What if Pixar released a ferocious broadside attacking the American way of life and the movie reviewers didn’t notice?
If Michael Moore, or Oliver Stone, or, God forbid, some effete French director, had crafted a feature film that was a thinly disguised political broadside portraying Americans as recumbent tubbos who moved around on sliding barcaloungers with built-in video screens and soft drinks always at the ready, don’t you think there’d be some sort of notice taken?
But Pixar does it and …
… the reviewers barely mention it. The new Pixar film, Wall-E, does indeed, as you have heard, tell the story of an adorable robot working alone on a depopulated earth. There’s an obvious ecological lesson here, and this has been duly noted, along with mentions of unspecified “themes” and “messages.”
But what was rarely analyzed in the reviews is that the earth is deserted because a Wal-Mart-like company called “Buy n’ Large” has filled it up with trash, and the departed humans, expanded to Big Gulp size, are contentedly gorging themselves amid the comforts of a flying Club Med, where they slide around on those carts, on which they watch TV continuously without even having to sit up completely. While some of the better reviewers mention the beglotted humanoid forms, I found it odd that most mainstream reviewers didn’t bother to point out what the film was saying.
I’m no film theorist, but I think what director Andrew Stanton is trying to tell us is that we humans eat so much and limit our movements to such a degree that we will soon become immobile whales unable to focus past the video screens permanently affixed in front of our field of vision.
(And not subtextually, either; as my friend Michael Sragow says about such obvious material in films, “It’s not subtext. It’s text text.”) What what are those wide-bottomed, view-screen laden SUV’s that cog our highways these days but early versions of the portly trams of Wall-E? I don’t want to be judgmental about people’s lifestyles, but it’s hard to look at the rotund, popcorn-barrel-toting silhouettes in a typical suburban movieplex and not notice that Stanton’s vision of the future isn’t all that exaggerated.*
The Hollywood Reporter doesn’t even mention the human sequences**.
Entertainment Weekly breaks the news gently and doesn’t discuss the implications***:
WALL-E himself is the movie’s mascot and unlikely hero; it’s up to him to save a spacebound colony of humans who’ve ”evolved” into hilariously infantile technology-junkie couch potatoes. Yet even as the movie turns pointedly, and resonantly, satirical, it never loses its heart.
Roger Ebert, too, goes easy on the bad news:
We meet a Hoverchair family, so known because aboard ship they get around in comfy chairs that hover over surfaces and whisk them about effortlessly. They’re all as fat as Susie’s aunt.
This is not entirely their fault, since generations in the low-gravity world aboard the Axiom have evolved humanity into a race whose members resemble those folks you see whizzing around Wal-Mart in their electric shopping carts.
Claudio Puig in USA Today mentions the engorged humans, but doesn’t make the obvous connection.
Joe Morgenstern in the WSJ mentions the trope in passing late in his review:
But I will tell you that humankind’s evolution, as foretold by Mr. Stanton and his colleagues, is a blissfully inspired reductio ad absurdum—or more accurately inflatio ad absurdum—of the ethos of consumption that now sustains the economies of prosperous nations.
Ken Turan tangentially mentions the humanoids. He’s better on the corporate angle:
Not to put too fine a point on it, our planet is a disaster, a bleak and disheartening ruin where every available surface is covered by towering skyscrapers of trash. It got so bad that Buy n’ Large, the conglomerate that has somehow taken charge of the planet, leaned on the entire human population to leave with a “space is the final fun-tier” campaign that featured slogans such as, “Too much garbage in your face? There’s plenty of space out in space.”
The only mainstream review I saw that made the obvious point (emphasis added) was A.O. Scott in the NYT:
Rather than turn a tale of environmental cataclysm into a scolding, self-satisfied lecture, Mr. Stanton shows his awareness of the contradictions inherent in using the medium of popular cinema to advance a critique of corporate consumer culture. The residents of the space station, accustomed to being tended by industrious robots, have grown to resemble giant babies, with soft faces, rounded torsos and stubby, weak limbs. Consumer capitalism, anticipating every possible need and swaddling its subjects in convenience, is an infantilizing force. But as they cruise around on reclining chairs, eyes fixed on video screens, taking in calories from straws sticking out of giant cups, these overgrown space babies also look like moviegoers at a multiplex.
They’re us, in other words. And like us, they’re not all bad. The paradox at the heart of “Wall-E” is that the drive to invent new things and improve the old ones—to buy and sell and make and collect—creates the potential for disaster and also the possible path away from it. Or, put another way, some of the same impulses that fill the world of “Wall-E”—our world—with junk can also fill it with art.
I disagree with his point, but it’s his perogative to make it. But why was he the only reviewer to take the film’s message at face value and address it head on?
