Ivy Allie

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On owning your web presence

Posted 04 Jun 2024

Background

As you probably already know, Meta has announced that they’re going to start feeding all of our data (text, imagery, what have you) into AI models. This has led to an understandable exodus of artists from their platforms, Instagram in particular. Abandoning these platforms probably the right move and I am not here to try to talk anyone out of doing so.

But I want to take this moment to talk about how we can avoid ending up in this same situation again.

How we got here

What has happened with Meta (and with Google, and the-website-formerly-known-as-Twitter, and any other tech giant managing our personal data) has only happened because we all accepted something of a devil’s bargain. These companies offered us two things: convenience and “free” service. In return, they got to have our data.

About twenty years ago, when we collectively began to accept this state of affairs, it seemed fairly innocuous to most of us, me included. You get to share stuff with your friends on a relatively stable platform, and the only cost to you is that some algorithm scans your data and uses it to serve ads? It’s a compelling pitch, and I don’t fault us for falling for it.

But now the mask is off, and we all know a good deal about the ulterior motives behind these “free” services. It’s been said many times but it bears repeating: if you’re not paying for a web service, you are not the customer, you are the product.

The fear

What I’m concerned about now is the likelihood of our abandoning one trap just to walk straight into another. The main places where my artist friends are going are Substack and Cara. Either of these are probably better than Instagram, to be sure–but for how long?

Substack is a for-profit company and already has some kind of dubious decisions on their record. And as it gains popularity, so too will it become more likey to be acquired by something like Meta, or to just become dastardly all by itself. (Remember that Google’s motto used to be “Don’t Be Evil.”)

Cara is an interesting case. At the moment it appears not to be a for-profit enterprise, and does seem to have been set up with the best of intentions. But again, for how long? Running an operation like this is expensive, especially if you expect it to function as smoothly as something like Instagram. And, ultimately, users are taking on risk by trusting Cara to be the cornerstone of their web presence. They too could turn evil, or simply go kaput.

So what can we do?

What I suggest is this: we need to return our communities to Web 1.0 technologies. That means static websites, blogs, and forums. I realize that sounds difficult, and a bit less streamlined than the phone-app-based access we’ve all become accustomed to. And, well, admittedly yes, this is not necessarily going to be easy. But if we’re going to salvage the internet (and I do think it is worth salvaging) we have to stop outsourcing its maintenance to third parties who work for “free.”

As a creator, you should consider setting up a website, blog, or possibly both. And pay for it with money. A decent hosting service may not be free, but they can be ludicrously cheap. Many of them will even install WordPress or other site-building software for you, which will make the whole project pretty easy. While it may sound hard, it really isn’t, and your hosting service will do everything it can to make this work well for you.

Now, there is an obvious caveat here: you are still sending your data to someone else and letting them hold it on their computers. These services could also turn out to be evil and misuse your data in one way or another. But it’s less likely – you’re the customer in this case, so their goal is to keep you happy rather than to immediately sell you out to the highest bidder. But the real beauty of using a host instead of a social media company is that you can just up and switch to another one, and take everything with you. If Host A turns scummy, it’s relatively simple to just move all of your files over to Host B. Your domain name doesn’t even need to change. No one else will even notice you’ve moved if you do it right.

Of course most of us are simultaneously creators and audience members, so we must think about the receiving end of this arrangement as well. The “feed” was one of the game-changing innovations of the social media apparatus, because it was convenient to channel everything you might want to see onto a single dashboard. But there is an old-school equivalent to this, one that we can utilize again: RSS. This was (and still is) a simple technology that allowed applications (“RSS readers”) to get a listing of new content from a website and display it in a convenient way. By setting up blogs with RSS feeds, we can establish a system by which the audience can manage a feed from their favorite artists that would look much the same as the one we see on places like Instagram. The sole difference is that all of the content will be decentralized rather than being served up by a single corporation with its own ulterior motives.

Finally, we come to the question of community interaction. For basic individual-to-individual communication, this may be as simple as having a public-facing email address that’s easy to find. For more community-based discussion, online message boards can be established as easily as any other kind of website, and for all but the largest online communities they need not be very expensive. (Note: Discord is not the answer.)

