WALL-E will rescue us all
I just saw WALL-E. Several months late, I know, but it is what it is.
Stunningly beautiful: check.
Cute Mac in-joke: check.
Typical Disney ’simple-hearted ragamuffin’ male, ‘beautiful sophisticated’ female romance. (I went straight to Lady and the Tramp): check.
Take-away “liberal” message linking consumerism and despoiling the world: check.
Wait, uncheck that one.
Did anyone watch the end? Or the credits? The take-away message of WALL-E is that even if we wreck the world and become infantile slobs who live in space and drink liquid cupcakes, it’s okay! We’ll be able to come back! We’ll be able to start over! And civilization will progress (rather quickly) through a few key phases represented via western Art History, and all will be well!
The take away message of WALL-E is that we will be rescued from our own bad decisions. And technology will do most of the rescuing. Sure, the ship’s captain had to stand up to the autopilot in order to get the humans home to earth, but the captain is as simple-minded as the rest of them. Other than a spark of rebellion (which seems to come from nowhere) and enough brute strength to switch the autopilot’s button to ‘manual’, he does nothing. Compare this to the relationship between Dave and HAL in 2001: A Space Oddessy. In WALL-E, the humans have no smarts, no ingenuity, and little will. The robots (the ‘rogue’ robots, that is) are the ones with those qualities.
In the credits of WALL-E, the obese humans on earth are shown planting crops (in soil of dubious cleanliness) and building structures with the help of the stalwart robots that were designed and built not by them but at some earlier stage of human existence. There is no human capable in the film of designing and building such things: the humans are sheep-like beings, for whom the mere act of standing up is revolutionary. Lucky for them they are surrounded by intelligent, tireless technology that does the heavy lifting.
Literally: the robots make fire, drill wells, till the soil, help lift nets of fish (which come from where?), supply bricks for buildings. And by the end of the credits we see towns, Renaissance domes, and Van Gogh-like flowers and birds (did he ever paint a bird?). Plus fields of some green plant that may be spinach. And somehow these humans who used to live in hoverchairs and watch TV and drink liquid cupcakes are happy to be doing all this. A return to simple pleasures and all that, I guess. A return made easy by robots that do all the work!
So don’t worry about a thing, it will all turn out okay. In the meantime, another cupcake in a cup won’t hurt.
