Steven Brence
11-16-2009, 06:50 PM
1. Although represented as living culturally and spiritually impoverished lives, the people on the Axiom are not shown to be in any way unhappy or to demonstrate any real mental or emotional dysfunction as a result. Could one live such a life and not be bothered by it, just because one doesn’t know what one is missing? Is that realistic? If the people in the film are living exaggerated versions of the lives many Americans presently live, are we to take the film as suggesting that we’ll remain mentally and emotionally healthy so long as we don’t expect anything else? Is WALL•E a dystopia without human dysfunction?
2. What is the film thinking in having only robots suffer dysfunction? Would that be another aspect of their greater humanity (along with a capacity for love, sensuality, and need for creative play, etc.) in comparison with the people in the film? Is the film thereby suggesting that such dysfunction (expressionistic painting, violent outbursts, etc.) could be a symptom of persisting, if suppressed, humanity in a dehumanized world?
3. Is it fair to suggest that the robots are those in the film who retain some measure of humanity because they are those who maintain contact with nature through their labor—the source of the proletariat’s ultimate overcoming of the bourgeoisie, who are removed from contact with nature, for Marx?
4. What is the film thinking about when it has what are officially regarded as “foreign contaminants” be the source of invention, progress, and a return to a more aesthetically rich, or even more human, existence?
5. Is there a veiled Christianity in WALL-E’s recovery, despite having had the majority of his parts, including circuit boards, replaced? Is WALL-E thereby suggested to have a soul?
6. In the montage over which the closing credits roll, it seems suggested that human history on Earth, now restarted, will follow much the same path that it did the first go around—from cave paintings, through the renaissance, etc. Is the film suggesting that there is something essential or inevitable that animates human development? Are we to expect that in Wall-E, another environmental catastrophe looms ahead at the end of this same path?
7. In that same film-ending montage, the entire planetary biosphere is shown to be reconstructed, from fish filled seas, to forests and wildlife. Is that not perhaps part of our present environmental crisis, that many of us regard significant alterations to our way of life as unnecessary, because technology will allow us to repair all but total devastation?
8. Does the stewardship model of environmental ethics—holding that we are responsible to care for the environment and represented in the film by Captain McCrea’s statement to the sapling recovered from an otherwise dead Earth: “You just needed someone to look after you, that’s all”--really make sense in light of the film? Would even robot-assisted farming actually reconstitute a staggeringly complex and ever evolving ecosystem that took hundreds of millions of years to develop?
9. Is it responsible to make films for children about serious social ills, if they suggest at the end that the solution to such ills will be fun and easy? Might they do more harm than good, serve more to forestall than encourage necessary action on behalf of the problems addressed?
10. In putting the “Buy-N-Large” logo (the logo of the monopolistic company/totalitarian government entity that controls all aspects of the lives of the people in the film, and which had a direct hand in the total environmental collapse of the Earth in the film) right after the Disney and Pixar logos at the end of the credits, are WALL-E’s makers in any way likening The Walt Disney Corporation (the largest media and entertainment conglomerate in the world) and its Pixar subsidiary (their employers, that is) with corporate irresponsibility and evil?
2. What is the film thinking in having only robots suffer dysfunction? Would that be another aspect of their greater humanity (along with a capacity for love, sensuality, and need for creative play, etc.) in comparison with the people in the film? Is the film thereby suggesting that such dysfunction (expressionistic painting, violent outbursts, etc.) could be a symptom of persisting, if suppressed, humanity in a dehumanized world?
3. Is it fair to suggest that the robots are those in the film who retain some measure of humanity because they are those who maintain contact with nature through their labor—the source of the proletariat’s ultimate overcoming of the bourgeoisie, who are removed from contact with nature, for Marx?
4. What is the film thinking about when it has what are officially regarded as “foreign contaminants” be the source of invention, progress, and a return to a more aesthetically rich, or even more human, existence?
5. Is there a veiled Christianity in WALL-E’s recovery, despite having had the majority of his parts, including circuit boards, replaced? Is WALL-E thereby suggested to have a soul?
6. In the montage over which the closing credits roll, it seems suggested that human history on Earth, now restarted, will follow much the same path that it did the first go around—from cave paintings, through the renaissance, etc. Is the film suggesting that there is something essential or inevitable that animates human development? Are we to expect that in Wall-E, another environmental catastrophe looms ahead at the end of this same path?
7. In that same film-ending montage, the entire planetary biosphere is shown to be reconstructed, from fish filled seas, to forests and wildlife. Is that not perhaps part of our present environmental crisis, that many of us regard significant alterations to our way of life as unnecessary, because technology will allow us to repair all but total devastation?
8. Does the stewardship model of environmental ethics—holding that we are responsible to care for the environment and represented in the film by Captain McCrea’s statement to the sapling recovered from an otherwise dead Earth: “You just needed someone to look after you, that’s all”--really make sense in light of the film? Would even robot-assisted farming actually reconstitute a staggeringly complex and ever evolving ecosystem that took hundreds of millions of years to develop?
9. Is it responsible to make films for children about serious social ills, if they suggest at the end that the solution to such ills will be fun and easy? Might they do more harm than good, serve more to forestall than encourage necessary action on behalf of the problems addressed?
10. In putting the “Buy-N-Large” logo (the logo of the monopolistic company/totalitarian government entity that controls all aspects of the lives of the people in the film, and which had a direct hand in the total environmental collapse of the Earth in the film) right after the Disney and Pixar logos at the end of the credits, are WALL-E’s makers in any way likening The Walt Disney Corporation (the largest media and entertainment conglomerate in the world) and its Pixar subsidiary (their employers, that is) with corporate irresponsibility and evil?