Wall-E: Anti capitalist or surprisingly subversive?
Wall-E is a wonderful movie, well worth the 98% or so positive rating over at Rotten Tomatoes, but it has the usual Hollywood anti-capitalist overtones (despite being manufactured by one of the largest and most bloated corporations in Hollywood, producers of precisely the mountains of useless junk which, in the movie, Wall-E is consigned to cleaning off the face of the blighted Earth). Or does it?
Seems to me Pixar may have slipped a subversive anti-Communist message past the bleeding heart liberal masses. Given the Randian undertones of The Incredibles and Ratatouille, this is not entirely surprising.
Consider: All property and wealth is owned by a single, central, power -- the Buy-n-Large corporation. Corporation? It has no customers -- all citizens are given all they desire for free. It has no workers, just robots (mostly) without free will. (The only ones who do have obvious free will are not victims of oppression, but are, in fact, the true masterminds behind the civilization -- and, well, our hero and heroine of course.) It has no competition. It has no executives, managers, or workers. There are no unemployed or underemployed. There is no evidence of any economy, money, or exchange going on aboard the Axiom -- all of the bloblike citizens are fed (and fed, and fed...), clothed, housed, and entertained from cradle to grave, for free. They live the ultimate Marxist ideal -- a life without care, struggle, need, or want -- and, as a consequence, a life without purpose or meaning. They are not the Oppressed Proletarian Slaves Of The Capitalist Class; they are the Liberated Workers, who do not actually do, or need to do, any work. Individuality, with all of the conflicts and problems it causes, has been eliminated; fashions change in an instant, conformity is all. The only decisions they must make are how to momentarily distract themselves from the tedium of their unchallenging life.
I find it amusing that many reviewers -- both approvingly leftist and disapprovingly rightist -- accept the world of Wall-E as one of "extreme capitalism" when there is no capitalism in evidence -- there is, after all, no capital! Calling the ruling government a "corporation" no more makes it capitalism than the government of the German Democratic Republic was a democracy. It seems people are often blinded by labels and symbols, instead of looking at the actual facts of the thing. Big shock there.
