Wall-E: Liberal propaganda?

You might think Wall-E is just good summer entertainment for kids, said Ben Crair in The New Republic Online, but the animated Pixar film has become the latest battleground in the culture wars. Conservatives, irritated by the film’s depiction of a future Earth destroyed by greed and corporate domination, are denouncing Wall-E as “leftist propaganda,” “Malthusian fear-mongering,” and a “90-minute lecture.” In the film, a charming robot named Wall-E attempts to clean up a ruined Earth buried under discarded consumer products. Humans have fled and now cruise the heavens, fat and happy, in a giant spaceship run by a corporation that pumps them full of liquid fast food, and keeps them wired to iPods and computers. I used to like Pixar movies, said Shannen Coffin in National Review Online, but this not-toosubtle attack on American life reminded me of an animated version of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. How nice for the techno-geeks at Pixar and the film’s distributor, Disney, to “make megamillions off telling us just how greedy, lazy, and destructive we all are.”

You missed the whole point, said Patt Morrison in the Los Angeles Times. Wall-E is the 1984 of the 21st century, and the target of this deeply affecting movie is not its audience but the “soul-shriveling tyranny” of runaway materialism. Audiences are both tickled and horrified by the film’s depiction of the humans of seven centuries hence—obese blobs so narcotized by creature comforts that they cannot move without the aid of flying lounge chairs, and who communicate with the people next to them via e-mail. With wit and visual brilliance, the film warns against being “reduced by comfort and convenience into something less than fully human.”

It’s “one of the most subversive movies I’ve ever seen,” said Rod Dreher in The Dallas Morning News, but Wall-E’s fundamental premise is actually quite conservative. The humans in the film are pathetic because they have succumbed to “their base appetites,” and let themselves be controlled by a totalitarian regime. Wall-E helps rally humans to reclaim the Earth and their own natures, and at the end, “you see that people renew the face of the Earth through their own

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labor, and by taking responsibility for themselves.” To be truly human, the film says, you have to rise above your desires. You have to work. You have to value our civilization’s traditions. It’s a brilliant, sophisticated movie, and as a conservative, I enjoyed every minute of it.