The response to Disney/Pixar’s WALL-E has ranged from unabashed gushing to morally based apprehension. During a recent chat, a friend confessed that he had some problems with WALL-E, “like the message that ‘no matter how much you fuck up everything will be okay.'” I let the comment pass without any objection then; upon re-watching the film, however, I recalled it with less passivity. This message can certainly be interpreted from WALL-E, but at the expense of a much less pessimistic vision beneath the surface.
WALL-E is a futuristic film, a science-fiction love-story that borrows as much from slapstick and E.T. as it does 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it deals in a futurism that essentially primitive. It’s no accident that the film’s meticulous and meditative opening sequence clocks in at 20 minutes without dialogue—that is, before language. Or that WALL-E’s love interest, a life-searching probe from the Axis’ transplanted civilization (I use the term ‘civilization’ loosely), goes by ‘Eve.’ The film’s trajectory follows the path of civilization, albeit in a hyper-technologized setting where humanity’s self-destructive program has led to the abandonment of our most elegantly essential practices. In WALL-E’s future, technology has reached a point of dangerous perfection that renders its absence unimaginable. Hence the punchline of Strauss’ “Thus Spoke Zoroaster” accompanying man’s ‘first step.’ After 700 years in space, Man must re-learn civilization step by step, from agriculture to musicals.
The film’s political value is derived from its setting in the future. The politics, while important, are incidental to the loving examination of human accomplishment. By the end, the plot’s relatively easy solution to environmental catastrophe takes a backseat to the (cautionary) ode to humankind. Like any good analysis of culture, WALL-E creates wonder at the foot of civilization and penetrates the core of ‘bare life.’*
That core, it turns out, is love.
*Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer.
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