Overcoming programming.

The positive reception to WALL-E wasn't much a surprise to me; however, after seeing it myself, I was surprised at the discussion surrounding the movie, which has seemed incomplete, reductionist. To walk away from WALL-E and feel that it is a film with only a didactic goal to warn us of unfettered consumerism, while playfully integrating the visual sentiment and style of a Chaplain or Buster Keaton film, is a bit like saying Apocalypse Now is just a film that says the Vietnam War was bad through adaptation of a Joseph Conrad novel. It's obvious and facile analysis, but you can't really argue with its validity. I also can't understand why critics are feeling the need to defend and apologize for the film's premise. Global warming has finally become "legitimized" (because we evidently trust our politicians' consensus more than our scientific community's) as a bipartisan issue, so let's all stop referring to movies that use it as a simple plot device as "preachy."

That said, critics are right about how beautiful the film really is. The first half hour is spent almost completely without language, and we don't miss it. Watching WALL-E clean up, organize, and occasionally pocket bits of an entire civilization's garbage, it only seems right that he should be a spirit without the clutter of verbiage. When the robot EVE arrives to search for plant life, it is both charming and sweet to watch them relate with only their names to exchange; it's nice to see the romance of gestures again on screen. When done superbly few things are quite as affecting, and WALL-E is a deeply felt movie.

The film eventually does evolve into a human narrative about returning to earth and returning to a laboring species. Human beings have all left earth on the space version of a luxury cruise liner, you see. All their needs are met by robots, which allows them to spend their time traveling around the ship on hovercrafts that look not unlike Hoverounds, and they interact with each other using projected computer screens. From what I could intuit, it was as if the product shelves and Slurpee machines of a 7-11, the time consuming annals of myspace and wikipedia, and the passive source of commercial video entertainment that is the television, were all combined and distilled into the convenience of a moving chair. A lot of people are complaining that the film's view of human beings devolving into a fat, anti-social, permanently sedentary, and mindlessly trend following species is too bleak and unfair. Naturally, I think it is spot on, and could almost hear a few people in the audience muse: "Why didn't I think of that!" after beholding the majesty of the hoveround 2.0.

Despite the chattering humans' rediscovering the evolutionary purpose of their legs, the love story between WALL-E and EVE never advances beyond the articulation of three words, those words being each other's names and the word "directive." The directive being EVE's programming to fully deliver the message that Earth has once again become habitable to life. And this is wear David Denby, Roger Ebert, David Edelstein, and all the other film reviewers really seemed to miss what I saw as the baldfaced point of WALL-E. Human beings, from an evolutionary standpoint, really aren't all that special of a creature. Our purpose in life, within that paradigm, is like any other organism's: to maintain our bodies in such a way that we reproduce. So, you eat, drink, breathe, probably groom yourself according to the kind of person you're looking to mate with, and that's about it. From what I could see, people on the ship in WALL-E were somehow producing babies, although it was unclear if anyone on the ship was actually having sex (which I doubt for reasons beyond the fact that it is a children's film). My suspicion is that the robots probably had some kind of cloning device and artificial uterus. Point being, once the issue of mating is taken out of the equation, whether sex is left in or out of the picture is pretty irrelevant, since jealousy mostly tears at the fabric of society when people apply an expectation of monogamy. So, instead of being eating and humping machines, humans just became eating machines. Since there was no limit to how much they could eat, and probably no limit to what kind of flavor combinations they could be titillated with, they all became obese. These things happen.

