By Phil Wegner, November 2008
One of the more pathetic spectacles this election year summer has been the far right’s consternation over Disney Pixar’s latest computer animated spectacle, WALL-E.
National Review blogger, Greg Pollowitz, effectively encapsulates this hysteria when he writes, “I saw WALL-E with my 5 year old on Saturday night. It was like a 90-minute lecture on the dangers of over consumption, big corporations and the destruction of the environment. All this from mega-company Disney, who wants us to buy WALL-E kitsch for our kids that are manufactured in China at environment-destroying factories and packed in plastic that will take hundreds of years to biodegrade in our landfills.”
Pollowitz then announces that “Much to Disney’s chagrin, I will do my part to avoid future environmental Armageddon by boycotting any and all WALL-E merchandise, and I hope others join my crusade.”
However, the only ones who will be chagrined, it appears, are right radicals, as both the critical and commercial success of the film is guaranteed (talk has even begun of WALL-E as an Oscar nominee).
What makes all of this especially pathetic is that the film offers very little in the way of the critical commentary of which it is accused.  If there is a contradiction between the film’s message and its agenda it is not that of which these commentators complain.  Most importantly, the film is not really that interested in the “destruction of the environment.”  This serves as little more than the film’s setting, as it opens on an Earth (though significantly, all we ever really see is a single American city) seven centuries hence that has been rendered uninhabitable for humans due to post-consumer waste (lovingly picked through and molded into lyrical skyscraper structures by our story’s apparent hero, the diminutive and big-eyed robot, WALL-E).  And the film does end (Spoiler Alert, if anyone hasn’t seen it yet) with “humanity” returning from its centuries long “cruise” in space and beginning to transform the despoiled planet into a garden.  This thematic opposition of the dangerous and dirty urban environment and the longed for return to the garden is a standard trope of the genre of which the film is a part, that of the dystopia.  We see the same opposition at play, for example, in the sterile domed city and the anarchic garden community in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s ur-dystopia, We (1921); or in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). We see it in the decrepit urban milieu of Airstrip One and Winston Smith’s dreamt of “Golden Country;” or, more recently, in the film adaptation of Fight Club (1999), in the representation of the post-industrial city and Tyler Durden’s primitive dream of a world where the skyscrapers are overrun with vines, corn fields have been planted in the city plots, and everyone wears leather clothes meant to last a lifetime.
There is one text in particular in the dystopian tradition that this film most nearly resembles and that is E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1908). Forster’s story offers an interesting window into what is really at issue in this film.  Forster, too, presents us with a far future “humanity,” which has become completely dependent upon its machines.  What we have in this story, as much as in the current film, is a little fable about alienation, of the loss of any sense of a capacity to shape our fates.  This is most evident in the character who is the real center of the film, the ship’s captain, who spends his days in slumber, and who has given over control of his ship to his robot auto pilot (driven mad it seems, in one of the film’s numerous borrowings from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, by its secret knowledge of the ship’s actual mission—to keep humanity in space, and in this infantilized state, permanently).  In WALL-E, however, and unlike Forster’s story, the machine’s stopping produces a happy ending, as the captain takes control of the ship once again and returns humanity to its rightful and natural place as masters of Earth.
What is the role of such fantasies today? In Forster’s moment, the anxiety was that of the British middle classes who were becoming increasingly concerned about their growing dependence on the working classes and were threatened with the takeover of society by these “machines.” Although in H.G. Wells’ original Sci Fi expression of this paranoia, The Time Machine (1895)—the story that in fact founds modern Sci Fi — these classes are represented as organic monsters, the Morlocks.  In fact, the word “robot” was first introduced by the great Czech science-fiction writer Karl Capek in his drama, R.U.R. (1920), and is derived from the Czech word “robata,” meaning “forced” or “serf labor.”
In the global context of WALL-E, this middle class “humanity” is equated with the United States, the bloated, over-weight consumers of much of the planet’s wealth. The working class conversely—those who both serve us and who are forced to deal with our garbage—represent the denizens of the global south: the ground water supply in parts of southeast China already having been seriously contaminated by PCBs from U.S. “e-waste,” especially old computers and cell phones.  If there is a subversive edge to the character WALL-E, it lies in his desire to become “like us,” a desire he has gained from watching over and over again the Hollywood musical, Hello Dolly [1969].  WALL-E, like many of Pixar’s earlier masterpieces, is thus a deeply nostalgic tale, expressing a longing for a simpler, earlier time—a moment that coincided with the United States’s unquestioned hegemony over the “free world.”  The ease with which the film suggests that this old order can be reestablished echoes the promises made in part to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (a project, too, that middle-class America can best participate in,  and President Bush coached us by saying “keep on consuming”)—and maybe it is its reminder of the hollowness of this promise that is the real reason the right has been so outraged by this film.