ExpanDrive

Slate talks about Wall-E today, and they’ve made me angry.

http://www.slate.com/id/2195126/

This is a very bad representation of the movie’s themes. In Wall-E, the environment didn’t collapse because people were fat and lazy. In fact, the movie makes pretty clear that people didn’t get fat until they’d been living in space for hundreds of years. This progression is shown several times (think of the successive captains’ portraits). It’s well-established science that you will get fat and lose bone mass floating around in space. The movie explicitly states that the Axiom’s denizens have grown obese under the effects of micro-gravity (it’s unclear why this would be, since the Axiom appears to have artificial gravity, but it is stated in the dialogue, so we’ll have to take their word for it) and more dramatically, technology. It may be true that some people are genetically predisposed to being obese, but if nobody has to walk anywhere anymore, everybody is going to get fat.

And everybody does get fat, but that’s a symptom, not a cause. The movie’s link between “obesity and environmental collapse” is much more circumspect and thoughtful than the Slate author insists it is when he says “Wall-E tells us that if we don’t change the way we live, we’ll all get really fat and destroy the world”. That chain of events actually happens in the opposite order, so finding the idea that “we gain weight and the Earth suffers” in the movie is bordering on fabrication. The same bad habits caused the environmental catastrophe and the bloating of humanity, but to suggest that the blame is laid at the feet of the genetically obese is a deliberate misreading.

Earth becomes uninhabitable because humans are wasteful, negligent, and encouraged into over-consumption by the giant corporation that also serves as their government, not because they’re fat; we’re even shown that they’re not fat when they leave Earth. No amount of FUD is going to change that very obvious (maybe too obvious) thematic statement from the creators. You can argue with it, but don’t don’t raise straw men and invent themes that just aren’t there in order to more enhance your offense. If you see the movie and come out with the idea that Pixar is decrying compulsive consumerism exclusively because it will make us all fat, then I will suggest you are missing the point entirely. If you come out thinking that Pixar believes obese people are destroying the Earth, I will begin to judge negatively your comprehension skills.

Tags: fat, slate, wall-e