WALL-E’s Critical Ideologues

July 3, 2008 in Reading Response
Tags: adult, audiences, bickering, conservative, consumerism, family, film, g, general, liberal, message, mindless, movie, narrow, one, political, rating, review, sentence, wall-e

My one-sentence review: WALL-E is an excellent adult love story, and, though it is appropriately G-rated, it will probably bore the most impatient kindergartners.

Though it’s a movie I found to be a little heavy-handed with its message, I thought well-done, anyway. As we’ve come to expect from Pixar, this film’s message is handled with greater panache and insight than most studios use over twelve films, a quality which more than makes up for WALL-E’s overwrought focus on having a message.

This film’s themes are environmentalism and slothful consumerism — I don’t give anything away to say that one is shown as good and the other is shown as bad — and, even so, the film doesn’t quite flesh with any single political ideology. Not that it matters — nothing could ever stop political ideologues from bickering.

Due to the nature of their bickering, spoilers ahead. I paraphrase in blockquotes.

One called it a movie that Al Gore would like, because of its environmentalism, making a cheap shot that forgets that global warming is never mentioned in this movie; another countered that WALL-E was quintessentially conservative, because it criticized the marriage of business and government, missing the entire point of the movie.

Ideologue the Third reported that his 5-year-old child was whining to leave within the first 15 minutes, proving that the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree; another observed that this Disney film was hypocritical for preaching against consumerism, even though, by contract, Disney has exactly zero creative control over a Pixar film.

It’d be worth noting that all of the quoted ridiculous observations come from conservative critics if left-wing pundits weren’t regularly guilty of equal or worse sins.

WALL-E is one of the most elegant arguments for stewardship of our planet in ages — it doesn’t argue that pollution hurts the Earth, rather that pollution intrinsically hurts humanity — and the film serves as one of the best-executed arguments against pursuing easy convenience at any cost.

Each of those arguments apparently clash with simple, narrow-minded conservatism. It may not clash with simple, narrow-minded liberal, if only because they’ll inevitably focus on the simple, surface-level message against pollution, skipping entirely the attacks on the perils of our culture of entitlement.

Simple, narrow-minded ideologues from either side could ever make heads or tails of this movie. Their loss.