The “Wall-E” debate continues: The far right attacks!
Wall-E is now officially a political football, with conservatives attacking it for it the premises of its environmental messages.
Patrick Henry Press News aggregates some of the commentary. (Link via Hollywood Elsewhere); Dan Abrams, on MSNBC, had a segment the other night on it as well.
The objections seem to be that the film portrays humans as having been responsible for filling the earth with trash. (Glenn Beck, waxing sarcastic: “I can’t wait to teach my kids how we have destroyed the earth.”) The Washington Times goes farther:
[…S]uffice to say the film treats our capitalist system as the Earth’s ultimate sin.
On balance, the attacks strike me as legitimate; the film is a polemic, about a Wal-Mart-like company that fills the earth with trash and then takes the remainder of the human race on board a flying spaceship, on which it induces them to lie back and watch videos and grow ever fatter. There’s nothing wrong with criticizing a film whose political premises you disagree with.
The Abrams show, however, was more interesting. He was ridiculing what he called the “paramoid far right” for their criticisms, but he was doing it on the basis that it was crazy to accuse a family movie of having such themes: “This is a movie, primarily about a robot in love, seven centuries from now,” he said incredulously.
You can watch the video from a link on this page; look for the link, “Wall-E’s hidden agenda?”
Abrams, like the critics I wrote about in my two previous posts, is part of the degraded middlebrow majority who would do anything to pretend that art doesn’t mean anything, in between decrying how culture today isn’t like the good old days.
—————
Previously in Hitsville:
4 Comments so far
Leave a reply
Just read the string of criticism of your criticism - it surprises me that no one has mentioned that ALL of Pixar’s movies have been overt critiques of capitalism. Monsters Inc was the most explicit - an entire universe selling the screams of children - but Finding Nemo (with its anti-trawl fishing) and Ratatouille (rats in the kitchen!) can EASILY be read as marxist tracts. And have been, although not in dailies. (I haven’t seen Incredibles, so I don’t know if it follows the pattern.) I didn’t think Wall-E was that polemic, comparatively. Plus, it matters not, but my kid was WAY more moved and ecologically activated by Happy Feet.
The Incredibles was actually the weirdest of them all; the setup was that the superheroes had been reduced to suburban anonymity after the threat of lawsuits made them unable to use their powers for the public good. Ha! Also, cars had a pretty retro, anti-modern cast, actually.
[…] The “Wall-E” debate continues: The far right attacks! […]
[…] Crair in the New Republic lashes out at the poor abused creature, but he’s not following the conservative line. His thesis: The film is indeed charming and as visually stunning as its enthusiasts claim, but […]