Wall-E and the Environmental Apocalypse

Wall-E and the Environmental Apocalypse
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Dossier » Our Animated World

The Perils of Thoughtless Consumerism

by Amarjeet Nayak

In an increasingly consumerist and market-driven world where environmental concerns have
taken a back seat, Pixar’s Wall-E comes across as a logical pointer towards an apocalyptic
future of the earth and its inhabitants.

The futuristic world that the movie projects stems
directly from the absolute indifference of the world’s
dominant species towards the protection and
preservation of its host – Earth. At one point in the
movie, the captain of the ship says, “I don’t want to
survive, I want to live.” However, if the human
species continues to be as greedy and consumerist
as it is now, then survival will be the most dominant
issue for it in the not-so-distant future. Through a
close analysis of the movie, this article will attempt to
show the overt and subtle ways in which Wall-E
points at the unfortunate anti-environmental
individual habits and collective policies which, if not
addressed to at the earliest, may prove too costly for
the Earth and its species.

The movie represents a dystopic world view. Even
though the dystopia that the movie so meticulously
creates during its one and a half hour running time is
set seven hundred years into the future, it does so
with such conviction that a perceptive movie-goer is
bound to feel uncomfortable in his seat at the role
that he may be advertently or inadvertently playing in
leading the world to such a stage. The almost
dialogue-free first half an hour of the movie shows an
inhospitable earth filled with garbage. There is no
humanity and no other form of life. While the dystopic setting can certainly be considered an
important character in the movie as well, the central character is a garbage collecting robot named
Wall-E who has been left alone on the earth and continues to collect garbage, and has a seemingly
indestructible cockroach for company. They seem to be the last inhabitants on this earth. Even
when Wall-E has to leave the earth in pursuit of Eve, a sleek and more advanced reconnaissance
robot, the cockroach stays back on the earth. This image of the mechanical cockroach being the
only ‘living’ being on the earth turns the idea of the typical ‘last man standing’ image seen in many
mainstream Hollywood movies upside down. Unlike movies such as I am Legend (2007) or The
Day After Tomorrow (2004), where one can at least get the solace of seeing one or a few human
beings having survived to tell the tale, in Wall-E we find that it is not mankind, but its machines, that
have continued to stay on in the world that no longer has any place for their creators. In the first
thirty minutes, the images of Wall-E and his companion moving around among the rubble, the tall

trash pillars dotting the skyline where there used to be skyscrapers housing human beings, are a
sad reminder of the undesirable consequences of human kind’s endless and thoughtless greed.
This is a powerful apocalyptic vision.

In the apocalyptic movies dished out by Hollywood, the reasons attributed to such a fate have been
varied – from alien attacks, spread of a lethal virus to nuclear annihilation. All of these are certainly
in the realms of possibility. The one common element in almost all of these apocalyptic visions is
that they talk of a sudden and unexpected action leading to mankind’s extinction. However a much
more imminent disaster is gradually brewing up through humanity’s continued indifference towards
nature and the earth’s other inhabitants. This point can be elucidated through the following
examples.

A 2008 report in The New York Times details the increasing number of dead zones in earth’s
oceans that have become inhospitable for marine life. The reason for the same is the large number
of pollutants that humanity manages to pump into ocean water for various reasons, mostly in the
name of scientific progress or economic prosperity. (Venkataraman: web resource) Similarly, many
rivers world-wide have now turned into dumping yards. For instance, the Yamuna river that runs
through New Delhi, India can hardly be called a river now. Delhi uses it as a natural dumping yard
where all its filth, from factories and housing colonies, is dumped. Naturally, its water can not be
used for drinking and is now considered one of the most polluted rivers in the world. Unfortunately,
the Yamuna happens to be only one of the many polluted rivers in India. Daniel Pepper writes in
Fortune: “The Yamuna, which flows 855 miles from the Himalayas into the Ganges, isn't India's only
polluted river. Eighty percent of the country's urban waste goes directly into rivers, many of which
are so polluted they exceed permissible levels for safe bathing” (web resource). A U.C. Santa
Barbara study revealing that the Mississippi delta is the world's dirtiest coastal ecosystem, worse
than the Ganges or Mekong (“8 Worst Man-made Environmental Disasters of All Time”, web
resource) brings home the unfortunate fact that even the developed nations are culpable in this
crime against the earth’s environment. One may try to argue, however flawed the argument may be,
that a developing country such as India lacks adequate resources to keep its rivers clean; but when
the developed countries too show a similar indifference towards the protection of our environment, it
shows that the real problem is not lack of resources; It is the absolute indifference towards nature in
the pursuit of wealth and (unsustainable) development which is the real problem.

