What Can We Learn From Wall-E In The Year 2020

artwork via Mad Rodent Tumblr

Our plucky robot friend should be the ambassador to our communal lock down

• Tristan Young @talltristan

Are we beginning to interpret and reinterpret everything through the lens of a Covid induced isolation? Is that a bad thing?  As we retreat into our back catalogues, our archives, and our mountains of (thankfully, digital) media that we never got around to, it’s hard not to read a little too heavily into the subtext of solitude even when it’s not really there. Is The Empire Strikes Back really an exploration of the dangers of hermetic paranoia? Probably not. Wall-E however! This is a story that just got some additional legs. The tale of a robot isolated to an entire planet characterized by arrested desolation, and what to do with such circumstances is rife with opportunities for interpretation. What can we learn from this film beyond its central theme that irrational love can conquer all, even programming? Upon its release in 2008, that moral was enough. In the hellscape that is 2020, we’re going to need something a little more relevant to draw from. 

The obvious one seems to be perseverance. We are not even 30 days really into the new world order and we already have had fools (re: presidents) advocating an end to social distancing by mid April. That’s not going to happen. We are in this for some time.  We may grimace at the impending dread of cabin fever and resent that we have already watched the entirety of Curb or that Seinfeld still isn’t on Netflix, but we have to hunker down. If we can do that with some grace and certitude, all the better. Look to Wall-E as a paragon of such decorum. He spends his time in a state of exile, left to his own devices with an outlook of persistence and endurance. Yes, he is a robot capable of keeping up this obsequies commitment to his purgatory for 800 years, which is a bit much to ask on our parts. Still, look for role models where you can find them in these strange times. 

As we enter our second month of social distancing, self quarantine, isolation and sample the weird cocktails of emotional stress derived from the mix, there has been a panoply of arm chair pseudo-psychology advice on what to do with this time; the best ways to make use of it. The prevailing irony has been- especially from the hospitality sector of which many have been unceremoniously ejected- is that for the first time we all have the same days off yet we cannot do anything together. Wall-E of course never had this issue.  Through modular repairs he existed in his barren world long after his robotic brethren had ceased to function, left alone to ponder only his obsolescence. For the rest of us, a lot of time on our hands. Instagram pundits and Twitter evangelists have argued authoritatively over the merits or demerits of how to spend the lockdown of 2020. I don’t know what’s happening on Tik Tok.

 Some offer that now is the time to write that book finally, get into shape like never before, turn a pet project into the next start up. We have been given the gift of time, and hopefully a frozen economy that will not have the functionality to punish potentially risky endeavours. Others take opprobrium with such models. The notion of inundating yourself with personal responsibility to fulfil ones potential at a time like this will lead to even more anxiety than an already shell shocked society can handle. Attitudes that we must finish that screenplay, that there is no excuse for not recording that album are pernicious. Some of us don’t know how we are going to pay rent, others are looking at their savings surely evaporate. We don’t need to be held to a standard that is unreasonabley ambitious simply because we have been forced from work. Now is not the time to be weighed down by anything else that could lead to additional duress. Others still take a more agnostic approach. Relax, nap, fresh air, whatever happens happens. Is that the clearest path towards mental stability? Is it a waste of a rare opportunity? Are these things mutually exclusive?

Wall-E’s contribution to this debate is sublime. You can see it in his garbage cube skyscrapers- somewhere between baroque and brutalism. Elsewhere in his collection of random but sentimental trinkets, or in the geometric precision with which he approaches his clean up duties.  In the time spent alone you can discover how to express yourself through your own routines. One does not have to stretch their mental or physical faculties merely to seem productive. Daily rhythms in of themselves can become exercises in engagement, in showing off your creative side. Wall-E never over extended his capacity for personal development or contributing to his, more or less solopilistic society. He wasn’t programed to. Yet every day he was out there, within the strict confines of all he was capable of doing he made art and landscapes. As each day ended he found something in that nothingness that was fulfilling to him one way or another, and brought it home. This is admittedly much easier to do in a world devoid of social media. But the point of Wall-E’s example is that we have too narrowly defined terms such as productivity, betterment, and fulfillment in the age of isolation. We still view it too myopically in terms of economic or aesthetic gains. Aren’t we advocating a total reformation of the economy? Do aesthetics matter when we are by ourselves? Wall-E broadens this canvas, and his own horizons. 

Of course these horizons can only be stretched so far by a single set of mechanical arms. The somewhat more explicit message we can draw from Wall-E in our pandemic climate is to never again take for granted the power of possibility that comes from community. In North America we abide by- to an extent- the tenants of rugged individualism. Notions of manifest destiny and liberty are often at odds with community and the greater social good. That’s why it’s been so hard initially to hammer home the idea of social distancing; it wasn’t about you, it was about everyone else. Now there is no longer an everyone else in the way we traditionally understood, only you. We have lost something profound but we will get it back. When we do, we need to understand the kinetic potential we have when we look outwards to the community and act in unison. 

When Wall-E arrives on the Axiom, the space-fairing ark holding what is left of humanity, things are tightly regimented. Humans have little control over their automated life; everything from their diets, their activities, and their movements are subject to algorithms designed for peak uniformity. Wall-E operates outside of these algorithms, to the extent that the bumbling robot can even operate at all. As Wall-E and eventually Eve join forces to bring humanity back to a just maybe habitable earth, the resistance they are met with is a little too overwhelming. That resistance takes the form of rigid consistency enforced not by collective will, but by code. There is no collective will. There is no collective, only directive. As Wall-E and Eve, begrudgingly or unwittingly recruit a band of misfit, delinquent robots to their cause, they are suddenly a force to be reckoned with. Not because of their coordinated efforts or their communal commitment towards one goal, but because when even a small collection of beings, humans or robot, are willing to push back against the axioms of everyday life in Wall-E, chaos ensues. Malfunctioning robots erupt in a flurry of misguided actions that upend all curated aspects of life. Anything can happen, and everything starts to happen. The rut that is human existence is injected with a jarring bolt of uncontrollable energy. That things worked out miraculously in Wall-E was never a given; but there would never have been even a chance if individuals didn’t start working together towards uncontrollable results.

It’s a little like the theme of Mad Max: Fury Road, in that in order to make the world some semblance of better, good people are going to have to start working together no matter what their background or differences are. Our current capacity to affect such change has been greatly diminished due to the pandemic, but it can’t last forever. For now we must draw lessons from where we can. That collective action can be chaotic and unpredictable, and maybe even frustrating in its set backs- lord knows how many EVE had to tolerate at the hands of Wall-E and his pals. However if the results are anything other than just the typical status quo, how can we not advocate for it? The status quo is what led to our woefully inadequate global response to the Coronavirus. Whatever comes after can’t be what came before. The beauty of Wall-E is we don’t have to know exactly what comes next, only that next won’t be achieved by ourselves.