The Abolition of Man, in my opinion one of C. S. Lewis’s most important works, begins thus: “I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance of elementary text books.” The same may be said, in our day, of children’s movies. While Lewis proceeded to challenge and refute the particular elementary text book he had in mind, my aim in calling attention to children’s movies is rather to commend one of the latest: Pixar’s WALL-E.
Apparently a number of “conservatives” have decried WALL-E as leftist or environmentalist propaganda. I find this rather misguided. For one thing, conservatives should maintain a healthy concern for the environment. We should conserve not only our heritage and traditions, but also our natural resources.
At a deeper level, though, I see WALL-E as a penetrating social critique in the manner of Huxley’s Brave New World. It’s like Brave New World light, projected onto the big screen and dispensing with the Shakespeare references. A couple of key differences: WALL-E’s dystopian future society seems to consist of people who are less vigorous and (consequently?) less obsessed with sexual pleasure than those in Brave New World. This may have something to do with the nature of the film’s target audience (children). Whatever the case, I think that judging from the direction our present-day society is headed—the direction the West in general is headed—Huxley’s dystopia is more plausible in this regard. With respect to another key difference, however, WALL-E seems closer to the mark. Whereas in Brave New World there is a rigidly defined caste system, the future society in WALL-E appears to embody egalitarianism (although it is difficult to tell, owing to the film’s focus on robots as opposed to humans—at any rate, the only effective distinction between humans that I picked up on was that between the captain of the spaceship and the others). Everyone wears the same clothes, drinks the same meals (they have progressed beyond eating), uses the same technology, etc., etc. Equality of conditions has been achieved, greatness has been extinguished. In this regard, WALL-E is more in tune with current trends and leanings than Brave New World. (For a futuristic story focused especially on radical egalitarianism and where it may lead us if unchecked, see Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron.)
As in Brave New World, the people in WALL-E are radically dependent upon technology. They are constantly carried around by hovering armchairs, constantly occupied and entertained by virtual screens, constantly pampered by gadgets and robots, nearly to the point at which they need not move their bodies at all. Thus they have all of them become obese—this should ring a bell. But even more unsettling than the shape of their bodies is their utter dependency on machines. They can do nothing without them. Creator has become subject to creation, and inventor to invented. One may be reminded of a certain dialogue in The Matrix Reloaded between Neo and some other guy:
Councillor Hamann: . . . when I look at these machines I can't help thinking that in a way we are plugged into them.
Neo: But we control these machines; they don't control us.
Councillor Hamann: Of course not. How could they? The idea is pure nonsense. But it does make one wonder . . . just what is control?
Neo: If we wanted, we could shut these machines down.
Councillor Hamann: Of course. That's it. You hit it. That's control, isn't it? If we wanted we could smash them to bits. Although, if we did, we'd have to consider what would happen to our lights, our heat, our air . . .
Dependency aside, what is perhaps most disturbing in WALL-E, as in Brave New World, is the state of the people’s souls. Their souls possess a certain flatness, a lack of interest and vitality. They are spiritually “impoverished” in the way of the students Allan Bloom describes in the first part of The Closing of the American Mind. Passion, love, risk, sacrifice, intellectual endeavor—these things have been almost entirely forgotten. We cannot help but feel disgust with the people’s complacency, their incomprehensible ability to be satisfied by lives spent on hovering armchairs. Yet there are those, like Mr. Bloom, who feel the same disgust (something reminiscent of Nietzsche’s nausea) in view of the average American’s acceptance of comfort, entertainment, and petty material pursuits as the ends—the mock telos—of life. Like Faust in the beginning of Goethe’s play, we have not touched the heights and depths of human experience. Unlike Faust, we don’t even know there are heights and depths to be touched. We resemble those in WALL-E more than we would like to admit.
The principal aim of dystopia, as I see it, is to shock and appall a society by projecting its prospective future in vivid detail and to spur it thereby to change its course accordingly. I do hope that we heed the warnings of WALL-E, along with Brave New World, “Harrison Bergeron” and the like, before it is too late.
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