This is precisely what Wall-E shows. The rich corporations such as “B & L” certainly did not lack the
resources to develop sustainable and environment-friendly policies of technological advancement.
Furthermore, the presence of huge rubbles of garbage dumped all over the earth as shown in the
movie is eerily similar to the kind of garbage dumping taking place in the Yamuna, Mississippi delta,
etc. leading to the extinction of marine life. These real life examples corroborate the reel-life anti-
environmental human actions and their sad consequences presented in Wall-E which attributes the
dystopia to unchecked pollution, a result of technological and material advancement at the cost of
mindless exploitation of earth’s resources. The naysayers, including those who still think that global
warming is a hoax, may call the movie’s ecological cautionary tale a case of ‘false alarm’, to use a
phrase from the movie, but there is enough evidence, as shown in the earlier real-life examples to
conclusively prove that it is anything but a false alarm.

Thus the futuristic dystopia that Wall-E envisages is a very realistic possibility. Unless human
beings, the dominant species on this earth that uses (or, exploits) most of its resources learns to
curb its anti-environmental habits, both at the individual and collective level, one will most certainly
not have to wait for seven hundred years for our earth to turn inhospitable for us. As of now, there
are already many places on this earth that have becomes inhospitable for some species. I would
like to argue that human greed is a major factor in gradually destroying the earth’s environment. As
Wall-E clearly demonstrates this greed functions at two levels – the greed of a common man to
earn more and lead a life of luxury and idleness, and the greed of the corporate for profit. The
former becomes the consumer and the latter, the supplier.

They are both entangled in a mutually profitable relationship. And such a reciprocating relationship
continues unabated, largely due to the marketing strategy of companies, most evident in the way
they advertise their products. A cleverly designed rhetoric of an advertisement becomes central in
manipulating the consumer to such an extent that the “product’s actual nature becomes irrelevant”
(Nayar 147). While giving specific examples of food products and their packaging rhetoric, Nayar

writes: “Knorr…identifies the entire family as consumer…The Red Label variety has on every
package the following tag line: ‘warmth for your family.' The 3 Roses variety has the following tag
line: ‘Perfect tea for your family’. Maggi Noodles, manufactured by Nestle India, proposes that there
is ‘extra health for your family in every pack’. The rhetoric of the healthy family is clearly central to
food product sales” (147).

It is worthwhile to notice here that in all the above-mentioned advertisements the thrust is on the
‘family’ instead of on just the individual. Even though a society is made of individuals as its lowest
units, it is the family that can be seen as the lowest collective unit. And getting an entire family to
endorse or use a product obviously is much more profitable for the company than getting some
individual members from families. Wall-E provides cinematic parallel to this real life corporate
marketing strategy. In the movie, one sees the Axiom-dwellers living like members of a family having
almost identical life styles, although they hardly interact with one another. All of them buy and use
the same products, have similar life styles that are devoid of any real action. There is even an
instance in the movie where a character gets to see a swimming pool for the first time in her life. Till
then, she was made to live in virtual reality, which she was admittedly quite contented with. What
this also shows is that by giving in to the temptations of luxury and comfort promised by the
corporate, human beings slowly move away from nature and into the world of make-believe.

