Two points can be made about environmental activism and Disney/Pixar’s film WALL-E (2008): first, the film marks a moment of progress by virtue of the fact that it is a popular film (by nature a conservative medium) and by the fact that excepting a few outliners, it was unremarkable and unremarked upon concerning its ecological content and the treatment of the content. The second major point to be made about WALL-E, however, undermines the first. While the popularity of films like WALL-E with their overt—if uncomplicated—criticism of dangerous visions of green capitalism and monopoly business economics underlines a sea change in environmental thought, the film itself offers no true criticism of the culprits or the ideologies responsible for the state of the planet (both the geospace of our real Earth and the imagined space of Earth in the film), nor does it provide any new cognitive map for understanding our threatened world and assumed truths about individualism, democracy and the marketplace. In fact, films like WALL-E reinforce failed models of environmentalism by relying on nostalgia, individualism and formula to fix the problems created (often) by nostalgia and the facile belief in individualism in the face of marketplace contaminated by the continued dominance of the cultural industry. This paper, therefore, intends to explore the formal aspects of WALL-E to consider if popular film can fully address a (literally and figuratively) changing environmental landscape.
About the presenterBrian Russell Lutz
Brian Lutz is the youngest person ever named Poet Laureate of Bucks County. A full-time faculty member at Delaware Valley University since 2006, Lutz, an associate professor of literature, has published widely in various local, national, and international journals. His scholarly focuses revolve around critical trends in contemporary literature, millennial poetics, and spatial studies—especially as it pertains to the fantastic.