www.slate.com/id/2195126/?GT1=38001
The hero of Pixar's new film Pixar's new animated feature Wall-E is more than a great movie. According to the critics, it's a trenchant social commentary. New York's David Edelstein calls it "one for the ages, a masterpiece to be savored before or after the end of the world ...
a gentle, if unmistakable, summons to remake the world before time runs out." Wall-E tells us that if we don't change the way we live, we'll all get really fat and destroy the world. The plot begins with the idea that a megacorporation called Buy N Large has essentially taken over the planet and induced so much consumption and waste that humans must escape their dying planet on an enormous, space-faring cruise ship. Once onboard, their self-destructive tendencies only get worse: After 700 years adrift, humans have grown too bloated to walk and too lazy to think. It's this cartoon of--oops, commentary on--modern life that so dazzles the critics.
richly detailed satire of contemporary humankind," in which the world is populated by "obese, infantile consumers who spend their days immobile in hovering lounge chairs, staring at ads on computers screens--in other words, Americans." Wall-E is an innovative and visually stunning film, but the "satire" it draws is simple-minded. It plays off the easy analogy between obesity and ecological catastrophe, pushing the notion that Western culture has sickened both our bodies and our planet with the same disease of affluence. According to this lazy logic, a fat body stands in for a distended culture: We gain weight and the Earth suffers. If only society could get off its big, fat ass and go on a diet!
myths about the overweight: They're weak-willed, indolent, and stupid. Sure enough, that's how Pixar depicts the future of humanity. The people in Wall-E drink "cupcakes-in-a-cup," they never exercise, and if they happen to fall off their hovering chairs, they thrash around like babies until a robot helps them up. It ought to go without saying that this stereotype of the "obese lifestyle" is simply false. How fat you are has a lot more to do with your genes than with your behavior. As much as 80 percent of the variation in human body weight can be explained by differences in our DNA.
And we didn't just figure this out, either: During the oil crisis of the 1970s, a pair of economists calculated that we could save 13 billion gallons by getting all overweight Americans to "optimum body weight." These calculations show the obesity-ecology metaphor run amok.
most prevalent among the poorest Americans, who almost by definition consume less than the skinny elite. Many live in dense neighborhoods and rely on public transportation. And the fattest people in the nation are not, as a group, the same folks you'd find driving Hummers or jetting back and forth between New York and LA The desire to link obesity and environmental collapse seems to have more to do with politics than science.
Nalgene bottles and wring their hands over the fat slobs in Middle America. It's these red-staters who are screwing things up with their shopping malls and their fast food. Of course, they can't exactly be blamed for their misfortune.
It's easy to imagine how they might respond to Pixar's dystopic vision of our fat future, in which puffed-up bodies are played for cheap laughs. What happens when the movie ends and the lights come up? Does the rest of the audience stare at the lone fatty as she waddles her way toward the theater doors? Do they see in her body a validation of the film's "darker implications"--a signpost for what we might become if we don't change our ways? Or do they just scowl at her, convinced that she's part of the problem?
|
http://csua.com/feed/