————-
* Compare, for example, the trenchant comments of Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells: “I understand the impulse on the part of director Andrew Stanton to call it a robot love story and leave it at that, but it’s a lie, of course—a disinforming of pig-trough moviegoers who might think twice about going to a ‘green’ movie that satirizes their lie-around, fat-ass lifestyle.”
** The standards of the Hollywood Reporter, incidentally, seem to be declining week to week. The review of Wall-E, by Kirk Hunnycut, is a piece of utterly mundane writing and doesn’t appear to have been edited. This is the review’s second graf:
The film is so clever and sophisticated that you worry, slightly, that it might be too clever to connect with mainstream audiences. But like those worries last year that having a rat for a hero in “Ratatouille” might throw off audiences, surely “WALL-E” will make that connection. It’s so sweet and funny that the multitudes undoubtedly will surrender to its many charms.
*** Owen Gleiberman in EW, incidentally, finally goes completely off his rocker into Spielberg lapdogism:
For a while, WALL-E is nearly wordless, and the director, Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo), stages the early scenes with a gentle, unhurried mystery that is unabashedly Spielbergian.
Yeah, the beginning of Wall-E is a lot like the beginning of War of the Worlds: Outside of the fact that the former is deeply moving, cinematically poetic, daringly political, gracefully imagined, and executed with such taste and grace it makes you want to cry, and the latter is a loud, heavy-handed, mind-numbing, senselessly plotted crapload of thuddingly unsubtle filmmaking mechanics, they are very similar.
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Wow. You’re kind of all over the place, and fairly incorrect.
Kyle Smith, commenting on the obesity issue in WALL-E, writes, “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a major corporation spend so much money to insult its customers.”
Variety adds, “One can’t help but speculate about the perverse prospect of plus-sized multiplexers laughing while digging into their popcorn and slurping their sodas.”
CHUD.com says, “The irony of this huge branding-obsessed, merchandise-spewing corporation (is) releasing a movie where consumers are shown as giant fat babies taking orders from advertising.”
This opinion is more widespread than you posit.
And yeah, WALL-E feels different than WOTW. But so does Schindler’s List. And Hook, for that matter. But they all bear Spielberg’s thumbprint. Why deny that?
I missed the Variety review, sorry, but even that one is just an aside. (In my post I mentioned in passing, but should have made clearer, that I was talking about mainstream reviews.)
Everyone says the culture is degraded these days, but here you have a movie that takes a very strong stand about some serious social issues—in a G-rated kids cartoon, no less—and people are falling over themselves not to examine the implications too closely.
It should have been in the lede of every review. The truly sad thing is, if for whatever reason Pixar had decided to market the film that way—”Pixar delivers a scorching indictment of our Wal-mart-dominated, trash-generating, overly obese culture”—it *would* have been in the ledes!
(The commenter’s review of the film, incidentally, is here.)
well, I laughed at myself while watching myself eat the popcorn and oversized coke, but I’m thin so maybe it was easier for me. I kinda felt like the filmaker was fence-sitiing. Why discuss the implications of evolving as a species after 700 years without gravity if the lazy American culture was sufficient explanation for the state of the cartoon humans’ bodies?
Is the real message that we should stop trying to advance technology and instead turn into a bunch of farmers/naturalists? In which case the real irony is the advanced animation and other technology used to produce this film.
Whether political or satirical, I thought it was a little boring after a while and I didn’t understand all of the time spent on eve getting worked on and why WALL-E was so upset that he charged through the glass to “save” her. Also, the kids at my screening were hardly entertained as they all kept running up and down the aisles and exiting and entering the theatre. I wasn’t even annoyed by this, rather I was impressed that they too found it boring.
On spielberg, what the heck does WOTW have to do with anything? I think he meant E.T., duh.
oh yeah, I think Variety is mainstream,like the Nile.
I think our society has gotten a little insecure about our development, and the answer seems to be, to talk nice about it, or ignore it. I myself have put on a few pounds since college, no real secret as to the reason why, I sit at a desk for 8-10 hours a day, and can afford to eat more. Now imagine you’re in outer space for 700 years, with a computer system that’s been ordered to distract you so you won’t want to go home, you’d gain weight as well.
Between the technological advancements that allow us to avoid human contact (email, cell phones, HD TVs) and high fructose corn syrup being in just about everything… maybe instead of getting angry… we should work on fixing the problem.
What does it say about our society that we rely on a video game to loose weight (Wii Fit) instead of going to the gym… or going for a walk, and as a proud owner of a Wii Fit, I am just as bad as everybody else.
Thanks, Bill.
Consider this. Maybe critics were protecting some of the film’s second-half secrets? Virtually all of WALL-E’s promo material (trailers, commercials, etc.) reveal the scorched-Earth first act. Because the social commentary arrived once on the Axiom, maybe some critics wanted to leave a lot of that to be discovered by opening-week audiences?
I’m sure more articles will surface with deeper discussions of Pixar’s political and social statements in WALL-E. I, for one, didn’t want to let too many cats out of this overstuffed bag. I wonder if others writing about the film felt the same way.
