Wall-E comments

(There are some spoilers in this post.)

I was bewildered by the plot point about bone mass. The writers went out of their way to establish that generations of living in low gravity have reduced bone mass to the point that people can no longer stand upright -- until the plot called for them to stand, at which point, they stood. It was especially hard to buy how easily all the humans were standing on Earth at the end; they should have been writhing in agony after reaching Earth. And they definitely should not have been able to walk.

It bewilders me, because they could have avoided the whole problem by not bringing it up in the first place. I'd be quite happy to accept a movie just ignoring the problem. But why explicitly bring up a problem in the script just so they can fail to solve it?

The best part of the movie -- the first forty minutes or so, before the plot leaves the planet's surface -- presents a world in which humans are entirely absent (although the evidence we were once there is all over the place). And it was pretty damn cool, because humanity wasn't the subject of the movie; it's a movie about robots. Then, in the final act, suddenly the plot became human-centric. It's as if the humans writing the film couldn't stand letting the story be centered on non-humans.

The film would have been better if it were indifferent to the fate of the humans. I would have loved it if all the humans had died in the course of the film, but the ending was nonetheless happy because Wall-E and Eve lived happily ever after. (Why should they care what happens to the meat?)



* * *

FAT

A lot of bloggers have been commenting on the politics of Wall-E. On the up side, conservative bloggers hate this film, so gotta love that.

On the down side, it's been getting a lot of criticism from pro-fat blogs, and rightly so. The Chicago Tribune review (via Big Fat Blog) summed up the film's take on fat:

Awaiting the word that Earth is once again habitable, the ship spends year after year in space, sustaining the last remaining humans--blobby, pampered creatures who never get out of their whiz-bang flying loungers long enough to look at what they've become.

My take on this is that although there was annoying fat bigotry built into the film's concept, I've seen much worse. I was able to enjoy the film despite the fat bigotry.

But it's going to depend on one's individual taste. Wall-E's fat characters aren't contemptible, repulsive slobs, like Fat Bastard, nor -- despite the constant sipping of drinks -- are they food-obsessed like Homer Simpson. Instead, they're presented as huge infants: round, helpless, cheerful and friendly. So unlike Jessica, I didn't find it all that wince-able, and enjoyed the film.

Fatshonista points out that Pixar apparently changed the film to make it less anti-fat, compared to its initial conception.

My Pixar friend said that essentially, the idea is that humanity was supposed to spend just 5 years on the luxury spaceship, but got trapped for 700 years, and because of the super-artificial situation (it was meant to be a total vacation to recruit people into going), got dependent in an artificial way. Originally they were apparently designed to be rather more gross and creepy, and had no intelligible lines; both of those were changed by the team working on the movie because of concerns about what it would suggest about fat people.

Now, the equation of sloth + fast food = fatties is still at the heart of this, and is undeniably problematic.

I liked this comment from Rethink:

Pixar tries to suggest in one throw-away moment that the people are fat because they have been in space so long and lost some bone density, but the much clearer message is that they are chunky because they are lazy and eat too much (and several times the characters' large size is used for visual jokes). A clear sign that Pixar recognized the nastiness of their message is that they chose not insult their target audience: kids. There are no children, let alone overweight children, at all on the ship -- we see only babies and chubby adults. [And good luck finding images of any of the chubby characters in Disney's advertising for the film or the film's official website.]

More ironic still is that the film's criticism seems to be levelled at the very folks who are viewing the movie -- you and me, sitting there, doing nothing, watching a screen while consuming buttered popcorn and Junior Mints. The movie wants us to know that mass consumerism will doom this planet and its people. And you can show your support for that message by going out and buying all the Disney tie-in products and toys that will be filling your store shelves, and eventually your landfills, in the next 6-12 months.

I also think this post from Red No. 3, responding to defenders of the film, is good:

....irregardless of what sci-fi talk about bone density was snuck into the film, audiences took the characters to be fat and ultimately the audience interpration matters more culturally than the filmmakers intent. Intent is nice, but if that intent was not effectively communicated to the audience, it doesn't matter. Just look through what the reviews say. From professionals to amateurs, people talking about the film have consistantly identified the future humans as "obese". And of course they do, because that is the visual language the film is using, complete with cues about the characters' gluttony and inactivity.

More fat-and-Wall-E blogging: Professor What If and Feministe.

* * *

GENDER

I haven't seen much discussion of the genderization of the robots in Wall-E. Essentially, Wall-E is presented as male, while Eve is presented as female. Visually, this is done by constructing Wall-E of machinery that resembles construction site equipment -- rusty, dirty, treader tracks and forklifts -- while Eve is rendered to resemble a Macintosh computer -- smooth, curved lines of white plastic. (As methods of making a robot femme goes, it could be much worse. Actually, it's extraordinary they resisted the impulse to either color Eve pink, or to give her a bow or eyelashes.)

I wish the gendering hadn't been done; it would have been wonderful if Pixar had shown a romance that wasn't gendered at all. But still, as Professor What If says, props to Pixar for making Eve tough and strong (she rescues Wall-E several times during the film), for making Wall-E nurturing, and for not making Eve's toughness a threat to Wall-E.

(And in case you're wondering, no, this movie doesn't pass The Bechdel Test.)

* * *

RACE

Oh, and although I'm sure folks will rationalize it ("in the racist Earth society, the people rescued and sent into space were disproportionately white!"), it bothered me that humanity, as presented in Wall-E, is overwhelmingly white. (I think some background characters were people of color; every single human who had a speaking role was white).

In a science fiction movie -- and one that didn't face any real-world casting limitations -- there's no excuse for not presenting humanity as it is. To reflect the actual make-up of humanity, most of the humans in Wall-E should have been Asian, with substantial minorities of Europeans, Africans, and Latin@s.