WALL•E (Andrew Stanton, 2008) - Culture of Convenience

[jwong]

Cell phones, drive-thrus, E-mail, automatic teller machines (ATMs), and even instant coffee are all examples of it. “It” being the convenience oriented culture that has come to dominate the so-called developed west and that is slowly but no doubt surely finding its way to the most remote corners of the globe. Often referred to broadly as McDonaldization or Coca-Colonization this process in which corporate interest, consumer based values are becoming the norm is portrayed and critiqued in WALL•E through the ever-present BnL conglomerate.

Without question WALL•E is a children’s film. The characters are cute and likable; the story line is simple and sweet on the surface; and the animation is particularly appealing to young children. However, this by no sense of the imagination means that WALL•E is not littered with more complicated and politically relevant themes and critiques. For example, as was discussed in lecture, possible more “meaningful” themes include: the state of the global environment, or the Biblical based translation with WALL•E representing Adam and Eve – appropriately named – depicting Eve in the Christian creation story of Adam and Eve. Another theme that I thought was extremely present was that of the consumer and convenience based culture that dominated life on the Axiom.

Life on the Axiom was easy. Robots serviced the humans every need, sports were played through a Wii-like technology, and even walking was replaced with mobile, floating chairs. Although life was easy and care free it was depicted in way that was almost shameful and seemed to be directed specifically at the culture of convenience that the world is so vehemently embracing currently. It was as if life on the Axiom was what the world would become if the corporate backed, neoliberal economic policies that are swiftly sweeping the globe are not stopped or at least slowed and contained. Funny as it was one of the most telling examples of this concept was when the Axiom’s loudspeaker system abruptly announced: “Red – it’s the new blue,” in reference to the uniform outfits that the ships inhabitants all don in unison. Flanked by advertisements on all sides a chubby man aimlessly drifting in his floating chair ordered the new red attire. Its not just having a cell phone, it’s having the “right” cell phone. It’s not just having an MP3 player, it having the “in” MP3 player. WALL•E, in my opinion, is filled with critiques of corporate culture and the convenience-based lifestyle that is so prevalent in society today.

[aradoff]

Wall-E is a cute little robot with droopy innocent eyes who lives in a world left behind by earlier human civilization. This cartoon Disney movie is appealing to little kids as well as teenagers onto adults. But like most movies there is a deeper meaning under the obvious plot, which jwong points out in his write up. There is the obvious message which is that humans today are producing too much and that eventually our society as a whole will be destroyed. This is a theme that many other films have brought up like The Day After Tomorrow, where because of the effects of global warming have become so great the Earth experiences extreme storms in order to cleanse its self. But beside these warnings in the film I feel there is another message that is being over looked. As a society most people are aware that we consume a lot, but the real danger isn’t that we are producing so much more, it is the fact that we don’t think there will be any repercussions. For every action there is a reaction. The scariest part is that we have no idea what those repercussions will be. There is speculation of what these will be in films like Wall-E, but the fact is no one knows for sure. We won’t wake up one day and all of humanity will be gone, but this film definitely makes us think about the possibility of something like that happening.

[breinka]

Yes, clearly Wall-E is a film that expresses ideas of the dangers of dependence on technology and corporate consumerism. However, I would argue that it goes a little further than that. I think one of the biggest ideas the film is exploring is the problem of apathy. As pointed out already, the problem is that nobody seems to care what the repurcussions are living your whole life through technological "convenience," or the constant purchase of meaningless materials. People kept consuming and consuming without care until the Earth itself was uninhabitable. Even then, when the initial plan to clean up the planet fails, nobody cares that this means living in space for the rest of humanity. The captain makes a small joke about it being the seven-hundredth year of their five-year cruise, but beyond that there's nobody cares. Nobody cares about anything. The underlying problem to all of humanity's conflicts in the film stem from this apathy towards their lives. Even as far as the corporate monopoly that Buy N Large has on this super-mall-space-ship, we're never given a point of view to indicate that somebody cares about the money they're making off of it - there isn't any evidence to show us that anybody cares enough about anything to be greedy. There are numerous other examples in the film of this general apathy that suggest to me that the film is more than concerned with its surface level issues of dependence on technology and massive corportations, but that the film is worried about how these problems become an issue in the first place. On a broader level, the film wants to know why do we allow ourselves to be subjected to these things, let alone participate in them? I think, at least, that is presents a very interesting and convincing hypothesis.

[cvranizan]

It makes sense that the people on the Axiom would be entirely apathetic towards their seemingly worthless lifestyles. On the Axiom, babies are taught by technology that basically conditions them to embrace BNL and their inevitable techno-dependant, consumer lives. And we can assume that is the same upbringing the adults on the ship experienced. It is not that the people do not care, they just do not know any different as evident by the captain of the ship knowing virtually nothing about human culture on earth. While people lived on earth, they must have cared while seeing the trash build up because they did try to do something about it. They just relied on technology to deal with it instead of changing their own lives. This is exactly how society is today. People are waiting for new sustainable technologies to take over for the harmful ones. We continue to pollute and emit enormous emounts of green house gases, collectively as individual consumers and as an industrial society, yet hear incessantly of the need to reduce our damages. Everything has been made so easy for us by technology that we just assume it will fix this problem too.