I explain this process because I think people don't think about their drives to survive and reproduce as their brains' programming. People like to think they are beings of pure consciousness, following interests of their own creation. You're not. You're nature's fleshbot. However, there's no reason that your own personal fleshbot narrative can't be nuanced, fascinating, and transcendent. What made WALL-E and EVE accessible characters and more recognizably human than the blobs in Hoverounds, was that they'd moved past the basic instructions of their programming and had become moral agents. WALL-E ultimately grew to understand the purpose of his trash compacting and the larger culture of people that it signified, and in so doing he became creative and also learned what it is to be lonely. EVE grew to understand what her larger task of bringing a plant specimen to the ship meant to an entire species, and was thrown into situations where sacrifice and loyalty challenged it. Throughout the entire movie I felt, even during the most obvious plotting that I knew would be resolved, incredibly moved on a very childlike level to EVE and WALL-E's circumstantial plights. I haven't been so emotionally invested in two characters on the screen in years, and I'm convinced it was because I was vicariously experiencing what it is like to be a new person in the world, discovering emotional pains, yearnings, and ecstasies within a reality inhabited by other beings, themselves all bubbling with complex layers of cognition and desire.

So, I don't think WALL-E is merely a warning about global warming. And I don't think the ending is a clarion call to start "being green"--although I don't think that's a bad idea. Really, I think it's a film that explores personhood, and how directives, either implanted by evolutionary pressures or humans playing around with your command line, should be thought about and evolved from. I do believe that people can be happy being mindless consumers, so long as you define happiness as the rush you get with a purchase and the chemical peaks of eating sugars and chocolates--or doing drugs for that matter. But the more you follow that path, even if (and, really, especially if) it's a sustainable one, the fewer moral choices you have to make, and ultimately the less recognizably human you become. Evolutionary psychologists believe that our species evolved into our larger brains for the purposes of communicating with each other and establishing larger indices of fitness in mates--smart meant healthy, and healthy meant sexy. Humans being an intensely sexually motivated species, meant the pressure of this kind of sexual selection would result in a mind whose knowledge and power would soon extend beyond the jungle, past continents, beyond the scope of the time it existed in, beyond the world, and eventually far, far past the solar system. It would be a shame for that mind to return to sleep once it found a way to merely sustain and satisfy the desires of its body indefinitely. All that chatting the humans were doing into their computers aboard the Axiom--about the new color of clothes to wear and the new available beverages--were the sleep murmurs of an entire species, finally sated.





WALL-E Addendum: SPOILERS

I got into a discussion with Joanna after the movie about whether or not the ending to the film was appropriate. Namely, should WALL-E have mysteriously regained his sense of past, present, and future, along with his memories of EVE. It's a hard question to answer. I think, as a film for children, it was necessary to have WALL-E survive, otherwise the film would have been too grim. WALL-E is, after all, a child in respect to the universe, and killing him, especially in such a way that his form goes on still animated, would be cruel. Imagine watching Bambi, only shortly after seeing the Hunter kill Bambi's mother, Bambi himself dies of early onset Alzheimer's.

OK, that'd actually be pretty awesome. But I say this as an adult who loathes that movie, not as the kid who once cried while watching it.

Anyways, the question still bugged me: if the film weren't directed at children, and were solely made for me, a 27 year-old pretentious twat, would I hold the ending against the film? I wasn't sure, because I can't specifically tell what parts of WALL-E were replaced, and which parts remained. It looked like they replaced one of his main circuit boards, but I can't be sure if any memory storage device was completely discarded and replaced. For the sake of liking the movie, I'll just assume that WALL-E's partial amnesia was the result of having a few bad sectors in his harddrive, and some restore software later retrieved it, right at the crucial and emotionally rewarding moment when EVE was trying to hold his hand.

I guess, ultimately, it's just a question of: does the film allow me to suspend enough disbelief to assume WALL-E had a chance for survival. I think it walks a tightrope, but it accomplishes it. Which is good, because I think either ending, whether WALL-E's spirit dissolves into the ether, or survives to hold EVE's hand for the rest of eternity, is permissible by the narrative. Joanna asked me while I was thinking aloud about whether I thought WALL-E should have died: "Well, why should he? Will that teach us a lesson?" And she's exactly right, his being a martyr wouldn't give the story any greater significance. Maybe this is why I felt The Passion of the Christ was affecting but meaningless.