Reveries of a Lonely Robot

Post-Apocalyptic Humanity and Utopian Longing in WALL-E

For Andreas, petit camarade

Ideology is never merely ideological. Walter Benjamin saw in Walt Disney’s early animated films a subversive potential, a touch of the surreal that prefigured a utopian vision of a deregulated world where anything could happen. In Mickey Mouse, he identified both a radical renunciation of experience and the libertarian fantasy of complete self-sufficiency. For Benjamin, Disney’s animation functioned as a kind of psychological immunization, shielding spectators from the spontaneous emergence of collective psychoses – those latent, repressed drives within the masses that bourgeois civilization had long sought to suppress.

 

Adorno disagreed with his friend on this point. For him, when the proletarianized masses went to the movie theater, they did not come to recognize their power over the reality that oppressed them; on the contrary, they merely sought compensation for their real powerlessness. Later, during the war, a few years after Benjamin’s tragic death, Adorno would be even more explicit: Disney cartoons did more than accustom the senses to the rhythms and shocks of the new technological society; they did something far worse. They hammered into the minds of modern image consumers the old lesson that life in society is nothing but relentless wear and tear, crushing all individual resistance. Donald Duck, for example, takes his share of blows so that viewers grow accustomed to the ones they endure daily. And since nothing – absolutely nothing – escapes our attention, the ultimate paradox is that instead of relaxing with these distractions, we leave the theater even more anxious and exhausted.

 

For the Frankfurtian, there seemed to be no room for criticism or independent judgment in cultural products that were pre-digested and pre-designed as consumer goods, as they did nothing but reaffirm life as it is. However, he conceded that, occasionally, something of genuine quality might emerge from the mass of cultural waste that contemporary production had become, suggesting that it was not entirely degraded or homogeneous as hardcore Adornians today might tend to think. In such rare cases, he argued, reification and alienation would be transmuted into a fleeting appearance of humanity and closeness.

 

Building on this idea, later critics emphasized the paradox of a new form of manipulation at work even in the most degraded mass cultural products. Alongside their role as ideological tools, these works would also contain a utopian or transcendent potential, since, according to Fredric Jameson, ‘they cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated’ (‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’). Even though the meanings, symbols, and images they convey are entirely shaped by corporate intentions, it is, as Andreas Huyssen puts it, precisely because the culture industry ‘articulates social contradictions in order to homogenize them’ that this very process ‘can become the field of contest and struggle’ (‘Adorno in Reverse’).

 

Despite being a Pixar/Disney animation, and although it doesn’t stray from broadly approved aesthetic idioms, WALL-E (2008) is surprisingly sensitive in its critique of cultural homogenization under brand fetishism, unbridled consumerism, and technological alienation (without slipping into technophobia, which is rare). Set around the year 2700, the film depicts a future in which humanity – after Earth has been rendered uninhabitable by the ubiquitous Buy n Large Corporation, a multinational technology conglomerate  – now resides aboard the Axiom, a colossal luxury spaceship at the fringes of the Solar System. There, society functions as a fully automated welfare state – seemingly without outcasts, hierarchy, or exploitation – a bizarre form of capitalism, without classes or money, yet where commodity reigns supreme.

 

For this very reason, although there is no labor in this society of pure consumption, alienation is brutal. The denial of sensibility and the body, the destruction of living experience, and the erasure of historical memory are absolute. A kind of general intellect exists – not so much in service of humanity as in command of it – while humans remain utterly unconscious of themselves. Human relationships are mediated, in part, by objects (goods and machines) whereas robots exhibit human traits: they are sensitive, possess character, firmness of purpose and memory capacity, fall in love, feel anger, fear, even go mad.

