James Poulos mines gold from the knockout credits sequence of "Wall-E," which in his view offers a telling commentary on the meaning, or lack thereof, of 20th-century art -- which, as Poulos suggests, given the dystopic setting of the film, is itself a commentary on the history of the West post World War I. Excerpt after the jump (it contains spoilers, so beware).
If nothing I've said so far convinces you that "Wall-E" is an important film well worth your time, read Poulos. Again, it would be a stretch to say that "Wall-E" is a "conservative" movie -- it really is beyond our categories -- but it's hard for me to think of a film that so clearly and gracefully offers a traditionalist conservative/crunchy con critique of contemporary society. The thing is, even if you don't notice any of the thematic elements, it's simply a beautiful work of storytelling and visual art.
Excerpt from Poulos:
But this set of musings was an elaboration that loops back on the first thing to blow my mind about Wall·E's outro: in the narrative they chart out, history -- and with it, art history -- ends, more or less, with impressionism. The final image is performed in the style of Van Gogh, the culmination of a modern series of images that includes pointillism and such. Now, the chronology doesn't have to be perfect for the glaring point to be valid: post-World War I styles, most notably Cubism, were absented from rebooted human history.Wall·E is an exceptionally nonviolent movie. Eve is the only character with a gun. Humanity is almost destroyed by its self-inflicted pleasures, not its self-inflicted pains. The memory of war seems to have vanished. But the replaying of human history that Pixar offers us is striking in its elimination of the art (and anti-art) that emerged in the wake of European civilization's destruction during the first decade of the 20th century. (Cf. Thomas Pynchon's rumination that after World War I all history properly belongs to the history of hell.) That art and anti-art -- I'm thinking Cubism, Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism, for just a handful of examples -- revolved around the rape and death of organic forms by geometric and technological forms.
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I believe Dr. Goebbels said much the same thing in his comments on the art of his time.
Yes, Charles, and Hitler was a vegetarian. What's your point?
Darn it Charles, you beat me to it!
I call Godwin: Reductio ad Hitlerum.
But Rod, isn't his whole point invalidated by the fact that the end of the credits is done in early-80s Atari style? Or is the Pixar crew maybe suggesting that computer-rendered art is picking up the lost tradition of pre-WWI Europe (a pretty heady claim, given the source)?
Or do I just need to RTFA?
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