Scientists tell us that the neurological mechanisms of memory appear to be same as the mechanisms by which we anticipate, and plan for the future. It's one of those ideas that, once you hear it, immediately makes sense. What is politics, after all, than controlling the future by retelling the past in a way that distinguishes "us" from "them"? The term "identity politics" always strikes me in the same way as the phrase "fiery conflagration"; what other kind is there?
Wall-E is a movie with a political message. But no political message has the power to persuade, even if it is wrapped in a story. A story needs to illustrate a theory.
Plots require driving forces. Good vs Evil obviously is a way to set characters against each other, but it's merely a device. It is a mechanical detail, it has no power to move people outside the story. It's not as if somebody is going to leave the theater and decide to change his ways for better or worse based on an object lesson experienced by fictional characters. Effective stories don't work that way. The obvious environmental and anti-corporatist themes of the movie are really just pro-forma. Wall-E is against trashing the environment, but so is Exxon. It's tempting to point out that Exxon's nuanced view of its own actions is self-serving, but no more self serving than most of us are over our own environmental footprint. Exxon makes money providing dirty energy to people who want a clean world, so long as somebody else is doing the cleaning.
Wall-E is against corporate greed and excess, but I'm sure Ken Lay would agree, provided that the proper operation of the market is excluded from the definition of "greed and excess."
It's not enough for an environmentally themed movie to espouse environmental themes, any more than advocating Good over Evil gives a movie moral weight. These days everybody is an environmentalist, even those who profit from pollution. In order to persuade, a story has to explain. In order to explain, it has to define the problem in a way that connects with everyday experience. That is where the power of as story -- even a fantastic story -- comes from. It has to strike a familiar chord.
A good story needs a good theory, and a good theory needs a good problem. Wall-E chooses what may be the mother of all day-to-day problems.
When we read popular explanations of Buddhism, the very first "Noble Truth" is usually called "suffering". Yet, like "good" and "evil", every life entails suffering, for most people, most days do not entail much that could without exaggeration be called "suffering". "Dukkha", the Pali word represented by "suffering" covers a lot more ground; it could equally be translated as "dissatisfaction". On the other hand, "dukkha" is also more specific. An athlete who is in training may experience pain or discomfort, but an expected and appropriate discomfort. Dukkha implies that there is something not right, something that really ought to be fixed. It needn't be big, in fact largeness has its compensations. "Suffering" has a pleasingly theatrical quality to it. It's the triviality of day to day dissatisfaction that is galling, and much evil is done by inflating that ordinary dissatisfaction into something more cosmically significant.
Critics detect an apparent discontinuity between the first and second half of Wall-E, as the movie seems to shift gears and themes. The first half is a sweet love story; the second half is about the liberation of humanity, which has been reduced to passive, bed-ridden consumers warehoused on a space station, far from the problems of Earth. But a love story -- between robots? Does that make sense?
It actually does. Love stories are not about procreation and the physical drives behind it. They are rooted in the most common experience of any settled adult life: discovering that what you are doing with your life, day in and day out, isn't satisfying or meaningful anymore. Love stories are about finding out you are maimed and becoming whole again. In the great movie musicals (which, sadly, don't include Hello Dolly), the power of love for the other is symbolized by characters spontaneously bursting into unimaginably creative and ecstatic dance; we see this echoed in Wall-E as well.
Wall-E, the little robot, has been picking up trash for seven hundred years. This automatically confers on him a kind of nobility, like all characters who take care of what others ought to, but are unwilling to. The sleek robot EVE, likewise has a noble purpose: to seek out and discover life. But neither is fulfilled, nor can either fulfill his purpose, until they have set that purpose aside for the sake of the other. Until they do they are just machines, mere components of a larger machine that isn't working. The second half of the story is really the same story recapitulated. Love stories are, after all, fundamentally stories of awakening, of hearing the call of something outside yourself. Once you hear that call, you can never be happy the way you used to be. It's like the old movie song, "love lifts us up where we belong." Who knows if that could possibly be true? Certainly we all love, and few of us feel we are where we belong. But it is a potent image. Perhaps we don't love perfectly or selflessly enough to deserve it.
Powerful messages never sound like this, "exploitation is bad." A powerful message is one that explains while it passes judgement.
This is the environmental message of Wall-E: our problems are rooted in our passivity. They come from our unquestioning acceptance of our lot as workers, and our unquestioning faith as consumers to the formulas for offered by capitalism for achieving happiness. The anti-corporate message is likewise powerful: we've become servants of a system that is supposed to serve us.