Final thoughts

At the risk of sounding overdramatic, we have arrived at the day of reckoning. We now know exactly what Mephistopheles got out of the bargain, and it turns out to have been more dear to us than we had anticipated. But there’s a whole line of would-be devils lined up with new contracts. And maybe some of them are angels–as I said, I do think the Cara people have their hearts in the right place–but even those should give us pause. We got into this mess by entrusting our online identities to agents who didn’t need to answer to us, and we’re not going to get out of it by doing the same thing over again.

We need to take our online identities and manage them ourselves again. It will be less convenient. It also will cost a few bucks. But we’ll build something worth having, something that works for us rather than against us.

They stole the internet, and it’s high time we took it back.

Appendices

Resources

I banged out the above as quickly as possible in order to get it out there, but when I have a chance I will come back and put some links here to hosting services, RSS readers, and other related things.

An aside regarding Discord

Discord is not the answer for creating community spaces, for all the reasons discussed above, and its proliferation is a scourge that must be stemmed as soon as possible. Discord is a problem because, like all the other social services, it’s a for-profit enterprise not answerable to its users, but what’s more, it is establishing a precedent of walling off its content from the open internet. This makes it essentially a black hole of information. Anything that exists solely on Discord could disappear at any time and would be lost for good, and even in the moment is hidden from anyone outside of its closed “communities.” There’s a place for private communities, certainly, but we will lose most of what made the internet great if we begin to make all communities closed by default.

Finally, a disclaimer

This website is hosted for free on GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft. While writing this I couldn’t help but think that everything I’ve said here applies equally to GitHub, and as such I should really consider moving this site back to paid hosting, as it has been in the past.

The Best Video Essays of 2023

Posted 29 Dec 2023

Drawing of hbomberguy

I'm back once again to render my opinions on the world of the expository YouTube videos. This year's list is shorter than last year's, though whether this is due to trends among the video creators or some aspect of my own psychology I'm not sure. As ever, this is all hugely subjective, and despite the fact that I've framed this as "the best", it's more accurately "videos that I enjoyed." If a particular video's description doesn't sound appealing to you, you can skip it without feeling like you're missing out on something amazing.

As with last year, particular favorites are marked with ★

Enough preamble! On to the list!

Film and Television

Video Games

Cyberpunk 2077

Broken on arrival, for the first couple years of its existence Cyberpunk 2077 was discussed primarily in the context of its disastrous launch. In 2023, the game had been stabilized long enough that we finally started to see some discussion of its actual content rather than its context.

Science and Technology

AI

Inevitably AI was a topic of much discussion this year. Here are a few highlights.

Art

History and Social Issues

Previous Years

Barbie, we're just getting started

Posted 17 Dec 2023

Author’s note: I wrote the following essay in Summer 2023, when the popularity of the Barbie film was at a fever pitch. I didn’t publish it at the time, partly because I feared backlash from the film’s fans. Now that some time has passed, it’s no longer clear whether the film will have the cultural sticking power that many people seemed to think that it might, but I believe the main points that I made here remain salient and worth recording.

Barbie appears to me to be one of the most cynically calculated works of art ever created. Judging solely from the discourse surrounding it, (sanctioned and otherwise) it appears to have been intentionally engineered to have wide appeal and head off potential criticism in service of rehabilitating a tainted brand for the long term and making a tidy profit for Mattel in the short term. Naturally, this is not the first attempt to use Hollywood to further such goals, but what frightens me about Barbie is how successful it has been.

Barbie, the brand, has long been the subject of harsh criticism from feminists, who have accused it of causing body image issues, glorifying consumerism, providing poor role models, and so on. I’m not here to argue any of these points, but neither am I here to argue against any of them. Barbie is, as it always has been and always will be, foremost a consumer product, a hunk of plastic that exists as a commodity to be bought. Mattel doesn’t care if feminists think Barbie is a bad role model unless those criticisms lead to a decline in Barbie’s sales. And, to be clear, Barbie’s sales have been declining. As of 2016, sales of the brand were at an “all-time low” and, as the press interpreted it, Mattel was having a hard time keeping it “relevant.” Whether this was due to feminist criticism or to unrelated market forces is hard to say, although I would venture to guess it was a mix of both.

