PicoBlog

My students have told me I have “no chill.” At first I thought this was quite bad — as if I don’t have coolness or calmness. But no, they meant I don’t have much of a filter, which to them is quite good, mostly.

I suspect the “no chill” claim results because of examples like the one that follows. The one I’m about to tell you makes them go “wtf?” and “can he really say that about an animated piece of entertainment?”

But I think it’s there, in WALL-E, one of the most respected movies of the last 20 years. That is, the WALL-E robot impregnates his would-be girlfriend EVE, and that leads to the restoration of humanity to its proper place as stewards of Earth.

I say this because the Adam-and-Eve symbolism is so obvious that the very feminized character that needs to “give birth” in the film is named EVE. Adding to that, WALL-E is an Adam figure at the beginning, the “last man on Earth” of post-apocalyptic fare but also the “first man” who is tending to his own garden.

Of course, in WALL-E, Earth is an infertile garden. Humans have sterilized it entirely — it’s one big desert of dust and skyscraper-high piles of trash.

But there’s the plant.

Wall-E finds it during his daily salvage routine. As an American Picker trying to find treasures in big piles of junk, WALL-E discovers life itself, the last or first life on Earth. This is the beginning of the new garden, without anybody knowing it until the movie’s end.

Right after WALL-E finds the plant, the central plot-point of the movie, he discovers EVE. She’s a probe left on Earth by automated human-scouting operations.

Here I ask students how and why we know that WALL-E is basically a man and EVE is basically a woman. The voices make it obvious. Their appearances — he’s dirty and mechanical; she’s sleek and curvy — register with us all unconsciously. (I’d add that she’s an Apple product while he’s a garbage-compactor with interchangeable parts, and maybe there’s something feminine/masculine in those associations, too.)

Showing EVE around his bachelor pad, WALL-E tries to impress his date. He brings out the plant. Immediately EVE’s programming kicks in. Her plant-program runs. She opens her compartment door, contains the plant within herself, and turns catatonic.

The container door on EVE could’ve been placed anywhere. As is, it’s place in a womb-like area of EVE’s shell.

At this point, WALL-E does the gentlemanly thing, looking after EVE while she gestates, as a man might do for his pregnant wife. I must add that having had four kids over three births, my innate maleness kicked in for my pregnant wife very often, looking very carefully out for her. I think I was more apt to consider her slipping, falling, getting into trouble then as I was now or before. I think.

Once WALL-E gets to the ship, as he holds on for dear life through space travel, his impregnated wife is taken away. Just look at her: to me she looks oval, egg-like. And when they strap her down on that table and take her away, I’m reminded of labor days in the hospital.

WALL-E pursues her, wanting to protect her but possibly also wanting to see the “birth.” His first priority is her; his second is the plant. This is the order of operations EVE needs to learn — others come first, namely WALL-E himself, and then the plant, the proper order of love for each individual. (The movie’s resolution turns on EVE relearning what her “directive” is. The directive becomes 1) love WALL-E, and then 2) take care of the plant, which is the right and only way to take care of the plant.)

Now, at this point, like my students, you might be rolling your eyes.

But oh no, says the man with no chill. WALL-E takes so much from the Book of Genesis that I fear I am not wrong at all; in fact, I am spot on, given the acknowledged Christianity of Andrew Stanton and some of the moviemakers involved.

One massive idea in Genesis, so massive it’d be hard to miss, is the stark division between fertility and sterility. God creates everything, the ultimate act of fertility, and then life breeds new life ad infinitum.

That’s in the command given to Adam and Eve: be fruitful and multiply. How’s that for a command? “Hey, creatures, procreate a lot!”

When sterility happens in Genesis, the reader is supposed to feel it. That includes Cain killing his brother Abel, which is anti-fertility, not only for Abel himself but for his “seed,” a common word used in English translations to denote a person’s future offspring. By contrast with Abel’s death, the seed of Abraham needs to spread and be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sands on the beach. For awhile in the Abraham story, this seems ridiculous and impossible, given how old and infertile Abraham and Sarah are.

But for God, what appears sterile to us is still yet possibly the source of infinite fertility. Kind of like robots without reproductive systems.

Anyway, on sterility in Genesis, you feel it in the Sodom-and-Gomorrah story everywhere. Those cities are destroyed and can never “reproduce” anything. Neither can Lot’s wife. What I’m saying even makes some sense of the weird Onan story, who pulled out and spilled his seed, rather than doing the procreative deed.

WALL-E impregnates EVE with the plant, at least metaphorically.

Meanwhile, humans aren’t doing that on the Axiom, the ultimate luxury resort/cruiseship. They don’t interact physically. That means there’s no sex on board. What appears to be an automated utopian wonderland is as desert-like as the Earth: a sterile environment.

My students, college-age now, universally comment on how sad WALL-E looks to them. They notice that they aren’t supposed to be aligned with the movies’ heroes, the robots, but with the obese, screen-obsessed humans. I believe they feel the critique partly in the sterility of it all. Nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing is dynamic. In Genesis, dynamism is good! The Earth is declared “very good” by God, not perfect, and his garden-tenders are to spread the garden over the whole Earth, which means improving what is already a well-made thing.

WALL-E himself instigates all the dynamism in the film, accidentally, comedically, and chaotically. He gets the entire ship to change course. He thereby changes the course of human history.

Why? Because his GF is pregnant with that plant! That’s the catalyst of renewal, restoration, renaissance. One fertile act begets a million.

And so from that plant, life begets life, to infinity and beyond.

Or at least, Earth goes from an infertile desert into a populated, artistically engaged, fertile landscape — so says the movie’s marvelous end-credits.

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