WALL-E, an Addendum

WALL-E is not the first time Pixar has dealt with issues politically and culturally active in America.

The Incredibles originally was supposed to start with a different scene--Mrs. Incredible at a dinner party, being subtly mocked because she was "only" a stay-at-home Mom and didn't do anything "important." The scene was later replaced with their more ingenious beginning, but it formed one aspect of the "politics" of the film: families are sometimes more important in their rough-hewn individualities than any overarching Plans to make everyone equally "incredible" by denying individuality. It was contraversial points like this that gave its cutting catchphrase: "if everyone is incredible, then nobody is," its strangely refreshing heft.

Cars was even more surprising in its positive portrayl of the urban mindset; I don't want to attack the Democrat nominee here, but I think Hollywood (despite their obvious love of the photogenic qualities of small-town life) could be categorized by his famous slip of the tongue: small town folks are just "bitter, clinging to guns and religion." Cars was, essentially, the counter that needed to be said: many people who live in small towns cling to a lot of things--because they know how life has been successfully lived and really don't care for risky plans to change things. Which is, as anyone who's stood in a grocery-store checkout would know, more than can be said for most of Hollywood. Cars simply refused to take a patronizing view of small-town existence; even the tribute to Dale Earnhart came off as genuine and heartfelt.

I sometimes wonder if the exceptionally low ratings critics tended to give to Cars represents such a urban bias against a poetry that wasn't city- (or future-) centric.

And then there's WALL-E, a film with an equally honest, equally heartfelt Green message. Which also happens to be the Message of the Year in Tinseltown lately, uniting everyone from Al Gore to M. Night Shamylan. It is also, by far, the most specifically preachy movie Pixar has ever released, filled with an almost religious awe in the face of biodiversity in both dialog and all-important visuals. I'm not saying that it's an Issue Film in the way that the horrible, terrible, excruciating Evil Film That Must Not Be Named is an Issue Film, but ecological concerns are far more foregrounded than any other political claims in other movies.

I happen to agree with Pixar here--simple environmental responsibility is crucially important, and something that our beloved "free" economic system obviously fails to implement on its own. But I wonder if this is a sign that even Pixar is somewhat tied down by the tyranny of Tinseltown Political Fashion.

Summer of Popcorn 4 (skipping 3): WALL-E

All fiction, taken as fiction, works in so far as it manages to touch on our fundamental and internal desires (whether universal, personal, or cultural.) The wooden boy becomes more than his parts but may return to wood. A young man, previously living a drab and sheltered existence, sets out to find his way in the world. A kiss brings the sleeping princess to life. Such stories, though admittedly made up, seem to consistently mean, or at least ask, something important. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live in society? What is it that fills us with a sensation of life?

Speculative Fiction (at least at its most self-reflective), tends to take the basic themes of legend and fairy tale and re-introduce them in a context that allows us to believe their literal plausibility. What is the difference between a replicant (who thinks he is human) and a real human? What happens to an intelligent and highly moral boy who slaughters an alien race to save humanity? Is Ofelia's final triumphant vision of virtue rewarded and grace received really in some way more real and human than the senseless cruelty of the Spanish Civil war?

WALL-E opens with a beautiful view of the cosmos, oddly enough sounding in tune with the hopeful city-centric music of "Put on Your Sunday Clothes." For a moment, we are in the world of pure legend/fairy-tale/Space Opera--where once the town was the location of life (filled with "sparkling lights") now the cosmos are on display. Yet as the camera moves to Earth, the music shifts sharply towards the ironic. We plummet out of the heavens through a haze of space-junk and into a trash-dominated wasteland out of touch with the sublimities of the heavens. Even before the opening song ends, it is but one small voice amidst the great silence of Earth. The empty cityscape brings with it eerily empty music, its loneliness only emphasized by occasional burst of cheerful music that accompanies WALL-E's brief appearances within the lonely landscape.

[Reader be warned: After this point, there be spoilers]

It is a brilliant opening, and one whose potential the rest of the film tries in vain to fulfill. On the one hand, there is the story we saw in trailers, the story of cheerful music amongst the stars. This is the story of WALL-E the robot, the ultimate underdog who finally learns the meaning of the love he has longed for in a grand adventure among the stars. But on the other, we have the story of Earth and humanity--a story of emptiness and lethargy, of an Earth that stands barren and an obese species that does (and can do) almost nothing except sit on floating chairs and sip their meals from a cup.

