I haven’t been posting or commenting much because I have just gotten through a Little League season with four children on four different teams. It has been baseball every night except Sunday or rainy days.
I will post about the season, and baseball in general, soon.
In the meantime, just a short note about the film WALL-E, which I took the children to last week. Basically, the rave reviews you have read are not exaggerations; the movie is an instant classic: intelligent, prophetic, funny, and beautifully rendered.
As you may know, it has generated some hostility from the Big Box Right, who see it correctly as a criticism of American consumerism and capitalism run amok.
And my thumbs-up for WALL-E runs counter to my general antipathy to stories about anthropomorphized machines, a hostility which weakened a bit when I encountered R2D2 in the Star Wars films. But WALL-E is so fine I was able to overlook my fundamental objection to the main plot, which is pretty much Robots in Love.
Anyway, just wondering if any of you have seen it, and what you thought..
–Daniel Nichols
I’ve neither seen it nor read enough of the controversy to know any more than that it exists. But the movie’s got two strikes against it for me: one, I share your antipathy to anthropomorphized machines, and two, computer animation is sort of vaguely off-putting to me.
Wall-E totally looks like the robot from “Short Circuit”… minus the cheesy 80′s style of course
I poked around on the web yesterday looking for comments. I find some conservatives really liking it, including a few who surprised me, like Jonah Goldberg of National Review, who is definitely no sympathizer with the CetT-Wendell Berry-et.al. folks, others balking at the socio-political angle. This guy at the Mises Institute must be the epitome of what you’re talking about, Daniel. I’ve only read the first few paragraphs, but the dude seems to be seriously humor-challenged. In fact if the piece weren’t actually on the Mises.org web site I might suspect satire: “editor-in-chief of The Rational Argumentator“?!
Forgot, links are more or less invisible: “This guy at the Mises Institute” is a link.
I’ve seen similar reviews at conservative movie sites I read, and in the Tory press. I’m looking forward to Wall-E coming to Aberdeen, but my anticipation as not as ardent as it is for Dark Knight. I’ve seen trailers for the latter, but none as of yet for Wall-E. I’ve always discounted clearly politically motivated bad reviews ever since that movie about the woman who holes up in a cave in a desert and dies during WWII was thoroughly trashed in the Tory papers as unpatriotic and hostile to WWII, so I didn’t see it, and then when it came on TV years later, it was a fantastic movie.
I’m slightly puzzled by the Dark Knight phenomenon. Coincidentally, I saw Batman Begins a couple of weeks ago–we happened to catch a few minutes of it on tv, and it looked like pretty good entertainment, so we rented it a couple of weeks later when we felt like having some undemanding entertainment. And it was enjoyable in those terms, but not something I’d get excited about. But I’m reading of people standing in line overnight for tickets.
The only movie I may see in a theater anytime soon is the new X-Files movie. I’m prepared to be disappointed. I’ll wait for Wall-e on dvd.
Wall-E hasn’t reached these shores yet. I noticed yesterday in ASDA, though, that Wall-E costumes for children have arrived.
It isn’t antipathy I feel for anthropomorphized machines, just boredom. I guess I agree with your description Daniel but just couldn’t bring myself to care much at all about the robots.
I really, really liked the vulgar sight gag with Wall-E scooping up trash, trembling with effort, and then expelling a compressed version of what he had “eaten”. Sophomoric jokes rarely impress me, but that one did.
I hope to get around to reading some of the conservatives froth about the movie.
Daniel, I’d like to hear more about the baseball….
It is true that computer animation is pretty bad at humans, who always look like they are made of plastic. And it’s not so good at organic life. But it is very good at things like machines, toys, water, cityscapes, and in this one impressive spacescapes.
And the character WALL-E is so engaging that it was easy to forget the antipathy toward emotional machines, or at least relegate it to the back of my mind. Think of him as the uber R2D2.
My ruminations on The Game are finished; I should finid time to type it and send it off in the next day or so…
“like plastic”–yeah, exactly. It’s like there’s a sort of synthetic surface on everything.
Here
is Barbara Nicolosi’s take on WALL-E. I frequently disagree with her specific opinions
although I like her principles.
And here
is Stephen Greydanus (National Catholic Register).
Unlike the Mises guy, he understands that Swiftian satire
is not meant to be realism.
