Anderson Response

“Post-Apocaplyptic Nostalgia: WALL-E, Garbage, and American Ambivalence toward Manufactured Goods”, an article written by Christopher Todd Anderson, analyzes the deep underlying messages conveyed by the Disney movie, WALL-E. The article is rather critical nature, and its critical nature can be seen before you even read the article…in the title. The title basically is a euphemism calling America out for its culture of wastefulness, and such a critical title draws you in from the start. The article starts broad, a technique we have been implementing in Decoding Disney (The Class I Make This Blog For). Anderson refers to apocalyptic literature and cites some famous apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic films in order to establish similarities between the examples cited and WALL-E. Smoothly and seamlessly, Anderson transitions his focus to the ability for such films to create powerful scenes that invoke nostalgia for physical, manufactured objects. Through such a flowing transition Anderson is able to start to narrow in on his argument. This nostalgia that Anderson refers to is a key component of WALL-E, after all, WALL-E is quite the sentimental hoarder.

After about the first thirty minutes of the film, which basically consisted of shots with no dialogue of a polluted, barren world, Anderson concludes that this film was created to perpetuate the idea that “present-day patterns of consumption and wastefulness are suffocating the planet and making it uninhabitable.” While the film persistently criticizes how much we consume as a nation, Anderson notes that it also emphasizes nostalgia for obsolete manufactured objects. In order to bring evidence to support his claim and strengthen his argument, Anderson intelligently cites the scenes in which there was camera focus on the Sputnik, Pong by Atari, and VCRs; in addition, he demonstrates the way they were nostalgically portrayed. Astutely, Anderson emphasizes the paradoxes of the messages WALL-E is sending. While I found the movie thinly veiled in criticism, I never realized the paradox of WALL-E’s hoarding and the focus on outdated manufactured objects with the criticism. Moreover, Anderson essentially labels WALL-E as a blatant attack against three targets and they are big corporations like Wall Mart, individual consumers, and recent technological advances. It was at this point that I was most confused. Anderson was building a seemingly flawless argument, and then he listed “twenty-first century style corporations” as a target of WALL-E’s criticism. When we refer to such companies the first company that comes to mind is Wall Mart. They dominate media with advertisements. But slowly I started to realize that Disney itself could be considered one of those powerful corporations that mass produce products and have excellent returns. Why would Disney criticize itself? This is where the argument in my mind took a worse. The rest of the argument was very interesting. Anderson implements many techniques we have been working on in this class and by doing so formed a very strong argument.