WALL-E Revisited

I love WALL-E. It may be my favorite Pixar film. Whenever I say that, though, people give me kind of a look. "Seriously?" they say. Most people agree that the first half hour or so, up to the point where WALL-E and EVE are on the ship, is spectacular, but lots of people tend to get hung up on the "environmentalist agenda" of latter half of the film. To these people I say, please don't turn setting into subtext.

WALL-E is not a movie about condemnation. It's not a movie about our responsibility to the planet. It's a celebration of remembering what it is to be human. The humans in space don't want to re-cultivate the earth because of any sense that they've done wrong. They want to do it because there's something about growing things, about dancing, about falling in love that innately appeals to us as human beings. WALL-E and EVE, in their initial discovery and pursuit of these joys, serve as a catalyst for the human beings in their rediscovery of them.

I think that what get's people hung up is the extreme way the humans are portrayed in the film. Maybe I get it because it's a rhetorical strategy that I like so much, but that's just a variation on captatio benevolentiae. It's a straw man built with a wink and a nod, a caricature actively recognized as such so that we can feel better about ourselves and our more legitimate situation. After all, if these poor oafs can get back to basics, what's to stop us?

Sure, responding to those fundamentally human callings towards creativity and relationship may require us to reject consumer culture, to an extent at least, but they don't make any insistence about that point, so what's the a problem? Beats me.