WALL-E: A World Without Us

By Michael Dudley, City States. Posted July 1, 2008.

Alan Weisman's recent book The World Without Us carries out a fascinating thought experiment, absenting us from the planet and then taking us through decades and centuries into the far future to see what befalls the works of humans. We watch as our cities and infrastructure crumble before the forces of insects, microbes, plants and rust and discover that our most lasting legacies are not our great works of art and literature, but our trash, our chemical and radioactive pollution and our television and radio broadcasts. The reader is left both humbled and awed at the uncontainable power of nature.

In Pixar's latest outing, WALL-E, the viewer is also treated to a vision of the far future, but is left instead with an unjustified faith in humanity but no real appreciation for or understanding of the natural world.

When the film starts the world has been without us for over 700 years, and all that remains are desolate cities and a planet covered in unimaginably massive piles of trash. The only activity we see is that of a lone robot named WALL-E (an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter -- Earth-Class), the last of an army left behind by the Buy 'n Large corporation to clean up the planet while humanity vacations on its corporate cruise starships far off in space.

The opening sequences of the film are breathtakingly ghastly, like no post-apocalyptic vision ever put on film. The cityscape is not just deserted, it is disappearing under a cancerous envelope of debris, and even orbital space is a cloud of satellites and junk. And everywhere we see the entity responsible for most of the despoliation: the Buy 'n Large Corporation, which appears, in the final stages of humanity's days on Earth, to have owned and run absolutely everything, making Wal-Mart look like a dime store operation in comparison.

Amid this ravaged world, WALL-E fills his days compacting and piling trash, but also collecting and relishing objects that delight and mystify him: egg beaters, Rubik's cubes and a television with which he watches Hello Dolly! over and over again.

His centuries of routine are disrupted when he finds a tiny green plant. Then a gigantic spaceship deposits the egg-shaped EVE (or the Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) robot, which proceeds to scan the city -- and when things surprise or annoy her, blow them up. WALL-E is smitten by her lethal charms, and when he shows her the plant, she immediately scoops it into herself and shuts down, awaiting recovery and return.

EVE's mission, it turns out, was at the command of the Buy 'n Large corporation, and the ship that picks her up (and to which WALL-E clings in a bid to rescue her) delivers them to the Axiom, one of the gigantic cruise ships launched centuries before.

Unsurprisingly, given that Buy 'n Large (BnL) is still our dominant institution, humans have learned absolutely nothing from their experience as environmental refugees. The Axiom is populated by identically-dressed and morbidly obese humans carried about on multi-media hoverchairs, their every desire met by a fleet of robots and the omnipresent BnL, which exhorts them to continue to consume every waking hour. And of course, the unceasing consumption continues to produce vast amounts of trash, which is regularly compacted and expunged from the ship.

But through his efforts to rescue EVE, WALL-E gradually disrupts the consumerist and media-soaked ecology of the Axiom. Deprived of their non-stop multimedia two of the humans begin responding to their environment as if for the first time -- appreciating beauty, taking physical enjoyment from a previously neglected pool and actually conversing with each other.

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Michael Dudley is a research associate at the Institute of Urban Studies.