At the same time, one should also bear in mind that the relationship between individual consumers
and big corporations is of mutual reciprocation. The corporations first create a need in people for
various luxuries cleverly disguising them as necessities. Once they succeed in convincing the
prospective consumers of their ‘needs’, they then proceed to fulfill those needs of the consumers to
lead a materialistically fulfilling life. The individual consumers continue to be indoctrinated by the
aggressive and cleverly manipulative marketing strategies of various products. For instance, when
the earthlings continue to stay away from the no longer hospitable earth, the corporate house “B&L”
aggressively promotes its products including its space ship that was supposed to be their temporary
home for five years as their new home. It tells them in no uncertain terms that Axiom is now their
home. This idea of home has been fed to them and their children from the childhood when they are
first told and then continue to be reminded that Axiom is their ‘home sweet home’. It tells them, “A
for Axiom, your home sweet home” while all the time ceaselessly also assuring them that it is their
best friend and has their best interest as its topmost priority. It tells them, “B is for Buy & Large, your
very best friend”. The juxtaposition of two contradictory words, ‘friendship’ and ‘buy’ suggest that for
the corporates everything has to be seen as a product and there is nothing that can not be sold,
including ‘friendship’. The consumers need to buy its product to remain its friends. The final
objective of any corporate, as shown in Wall-E, is that the consumers should be made completely
dependent on its products while not exercising their mental faculty before buying. At one point,
B&L’s advertisement tells the Axiom dwellers: “Attention Axiom shoppers. Try Blue, it’s the New
Red.” And the fact that almost immediately the shoppers buy the new product shows the extent to
which the consumer becomes a mere thoughtless buying machine in the hands of the corporate
which, through its continuous bombarding of consumer-friendly rhetoric, gradually but surely takes
away the consumer’s ability to think for himself.

Just like the marketing strategy that sells blue as the ‘new red’ and still convinces the buying
consumer, there are many instances in the movie that clearly show how words slowly become
meaningless. For instance, the captain utters the following absolutely meaningless words with
hardly a hint of sarcasm, and almost in a matter of fact manner: “Good Morning Everybody and
welcome to Day 255 thousand six hundred forty two aboard the Axiom…today is the seven
hundredth anniversary of our five year cruise." The apparent meaninglessness of these words does
not matter to anybody aboard the space ship. Even the irony of being hoodwinked by the corporate
and being held hostage in an almost literal sense that should have otherwise been quite clear to a
man with average intelligence, seems to be lost on these people. To some extent it can be argued
that they have grown accustomed to the life style dictated almost entirely by the big corporate body
“B & L” and have reconciled with this lifestyle enough to consider it as normal. A frightening and
almost dystopic notion of the space ship as their new home and earth as a distinctly forgotten alien
land can be construed from a scene in the movie where Eve lands in the captain’s dock with a plant
taken from the earth as evidence of life there. However when the plant goes missing, the captain
calls it a ‘false alarm.' There is some hint of resignation in his voice, but one can also perceive a
sense of relief because for the captain as well as almost all of his fellow ‘Axiom dwellers’ Axiom is
their home. Anything that challenges this ‘normality’ in life is seen as a nuisance and a possible

cause for danger or alarm.

Wall-E also hints at the crippling effect of technology that leads to a situation where there is non-
existent interpersonal communication. The Axiom dwellers lead the kind of life where each one is
cocooned in its own shell. They hardly interact with each other. For every tiny bit of work, they take
help of a machine instead of calling out to a friend for help. In real-life the growing dependence on
the Internet to the point of being addicted to it is a very legitimate precursor to the kind of situation
that the future human beings have landed themselves into in the movie. The virtual communication
through internet, especially through the popular networking sites, have ironically seen to it that the
thrust is more on the communication with faceless people who could as well be machines on the
other side. This sort of isolation on the part of every individual makes each person aloof from the
larger picture, unconcerned about what happens to the society at large or to the environment. By
the time realization dawns upon them, it may be too late, as is the case in Wall-E. The earth
inhabitants have had to leave an inhospitable environment. It is then that survival, rather than ‘living’
that becomes the topmost priority, however much one may dislike such a scenario, as is clearly the
case with the ship captain who is bored of having to survive and wants to live.

