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You cannot escape motherfucking Wall-E. He is in your dreams. He is your dreams.
Well, not really, but I wanted to approach yet another facet of this movie. And no, it’s not the fact that Wall-E is a less verbose Johnny 5. It’s the conservative caterwauling about it. I’d go over a list of complaints, but the fascist bomb got pulled by Jonah Goldberg-
(Okay, we’re going to talk about Jonah Goldberg for a second. Actually, what we’re going to do is make Jonah Goldberg jokes. Jonah Goldberg is so dumb he blamed baby back ribs on Roe v. Wade. Your turn.)
-so we’ve pretty much had All Conservative Internet Traditions invoked. But here’s the big thing that all these reactionaries are missing about Wall-E, something that you’d think, in their penchant to declare everything from Cinderella Man to, uh, Cinderella Man: Director’s Cut a conservative movie, they’d have picked up on. There’s a perfectly reasonable conservative read on the movie that doesn’t turn it into a total piece of shit! Of course, that also involves not calling a movie that’s anti-corporate “fascist”, so leave it up to the hairshirted liberal to find it.
The fundamental story of the movie is about a culture beholden to a nanny state - in this case, a literal nanny state that coddles them like babies from the cradle to the grave, a world where individual initiative is destroyed and cultural history is entirely alien to the entire human race. Basically, it’s the exact thing that conservatives have been warning us about for years, wrapped up in a movie with cute robots who rebel against it and lead humanity to a hunting-gathering-growing Earth.
The main problem, obviously, is that the movie views the nanny state as a corporation rather than a purely public/liberal government entity. But for a movement which lists one of its biggest recent cinematic accomplishments as The Island, they need all the help they can get.
Where the power of Wall-E rests, and what makes it so controversial, is that it plays on a universal theme in a specific way - the abandonment of what truly matters in service to an easy and seductive evil. It’s the distraught person selling his soul, the teenager selling out to be popular, Judas selling out Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. Hell, if you want, it’s even a contorted Rapture story - mankind has finally managed to bring a reckoning on itself that has destroyed all it ever knew, and only by finally realizing the truth are they saved and returned to a peaceful reign on Earth.
It’s just disappointing watching these people give up and reflexively turn against a movie because it involves environmental destruction rather than the hellfire and homosexual orgies they would normally connote as the End of Times, and a charismatic corporate leader rather than a slick Jewish leader coming under the guise of the United Nations. You’ve gotta work at this, people!
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Jesse Taylor on 10:00 PM •
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Jonah Goldberg is so dumb he blamed baby back ribs on Roe v. Wade.
And then wrote a 1,000 word rebuttal to “A Modest Proposal”, decrying that Smith was obviously a pseudonym for Amanda Marcotte.
Whoooo boy. Yeah, the idea that corporations had nothing to do with fascism? The idea that EVE by escaping her programming was being fascist? Goldberg’s reader is thinking of Marxist false-consciousness--if the ‘reader’ is thinking at all.
Oh right environmental concern. Which was raised by Progressives, Hippies, Environmentalists, but, I have to argue, not by the people who brought you the Autobahn. Or the blitz.
And Red. Communism again! Fascism is Black or brown, generally speaking. Communism is red. Capitalist democracies are Blue. Look at an election map, fellas, and tell me: a rose by any other color would smell as sweet.
I haven’t seen the movie, so I won’t comment on complaint #4, except to note that apparently it’s green and not red now. I wonder why?
Didn’t Mussolini coin the term ‘Estato Corporativo’--’Corporate State’--to describe fascism? And wasn’t his name on the cover of Goldberg’s alleged book?
Jonah Goldberg is so dumb he got tangled in a cordless phone.
This film is an esoteric masterpiece. Your interpretation works, but is probably limited in it’s scope. Stuart Davis says giving a movie like this to a critic is like giving a box of rubiks cubes to drugged monkeys. In that spirit:
The fundamental story is of an ayahuasca (traveling vine, ie that vine in a boot) trip of the principle creative that inspired him to make the movie. At this level, the surface interpretation is that all characters are aspects of the directors psyche, and that he is most clearly identified as the captain of the axiom. The deep metaphor at this level equates the systems of control in his own psyche with the systems of control in the drug war that try and protect the buy and large system from gnostic experiences that destroy the illusions necessary to maintain the system, and his personal triumph over auto represents a collective triumph over censors.