Mattel clearly thought so too: the Barbie movie, as a rehabilitation tactic, took aim both at the feminist criticisms and the cultural irrelevancy.

It’s been obvious from the start that Mattel has wanted this to be seen as a feminist movie. Attaching Greta Gerwig to the project is a clear enough sign of that. And much of the discourse around this film since its release has been related to feminism, and whether or not it’s successful at making some sort of feminist statement.

I argue that it is impossible for this kind of film to be unequivocally feminist, especially not in the contemporary intersectional sense. Regardless of what statement Gerwig et al. are trying to make here, you cannot make a philosophically consistent argument for feminism in a product that also functions as a commercial for an international toy conglomerate.

This is because Mattel is not, and can never be, a bastion of feminism. It is a legacy corporation, one worth billions of dollars, and is built on a foundation of greed and suffering. It’s been known for years that Barbies, and most other Mattel products, are produced for low wages under hazardous conditions in factories throughout the global South. Many of the workers in these factories are women, and Mattel has consistently denied or ignored reports that find them to be hotbeds of sexual harassment. Additionally, Mattel, being first and foremost a purveyor of plastic gewgaws, is unavoidably a contributor to the plastic waste that is befouling our planet and—go figure—having an outsized effect on women in poor countries. To support feminism, Mattel would have to become something other than Mattel. The old disclaimer still applies: the views and opinions of the filmmakers do not reflect those of the company.

Of course, the film does not let Mattel off the hook entirely. In fact it addresses Mattel very explicitly, depicting its CEO as a buffoon in what is clearly meant as a light criticism of the corporation’s dubious intentions. But this also serves to obscure the fact that the CEO of Mattel is a real guy, one whose intentions with Barbie are every bit as questionable as those of anyone who came before him. His name is Ynon Kreiz, and he has not been at all subtle about what the Barbie movie was supposed to do: “This was not about making a movie. This was about creating a cultural event that will reach, engage, and touch consumers all over the world.” Note the telling use of the word consumers there. This was not about “reaching, engaging, and touching” people more generally, it was about talking to the people who are likely to buy things, and telling them that what they ought to be buying is Barbie.

Regarding his depiction in the film, Kreiz said simply that Mattel “embrace[s] self-deprecation.” Naturally: recent years have proven quite definitively that corporations like Mattel can have their cake and eat it too. They’ve learned that people no longer appreciate corporations that comport themselves like stuffy authority figures, we prefer corporations that act like our pals. That means PR offices making snarky comments on Twitter, it means CEOs who dress like teenagers, it means rainbow-colored pablum every June. And in 2023, corporations realized that they can take direct potshots at themselves and reap rewards for doing so, as Netflix has done in a recent Black Mirror episode. It is now a viable marketing strategy to stand up and say “hey, we suck, don’t we?” and get an appreciative laugh from the audience. If self-deprecation is more likable than maintaining an air of superiority, of course they’re going to do it.

So if the problem is that Barbie is no longer culturally relevant, what tactic did the movie take to make it culturally relevant again? Essentially, they tied it to a larger cultural phenomenon: camp. Camp has been with us for a long time (Susan Sontag’s seminal essay on the topic was published in 1964), but the increased popularity of the phenomenon has recently run the gamut from high to low culture, from TV drag competitions to the hallowed halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, camp becoming more culturally relevant at the same time that Barbie’s popularity was on the wane. The pairing of Barbie with deliberate camp was a natural one: Barbie has always been campy, with its bright pink trappings and its emphasis on fashion. It’s hard to imagine any other current cultural trend that would have been a more convenient vehicle for Barbie’s return to relevancy.

