of colliding with another vessel.
The captain instructs the signalman to send a message: "Advise you to change course 20 degrees." A message returns: "Advise you to change course 20 degrees." The captain, furious, sends back: "This is a British battleship. Change course 20 degrees." The laconic message returns: "This is a lighthouse in Kerry."
I thought about that lighthouse when I discovered, browsing on the internet, that some American conservatives don't like Wall-E, the latest Pixar movie. For those of you without children to use as an excuse to see it, it is a little gem of a movie. It is set 700 years into the future. Wall-E, a little robot, is still tirelessly working to clean up Earth, centuries after human beings have trashed it, and long after his fellow robots have rusted away. The last humans departed on a mother ship, Axiom, for a journey that was supposed to last five years while Earth was made habitable again. Instead, centuries later, the planet is still desolate, poisoned with the rubbish of a consumer society.
Wall-E's name is an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth Class. Day after day he compacts rubbish into neat cubes and piles them up into towering skyscrapers in a dusty, barren landscape. Along the way, Wall-E has fallen in love with the departed humans, or at least with what he knows of them from a clip of Hello Dollyand various artefacts that he finds fascinating and stores in his trailer. His only companion is a cockroach. He is achingly, desperately lonely. He watches again and again a scene from Hello Dollywhere the lead characters hold hands, and longingly interlaces his own work-battered metal fingers.
One day, everything changes when a sophisticated robot, Eve, (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator ) arrives in search of vegetation on earth, which will signal that it is safe for humans to return.
For people in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the resonances are obvious. Eve in Genesis was "mother of all the living". Later on, a dove (Eve is white) is sent out by Noah to see if the flood waters have receded, and he knows that they have when the dove comes back with a twig.
Eve has a propensity to shoot first and ask questions later, which might mess up the comparison somewhat, but she softens towards Wall-E. He adores her and longs to hold her sleek fingers. She is then triggered into a hibernation state, and Wall-E cares for her despite her lack of response. Wall-E hitches a ride on the spaceship that comes to bring her back to Axiom. On the mother ship, humans live like blubbery infants, continually sucking on what look like large milkshakes, and being transported everywhere on comfy couches. People don't talk, but communicate through computer screens.
Without wishing to give away all of the plot, Wall-Eis a love story, where along the way humans discover there is more to life than being cossetted. It is the quirky robots, more human and alive than themselves, who enable them to rediscover another way of being.
So why do some conservatives hate it? Well, Shannen Coffin, writing in National Reviewonline, is particularly agitated.
"From the first moment of the film, my kids were bombarded with leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind . . . Nice to see that Disney and Pixar can make mega-millions of telling us just how greedy, lazy, and destructive we all are. There's no hope for mankind. Hand over your wallet."
The Dirty Harry blog, billed as a "conservative look at film, punk", concurs: "The humans are . . . meaty, lazy, chair-bound consumers who live in a world run by a large corporation. The message about our consumerism, sloth, and addiction to visual stimulus is eventually beaten like a drum."
Lighthouse, anyone? The American diet is universally recognised as bringing obesity and ill-health everywhere it is adopted. Addiction to visual stimulus? Americans spend more time in front of TVs and computer screens than virtually any other nation. As for the ecological message, the film does not explicitly reference climate change, but rather drowning in the waste of excess consumerism.
Basically, these critics are saying that the market is God, the society built on the market cannot be questioned, and Pixar are evil lefties for satirising the consequences of being infantilised by corporations. One particular view of the American way of life is like the battleship at the beginning of this article, and any other viewpoint must make way.
Luckily, not all conservatives see it the same way. One of my favourite columnists, Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons, waxes lyrical about it.
" Wall-Eargues that rampant consumerism, technopoly and the exaltation of comfort is causing us to weaken our souls and bodies, and sell out our birthright of political freedom. Nobody is doing this to us; we're doing it to ourselves. It is the endgame of modernity, which began in part with the idea that Nature is the enemy to be subdued - that man stands outside of Nature, and has nothing to learn . . . from Nature's deep logic."
Some of you by now may be taking deep breaths, and wondering how people can get so overwrought about a movie aimed at kids. Perhaps it is because we have always embedded our most profound truths in stories. Since 9/11 there has been a strong streak of paranoia in American movies. If Pixar had made a movie depicting Earth devastated after terrorist horrors, no doubt some of the currently outraged conservatives would have applauded. Yet an ecological message is condemned as subversive.
I believe that what the critics are missing is that the best stories not only illuminate truths about human beings, but also nurture hope. This little movie tells us that love and labour make us human, that we can lose our way, but that there is always a way home, even from a galaxy millions of miles away.