In the beginning of the movie, right after he takes the vine in the boot (literally, traveling vine) into his pad, very closely resembles the ayahuasca scenes in Altered States with the volcanos and explosions. The captain with the book with the vine on it, and his exposition, has double meaning about the code in the film, literally mocking the people who don’t understand the code, while they are laughing at his infantilism, which also reflects on them. When he plays with the ship, bringing it back to earth, he is speaking for the director, about the impact of the film. When he conquers autopilot, it is a personal victory of the sort aimed at in meditation, and a metaphor for his cultural victory, all at once.
The secondary story is the ecology parable. The ecology parable is the surface, and it is a metaphor for the psychological debris caused by the effects of the bnl system of thinking in the present day. Returning the ship to earth represents returning psychic awareness to the body, which, as it pays more attention to natural beauty, is freed from the psychic pollution of consumerist culture.
The tertiary story is the consumerist cultural critique, which is actually an extended metaphor about the deep nature of reality. When we see the golfers using screens to control golf bots, we are seeing a critique of consumerist culture, but we are also seeing a representation of the mind body split as it would exist in actual people golfing. The critique of culture is the surface meaning, beneath that is an analogy about the nature of reality. In fact, all the scenes in that economy map directly onto esoteric teachings about the illusory nature of what we confuse for reality.
The fourth story is the love story (which maps onto the conscious and unconscious autistic aspects of the directors self reconciling by completing the archetypal hero’s journey, including death and rebirth, giving him the ability to connect with people). When we see the tree (of life) with roots in the shoe, and wall-e and eve hold hands (connect) and watch, we are seeing a metaphor for hallucinogen use revealing deep religious secrets much more then we are seeing the resolution of a love story or ecological parable or critique of consumerism.
What makes this film work so well, is that it’s perfect at every level. It has all the features of the most brilliant Fellini movie or Joyce novel. There is something for everyone, and everyone can take away just what they are ready for.
The real reason this should piss off conservatives is that for all their trouble in the drug war, Americans just spent 62 million dollars imprinting the ayahuasca experience and wisdom directly into their kids and the collective unconscious of America. This is an excellent thing. Watch the end credits, as wall-e and eve evade the cop bots with the vine, then crush them with their work. It’s very explicitly coded in the film, if you are willing to take the scene with the code book seriously. In fact, the scenes over the end credits serve as a rosetta stone to decipher the meaning in the film, as the forces that are represented as parts of one psyche (or characters in one story) are reinterpreted historically through culture, and as archetypes, before the drug war metaphor. I hope people talk about this brilliant movie for years.
Sorry about that. Click “Entertainment” and 4d film at the bottom.
At the risk of sounding like an ignorant boob, I’m going to have to say that you are really, really overthinking the film, TomK. Normally I’m just find with detangling symbolism, but in this case not only are you going way above and beyond a children’s movie, it is contridicting what the director said in interviews.
Didn’t Mussolini coin the term ‘Estato Corporativo’--’Corporate State’--to describe fascism?
What would he know? Mussolini wasn’t enough of a liberal Democrat to qualify as a fascist.
This movie is entirely about Wall-E wanting to hold EVE’s hand, period.
Eddie Murphy’s upcoming masterpiece Meet Dave better get this sort of royal treatment, or I’m calling racism up in this bitch.
I never stop being amazed that people like Jonah Goldberg and Megan McArdle sincerely seem to believe that corporations are this horribly oppressed group that need fierce protection.
Well, it’s not the whole big run down, but it’s more than simple. There are several layers to the story. There’s the ecological story, there’s the “anti-corporate” story....I don’t think it was so much anti-corporate as much as it just followed the lines drawn in the road. In the end, it’s not evil, but hubris and the natural result of people’s greeds and desires. (Putting Fred Williard as the CEO/President was a stroke of genius), there’s the science fiction story..the robot and technology designs were wonderful, and the vision of how the technology and society would have developed just worked.
And yes, there’s the love story. Which was amazing what they could pull off considering the limitations of the characters. The reason it worked was that they hit the inflection perfectly, so with one word, you could portray many different emotions.
The only bad thing about the movie is that it’ll piss me off that it won’t be nominated for best picture because #1. It’s animated and #2. it’s science fiction
True story: I remember articles that “Antz” promoted communism because the society was, well, ant-like in that the ants have no property and no real identity and the ‘government’ takes care of them, and, well...because the ants were Red ants.
I swear I’m not making this up.
TomK, I love your posts. You sound like Alejandro Jodorowsky.
I wonder how these guys sleep at night knowing that their hero Charlton Heston was in Soylent Green, with its apocalyptic vision of a world destroyed by overconsumption.