No point complaining that it’s physiologically impossible for horses to talk.
Mrs Nicolosi’s review is an example of the over-reactive Big Box Right’s take on the movie, even if she did come down solidly favorable. I mean, to call such a sweet and hopeful tale “cynical” is mind-boggling. I think maybe the satire just hits a little too close to home for some folks. The space ship is just an exaggerated take on a visit to Wal Mart. And as for over-analysis, hey, it is just a cartoon. What none of the defensive conservatives seem to note is that the infantilized humans are not portrayed as evil, only foolish and lazy, and in the end they recolonize earth and rediscover their humanity. The closing credits have a “history” of the recolonization, done in a rough parallel to historic art styles. Curiously, it ends with Impressionism, which was the last style of art that valued beauty.
Greydanus’ review was much better; he got the movie evidently.
The objections to the film almost all are a variation on “they are criticizing the American Way of Consumption! How dare they! This is just leftist propaganda!”
Of course, none of this rings true to readers of C&T, which made the same criticisms throughout its brief history…
Oh, and the director is a Catholic.
At the outset, I should identify myself as an unabashed Pixar enthusiast. CET folks might also enjoy Cars which, viewed in a certain frame of mind, might have been written by James Howard Kunstler.
I’m not so sure there is much of a real controversy about this film on the right (or anywhere else). To the extent I’m aware of it, it seems like one of those phony disputes the are often set up on shows like Crossfire, Bill O’Reilly, or, going way back, Morton Downey, Jr. but are not actually found outside the media hothouse.
What I liked about the film was that the overwhelming majority of the story was conveyed by gesture. The vocabulary of the robots was very limited but so much was conveyed by movement and expression.
I don’t share Maclin’s distaste for computer animation (or anthropomorphicized machines). In my view, it’s is no less artistic for having been created on a computer. The effort that goes into a Pixar production is as painstaking as the cell-by-cell animation that preceded it. One always get’s the sense of that watching a Pixar film. There is so much attention to detail, even detail that is almost bound to be overlooked that one can only conclude the creators are taking real and evident joy in their creation. Their films are not just some knock-off cartoons to fed to the indifferent masses. They stand as art in their own right.
So I enjoyed WALL-E immensely, the slapstick routines of the robots, the touching expressions of quizzical wonder. As to the anit-consumerist meta-narrative, it seemed to me to be a mild caution as to what might be if…
As always, I’m very wary of the folks who find the trumpet blast and clarion call of the prohpetic in what was essentially a light-hearted enterprise. To the degree that it is foolish to get tweaked about such a mild rebuke of some of our sillier habits so too is foolhardy to turn it into a Jeremiad.
Over the weekend I read Ross Douthat’s review of it in National Review. He liked it. The review is not online (except for subscribers, and since private property is sacred and all I won’t avail myself of the copy/paste option), but he praises it for, among other things, making a socio-political statement in a way that isn’t narrowly topical and partisan.
My college-age daughter was recommending it, too. I’m not motivated enough to go to the theater, but I put it on our Netflix q–along with The Incredibles, another often-recommended Pixar thing. I haven’t even managed to get myself to the new X-Files movie, although that’s partly because I don’t have much hope of it being really good.
I don’t have any philosophical or principled objection to computer animation, btw. I just don’t much like the way it looks. As for anthro machines: the further from reality the movie as a whole gets, the less that stuff bugs me, so I’d probably accept it in a cartoon.
What *really* bugs me is not so much silly anthropomorphism as the serious “Oh my goodness we created this machine and now it’s suddenly become conscious and is (a)about to kill or enslave us all because we aren’t running the world properly (b) a victim of discrimination (c) in love with my girlfriend and writing poetry for her (d) getting wackily drunk on WD-40.”
In effect, the machine just becomes a psychologically odd human being, with the whole question of what consciousness is and how it comes about totally ignored. Very unimaginative. The only really interesting machine of this sort, in my opinion, is HAL, precisely because he doesn’t just become a human being.
Mac,
Frederica Mathews Greene reviews it on NRO more or less favorably as well. I get the impression that most of the ‘conservatives hate WALL-E’ columns were more or less pre-written. It’s hard to find much conservative distaste for the film in the usual places. Sometimes I get the impression that there are certain propositions that liberals wish conservatives believed and vice versa.
