"Wall-E" is a crunchy con masterpiece

"Wall-E" is out on DVD now. If you missed it the first time around, here's my blog take on the movie, in which I tease out the crunchy con themes in the film. We're going to rent it for our family's holiday weekend viewing. Excerpt from my post from earlier this year:

The captain is a likable slug whose job consists of waking up, eating, checking with the autopilot (Otto, this movie's nod to 2001's HAL) to make sure everything is fine, then relaxing. You see on the wall in a group of photos of his predecessors how with each successive generation, the humans grew fatter and fatter. The implication, in terms of this movie, is not so much that they grew lazier (though they did) but that they lost contact with their own humanity.

Technology emerges as a villain here -- but it's a complicated villain, as I'll explain. Technology allowed for the development of the consumer economy, and the creation of the fantastic spaceship that allowed humanity to escape an earth it despoiled with technology. But technology also shaped the consciousness of the humans. It led them to break with nature (Nature), and to think of technology as something that delivered them from nature. As humanity became more technologically sophisticated, the film argues, they became ever more divorced from Nature, and their own nature. They developed a culture and society that was mechanistic and artificial, versus organic and natural (the grotty little Wall-E robot is an instructive contrast with the sleek, ultraclean robots on the Axiom). Consequently, they've become slaves of both technology and their own base appetites, and have lost what makes them human. They can't even talk naturally to each other. Two people lying on lounges next to each other communicate via computer. People on the Axiom live their days moving around from mindless entertainment to mindless entertainment. They are the perfect consumers.