What a self-serving crock. Any careful check would reveal lots of critics, including me, who didn’t “ignore” the fat people/Wall-Mart angle. Anyone who suggests this should have been in the lead in reviews in mainstream papers doesn’t understood the fuction of movie reviews.
http://kylesmithonline.com/?p=1330
Kyle Smith’s full, and HI-larious, review.
Actually, the comments and Smith’s massively thin skinned response to them are even funnier.
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The human whale thing is the one sizable weakness of the film. It’s an obvious joke that never moves beyond being an obvious joke.
OMG Hollywood is sneaking subliminal messages into our children’s minds, and no reviewer save for said blogger has the clear-thinking gusto to tackle the issue!
A brief search of Rotten Tomatoes’ top reviewers, a search even a child could execute, finds several quotes that counterpoint this claim few reviewers want to undercut ecological (ahem, liberal) themes being threaded into Pixar’s supposedly innocent narratives.
What strikes me most after reading your blog, then the top critics’ reviews, is that the vast majority of reviews regard the fat fatties as an outgrowth of the movie’s QUITE BASIC message of overconsumption and its consequences.
To wit:
James Berardinelli, Reelviews: “The film sounds a couple of cautionary notes. The first is the old-school ecological message of what a consumption-based society can do to a planet when pollution runs unchecked. The second relates to what happens to human beings when they become so lazy that all they do is lie around being waited on by robots.”
Christopher Orr of the New Republic makes a similar observation: “the film’s moral lessons–about the seductions of comfort and importance of effort, the proper relationship between man and machine, the need to clean up our own messes–are not unexpected.”
Liam Lacey from Globe and Mail says: “If the first hour of WALL·E is poetic, the second is a more conventional, if witty, satire on consumerism. The Axiom is a giant spaceship that houses humanity on a sort of interminable all-you-can-eat luxury cruise. The humans are immensely fat from never exercising, as they float around on mobile chairs, sipping giant drinks and talking to each other through the same transparent video screens they use to play virtual sports.”
Note a commonality in the phraseology: “old school,” “not unexpected,” “conventional.” So human beings are big fat lazy pigs that are ruining the planet. Who is so blind as to see this message as a “broadside”?
And the human buffoonery operates on more than one level; structurally, it is a comic counterpoint to the gravitas surrounding non-human characters, which apparently did not work for everyone.
Mick LaSalle of the SF Gate has the audacity to analyze the subject without weaving a political subtext: “Once WALL-E and Eve arrive on the ship, the story doesn’t have much distance to travel, but ways are found to stretch out the experience - and that’s where “WALL-E” goes wrong. The film loses touch with the poignancy and profundity of the Earth scenes and becomes gimmicky, slapsticky and cute, with a glossy sheen in contrast to the grit of the opening.”
Much like the lardball humans in Wall-E, dude, you need to lighten up.
Wow, I’m incredibly disappointed in Patrick Goldstein at the Los Angeles Times for linking to this piece of trash. And for the record Owen Gleiberman was alluding to Spielberg’s Cast Away. Duh infinity!
> Yeah, the beginning of Wall-E is a lot like the beginning of War of the Worlds: Outside of the fact that the former is deeply moving, cinematically poetic, daringly political, gracefully imagined, and executed with such taste and grace it makes you want to cry, and the latter is a loud, heavy-handed, mind-numbing, senselessly plotted crapload of thuddingly unsubtle filmmaking mechanics, they are very similar.
Just FYI, this Spielberg fellow has made other movies besides War of the Worlds.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000229/
Dude has an axe to grind. Sorry if you don’t like someone poking fun at your lazy wally world lifestyle. But seriously, there are people out there who don’t want to read a drawn out analysis. Your average movie-goer wants to know the plot, and the impression the reviewer gets and whether they liked a movie. Those short descriptions of ‘Fatties hovering around with screens’ summaries aren’t wrong. They’re describing a movie and letting people come to their own conclusions. Avoid the movie if you don’t like it, tell us all how bad it was, but give the reviewers a break. Most are just fine sticking with a brief description, and probably their readers expect that. While others, those that DID discuss all the details and implications, were also longer winded. They are there for people who like to know more about a movie beforehand. Sorry if I’m thoroughly unconvinced that there’s a massive leftist cover-up here.
I think it’s hilarious that when the guy who wrote it and directed says he didn’t intend any messages, that he was just trying to make a world that made sense within the context of the story he wanted to tell, the critics are so sure of their personal interpretation that call him a liar. Why not take his word for it and simply enjoy the movie as a beautifully crafted love story?
@LJM:
Your question is a fine one, one that brings up many hermauetic and semiotic conundrums.
My (admittedly reductive) answer: It’s Stanton’s job to write the movie and mine to tell you what it means.
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