I spent much of last week trying to avoid all that hysteria about Wall-E being “left-wing, America-hating propaganda,” even though I’m absolutely positive that The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was responsible for that steep rise in an interest in black magic amongst teens in the early 50s, and also that there would be neither PETA nor any form of federal gun control if it weren’t for Bambi. But what can I say? For whatever reason, I wasn’t in the mood to hear Steve Jobs compared to Joseph Goebbels, or to sound the violins for the poor demonized corporations, any of which could surely rule our state better than any democracy. Chalk it up to the holiday, I guess!
But now, here comes Frank Rich, late to the party but determined to shoot it up nonetheless. “Wall-E For President!” his NY Times Op-Ed column shouts from the headline––the exclamation mine, but definitely implied. Tired of seeing Wesley Clark’s talking head on TV, he explains, Rich went to the movies last week to see Wall-E. After making the patently false statement that the film counts as “a rare economic bright spot” in the current movie year (yes, it did well, but a LOT of movies have been doing well––virtually every movie vertical is doing better than 12 months previously), Rich declared the apocalyptic animated film to be “more realistically in touch with what troubles America this year than either the substance or the players of the political food fight beyond the multiplex’s walls.” Read: people are fat, they live amongst garbage and they allow corporations to control their lives, and John McCain and Barack Obama don’t even notice! But the kicker doesn’t come until the final paragraph:
Mr. McCain should be required to see Wall-E to learn just how far adrift he is from an America whose economic fears cannot be remedied by his flip-flop embrace of the Bush tax cuts (for the wealthy) and his sham gas-tax holiday (for everyone else). Mr. Obama should see it to be reminded of just how bold his vision of change had been before he settled into a front-runner’s complacency. Americans should see it to appreciate just how much things are out of joint on an Independence Day when a cartoon robot evokes America’s patriotic ideals with more conviction than either of the men who would be president.
I haven’t seen Wall-E, and though I’m sure it’s just as good as everyone insists it is and totally deserves 20 million Oscars (or else it’s a virus that’s going to turn Our Children into tax-hiking Commie zombies––whatever!), there few things in this world that irk me more than the sanctimonious suggestion from a newspaper columnist that prospective world leaders “could really learn a thing or two” from watching a Hollywood movie, let alone a Hollywood movie geared toward an audience old enough to be susceptible to the charm of the film’s assorted synergistic tie-ins, but too young to actually pay for their own ancilaries themselves. Shit is, as we know, pretty bad out there, but it’s hard to decide what’s the more ridiculous rhetoric suggestion for the replacement of our current political system: rescue by corporation, or by cartoon.
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