It really disturbs me when these morons start shouting out Fascism and Communism when they could vastly improve their knowledge of these topics just by reading Wikipedia. Of course it isn’t that surprising because they avoid any Political Science class because you know, it’s too “liberal”.
We don’t get enough information is WALL-E to determine the exact type of government they have because surprise, surprise it’s a kid’s movie. Obviously the Buy N Large company is pretty totalitarian, but that doesn’t even rule out democracy.
Antigone -
First, an esoteric master like Stanton would be subtle about the interviews. He’s not gonna say to USA today the whole truth about it. He says he came up with the love story first and that he didn’t intend the ecological and social parables as they are being read. This is all true. He means them the alchemical way. So, the interviews are pretty subtle about this.
Second, he has talked a lot about artistic freedom in animation. He clearly thinks the limits on what can done with animation are arbitrary. He does not agree its just a kids movie, and has explicitly said he wants to push that as far as it will go.
Maybe you have not been initiated into the ayahuasca experience, or have not had deep meditative experience with ego dissolution. Thus, the esoteric aspects are not available to you. That doesn’t mean I am overreading this. Its all so explicit if you know the code. Look at the 4d movie under entertainment on that bnl page. Its all there. Just because you cannot decipher it does not mean its not there. He even makes fun of your attitude in the movie with the way the infantile captain acts when given the codebook.
Jonah bought his stupid at a two for one sale.
TomK reminds me of why I became straight-edge.
TomK, as a veteran of the heroic dose experience, I’m all in with your explanation. Brilliant.
TomK isn’t serious. He might be annoying, and he might be convinced he needs to continue his charade, but that’s only because people aren’t coming out and saying that they realize he’s just yanking our chains.
He’s mostly harmless anyhow, just someone posting walls of text in the hopes someone else will believe him. Compared to some of the sub-literate, drooling, babbling morons we get trolling this place some days, he’s a welcome change.
I’m totally serious. Look. It’s a lot more archetypal psychology then it is psychedelia. Psychedelia is about 25% of what I am proposing, but you people reduce everything I said to that, even as you accuse me (incorrectly) of reducing everything to psychedelia. All the imagery is there, most of it comes from archetypal psychology, some from Leary’s 8 circuit model, and some is psychedelic because that’s what the vine represents, obviously. I guarantee this is how the creator imagined the work.
Tom, the moment you start talking about the “creator’s vision” as if you could see it for yourself, you start declaring yourself either unserious or an outright troll. YOU DIDN’T MAKE THIS MOVIE. Stop acting like you did. All your post-modernistic bluster is getting extremely tired.
Ultimatum: Either admit you’re not serious, or admit you’re a lying sack of shit. Those are your choices.
There is nothing postmodern about what I am saying. You are revealing the limited and conventional scope of your thinking by confusing what I am saying with postmodernism. This is way beyond post modernism. I can talk about the creators vision because it’s an archetypal experience that it so clearly maps onto and is replete with explicit symbolism from that experience. If this was full of references to china, and had hidden chinese text and symbolism in it, I could say it’s hidden meaning concerns china, and you could make the same argument about me being full of shit if you didn’t know chinese. It’s just written in a language you don’t understand, because the frontal structure of your ego you confuse with yourself is afraid of being dissolved by the experiences that esoteric language conveys.
You are the one who is full of shit, my friend.
“It’s just a kids’ movie” is a rude way to shut down discussion. Entertainment for children is _all about_ lessons, fables, parables… in short, ideology. TomK’s “esoteric” reading isn’t my cup of herbage, but it makes perfect sense for anyone to read this film for its agenda or its ethics, be they intended or implied.
Geeze. I think I’m the only one who’s seen this movie who thinks it’s a snoozefest. A couple of cute moments, mostly involving the cockroach, and the rest totally predictable. Come on, was there ANY doubt that that damn plant wouldn’t get back to Earth?
Jonah Goldberg is so stupid he tried to kill a fish by drowning it.
I wonder how these guys sleep at night knowing that their hero Charlton Heston was in Soylent Green, with its apocalyptic vision of a world destroyed by overconsumption.
AND the most hideous evil - cannibalism - was being thrust upon an unknowing public by… a monopolistic CORPORATION!
Charlton Heston: liberal fascist tool!
TomK, or maybe you’re just seeing Jesus in the burn pattern of a grilled cheese sandwich.
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And then wrote a 1,000 word rebuttal to “A Modest Proposal”, decrying that Smith was obviously a pseudonym for Amanda Marcotte.