I saw Wall-E today for the first time in near two decades. I wanted to watch it again because of its eerie accuracy and dystopian prophecies. Considering the world we now live in, our dystopian stories seem closer than ever.
Premise
This is a cute Disney movie about two robots that fall in love, but the backdrop to this story is one of total climate apocalypse, apathy about corporate take-over and a world that is full of garbage. In fact, it’s full to the brim with it. Efforts to ‘clean up’ the world fail. As a result the people on board the ship stay there indefinitely.
Wall-E is one of the robots whose job it is to clean up the world. But while most of his robot peers have been dismantled or run out of batteries, he’s been left to do the impossible work on his own, not realizing that the mission was abandoned. It’s his job, so he does it.
When he meets Eevee he is enamoured. It’s another robot! It’s someone! And she’s different than he is. So he does what he can to be near her and to protect her.
Aspects of Wall-E I Find Frightening
Wall-E was released in 2008, so we’re 15 or so years removed from the “warning”.
Back in 2008 there wasn’t as big a push about climate change, but the landfills, the garbage, the talk of plastics and the talk of “corporate overlords” was everywhere. Here’s everything Wall-E warns us of, predicts, or asks us to be conscious of:
- Internet addiction: In Wall-E, everyone aboard the ship that humanity lives on is glued to a screen. In fact they rarely do anything else. We see one example of a woman who comes away from this for one minute and is astounded to notice a pool. They’re also ignorant of what life on earth was like, because it’s been 700 years or longer and they’ve had no need to learn of things like dancing, or soil, or farming. In a way this reminds me of the way people are under-educated and misinformed in today’s world. It’s also ringing alarm bells about the future of the internet, VR, and what this will mean.
- Unending garbage: This is the major theme of Wall-E really. We see the world becomes so toxic it’s uninhabitable. This is by the amount of plastic and rubbish we let build up. The mid 2000s was when we first started learning about this and it continues to happen to this day. Instead we’re learning that recycling programs are sending plastics to the trash and sending trash overseas. The ocean is still filling up with plastics and no one has a solution for it.
- Corporate takeover: While I believe this was a shorthand for Walmart, in today’s world it would be Amazon. The thing about corporations with this much money is they don’t have to face up to the harm they’re contributing to if they can point fingers at someone else doing the same thing. In Wall-E we also see examples of people eating fast food for nutrition. This points to another corporate problem wherein unhealthy food is cheaper than nutritious food.
- Robots performing manual labour: In today’s world, automation is a hot topic. Not only are AI doing more and more intellectual labour, our world is also building robots for a variety of reasons. Some of these are practical, and other reasons are companionship based.
Truthfully, I don’t know if we are about to move away from the nightmare(s) or dive right into them. There’s a real sense of collapse in the air, and people are both begging for change and doing nothing to change things. On another hand I think there was a point when it was all reversible and we let the chance go. We’re living out late stage capitalism and it’s a terrifying place to be. Safety nets are collapsing and so is our hope and faith in systems. What we’re actually walking into could be terrifying and predictable, or a mystery. As someone whose seen a lot of Black Mirror episodes, it’s hard to embrace this future we’re headed towards when it looks too much like not just one, but several dystopias.
Two Robots in Love Save Humanity
The most interesting aspect to this particular story though is that the fate of humanity falls onto two robots: One fulfilling her intended purpose and another following his heart. I know these are two very mechanical and “one job” robots, but I thought about it. Humans sometimes believe their purpose is to serve a company that pays them. In the film AI a robot boy’s only real goal is to find his parents, to find love and a family. It’s a built part of his programming to be a companion. He spends hundreds of years searching.
Maybe if we lose faith in each other and ourselves, something we create will get to do it for us. Then again isn’t that the argument for why we might live in a “matrix?” That we lost the war on climate change and built an artificial one to see if they could solve it?
Solutions
I’m just as caught up in this cycle as anyone else. It’s hard to step out of it when I’m only rewarded for pushing us towards collapse and never when I pull back and say no. We need available systems to help us change the future. But it seems like the systems don’t want to change. The mind fuck sometimes is that we’re allowed to ask it to, but how often do people want to? Most people don’t vote for change. It’s status quo or bust. Busting, I suppose, is what we’re doing until something better than us can steer our ship away from apocalypse.
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