However, I would argue that Barbie is not doing camp so much as it’s appropriating it. Camp has always been inextricably linked to gay culture, to the extent that it’s almost impossible to discuss one without discussing the other. Granted, no group can claim exclusive ownership over an aesthetic, but is this not a form of cultural appropriation? Greta Gerwig isn’t gay. Margot Robbie isn’t gay. Ynon Kreiz isn’t gay. Mattel sure as hell isn’t gay. I won’t claim that no queer people worked on this film (which would be absurd), but the major stakeholders and decision-makers involved were not. This is a film made by straight people that was designed to capitalize on a trend created by queer people.

And did it ever work: a veritable waterfall of bright pink money for its creators, very little of which is going to find its way back into the pockets of the queer people who pioneered the style. Regardless of how Mattel wants to position itself in terms of its relationship to queer people (and to be fair, it has a somewhat better track record than many large corporations), it’s important to remember that it does not exist to be anybody’s friend. They make “gay stuff” if they think people are interested in buying gay stuff.

The integration of camp is just one aspect of the film’s larger strategy toward being universally appealing, however. The first thing that I found alarming about Barbie, before I thought about any of this, was the way that it seemed deliberately (and very effectively) engineered to have the broadest appeal possible. This is a strategy that film studios seem to be getting increasingly adept at, and I find their success deeply unsettling. It’s akin to other forms of social engineering like the casino or the con man, systems which exploit quirks of human psychology as a hacker exploits a software bug.

This “universal appeal” is attained by building up the film in such a way as to appeal to broadly different demographics whose interests wouldn’t normally overlap much. We’ve got the camp aspect to bring in the queer people and aesthetes. We’ve got Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach to bring in the cinephiles, who normally wouldn’t show up for this kind of corporate production. This also loops back and ushers the film into “critical darling” territory, which is useful for drawing in the more casual moviegoers for whom Rotten Tomatoes is the final word. We’ve got the trappings of feminism to draw in the NPR-liberal demographic (which conveniently also sells tickets to the Ben Shapiros of the world, who will watch anything if they think they can make culture-war fodder from it). Including Margot Robbie brings in her substantial fanbase, a significant percentage of which are also the highly lucrative superhero fans. Then there’s the nostalgia aspect for the many, many people for whom Barbie is associated with fond childhood memories. If you get enough momentum behind the marketing (and Mattel spent $150 million marketing this baby), you can even start getting straight men into the seats, whether they come out of curiosity or because a female partner dragged them into it.

Finally, you also get children. With a rating of PG-13, the movie isn’t meant for them on paper, but obviously a lot of them are going to see it anyway, and you can bet that Mattel is well aware of this. The Jurassic World films are rated PG-13 as well, and Mattel makes tie-in toys for those. Much ink has been spilled to the effect that Barbie is a film meant for adults, but it’s not meant for adults, not exactly. Barbie is a film meant to be fun for the whole family, as the old cliche goes. But where this usually means “fun primarily for children, and more or less tolerated by adults,” here it’s the opposite. Mattel knows kids will see this movie. They expect and want kids to see it. And they’re hoping that said kids will like it at least enough to beg for more pink plastic crap come Christmas (and presumably grow up to be the next generation of Barbie-loving adults). Regardless of what else it has become, and what so many people want to believe, Barbie is still a toy commercial, and always has been.

Target's Christmas 2023 toy catalog displays Barbie film merchandise alongside its "standard" Barbies.

And even as the film sells toys to kids, as per tradition, Barbie is also the harbinger of Mattel’s pivot from being a purveyor of childhood playthings to being a company that profits off of its intellectual property. This is the company’s stated goal, according to recently-hired executive Josh Silverman, formerly of Disney. Barbie is merely the beginning of a slew of branded media franchises that they plan to unleash on the public. Films based on Hot Wheels and Monopoly sound idiotic now, but Barbie would have sounded just as silly before it became a phenomenon. I see no reason to think that they won’t be able to find equally compelling justifications for these films. Hot Wheels is already “revving its engine,” so to speak, with producer J.J. Abrams (an experienced reinvigorator of tired properties) saying that the film will be “emotional and grounded and gritty.” Of course. It’ll have a script that’s just good enough for it to be better than people expect it to be, it’ll have some star with a cult following, it’ll have a slightly surprising hook, and a message just to the left of centrism. These people know exactly what they’re doing, and so far they’ve done it very well.

