Discuss.

  • Mog_Pharou [he/him]
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    edit-2
    4 years ago

    Mark Fisher talks about Wall-e in Capitalist Realism.

    Take Disney/ Pixar’s Wall-E (2008). The film shows an earth so despoiled that human beings are no longer capable of inhabiting it. We’re left in no doubt that consumer capitalism and corporations – or rather one mega-corporation, Buy n Large – is responsible for this depredation; and when we see eventually see the human beings in offworld exile, they are infantile and obese, interacting via screen interfaces, carried around in large motorized chairs, and supping indeterminate slop from cups. What we have here is a vision of control and communication much as Jean Baudrillard understood it, in which subjugation no longer takes the form of a subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but rather invites us to interact and participate. It seems that the cinema audience is itself the object of this satire, which prompted some right wing observers to recoil in disgust, condemning Disney/Pixar for attacking its own audience. But this kind of irony feeds rather than challenges capitalist realism. A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief.

    On top of the interpassivity argument, he also mentions later that Wall-E vindicates the all consuming growth of capitalism at the end. Climate change is a temporary setback solved with technology, the earth (or other planets) are recolonized and the zombie flesh beast of capitalism continues feasting without even the destruction of the planet to limit it.

    Edit: Found the 2nd quote, in relation to climate change

    In the end, Wall-E presents a version of this fantasy - the idea that the infinite expansion of capital is possible, that capital can proliferate without labor - on the off world ship, Axiom, all labor is performed by robots; that the burning up of Earth's resources is only a temporary glitch, and that, after a suitable period of recovery, capital can terra form the planet and recolonize it). Yet environmental catastrophe features in late capitalist culture only as a kind of simulacra, its real implications for capitalism too traumatic to be assimilated into the system. The significance of Green critiques is that they suggest that, far from being the only viable political-economic system, capitalism is in fact primed to destroy the entire human environment. The relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster is neither coincidental nor accidental: capital's 'need of a constantly expanding market', its 'growth Capitalism and the Real fetish', mean that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability.

    • corporalham [none/use name]
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      4 years ago

      Nothing more to add really. It's difficult to imagine what a truly radical movie would look like, at least any kind that would end up with a wide release. Doing something revolutionary-shaped can just as easily serve as a release valve for social energy as can incite it. Winning the culture war would probably hurt the actual war, because it would produce the illusion that we've already won.