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Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Trashing the WALL-E backlash
It seems that a backlash of sorts has developed against WALL-E, my absolute favorite film of the year.
After the initial flurry of raves (including my own) I’ve sensed an increasingly vocal dissatisfaction with Pixar’s latest film - most of which I can live with. If you think it’s too arty, or that the second half is heavy-handed, or that the movie is (shudder) boring, I will fiercely disagree with you, but allow that you are entitled to your opinion.
However, there are a couple of complaints about WALL-E that I simply cannot abide. Some people grumble the film is an anti-global warming tract, an animated version of An Inconvenient Truth. Other have been aghast that the movie denigrates obese people.
Wrong! Factually, provably, wrong!
It’s all too easy to dismiss the stupid global warming accusations. Obviously, WALL-E has a green message on its mind, but it’s not about global warming. If people would bother to pay attention to the movie, they would see that the dominant energy source on Earth is solar power. Greenhouse gases seem to be long gone, not that it got us out of trouble.
No, what has desolated the Earth is massive littering. A newspaper WALL-E rolls over bears the headline “TOO MUCH TRASH.” The planet became so covered with it, we killed the plant life and had to leave. Some people scoff at this notion too, but anyone who doesn’t think we humans are a wasteful lot hasn’t looked by the side of the highway lately. And anyone who doesn’t think it’s a good idea to live a little cleaner than we’ve been doesn’t have his ducks in a row.
The complaints that WALL-E ridicules the obese are even more troubling. It’s simply not true.
I’m sensitive to attacks on the less able-bodied myself, because I’m disabled, with a mild case of cerebral palsy. That makes it especially hard for me to lug around 50 pounds of weight I shouldn’t have. But WALL-E didn’t offend me - it emboldened me to do something about it. I wish the movie made more people feel that way.
Yes, the humans in the film who live on a spaceship have wide girths and seem to spend a lot of time slurping down food. But writer-director Andrew Stanton and his co-authors Jim Reardon and Pete Docter aren’t laughing at fat people and suggesting they deserve contempt or even pity - far from it.
First of all the movie explains that because humans have spent several hundred years in space, they’ve suffered massive bone loss. People of the future aren’t fat, they’re small-boned.
More important than that, WALL-E’s main concern isn’t how much humans eat. It’s that they’ve become so beholden to technology, letting machines do everything for them, that personal contact is alien to them. That’s why the characters John and Mary, the two humans we get to know besides the captain, seem so shocked when they actually - touched each other.
As Stanton explains in this interview with Christianity Today, “I wasn’t trying to make the humans into fat, lazy consumers, but to make humanity appear to be completely consumed by everything that can distract you—to the point where they lost connection with each other, even though they’re right next to each other.”
And here’s the ironic counterpoint: the two most romantic characters in the film are the robots, WALL-E and EVE, who learned to be affectionate by watching the way humans used to behave in a bygone era.
It saddens me that such a life-affirming sentiment gets lost amid complaints of such narrow vision. As far as I can see, the attacks on the film say a lot more about the attackers’ self-esteem than they do about WALL-E. The movie might improve their outlook - if only they would decide that they would live a little.
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