We are allowing technology to distance ourselves from nature. Technology enabled BNL to take over people's lives to the point where it was all they saw, heard, ate, touched or smelled. The people became more robotic than human as they are nothing but a product of the technology that sorrounds them. They are happy but living in a completely synthetic world, no longer viewing earth as their home. The movie makes it seem like a perfectly happy society but as a viewer it is uncomfortable to see humans reduced to such automatons. I cannot imagine many people would want to live in this future and WALL-E does an excellent job of warning people away from the unatural, technology driven society we are progressively becoming.

[ADeMeo]

Wall-E, like most good science fiction, uses a futuristic world to critique our current one. The Big and Large corporation and the culture aboard the Axiom was an excellent criticism on the US's obsession with turning it's people into good little unquestioning consumers.

Seven hundred years in, it has become commonplace for babies to be indoctrinated into the Axiom consumer culture. I thought that maybe, in the Axiom world, consumption is a stand-in for religion. Human cultures have been indoctrinating their babies into their religions (think baptisms or circumcisions) for hundreds of years, all long before a child is old enough to question whether it is the right thing for them or not.

It made me think that maybe humans are predisposed to following something--anything--religion, consumption... without objectively considering the option that to have your own mind is the best thing you can do. I guess being told what to do and how to think is easier for most people, and I can't say I blame them.

Wall-E had no choice but to sit around on earth and do what he was programmed to do. Ironically, though he was as programmed as the people on the Axiom, he had apparently developed a crude sense of humanity through the bits and pieces of our culture we left behind. The people on the Axiom, through no fault of their own, were not granted that luxury. It's not that their humanity wasn't there, it's just that they, up until Wall-E showed up, had never been given the chance to really use it.

[kflagg]

In WALL-E, we see a world seven-hundred years into the future that was abandoned by the human race after its resources are used up and discarded by the humans. One of the main issues in today’s world that this film critiques is our unhealthy reliance on technology. This theme was also quite prevalent in the film Brazil where we also see the human race living in an artificial world run by computers. Both films show a main character in conflict with the machines but unlike Brazil, WALL-E’s main character is a product of human-made technology that happens to exhibit more human characteristics than perhaps anyone in the story. WALL-E is a small robot whose directive is to remove waste amongst the desolate remains of our garbage. WALL-E spends his days listening to a tune from the Disney musical Hello, Dolly, and scooping up minute amounts of debris and arranging the rubbish into never-ending stacks of waste. Hello, Dolly! has a large influence on WALL-E’s qualities as it is teaches him human attributes such as curiosity, friendship and love. During his time spent cleaning up waste WALL-E collects human inventions like Zippo lighters and bubble-wrap. He is friends with a small cockroach who follows him everywhere he goes and we later see him fall in love with EVE, a robot from the axiom whose directive is to find signs of plant life. These qualities that he has learned have prolonged his existence because he has reason to keep going through his daily routine unlike the other WALL-Es who did not have the intelligence to keep going.

The love story between WALL-E and EVE is meant to charm the audience by giving us a unique twist on a timeless story of courtship. Although there are many humorous and charming scenes featuring WALL-E and EVE (particularly when WALL-E protects EVE from the rain with an umbrella) I found the relationship between Eve and WALL-E to be a slightly disheartening. While heaps of humans float around in space, a product of our own design shows more humanlike qualities than any person in the film. What are the makers of the film trying to tell us when we see a robot show more so-called “human” features than an actual human? Perhaps they’re telling us that our lives are already controlled by corporations and technology and that there is no escaping their influence. This is evidenced by the Buy n Large logo at the very end of the film which can be interpreted as a warning message. I see the logo as dark humor from the creators of the film who are reminding us that a giant corporation distributed this film and without computers, the movie would have never existed in the first place.

[jelzie]

I appreciate what Jwong brought up about the convenience of consumerism being displayed as problematic in Wall E. What I found most ironic in the movie was the name of the spaceship the people all survived on after ruining the Earth's ecosystem by pollution, the Axiom. If you look up the definition of Axiom you will find that it means a self-evident truth, therefore requiring no truth. I think this says a lot about technology in general terms. Technology merely exists to perform a prerogative that was programmed when it was created. This apathy for anything outside of the program is evident in all things, even the humans. People living on the Axiom is a metaphor for living in the programmed world that exists just to perform a task, not to live. It is almost as if these people lost their free spirit to consumerism and left it back on Earth, where if found again (in a plant or Wall E) it meant the people could return to Earth. But the technology tried to kill the live plant because in a way it would interfere with the programmed mission of "keep on keeping on". Back to the spaceship, the Axiom is a small plane that the people exist/live on without a need for questions because almost everything is premeditated to be convenient for them to consume. So all in all Wall E is almost acting as a warning to all people, although it targets children probably to have a larger impact, that technology is only a small part of our human existence and if we buy into it too much we could become consumed by technology forever.