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([personal profile] dougo Aug. 2nd, 2008 08:24 pm)
Is the future depicted in WALL·E utopian or dystopian?

From: [identity profile] prog.livejournal.com

Spoilers (but you knew that)


(Assuming you mean the world as it is at the start of the film.) It would be hard to make the argument that it's a utopia. I'd only let you say it was if you also granted that the world at the start of "The Matrix" was also a utopia, due to the similarities: the remnants of humanity kept happy and dumb by robot overlords, even if the machines of "Wall-E" have an ostensibly more benign intent.

The agrarian paradise alluded to by the end-credits epilogue is much more of a utopia, I think... humanity is operating under its own power again.

From: [identity profile] dougo.livejournal.com

Re: Spoilers (but you knew that)


I did think about The Matrix, but I wouldn't say that the humans in the matrix are happy. Keanu didn't seem particularly happy in his cubicle job at the start of the film.

From: [identity profile] prog.livejournal.com

Re: Spoilers (but you knew that)


They were happy in the sense that the machines gave the humans their own little playpen to romp around in. It had more (apparent) freedom than on board the Axiom, and the machines employed a much higher degree of deception, but I say it's the same deal overall for the people. In both cases, they were kept ignorant of the bigger picture.

And while it's easy to imagine that individual characters might have preferred to stay in the Matrix or on the Axiom rather than return to The Real World, both films clearly present the former state as a stunted sort of existence at best.

From: [identity profile] emmacrew.livejournal.com

Re: Spoilers (but you knew that)


This is pretty much what I was thinking, complete with Matrix reference. Dystopia with a utopian veneer. Though the Wall-E veneer is more utopian than life inside the Matrix.

From: [identity profile] mshonle.livejournal.com


Hmm, neither?

You could argue that it was utopian because they managed to meet all of their material needs. (The problem being they made too much garbage.)

But you could say it was dystopian because the co-pilot robot was taking over and oppressing the people.

What's funny is that a lot of smart people have made comments about Wall-E that are either inaccurate or missed the point completely. FWIW, I don't think the movie made fun of fat people, as Slate claimed. And it's also plausible that a cockroach would still live in that time, because the robots gave off heat, and Wall-E provided protection and Twinkies for it.

Anyway, it does tap into a common theme: As we get more labor saving devices, it's easy for life itself to lose its meaning.

From: [identity profile] prog.livejournal.com


Interesting about Slate. I held my breath when plot details started to leak out earlier this year, and I was dreading the reaction the film would get from my fat-politics friends, but as far as I've heard they didn't have that criticism of it. It seems quite clear to me that the people weren't supposed to be merely obese; they had evolved (more or less) over time into having the bodies of enormous infants, a manifestation of their complete dependence on machine helpers. (In my view, the plot's climax occurred when the ship's captain took his very first baby-steps, while he was fighting to regain control of the ship.)

From: [identity profile] mshonle.livejournal.com


Yeah, every human was depicted as being a good person. Except for Fred Willard who, of course, was thin!

From: [identity profile] ex-colorwhe.livejournal.com


portraying individual fat characters as bad is not the only way to demonize fatness. another way to demonize fatness is to use it as a symbol of what has gone wrong, even if you blame the fact of things having gone wrong on society's systemic ills rather than on the fat characters themselves.
Edited Date: 2008-08-03 03:56 am (UTC)

From: [identity profile] ex-colorwhe.livejournal.com


i haven't seen it, so i don't have an opinion. fat politics bloggers do think so. here's an example (http://red3.blogspot.com/2008/07/rationalizing-wall-e.html). it addresses the exact point of the fat people in the film not being bad guys.
Edited Date: 2008-08-03 04:11 am (UTC)

From: [identity profile] mshonle.livejournal.com


Thanks for the link! These are points I wasn't aware of before, and much more sophisticated than the rather lame and disingenuous article on Slate.

From: [identity profile] dougo.livejournal.com


Yeah, I totally didn't notice the big-babies thing, but that's what the director was going for:
A lot of people have suggested that I was making a comment on obesity. But that wasn't it, I was trying to make humanity big babies because there was no reason for them to grow up anymore.

From: [identity profile] ex-colorwhe.livejournal.com


it doesn't matter what he meant. he used a demographic group of people as a symbol.

From: [identity profile] luckylefty.livejournal.com


This is a movie about people so dependent on the machines that cater to their every whim, who have become so passive, that they no longer even walk, or get any other exercise whatsoever, because the computer transports them and does every other physical thing for them.

Is it politically unacceptable to make such a movie?

If you made such a movie were the people were trim and muscular, it would be a distraction. Some people complained about the WALL_A's in WALL_E, saying "If you're going to survive in space for hundreds of years, you would have to recycle everything, not throw it out". It was a minor distraction for me, a major distraction for others. If the characters were trim and fit, that would be a major distraction for a lot of people, including me, who would wonder how they got that way.

There are plenty of fit, healthy, fat people who get a healthy amount of exercise. But very few people past a certain age who get no exercise are skinny or healthy. So if your top-level goal is to present people who get no exercise, which I claim is acceptable, then it's unrealistic not to present them as fat.

From: [identity profile] mshonle.livejournal.com


It's plausible to me that the Axiom would mine asteroids and moons for new material. If it couldn't, then there would be no reason to explore space or be so far away from earth.

From: [identity profile] dougo.livejournal.com


It was sort of inexplicably nestled in a cloud of space dust. Although, now that I think about it, that might just have been centuries of expelled garbage.

From: [identity profile] gemini6ice.livejournal.com


dystopian, but only in the context of the movie itself. It was implied that it was inferior to mankind's potential, and that makes it dystopian. The Axiom, and of itself, without the Wall-E context, is debatable.

From: [identity profile] dougo.livejournal.com


Yeah, I was just noticing that my question was ambiguous: is it portrayed as dystopian, or is it actually dystopian. I was more interested in the latter question.

From: [identity profile] mshonle.livejournal.com


Dang, I'm kicking myself for not using the phrase "By and large" in my original post. (Buy 'n' Large)

From: [identity profile] 42itous.livejournal.com


Dystopian for a couple centuries or so, then potentially normal, but never utopian. There's no such thing as a nonfictional utopia.

From: [identity profile] 42itous.livejournal.com


Oh, sorry, I misunderstood the question: I thought you were asking about "the future of the movie," i.e. what we expect to happen as the people repopulate Earth.

Hmm. Human life on the Axiom would be utopian to the people living it if they were ever to think a little bit... and dystopian for them if they were ever to think more than a little bit...

...and from our point of view, because at this stage of human evolution we're used to thinking rather a lot, it's decidedly dystopian.
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