In general, anthropomorphed animals or machines in animation tend to be stand-ins for human archetypes which avoids the whole machine-becomes-man dilemma you mention. It is a problem for WALL-E because the machines and the humans are more or less co-existent which may account for the more or less de-humanization of the humans in the story. Not in a mean way but into hapless, blobby, infantilized consumers.
I guess it was a bit of a problem in Ratatouille which I also loved (the Parisian sets were amazing). Cars didn’t have humans but wound up as a sort of tribute to small town life and the value of family.
..see if I can turn off the italics… WordPress doesn’t give me the ability to edit comments so I can’t go in and fix it.
I think Daniel’s right that there is such a thing as the Big-Box Right, for whom criticism of anything associated with capitalism is the same thing as embracing socialism, but they’re more in the libertarian wing of the right.
Mac,
In my mind I guess there is some question as to whether Libertarianism is its own thing or if it properly belongs to conservatism. I’m trying to pare back to a simple definition of conservatism because I guess that’s basically what I am.
As ever, I tend to doubt the existence of things which seem to me to be strawmen. I remember seeing articles about the conservative dislike of WALL-E before I ever read a word about it (and I do have tendency to hang out in the more conservative corners of the web).
A different example: I’m often told that if I will but travel to the deep south or the midwest and I will find vast herds of ‘Christian fundamentalists’ who disbelieve evolution and think the earth is 5000 years old. Problem is, I’ve been to both places and have yet to find a specimen. I’m not saying there isn’t the odd congregation here and there that thinks this way but it’s hardly a vast herd.
To the extent that that position exists at all I think it is almost always as a sort of pugnacious, thumb-in-the-eye response to folks who view them as some sort of roadside attraction. ‘Course the earth is only 5000 years old, bible says so, right here, add up all the days since Genesis. Plain as day. Now go away and stop bothering me about chimpanzees and atheism.
And I think this explains Big Box Conservatism to the extent that it is observed in nature. It’s a sort of knee jerk reaction that is based not so much on a genuine belief in, say, the goodness of strip malls but more in a dislike or distrust of the know-it-all, busybody, holier-than-thou messenger.
I suppose there is a sort of Fatalistic Conservative that maybe doesn’t much care for strip malls but also doesn’t care for things like ‘snob zoning’. To some extent, I guess I fall into that camp. I might not like environmental destruction but I tend not to trust government solutions for it. My thinking is, if you are worried about global warming, then stop putting out carbon. Anyone can do that and I think they would if that was truly the worry. One doesn’t need the government to tell you to stop if you’ve concluded it’s a bad thing. It’s like a fat man waiting for the government to tell him to go on a diet.
Of course, this Fatalistic Conservative is all too likely to tell the fellow on the phone from Pew Research that, of course the earth is 5000 years old. Any fool knows that…
The problem with placing libertarianism in the “conservative” camp is that “libertarian” is just an alternate spelling of “liberal.” Indeed, the whole “liberal-conservative” debate is just a minor dispute between left-wing and right-wing liberals, and this has become more true in the last 40 years, when any genuine conservatism disappeared into the current movement of disaffected liberals now known as “conservatives.”
This is not to say that there is no virtue in libertarianism, but it is important to identify where its virtues lie. Further, libertarianism itself is not a monolithic movement, buy has left-right divisions. Prior to Marx, “libertarianism” was an alternate name for socialism, not indeed the “state socialism” (or more accurately, the state capitialism”) of Marx, but the usufruct property socialism of Proudhon. The progress of libertarianism in some ways mirrors the progress of its socialist roots. As socialism became an apology for state collectivization, libertarianism became an apology for corporate collectives. Both promised a “withering away of the state” in theory, and a geometrical expansion of its powers in practice.
What is the real criteria for “conservatism”? My old professor, Mel Bradford had a pretty rule. In the days when politicians were judged by whether they were “hard” or “soft” on communism, he said “My criteria for a man is whether he is hard or soft on the wheel.” I am not quite that paleo-, but my own criteria is whether a man is hard or soft on the Enlightenment. If one accepts the Enlightenment definitions of man, knowledge, politics, society, and economics, one cannot be a conservative; a “Lockean” or “Kantian” conservative is a contradiction in terms.
