Food (in a cup?) for thought

I loved Wall-E. Like many viewers, I adored the Chaplinesque first third with its melancholy charm. The shots of the lone robot building skyscrapers out of cubes of compounded trash set a dark backdrop for the poignant revelation of the lonely android's home. For Wall-E is a collector, and his abode -- an abandoned transport unit -- is lined with junk he has salvaged from the global landfill. These curiosities: strings of Christmas lights, a Rubix cube, the enigmatic spork, and a tape of Hello Dolly, which he totes around with him while he works. This insight into Wall-E's world is touching not only because it reveals the robot's acquired human sentimentality, but also because, in a way, it softens the film's stark eco-disaster pitch. The discarded trinkets Wall-E gleans from the garbage are reborn as objects of fascination, something worth preserving. It adds a touch of empathy for the waste-ruined humans: if Wall-E can fall prey to the fruitless accumulation of 'stuff', who can blame us? But it also reminds us of why we collect in the first place. 'Stuff' has meaning. From artifice comes art, and culture. Cue Strauss here.

But I digress. This isn't really a review of the film. As we emerged into the theater lobby, the four-foot ads for popcorn and Coke popped out at us in garish moving colors. My mom commented, "It looks like the spaceship!" Indeed it did resemble an eerily accurate foreshadowing of the Axiom, the ginormous space colony where the escaping human population has been devolving for the past seven centuries. Sponsored by Buy N' Large (whose empire is so pervasive that the U.S. President serves as their Global C.E.O.), the Axiom is a floating dystopian resort where obese, bone-deficient people move about exclusively in flying individual easy chairs, equipped with holographic screens and cup holders for all their supersized liquid meals. In order for these cartoon people to return to Earth, which has once again become inhabitable, they must regain their bipedalism and their determination to live rather than merely survive. Yadda ya.

Not everyone was as wowed by the film as the most effusive reviewers, but I never expected the futuristic fable to offend anyone, except perhaps the most avid anti-environmentalist. However, this Slate piece by David Engber brings up an interesting point.

Wall-E is an innovative and visually stunning film, but the "satire" it drawsis 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!

But the metaphor only works if you believe familiar 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. They watch TV all day long and can barely read.

The article continues to point out that obesity has far more to do with genetics than with actual eating and exercise behavior (though I find the degree of assertion dubious). Engber goes on to cite other examples in which the growing obesity epidemic has been linked to the growing environmental crisis. He reminds us that this connection is not so simple. Fat people may weigh down planes and increase fuel use, but the people doing the most flying are the trim business class, not the demographic raised on Big Mac. Finally, Engber suggests a political overtone to the discussion, framing urban "eco-liberals" as fretting over their less enlightened brethren in Red State U.S.A.

It is Engber's last citation that really got my attention. We get the sense that this was the piece that prompted the Slate writer to action in the first place. In a heartbreaking viewer reaction, a presumably obese woman writes a letter to Pixar denouncing the portrayal of the overweight in Wall-E. She left the theater crying.

It is horrible when you see the only bodies shaped like you as things to laugh at, as living examples of as a culture, how shoddily we treat the earth. There’s no complexity, no understanding, just an easy punchline. Why is it instantly funny to see people fall and struggle and be hurt? Worst yet, I sat there watching trying to be hopeful because at least the fat couple touched hands and smiled at each other. Unlike Wall-e and Eve, they never got to dance...

I support environmentalism. I am hurt by the same issues in consumer culture. I don’t even drive and have lived car-free for my whole adult life. I guess if you look at me that doesn’t matter.

As someone who has been weight-sensitive my entire life, I can empathize with this woman. At the same time, I cant help but feel like a perpetrator. After all, who demonstrates more prejudice against the overweight than a normal-weight girl on a diet? After finishing a double scoop instead of a single, I would fear the slightest weight gain and chastize myself as "greedy" in the same breath. In that theater, I laughed along at the bumbling, doughy cartoon bodies. Did I fail to notice the prejudice because I myself have the same deeply rooted bias?

Let's look at this anthropologically.

First let's look at Engber's argument that genetics, not lifestyle, controls obesity. This is only partially true. For example, as a demographic, Native Americans today have one of the highest rates of obesity in the country. Obviously, in addition to high poverty rates, there is some genetic factor at work here. But in the 1700s, obesity as we know it was nonexistent in Native Americans. The difference, of course, is that back then then the Indians -- like most of the world -- were living in a much more sustainable way. Fast food was a buffalo, and you had to ride like hell to catch it. Whatever genetic component it has, the truth remains, obesity is not healthy and it is not natural. Yes, we all have a set point; most of us are never going to look like Kiera Knightley. But no one's set point is 300 pounds.

Engber is right that the poorest, fattest demographics are not the ones most directly harming the planet. However, it's no coincidence that the age of obesity is the age of global warming. Obesity and pollution are each symptoms of a broader problem: over-consumption. Whether it's 99-cent cheeseburgers or $5.00 gas for the Hummer, Americans today over-consume to a degree that was never possible before. We all eat, drink, drive, fly, watch, produce, buy, discard, and use too much.

I will defend Wall-E by pointing out that in the film, the environmental crisis precedes the waistline crisis. The planet did not have to evacuate Earth because they were fat; in fact, the film makes clear that the rotund human form at the time of the story is the direct result of the 700-year stay aboard the Axiom . In other words, fat people did not kill the Earth; they were fat because their environment was restricted. The truth is, in the robot-controlled conditions in which Wall-E's people live, we would all become floating doughboys or close to it. Like animals in captivity, they changed, and though some spiritual or intellectual failings seem to accompany the physical degradation (primarily ignorance), the humans do redeem themselves. They take action. If super-fat people who can't even walk can turn around to save the world, certainly the film isn't arguing that fat people today are ruining it. Nothing in the movie blames obese people for the waste that Wall-E is cleaning up on the abandoned planet. It does suggest, however, that we are ultimately responsible for our own obesity problem, which for some may be an inconvenient truth that's hard to swallow, even in a cartoon cup.