Good Times
Commenting on Patrick Ford’s post, Rod says:
It will be a good day when it becomes possible to criticize the excesses of American consumerism without being pilloried from the Right for being some kind of America-hating lib symp.
A good day, and also a distant one. Not to dwell too much on old controversies, but I am reminded by this little argument against WALL-E of the endless occasions when critics of Crunchy Cons and Rod would simultaneously mock him and his confreres as socialists and meddlesome, brie-eating snobs and also deny that anything like materialist and consumerist conservatives existed. There was always this same mix of complete denial and outraged defensiveness, which we see again in these responses to the Disney film. In the old arguments, his critics kept repeating that Rod had concocted conservative consumerism out of thin air, but how dare he impugn their consumerist way of life! When he was right, he was intruding on their private lives and telling them what to do, but he was also wrong because supposedly no one on the right was materialistic. According to the critics, they were more pious and self-disciplined than the Amish, but don’t even think about questioning their consumption habits.
Now maybe WALL-E is not a good film, or maybe conservative audiences will find something overbearing and obnoxious about its presentation of “the dangers of over consumption, big corporations, and the destruction of the environment,” and it is reasonable to mock the pretensions of a multinational corporation to having a social conscience. Even so, that conservatives should be concerned about “the dangers of over consumption, big corporations, and the destruction of the environment” and should integrate such concern into their arguments if it is not already there ought to be obvious. Since when is advocacy of moderation, restraint, conservation and the distribution of wealth and power anything other than a conservative argument? (I hear someone there laughing in the back.) That’s the problem–conservatives who advocate such things tend to come off as some mixture of antique and eccentric, while the “mainstream” continues its embarrassing glorification of an unsustainable, undesirable, unhealthy and foolish way of life. The last laugh will be on them.
I just got back from seeing the movie with my wife, and I think those who claim that it is an ecological tale are seriously overstating it. Despite being about robots, the movie is about being human… and to that end, what ecological message there is is probably best understood as being agrarian, which is quite conservative after all.
Thanks for the comment. From what I have heard about it, that makes a lot of sense.
As you point out, and as the controversy on the right about Rod’s book or this movie show, these so-called American “Conservatives” are no such thing - it is a just a word for them - and a convenient cover for an aggressive, imperialist agenda that glorifies the collusion of big government and big business coupled with electoral success and a spoils system for the Republican Party.
The movie’s pretty interesting in this regard, especially in using culture as a theme (and, in the wonderful credits montage, a metaphor). That is, consumerism as such blinds us from human culture; culture involves not just purchasing power or absorption, but participation. (In some way, Pixar’s films–insofar as they consistently encourage discussion!–are a slight corrective for that problem.) The people aboard the Axiom are blind to what being human is, both physically and mentally (the movie is subtle on this latter point, but it is there). When the captain proclaims he would rather live than simply survive, he sort of stands with culture against consumption… with the search for meaning against Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs.
While people may quibble about the specific imagery in places (I am awaiting the tormented cries of Beltway libertarians who never shop at Wal-Mart defending the big box against the portrayal of Buy ‘n Large in the film), the overall message of humanity against reflexive pursuit of advertised product is rather, well, traditional. It is the movie’s subtlety in presenting what it means to be human that makes this work; a pontificating film of this sort would have certainly annoyed any audience that differed slightly from the producers’s world-view.
The NRO critiques abouve are certainly reflective of the impoverishment of what is called ‘mainstream conservative thought’ Any notion that a truly human life should have limits and boundries, that we should take responsibiltiy for our limited and finite world for the benefit of generations yet unborn, any notion that that we are or should strive to be something better and richer than merely good little economic units who consume with abandon is frankly regarded as heresy at best, and some leftish hippy type of sentiment at worst.
I’m not sure if WALL-E quite rises to “Toy Story” level of awesomeness, but it is very, very good.