I saw Wall-E this weekend and found it charming, if a bit repetitive and simplistic. But Buy-n-Large, I enjoyed the film, even from a “conservative” veiwpoint.
I think it was always more an alliance than a merger between libertarianism and conservatism, based on a shared hostility to collectivism. They really have very different philosophical roots. I get the impression lately that the alliance is pretty fractured, with libertarians emphasizing social liberalism (sexual freedom etc.) more, and the more philosophically grounded sort of conservative becoming more critical of capitalism. I’ve seen libertarians express the kind of spitting hostility toward social conservatives that you would normally find at the Daily Kos etc.
I don’t think young-earth creationists are all that hard to find in evangelical circles here in the south. My impression is no doubt influenced by the fact that there’s one in my family.
I cross-posted with you, John–mine is a reply to Christopher, not to you.
Although I frequently describe myself as conservative-for-lack-of-a-better-word, I don’t have much heart for the intra-conservative debate about what constitutes real conservatism. There have been a lot of discussions here about whether “conservative,” “liberal,” “right,” and “left” even have meaning, or useful meaning. I think they do, but in a limited and conditional way. I don’t think it’s possible to give them fixed and precise definitions because they indicate relative rather than fixed positions.
I don’t, for instance, find the acceptance of *some* of the Enlightenment legacy to be incompatible with conservatism. You could say I’m soft on the Enlightenment, which doesn’t of course mean I “accept the Enlightenment definitions of…” etc. I think it was a year or so ago, before I gave up talking about this stuff almost completely on my blog, that I appropriated the term “liberal conservative” for myself.
It was not for nothing that I tossed out the young earth creationist example as a mostly mythical being. While in the military I was thrown in with many folks who nominally belonged to various sects that held simlar beliefs. What I noticed was that however literally a given text was understood at the outset of a conversation it invariably took on many new and non-literal meanings as the conversation wore on.
This is not the sort of thing to be teased out from a sociologist’s questionnaire during a telephone poll. It’s also not the sort of thing one discovers in passing, in my case I had to be confined on a ship at sea to figure some of this out. But there was a very real ‘us against them’ sentiment that I took to be a sort of crude affection for their families, communities, and traditions. The common thread always seemed to be an adherence to a creed held only locally and proudly against all others. I found that admirable but, admittedly, it’s only anecdotal.
To John’s point, I had better clarify what I mean by ‘conservative’. I mean temperament rather than a prescribed philosophy. This manifests itself at various times as a vague anti-collectivism although one that does not extend towards monastic or local communities. Sometimes it is, similar to my creationist shipmates, a stubborn preference for the known, the traditional, and the understood against the unknown, the novel, and the inscrutable. It is not hyper-rational but it prefers things to be sensible. It is not pacific by definition or necessity (though I am) but it is not outwardly aggressive. It is content to be still.
What all that works around to in politics is, I suppose, a strong disaffection for one party and an only slightly milder one for the other and an indifference to it in general.
I don’t have any philosophical or principled objection to computer animation, btw. I just don’t much like the way it looks.
Mac,
I can think of no better remedy for this than an immediate viewing of Ratatouille. Pixar raised the level of their artistry by several notches with that one I thought
(although the landscapes in Cars are a close second). The panoramas of Paris, the interiors of the restaurant kitchen, and chase scenes on the Siene and through the streets are all delightful.
I’ll let you who consider yourselves conservatives argue about the sects and subsects within that category. All I know is there is a certain kind of conservative with whom I have much affinity, and I know ‘em when I see ‘em.
I think you are wrong, however, in saying that it is only libertarians who object to WALL-E’s critique of mall culture. The world is full of Bush League Republicans who adore the Buy ‘N Large world. I remember talking to one some years ago, a Catholic apologist for capitalism and standard Republican, and I thought I’d appeal to his aesthetic sense, so I pointed out the north end of Manassas Virginia – truly a wasteland- as an example of the ugliness that unrestrained markets can create. But he said the malls and fast food joints and the rest of the indistinguishable sprawl were “beautiful”, as it meant that money was being made.
And there are plenty of folks around here, too, who think the earth is 6000 years old. For all I know they are right, as I am a strict agnostic on scientific questions: global warming, evolution, the age of the earth. All I know is that most humans in most ages have been way off in their assessment of reality, and it seems a stretch to think that moderns are the exception, as screwed up as we are.