Apart from such consumerist behaviour of human species and its never-ending greed, its gradually
changing relationship with machines is another factor that can be seen to be ultimately leading to
the environmental apocalypse depicted in Wall-E. The machines are initially there to help humans
with their work. However with time, the dependence on machines grows to such an extent that
machines become indispensable. This can be seen as a moment where the power dynamics
changes. Instead of humanity controlling the machine, humanity starts being controlled by it. Wall-E
provides some powerful and startling images that depict this reversal of power dynamics,
something that gives us one more sneak peek into the possible reasons for an avoidable
environmental apocalypse. Almost eighty minutes into the movie, there is a scene where the
humans fall over one another and somehow manage to congregate in relative safety. It is at that
instance when the machines (arm chairs) that used to carry and in a way shelter them, start
tumbling towards them in an alarming fashion. This image of the seemingly harmless machines
about to fall on the frightened humans is a powerful image of man’s helplessness when confronted
with its own creation, reminiscent of Frankenstein’s monster. However, unlike the terrible looking
monster, this image also shows that the machines can be lethal while coming across as seemingly
harmless and even beautiful.

 The above analysis may lead to the conclusion that Wall-E attempts to show that the human
species don’t need aliens to destroy us and our planet. Through our anti-environmental individual
habits, such as growing dependence on machines, increasingly individualistic behavioral patterns, a
largely indifferent attitude towards our societal and environmental issues as well as anti-
environmental collective policies such as the corporate-dictated government policies whose sole
motif is profit sans any real concern for environmental issues, we are hurtling towards an
environmental apocalypse. However, it is important to realize that Wall-E need not be studied as a
simple morality tale against technological innovation, or the pitfalls of mechanical advancement.
Wall-E’s ambivalent position can be gauged from two seemingly contradictory events that it shows.
Firstly, it shows a machine (Wall-E) being the savior of humanity while also depicting machines as
the enemies as well. Secondly, even though Wall-E depicts the dangers of technology and virtual
communication, as argued earlier in this article, still at the beginning of the film, Wall-E is shown in
rapturous delight as he watches his old VHS copy of “Hello Dolly”. This complicating aspect of the
film can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, such a seeming contradiction can be seen to
be making the film itself as a part of the consumerist virtual media. On the other hand, one can also
argue that through such seemingly contradictory examples of the role of technology and virtual
communication, the film attempts to show an optimistic vision of technology, of how it is not
technology in itself that is bad, but the way in which we use it. One could even go so far as to say
that this film makes us look again at our technology itself – both of how we use it (the difference
between watching a film for amusement and becoming totally dependent on virtual communication),
and how it might teach us something if we actually paid attention to it.

Works Cited

“8 Worst Man-made Environmental Disasters of All Time”. 21 Oct 2009.
(http://www.ecopreneur.co.za/2009/10/21/8-worst-man-made-environmental-disasters-of-all-time-
treehugger), last accessed on 13 April 2010.

Nayar, Pramod K. “Cultures of Consumption”. From An Introduction to Cultural Studies. New Delhi:
Viva Books, 2009.

Pepper, Daniel. “India’s rivers are drowning in pollution”. From Fortune

. June 11 2007 issue.
(http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/06/11/100083453/index.htm) last
accessed on 13 April 2010

Venkataraman, Bina. “Ocean ‘Dead’ Zones on the Rise”. From The New York Times.Aug 14 2008
(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/science/earth/15oceans.html?
_r=2&ref=environment&oref=slogin), last accessed on 13 April 2010

Wall-E

. Dir. Andrew Stanton. 2008. DVD. Walt Disney Video, 2008.