Before Barbie was released, when it wasn’t yet clear whether we had a bona fide cultural phenomenon on our hands, I predicted that it would be one of the most significant works of art in recent memory. I felt insane as I said it, but the film’s reception has not led me to think otherwise. The Barbie phenomenon is deeply disturbing to me, perhaps the most thorough and effective fusion of commercialism and culture that I’ve ever seen. All big-name films sell merchandise, of course, but it’s rare to see something that is so transparently an advertisement be wholeheartedly embraced by people as a cultural treasure in its own right.

I have no doubt that some of Barbie’s fans, reading what I have written here, will want to rush to the film’s defense, and charge that the film is more than an advertisement, that it’s just a good and fun movie. Maybe so. But if anything, that makes it worse. Barbie has shown that you can wrap a commercial in a veneer of cultural legitimacy, and that you can make unfathomable amounts of money doing so. The same formula that saw Saturday morning cartoons reduced to toy commercials in the 80s has come for cinema, but now it’s been optimized for grownups—including the kind of grownups who think they’re beyond this kind of pandering. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a Trojan horse. A spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. They’ve found a way to make us pay to watch commercials and go home swearing that we enjoyed it. If that doesn’t scare you, I don’t know what would.

The Best Video Essays of 2022

Posted 17 Jan 2023

Drawing of Big Joel

Well, 2022 was not a banner year for the video essay. The medium seems to be in a sophomore slump of sorts, having matured enough to establish certain conventions but not quite comfortable enough to begin pushing its boundaries very often. Hopefully 2023 will be better, but in the meantime, I have once again gone back through my viewing history to find a few standout examples worthy of your time.

As before, this is by no means an objective or definitive thing. I can only speak for videos that I actually watched, which are themselves a subset of the videos that YouTube deigned to recommend to me. And this year brought an increasingly unreliable YouTube algorithm that often failed to highlight videos from creators who I explicitly follow, so I have no doubt there were many good videos that I never saw at all.

But here are some that I thought were good. I hope you enjoy them as well. As you can probably guess, those marked with a star are particular standouts. For convenience, here is a playlist with all of them, in no particular order because that would be a big pain.

Film and Television

History

Internet culture

Online masterclass grifting

One unexpected trend this year was a series of high-profile videos about the highly lucrative scam of selling online courses that promise to teach you to become a rich and famous Influencer.

Social Issues

Video games

Miscellaneous

That’s all, folks! And in case you missed it, here’s 2021’s list.

Ivy's Li'l Book of Perspective

Posted 26 Nov 2022

Debuted at SPX 2022, Ivy’s Li’l Book of Perspective is now available online for free! Whether you’re new to perspective drawing and looking for a simple introduction, or you’re experienced with perspective and in need of a convenient reference guide, this is the resource for you.

Click here to read the Li’l Book!

Cover of Ivy's Li'l Book of Perspective

This also marks the debut of a dedicated resources page, which hopefully will continue to grow in the future.

Ivy Goes Web 1.1

Posted 20 Feb 2022

I’m tired of the internet. More specifically, I’m tired of what it’s become: at best, an exercise in austere, uninteresting design, at worst a trainwreck of advertising and bloated JavaScript. Maybe it’s just the nostalgia talking but I miss the Internet of old, with its hackneyed personal websites, built not out of an attempt to create A Brand but for the sake of putting something out there.

I’ve been much gratified recently, even as certain parties clamor for a blockchain-based “Web 3.0”, to see the rise of a counter-movement, often going by the name “Web 1.1”. This calls for a move back to the ways of the late 90’s and early 00’s, when what we had was a World Wide Web and that Web was largely made up of thousands of personal websites. These were noncommercial, they were labors of love. They were weird and often ugly. They loaded fast because they were mostly text and had little to no JavaScript.

And they added up to something endlessly interesting. There were “rabbit holes”, but there was no “doomscrolling.” There was no Algorithm that was dedicated to keeping your eyes on the website for as long as possible. It was just you, your web browser, and an endless supply of idiosyncratic bric-a-brac that had been put together by regular people much like yourself. It was an art form like any other (but also unlike any other), and it’s been slowly eroded by large companies who want “the internet” to become synonymous with their own private platforms.

