pursuit of perishable things | brooke bryan

I saw Wall-E with my family of five on Saturday, opening day, and was somewhat taken aback. I actually found it only remotely enjoyable (in that escapist, pop-corn crunching kind of way) because of the gravity – and the overt nature – of the message. In fact, I had my forehead in my hands and surely had wrinkled my forehead in that ambiguous “I’m trying to take this in” thing that my professor always does to me.

Wall-E pummels us to the future. First, there are the sky scrapers made of trash-bricks by Wall-E himself which tower over the existing modern (but completely abandoned) towers of the waste-land city that represents Earth.

Wall-E is the last functioning robot of his kind, an instantly like-able character, who creates himself a home in his compound that he must retreat to when the wind storms strike. He has a pet cockroach (who is reliably hardy) and together they dwell in a cozy little space outfitted with strings of light and rotating bins full of Wall-E’s favorite finds. He even maintains a video and music collection, whereby he presumably learns more human intelligence by watching and feeling with his characters. Well, there is topics one and two – environmental devastation and artificial intelligence (likely I have missed the themes I wasn’t hit over the head with).

Soon, Wall-E finds a special little sprout, and meets Eve, and the fun begins. After locking up into a robotic coma upon seeing (and seizing) the sprout, apparently phoning home to the mother ship, Walle-E hitches a ride into the stars and soon finds himself back with the humans. Only this time, he is a foreign contaminant on a ship out to pasture in space for 700 years.

The humans are now infantile bulbous creatures that look as if they were popped out of jello-shot cups. They lack muscular and skeletal structures because they have lived and reproduced outside of gravity long enough to stop prioritizing this need. Incidentally, the humanoids hover on space scooters (gliding around tracks around the ship) and drink their meals out of super-sized cups with straws while continuously chatting in virtual talk to the screen that is ergonomically placed directly in their line of vision. After having her screen knocked off her scooter, one woman exclaims at the world around her: “I didn’t know we had a pool!”

Surely Pixar has “pro-large” groups up in arms, and I have visited a few blogs. But “proud fat people” are giving themselves way too much credit on this one, having their causality all mixed up in their head. The movie does not infer that “fat people caused” any of the steamrolling human blunders this film so aptly adds imagery to. Rather, Pixar takes us to the place all of our own arrows are pointing to: the point of no return.

We might be closer to Pixar’s imaginative vision than we think we are, and this is what angers us. After all, while I sit here toying in a virtual world of my own creation, a Village pool goes underfunded and underutilized. I am always plugged in, I eat homogenized, colored, flavored food. Our babies and kids are corralled together, and the societal “introjection” begins almost immediately. The scooters at my local grocery store are always full, and I would hate to speculate (but cannot deny my urge given what I see) on how many of those fellow shoppers are able-bodied people who like the convenience factor of a motorized means of shopping, but could – if they had to – do without.

And, really, this mentality is the subtle thread through the movie. The idea that having things done for you is better than having to bother about them yourself. While most of the movie shows like an Orwellian glimpse at the future, it is also an Arendtian look at how tools and technology fashion their users. We may create the tools, Arendt will tell us in “The Human Condition,” but the tools then come to form us as we use them.

Rock on, Pixar. I came for folkloric Disney but you slipped me the old sci-fi.