WALL-e: Life After The Goldrush

We don't generally cover movies here at Thrasher's Wheat that are non-Neil or not related to music. And especially a children's film by the Disney CORPORATION.

So it may come as a surprise that we're mentioning that Thrashette and I ventured out this weekend to see the film WALL-e. Quite simply, WALL-e is a vision of life after the goldrush.

But the only thing we can really say is that seeing Wall-e may help visualize the post-apocalyptic world that Neil Young sings about in "After The Goldrush" (lyrics analysis).

From Climate Progress review "Wall-E is an eco-dystopian gem — an anti-consumption movie (from Disney!)":

Disney/Pixar’s new hit Wall-E is easily one of the best movie dystopias ever. It ranks with Blade Runner, Brazil, A Clockwork Orange, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the Matrix, Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, and the first two Terminator movies.

I have a couple of reasons for writing about the movie. One is that we can expect to see more environmental dystopias as the painful reality of global warming becomes more and more obvious to all. Wall-E makes clear that even the most brutal satire of our self-inflicted environmental predicament can be a box office success, if it is well done. The second reason is the incredible irony of Disney making this movie.

As a film it is superb, a must see for children and adults. Critically acclaimed, it received a rare 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. The New Yorker’s tough-to-please David Denby writes:

Watching Pixar’s animated film “WALL-E” must be a humbling experience for other filmmakers, because it demonstrates not just the number but the variety of ideas you need to make a terrific movie.

This may be the only major movie ever made that is both a dystopia and anti-utopia. In the dystopic first half, we see a lifeless post-eco-apocalyptic Earth overrun by toxic garbage, which is collected and compacted by our robotic hero, WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth-Class). WALL-E has become sentient by collecting and studying the waste of humanity, including an old tape of the movie Hello Dolly he plays over and over again.

In the anti-utopic second half, the megacorporation Buy ‘N Large had created a seeming paradise for humans on board “Executive Starliners” where every task has become automated. But hundreds of years after what was supposed to be a brief exodus while Earth was cleaned up, humans have become “a flabby mass of peabrained idiots who are literally too fat to walk.” These lazy, overweight video-addicts — whoever could the moviemakers be talking about? — are less human than WALL-E.

Though criticized by some conservatives as anti-capitalist, WALL-E is perhaps best described as one of the most anti-consumption movies ever made. That’s why even Michael Gerson, a Former Bush speechwriter known for his evangelical moralism, loved the movie and saw it as a daring attack on “a culture of consumption.”

As much as I loved the movie, I did find an odd disjunction….

Yes, the movie is a brutal satire on “self-involved consumption.” But if we are looking at who in the world is responsible for self-involved consumption, for the global homogenization of mass consumerism, for instigating the shop-until-you-drop culture at an early age, surely Disney itself would be on the short list.

Our culture is going to undergo a remarkable transformation over the next few decades. Either we will proactively embrace an efficiency, conservation, and clean energy revolution starting in the first term of the next president. Or a culture of scarcity will be forced upon us sometime during Planetary Purgatory (see “Anti-science conservatives must be stopped“). I am not so rosy-eyed as to see the former as a utopia, but the latter will most certainly be a dystopia grim as any ever envisioned.

After leaving the theater, we could somehow hear Neil's song "Mother Earth" wafting about the airwaves. And we mention this in the context that we heard a number of reviewers of the Europe summer tour mention that they were not particularly enamored with Neil's performance of "Mother Earth" at huge outdoor concert festivals. That somehow "Mother Earth" didn't fit into the setlist of vintage songs mixed with the newer Chrome Dreams material.

We would argue that songs such "Mother Earth" and "After The Goldrush" are more relevant than ever. The restless consumer meets Buy-N-Large.

So check out WALL-e. It's not a piece of crap.

Afterall, the inconvenient truth of Greendale is that Sun Green was right.

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