Americans Slapped By WALL-E’s ‘Message’

By Jack Markowitz

WOW-E! How vile the human race is.

Consuming is all we are good for. Or rather, bad for. Because as we consume we ruin. We leave a terrible mess. The planet will be dead if we don’t stop. It may already be too late.

Sound familiar? This is the very cream of environmental extremism.

It is also the moral framework of one of the summer’s better movies, a film “for the whole family.” Sure, bring the kids. Clue them in early on how their parents’ generation is destroying Mother Earth.

Is this too humorless a reaction to “WALL-E?”

The animated fantasy is praised by critics, doing well at the box office, and is entertaining and imaginative. But do even the producers realize how much they are, perhaps unintentionally, promoting an anti-market — even anti-American — world-view? Because the ruined future of “WALL-E” is certainly America.

Skyscraper piles of rubble loom in a perpetual smog. A cute little robot scurries about picking up trash. The energy for its own movements and its nightly video entertainments seems electrical, but that would imply a power plant: how, where, and operated by whom? Don’t ask, don’t spoil the story. On a dehumanized world nothing else moves but a friendly cockroach.

Periodically a spaceship deposits an egg-like robot scouting for sprigs of green, any sign of life. And what a robot. It flies, it hovers, its quick arm shoots explosives — and all without emissions! See how easy it is? If only we dared imagine a world free of “greenhouse gases.” And put our best and brightest to work on it. The laws of physics would fall before them.

Human beings in this future are mere blobs. Junk food addicts lolling in front of TVs. They survive in a spaceship far among the stars, served by robots. Yet who put the spaceship out there if not our feckless species? Don’t ask.

All this is fun of course. The film is overlong but does contains smiles and little shocks of awe for the skills of animation. Plus a toe-tapping sound-track of old songs, curiously enough; nothing futuristic about “Hello, Dolly” and “La Vie en Rose.”

But the moral heart of the entertainment is of stone. And like so much Hollywood product nowadays: a condemnation of the freest people on earth, of our values, the American way, “the system,” never mind that Hollywood itself flourishes in just that profit system.

There is no recognition that human beings live by consuming but also creating, inventing, producing. Is trash piling up and the sky fogging over? These cry for sensible human solutions and free markets are the likeliest to find and apply those solutions.

Generations of kids have formed their ideals of men and women, and of a great and brave America, at the movies. Today, what early disbelief and cynicism seep into the minds of children from flickers of a world wrecked by Mom and Dad?

(c) 2008 Tribune-Review/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.