Cleaning Up Our Mess: A case study on Wall-E and what may lie ahead for us
Pop culture offers many different views of what our potential future looks like. With that, we as a culture love to compare our trajectory to the different views we watch and read about. Whether it’s Blade Runner or Interstellar, we can envision their version of the future because they’re written as a commentary on present-day events and trends. Stories about the future wouldn’t work if we couldn’t connect them to today. Some though are viewed as more prescient than others. The two that seem to come up most often when talking about the future are 1984 and Brave New World. These are broad stories that take an all-encompassing look at how society will operate in the future. While they focus on individuals the themes of the books are all about macro-trends. 1984 serves as a warning about government encroachment and the rise of fascism through the use of technology. Big Brother would be constantly watching our every move and governing our every thought. Brave New World on the other hand is about how we would be pacified as a culture through the use of technology and pharmaceuticals. Everything in life is taken care of so there are no wants or needs. All traces of personality are erased as people just go through life on autopilot. There’d be no need for fascism since everyone has already essentially given up their free will to live technologically domesticated lives. It’s probably not hard to guess where I think we’re headed today. Social media is the first phase in which we pacify ourselves with technology. We still have needs, but when we’re not taking care of those needs, we’re opting to tune out of the world and get all of our dopamine from our feeds. The attention economy relies on us all to be on autopilot blindly consuming content. Eventually, new technologies and drugs will only increase the amount of time we spend on autopilot. While all of this does mirror Brave New World, I think there’s another parable that better fits our current trajectory, one that you may not be expecting.
Wall-E like most Pixar films isn’t just made to keep kids entertained. Behind all of the incredible animation, there’s a heartfelt story about a character's quest for love and belonging. Wall-E is the last of his kind, a robot meant to clean up an inhospitable and trashed Earth. Humans left the planet hoping to return after enough time had passed for the planet to heal and Wall-E’s kind had done their job. When the movie opens it’s obvious that their plan didn’t work. We’re treated to a silent montage of Wall-E doing his best but barely making a dent in the toxic state of the world. A single plant triggers another robot, EVE, whose job is to notify humans when it’s safe to return to Earth. Long story short Wall-E falls for EVE and follows her back to the humans. What Wall-E finds when he follows EVE is a far cry from the humans that left Earth. They’re obese, unable to walk, and spend their entire days in floating chairs in front of a screen. Communication is largely done through these screens and there’s hardly any meaningful interaction between them. Like Brave New World, all of their needs are taken care of and with that, they’ve become shells of themselves. While the arc of Wall-E finding love is entertaining and moving, what’s even more fascinating is the backdrop for that story. It’s a story that touches on a lot of current issues with humans abandoning their home planet and eventually doing nothing but consuming content.
Climate change sets the tone for the whole movie. The Earth in Wall-E is a barren wasteland filled with skyscrapers of trash. Humans used up all the resources until nothing was left and the air was too toxic to breathe. Instead of dealing with the consequences, they decided to leave. This is all too real for us living through the 2020s. While I don’t think we’re going to have to leave the planet anytime soon, we are seeing the effects of an extractive economy on the environment. We’re currently living through the warmest winter on record, which would seem shocking if we didn’t see headlines like that daily. Yet, none of those headlines seem to affect how our economy is run. We still push for infinite growth, so we always need more resources, which leads to more destruction and more waste. Wall-E is indicative of the type of technologies we employ to deal with crises like this. We love to create Bandaids instead of choosing to slow down to create new economic or value systems. It’s far too easy to imagine one of the tech companies praising themselves for introducing a robot to clean up all the trash that they’re responsible for. Another believable picture is that of one of these companies and its CEO building a ship to leave. Billionaires are all already trying to be the first ones to establish themselves in space. Right now it’s for tourism and mining (more extraction and more capitalism), but they also have their eyes set on establishing colonies. They all want a Plan B because they know what they’re doing to the planet. Honestly, I’d rather be stuck here breathing in toxic fumes than live in a Mars colony with Elon. Bezos has Blue Origin. Branson has Virgin Galactic. We may not know about it but there are definitely plans in place for a ship like the one we see in Wall-E. All of these people would rather spend billions trying to get off the planet than trying to save it.
Wellness is another key theme here. When we get introduced to the humans of Wall-E’s time, things aren’t going well. Their bodies have essentially become useless as they’ve elected to spend all of their time floating in chairs and have their whole lives automated. I don’t want this to become a debate about body shaming a Pixar movie. I understand that people have different genetics and health issues. We shouldn’t value anyone based on their weight, but we can look at the contributing factors in a non-blaming or derogatory way. Obesity has been rising for decades in the US. This is not any one individual's fault. We live in a society that has placed priority on profits over health. We’re constantly being pushed food that isn’t good for us because it’s cheap and easy to manufacture. What we see in Wall-E is just the logical extension of that. If a corporation was running a ship they wouldn’t spend the effort to create nutritionally dense food. They’d just do whatever’s easiest, even if that made people sick and unhealthy. It’s not just the food that’s making people sick though. People today aren’t moving as much because there are fewer and fewer reasons to move. We’re living increasingly sedentary lives because the whole economy is built around our addictions to screens. When you’re constantly scrolling you’re not going out and doing things. Corporations aren’t incentivized to have you move if all of their money is made through screens. Wall-E also shows where this trend can lead. If this is the life you’re used to, it’s only natural that eventually you’d spend your whole day online.
Spending your whole life in a screen also has real impacts on relationships and your life. It’s obvious from looking at the people of Wall-E that they don’t have rich social lives. How could you if you don’t even look at one another? This links back to what I’ve written about before with phone culture and how it disrupts the way we relate to one another. Meaningful relationships require you to spend undistracted time with each other. The problem is now we’re always just one notification or app away from distraction. Those distractions are more disruptive as more content is pushed on us, and we become more addicted to that content. While the factors behind the screen addiction in Wall-E aren’t necessarily capitalism, money isn’t being made off their screen time, the results are the same. They don’t spend time with one another despite being next to each other. Aside from a few small interactions, they’re isolated to their screen where all they do is take in content. They have no real lives to speak of. Their lives are what’s ever on their screens. This doesn’t just affect their relationships but also their lives in general. I’ve heard parents and teachers discuss the trends they see with kids today, and it’s concerning. Kids spend immense amounts of time binging content even when they’re with their friends. Real hobbies are becoming rare because they’d rather watch someone else do something than do it themselves. It’s easier to get the cheap dopamine from watching something than the more fulfilling dopamine of doing something. This is exactly the future Wall-E envisions where it’s about watching instead of doing.
The future hasn’t happened yet. No author or filmmaker knows for sure what lies ahead for us. All sorts of developments could happen that would put us on a different path. What’s more, is that this is all from my lens. I spend maybe too much time thinking about the planet, our health, how we spend our time, and how we connect. My worst fears are all of us spending our days not moving, never thinking, not connecting, and watching the world burn. It’s hard to say that trends aren’t moving in that direction, but it doesn’t have to be our future. Talented and brilliant people are working on solutions to climate change that don’t involve us abandoning our home planet. Health and Wellness are some of the fastest-growing industries in the world. Plenty of people have rich and fulfilling lives away from their screens. Every day you see people strengthening their connections with one another, even through technology. I believe in people. At the same time though, I think we should look at stories like Brave New World and Wall-E because they can be motivational. By seeing what a potential future may look like we can feel more urgency to make sure that future doesn’t happen. We’re still writing our story, let’s do our best to make sure it’s a good one.