A computer, not a divider

National Review, August 4, 2008 by Ross Douthat

THE most interesting political controversy of the summer involves a polarizing figure with Phil Gramm's small head and goggling eyes, Bill Clinton's affinity for dangerous babes, and an oppo researcher's zeal for picking through other people's garbage. Superficially endearing but ultimately divisive, this troublemaker has been dropped like a hand grenade into the slow political season between Memorial Day and the conventions, turning conservative against conservative with a ferocity not seen since this year's South Carolina primary, and opening up a few cracks in liberalism's united front as well.

I speak, needless to say, of WALL-E, the trash-compacting robot--his acronym stands for Waste Allocation Load-Lifter Earth Class, a piece of trivia worth memorizing if you plan to be a game-show contestant anytime in the 2010s--who lends his name and caterpillar-tracked charm to Pixar's latest computer-animated confection. WALL-E and its eponymous hero debuted to the sort of rapturous reviews that practically every Pixar effort enjoys, but the critical hosannas were quickly joined by a political backlash--from free-market conservatives annoyed at the movie's anti-capitalist bent and Inconvenient Truth-y environmental hysteria; from anti-fattist liberals who worry that Pixar is propagating myths about obesity and the environment; and from hypocrisy-scourges of the Left and Right alike who don't take kindly to being lectured about capitalist greed and conspicuous consumption by anyone associated with the Disney behemoth, which is busy peddling enough WALL-E tie-in merchandise to fill every Eastern Seaboard landfill twice over.

These are all overreactions, to my mind, but the great WALL-E controversy isn't just a case of hyperactive, election-addled pundits' politicizing a simple kids' story. Indeed, if you managed to sit through Pixar's latest film without picking up on the politico-philosophical themes that everybody's bickering over, then you're either a very stressed-out parent or a robot whose brain is artificial but not particularly intelligent.

WALL-E, our hero, is a solitary, solar-powered survivor of a planet-wide disaster, puttering around in a city where robot-compacted garbage is piled higher than the skyscrapers, and where sun-baked, mud-spattered ads for a corporation-cum-global-government called Buy N Large stand watch, like the eyeglasses of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, over a landscape even more barren than the ash-heaps of Long Island. Having consumed its way to environmental catastrophe, the human race has fled the planet aboard a fleet of spacious Buy N Large starliners, leaving an army of robots to clean up the mess. Time and chance have whittled that army down to just the one WALL-E, who's groping, in his post-apocalyptic solitude, toward something resembling humanity. By day, he still fulfills his trash-compacting directives, but along the way he scavenges interesting knick-knacks from our civilization's degringolade, and when night comes he places them reverently in a storehouse of treasures and then settles down to watch the last working VHS tape on Earth: The 1969 Hollywood version of Hello Dolly!

As it turns out, Hello Dolly!'s lessons--about love, dancing, and the connection between the two--come in handy when a spaceship touches down and disgorges a sleek white female robot, EVE (that's for "Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator," game-show hopefuls), whose mission is to canvass the planet for plant life, while using her laser gun to blast anything that makes a sudden move around her. Ducking the blaster-fire, WALL-E falls in love, but before their courtship has gone very far EVE finds the sort of seedling she's been looking for, seals it away in her robotic womb, and goes into hibernation mode, waiting for her ship to pick her up. The faithful WALL-E guards her while she hibernates and then stows away on her vessel, which carries them both back to the largest of the Buy N Large starliners, the Axiom, where we finally see what's become of the human race.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It's not a pretty sight. The humans of the future look like a cross between an Upper West Side liberal's stereotype of the typical Wal-Mart shopper and the same New Yorker's iPhone-obsessed, always-texting teenage kids: We've turned morbidly obese, with vestigial legs that can't support our vast, Slurpee-guzzling frames, and we float around the Axiom on hovering recliners, chattering away Bluetooth-style while computer screens are projected permanently in front of our piggish eyes. An army of robots caters to our every whim, while Buy N Large propaganda fills every screen and airwave with a gentle, insistent imperative: more, more, more.

So yes: This is a political movie, in which a critique of American consumerism is wedded to fears of ecological catastrophe, and the recovery of our humanity, the theme of the film's second half, is explicitly linked to an agrarian humanism that ought to warm the hearts of Wendell Berry fans and Michael Pollan obsessives, liberal and (crunchy) conservative alike.