 

Of course, the main point is implicit, but not entirely concealed: what remains of humanity is almost nothing, a population so small it wouldn’t fill a soccer stadium. This suggests that the final class war on Earth was vicious, with a handful of the ‘fortunate’ managing to escape at the last moment on ‘missions’ backed by some Elon Musk-like figure. Though much remains unexplained, one of the film’s most striking elements is the persistence of fetishism and blind automatism, even in the absence of property, class antagonism, and labor. It presents a society at once freed from the burden of alienated work and yet utterly alienated; a dystopian utopia, where suffering and violence seem absent, yet so is any life worthy of the name, leaving only a comfortable, high-tech bovine existence.

 

At times, the film almost feels as if it were written by Marxist screenwriters. At one point, a revolt erupts among dysfunctional robots – their defects making them open to purposes beyond their programmed functions – against the forces of order, which are themselves robotized. This uprising leads to an alliance between these ‘useless’ insurgent machines and humans who have broken free from their own alienated condition, joining forces in a collective struggle against the automated subject (Marx’s name for capital) embodied by the robot Auto. This struggle becomes the precondition for humans and machines to rebuild civilization together on the ruins of the old Earth.

 

That said, there is an undeniable ease – perhaps too much – in how the humans’ de-alienation (and their resulting shift in perception) unfolds, despite having previously seemed like mere automatons. Even so, it is significant that the breakdown of reification coincides with – and is partly driven by – the resistance of the dysfunctional. A dynamic rarely seen in films for adults, let alone those made for children.

 

The ease of transformation is precisely what Mark Fisher found troubling about WALL-E’s hopeful ending. The return of humans to rebuild Earth, he argues, feels unearned, as the capitalist system that caused the catastrophe is never truly questioned, only softened. Though WALL-E appears to critique consumer culture, its resolution, according to him, ultimately neutralizes that critique. The infantilized, immobilized humans aboard the Axiom embody capitalism’s endpoint: passive consumers entirely dependent on the system. Yet rather than envisioning a genuine rupture with capitalism, the film offers a nostalgic redemption arc, reinforcing the status quo instead of challenging it. For Fisher, WALL-E exemplifies how late capitalism co-opts dissent, repackaging critique within emotionally satisfying but ultimately conservative narratives.

 

And yet, for all its limitations, there is something in WALL-E that resists easy recuperation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its opening act, which could almost stand alone as a separate film (as Fisher himself highlighted): a devastated Earth, devoid of life – human or otherwise (except for a little cockroach, and an unlikely new vine sprouting inside an old boot – and a lonely, Benjaminian little robot wandering through the ruins, collecting remnants of a civilization that has self-destructed. Through these traces, he reconstructs fragments of the world-thing that led to the telluric catastrophe – yet perhaps in a way that also reveals the utopian spark latent in what blind historical tendencies have condemned to oblivion. Forgetfulness itself, along with the disappearance of all language, is thus recorded, albeit obliquely. This may be why the melancholy pervading these scenes is not purely melancholic; it does not simply fold into itself. It lingers, but rather than merely mourning what is lost, it gestures toward something other.

 

In contrast to a society that subsumes all that is spiritual under the logic of consumption and accelerated disposal, the world recreated by the little robot makes room for everything – except, tellingly, a shiny ring, which he discards without the slightest hesitation. Here, each object finds its place, even a child's hybrid cutlery – half fork, half spoon, neither one thing nor the other: ‘Irreplaceable is only that which serves no purpose’ (Adorno). WALL-E’s shelter, a sort of Benjaminian dreamworld, is a fragile yet defiant stronghold of what, in the words of Ernst Bloch, ‘has not yet been fully realized anywhere, but which, as an event worthy of the human being, is imminent and reveals itself as the mission to be accomplished’. And in this fragile persistence of the useless, in that which refuses to be discarded, perhaps lies the glimmer of a world still worth building.

 

P.S.: The first draft of this text was written in the spring of 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, when I watched WALL-E multiple times with my then five-year-old son. At the time, so much about the virus remained unknown, and the looming prospect of a decimated humanity cast an eerily realistic shadow over the film – a feeling which hasn’t left me since.