Conservatives vs. the End of the World
So this is what our cultural discourse has come to: spitting, ranting Republicans raging against the evils of a cute little robot named Wall-e. For God's fucking sake people.
This is the conservative complaint of the day: that Pixar's cute little movie, Wall-e, is pushing its America-hating, liberal agenda in our faces, and turning our children into tree-hugging potheads. They don't understand that intelligent storytelling requires that characters make, and occasionally acknowledge, their mistakes. That the humans in Wall-e are bloated, helpless sacks isn't some damnation of capitalism. It's an indictment of inaction and dependency. It's a stern finger-wagging against the immaturity that tells you things will get better if you just wait for someone else to handle them. It's tragedy. You know, like Shakespeare.
The point of movies is to be entertaining. To be entertaining, movies need drama. Sometimes the most dramatic concept of all is the idea that the world, as its characters know it, is about to end, and for whatever tragic reason, the characters are helpless to save it. Think about Tony Montana. Think about Robert the Bruce. Think about HAMLET, for God's sake. These are men who strive for what they feel they deserve, whether its money or titles or personal justice, but who are too greedy, sheltered, or doubtful to attain it. Shit, I'm no literary scholar, and even I understand this. Didn't any of you go to high school? Didn't you learn about internal conflict? Tony Montana, high on coke and ego, is nevertheless incapable of stopping his fellow mobsters from turning on him. Robert the Bruce, despite his good intentions for Scotland, betrayed William Wallace and caused the deaths of hundreds of his countrymen. And Hamlet...oh, for fuck's sake, I really shouldn't have to explain Hamlet to you.
What I'm trying to say, conservatives, is that this is drama. Filmmakers are paid to imagine stories that will draw out the greatest emotions from their audiences. You must keep in mind that while Wall-e bears the heartbreaking image of an Earth choked with garbage, it also contains a sweet, sentient robot so cognitively advanced that it is capable of falling in love. Do any of you really believe that we're going to see either of such things before our economy collapses, anarchy erupts, and China and Russia swoop in to conquer us?
See, I bet it upset you that I even thought of such a scenario, but you know what? It's not going to happen. I was being dramatic there. That's what storytellers do.
I can understand your concern. Maybe there are some nutcases out there who think that every extinction-level event presented in the movies is plausible and likely, but folks like these have to remember that movies like Wall-e also have singing, dancing robots. I completely agree that anyone who has that much trouble differentiating between fantasy and reality shouldn't be allowed outside of his house. However, there are also a lot of nutcases who think that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, and that Barack Obama is related to Osama Bin Laden, and who think that we can keep fighting insurgents in the Middle East for the next hundred years without it having any effect on our nation. Those ideas are also fantasy, and like movies, I think they are clutched so their owners can better cope with the pains of the day.
Wall-e is not a threat to your comfort zone. It can't be a threat to your comfort zone, because it's a comfort zone itself.
This paranoia, this insistent batshit belief that EVERYONE is out to shit on your precious little ideals, is part of the same self-obsessed, hermetic fear-mongering that put us in this fucking recession. It's why the American dollar has shrunk to half its value. It's why people are losing jobs left and right. It's why everybody's socking away their Stimulus Packages to pay for gas. It might not be October 1929 all over again, but it's pretty bad, and it's REAL. Not a movie. No spaceships, no robots, just a bunch of hard-working people with nothing to show for their efforts. Now, are you going to sit there and cry about how a fucking Pixar movie MIGHT derail America, or are you going to stand up and make an effort to fix what's breaking down now?
This is the conservative complaint of the day: that Pixar's cute little movie, Wall-e, is pushing its America-hating, liberal agenda in our faces, and turning our children into tree-hugging potheads. They don't understand that intelligent storytelling requires that characters make, and occasionally acknowledge, their mistakes. That the humans in Wall-e are bloated, helpless sacks isn't some damnation of capitalism. It's an indictment of inaction and dependency. It's a stern finger-wagging against the immaturity that tells you things will get better if you just wait for someone else to handle them. It's tragedy. You know, like Shakespeare.
The point of movies is to be entertaining. To be entertaining, movies need drama. Sometimes the most dramatic concept of all is the idea that the world, as its characters know it, is about to end, and for whatever tragic reason, the characters are helpless to save it. Think about Tony Montana. Think about Robert the Bruce. Think about HAMLET, for God's sake. These are men who strive for what they feel they deserve, whether its money or titles or personal justice, but who are too greedy, sheltered, or doubtful to attain it. Shit, I'm no literary scholar, and even I understand this. Didn't any of you go to high school? Didn't you learn about internal conflict? Tony Montana, high on coke and ego, is nevertheless incapable of stopping his fellow mobsters from turning on him. Robert the Bruce, despite his good intentions for Scotland, betrayed William Wallace and caused the deaths of hundreds of his countrymen. And Hamlet...oh, for fuck's sake, I really shouldn't have to explain Hamlet to you.
What I'm trying to say, conservatives, is that this is drama. Filmmakers are paid to imagine stories that will draw out the greatest emotions from their audiences. You must keep in mind that while Wall-e bears the heartbreaking image of an Earth choked with garbage, it also contains a sweet, sentient robot so cognitively advanced that it is capable of falling in love. Do any of you really believe that we're going to see either of such things before our economy collapses, anarchy erupts, and China and Russia swoop in to conquer us?
See, I bet it upset you that I even thought of such a scenario, but you know what? It's not going to happen. I was being dramatic there. That's what storytellers do.
I can understand your concern. Maybe there are some nutcases out there who think that every extinction-level event presented in the movies is plausible and likely, but folks like these have to remember that movies like Wall-e also have singing, dancing robots. I completely agree that anyone who has that much trouble differentiating between fantasy and reality shouldn't be allowed outside of his house. However, there are also a lot of nutcases who think that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, and that Barack Obama is related to Osama Bin Laden, and who think that we can keep fighting insurgents in the Middle East for the next hundred years without it having any effect on our nation. Those ideas are also fantasy, and like movies, I think they are clutched so their owners can better cope with the pains of the day.
Wall-e is not a threat to your comfort zone. It can't be a threat to your comfort zone, because it's a comfort zone itself.
This paranoia, this insistent batshit belief that EVERYONE is out to shit on your precious little ideals, is part of the same self-obsessed, hermetic fear-mongering that put us in this fucking recession. It's why the American dollar has shrunk to half its value. It's why people are losing jobs left and right. It's why everybody's socking away their Stimulus Packages to pay for gas. It might not be October 1929 all over again, but it's pretty bad, and it's REAL. Not a movie. No spaceships, no robots, just a bunch of hard-working people with nothing to show for their efforts. Now, are you going to sit there and cry about how a fucking Pixar movie MIGHT derail America, or are you going to stand up and make an effort to fix what's breaking down now?
posted by Daniel | 1:50 AM
|
0 Comments