But he said the malls and fast food joints and the rest of the indistinguishable sprawl were “beautiful”, as it meant that money was being made.
I was trapped for the better part of a week in a Courtyard Marriot in that part of Manassas and it is indeed a wasteland unfit for human habitation. Not to mention totally unwalkable (I was without the benefit of a rental car).
But it sounds like the guy you’re talking about isn’t conservative per se so much as confused. His comment is more Milton Friedman than anything else.
Not to put too much stock in my own theories though, do you ever get the sense that there are these sort of stock phrases and replies which are mouthed for no other reason than that the utterer perceives his is speaking to a hostile outsider?
I know I do it myself but perhaps I’m just projecting my own behavior into a larger trend.
I spent two full weeks, including the intervening weekend, in a Holiday Inn in a location very much like the one y’all are describing. It was in the suburbs of Cincinnati, at an interstate exit. A very weird experience–almost sci-fi-ish, like living in an outpost on some semi-inhabitable planet, where an artificial earthlike atmosphere is maintained inside the buildings but you need certain equipment and precautions to venture outside.
I suspect there was indeed some knee-jerk involved in the response of Daniel’s Republican to criticism of sprawl. But in any case his use of the word “beauty” would probably be revealed as incorrect even by his own lights if someone suggested that he live there. That to me is a damning piece of evidence against the attempt to paint factories and suburban sprawl as unqualifiedly Good Things: the people who benefit most from them don’t want to live within sight or sound of them.
The knee-jerkiness is typical of the debate about this stuff. “You don’t like sprawl? Well, I SUPPOSE YOU THINK THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OUGHT TO CONTROL EVERY FACET OF OUR LIVES, RIGHT!?!?!”
Or from the other direction: “You don’t support government-provided universal healthcare? Well, I SUPPOSE YOU THINK SICK PEOPLE OUGHT TO BE LEFT TO DIE IN THE STREETS, RIGHT!?!?”
Well I’m conservative and I loved Wall E. Thought it was very much prophetic and fun to watch at the same time, which seems to be a hard one to accomplish in Hollywood (The Day The Earth Stood Still, blech!)
We watched it last week on DVD, our second viewing, and enjoyed it just as much as the first time. When it was over I mentioned to my bride that some right wingers had attacked the movie as anti-American. “But isn’t it self-evident that such a culture is dehumanizing?”, she asked. I reminded her of a conversation I had with a young capitalist years ago, that I wrote about in the magazine. I cited Sudley Road in Manassas Virginia, a 3 mile stretch of malls and shopping plazas, a real suburban wasteland, as proof that the market does not automatically contribute to the common good. But he responded that when he saw such landscapes he thought them “beautiful”, all those dollars being made and spent.
My pithy beloved responded, “Beautiful, huh? So where does he take his vacations?”
If you go back a few comments, I made the same point as bride when this was being discussed last July. WALL-E is slowly floating up to the top of my Netflix q.
Vargas, I like The Day the Earth Stood Still. Or are you talking about the new one? In which case I might agree in the unlikely event that I ever see it.
We watched WALL-E a couple of nights ago. I didn’t like it as much as you did, Daniel, but I did enjoy it. I got pretty tired of the cutesy robots but the satirical stuff was very amusing, and general it was terrific visually. I’m getting over my aversion to computer animation. I thought the way so much of it–the first half or so?–was done with almost zero dialog was brilliant & effective. And I admit it was a bit touching in places.
I had trouble getting my inner AI-skeptic and science fan to shut up about certain things–e.g. the space ship half-hidden in that nebula, which looks like a cloud but is based on a familiar astronomical photo of something that is actually hundreds of light years (or some ginormous distance) across. Apparently I find it easier to suspend disbelief in a duck that talks and wears a sailor suit than in machines that have language and emotions.
My wife, on the other hand, wanted the cockroach to go away. “I don’t *like* him.” She has a real horror of cockroaches, cartoon or not.
I’d like to see somebody take this technology and do something less Disney-like. I don’t mean some dark sex-n-violence thing of the sort Hollywood seems to think represents maturity, but something with less cutesiness and old-style cartoon antics. I mean, I actually got bored during the chase sequences.