In execution, the first story is Pixar's first priority, a not unexpected choice considering that even The Incredibles, Pixar's previous flirtation with sociological pessimism, was ultimately a story of self-realization. This straightforward story is bolstered by their most courageous directorial decision yet--the limitation of significant dialog only to the supporting human characters. Instead of words, details of animation tell us the story: EVA's stylishly triggerhappy acts of large-scale destruction; WALL-E's tendency to quiver and then collapse into a box at the first sign of danger; the constant anthromorphisms by which EVA coldly rejects WALL-E's nervous advances; the climactic breathtaking dance around the spaceship Axiom. Pixar has always featured an unprecedented depth and ingenuity in their animations, so the lack of speech serves only to highlight what has always been their greatest strength.

Yet the second story is not such an unqualified success. An overweight, lazy, consumerist collection of nearly-identical blobs of humanity is, it turns out, not nearly so likable a protagonist as a small, anthropomorphic garbage-collecting robot. And perhaps that is why Pixar avoided the obvious conflict of the colonist's struggle to love and re-colonize Earth, and instead created a HAL-like autopilot which can only be dealt with by the cuter robots (along with the captain.)

Of course, it may be that realistic portraits of our darker thoughts about humanity are not necessarily a good fit for a bit of kids summer entertainment, and certainly WALL-E's triumphantly happy ending is a refreshing counter to the avalanche of depressing eco-themed movies released lately. In the end, the robotic antics and elements of satire were enough to leave me more than glad I'd seen the movie--it's almost certainly the best movie this summer so far--but like the latest Indiana Jones, regret over the movie that one couldn't help but imagine somewhat mars the otherwise well-crafted summer film.

Quotes from Gaudy Night

Lots of thoughts over the summer, but not much time for posting. In the meantime, some quotes from the inimitable Dorothy Sayers.

"Look here! I admire you like hell, but I believe you're all wrong. I'm sure one should do one's own job, however trivial, and not persuade one's self into doing somebody else's, however noble."
(48)

"Yes. Best intentions no security. They never are, of course. You may say you won't interfere with another person's soul, but you do--merely by existing. The snag about it is the practical difficulty, so to speak, of not existing. I mean, here we all are, you know, and what are we to do about it?"

"Was this what lived in the tower set on the hill? Would it turn out to be like Lady Athaliah's tower in frolic wind, the home of frustration and perversion and madness? 'If thine eye be single, the whole body is full of light'--but was it physically possible to have the single eye? "What are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?" For them, stereoscopic vision was probably a necessity; as for whom was it not? (This was a foolish play on words, but it meant something.) Well, then, what about the business of choosing one way of life? Must one, after all, seek a compromise, merely to preserve one's sanity? Then one was doomed for ever to this miserable inner warfare, with confused noise and garments rolled in blood--and, she reflected drearily, with the usual war aftermath of a debased coinage, a lowered efficiency and unstable conditions of government."
(74-5)

"With tobacco and literature one could face out any situation, provided, of course, that the book was not written in an unknown tongue."
(287)

"'You would have to abandon the jig-saw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change.'
'I'm afraid to try that, Peter. It might go too near the bone.'
'It might be the wisest thing you could do.'
'Write it out and get rid of it?'
'Yes.'
'I'll think about that. It would hurt like hell.'
'What would that matter, if it made a good book?'"
(291)

"What does it matter if it hurts like hell, so long as it makes a good book."
(347)

"Now that you have the age of national self-realisation, the age of colonial expansion, the age of the barbarian invasions and the age of the decline and fall, all jammed cheek by jowl in time and space, all armed alike with poison-gas and going through the outward motions of an advanced civilisation, principles have become more dangerous than passions. It's getting uncommonly easy to kill people in large numbers, and the first thing a principle does--if it is really a principle--is to kill somebody.

...One may either hulloo on the inevitable, and be called a bloodthirsty progressive; or one may try to gain time and be called a blood-thirsty reactionary. But when blood is their argument, all argument is apt to be--merely bloody."
(317-8)

"I do know that the worst sin--perhaps the only sin--passion can commit, is to be joyless. It must lie down with laughter or make its bed in hell--there is no middle way."
(436)

"Here then at home, by no more storms distrest,
Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled;
Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled,
Here the sun stands and knows not east nor west,
Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best,
From the wide zone in dizzing circles hurled
To that still centre where the spinning world
Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.

Lay on thy whips, O Love, that me upright,
Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed
May sleep, as tension at the verberant core
Of music sleeps; for, if thou spare to smite,
Staggering, we stoop, stooping, fall dumb and dead,
And, dying so, sleep our sweet sleep no more."
(346)