I’ve made some small changes to this site to bring it more in line with the Web 1.1 philosophy. I didn’t need to change much; it was most of the way there already. But I discontinued use of Google Fonts, so the site no longer uses outside resources, and I added a “Webmaster’s Pledge”, which explains the ways that this site uses JavaScript.

I don’t want this infinite canvas to become obsolete. I’ve had personal websites since I was about 9 years old and I intend to continue until my demise. Longer, if archive.org persists. And I hope you will make one as well. And not a Web 2.0 site on Blogger or Squarespace or whatever, but a static site of your own creation.

Let’s keep the Internet weird.

I kinda like The Phantom Menace

Posted 17 Jan 2022

Every once in a while I feel compelled to revisit this thing, probably partly because its imagery saturated formative years of my childhood despite the fact that I didn’t see it in its entirety until years later. And every time I revisit it, I come to the same conclusions:

  1. This film is very funny, but only when it’s not trying to be. Moments of unintentional comedy are as frequent as its deeply embarrassing intentional jokes. Endless laughs can be had by, say, taking photographs of the screen and sending them to your siblings with snarky comments. But the insipid Mickey Mouse theatrics of Jar-Jar lose all their appeal if the viewer’s age has multiple digits.

  2. This film is very boring. So boring. Not as boring as Attack of the Clones, but still, a major chore to sit through. The Senate Chamber scenes get a lot of grief but that shouldn’t be taken to imply that the battles are a good time, because they’re not. It would be easier to get emotionally invested into watching someone else play Space Invaders.

  3. Visually it actually looks pretty good. The production design is phenomenal and the CGI isn’t nearly as bad as people make it out to be. For a film that came out in 1999 it still holds up remarkably well. And every once in a while there’s a shot that makes you say, “wow, this George Lucas guy is a pretty fine director!”

  4. It borders on campy, but it’s not really campy enough. I want a campy Star Wars, please. All these things take themselves too god damn seriously.

  5. Such racism. I mean, come on. We’ve got Jar-Jar the Minstrel, Watto the Space Shylock, and an evil cabal of Yellow Peril Aliens. Who thought this was OK?

  6. The machinations of the political schemes make no sense. As a kid I always figured I would understand them when I was older, but no. If anything the older I get the less sense they make.

But five years from now or so I’ll probably again want to go through it again. Somehow it’s all worth it so long as I get to see Natalie Portman’s hilarious facial expressions, hear the weird stilted dialogue, watch Darth Maul drive a motorcycle off a cliff, and look at all the nice environments that totally aren’t ripped off from Dinotopia, trust us. And, of course, the greatest line in all of cinema: “There’s always a bigger fish.”

Final note: The first time I watched this in its entirety was in the late 00’s, when it could be found split into about a dozen chunks on YouTube and watched in multiple sittings over several days. I submit that this is still the ideal way to watch it.

The Best Video Essays of 2021

Posted 24 Dec 2021

Possibly the most fascinating and vivid new art form of our time, nearly everyone I know under the age of 40 watches video essays on at least a semi-regular basis. The best of them are as well-made, sophisticated, interesting, and insightful as anything that might get nominated for established awards. Yet so far there’s been very little recognition of the form outside of the potent enthusiasm of its audience. So I thought it might be fun to compile a list of some of the video essays that I most enjoyed this year. This is not a ranking, nor is it an award, nor is it comprehensive. Consider it a list of recommendations.

I’ve also made a YouTube playlist for your convenience.

Internet culture

The Ballad of Doug Walker

There was a lot of good discussion this year about my favorite disgraced Internet celebrity, Doug “The Nostalgia Critic” Walker. Full playlist here.

Video games

Urban Planning

Film and Televison

The Sia Saga

The most fascinating and horrifying event in 2021 cinema was the release of the ill-advised autism film “Music”, created by ostensibly famous musician Sia. (Had you heard of her before this debacle? Because I hadn’t.) I can’t remember which of the many videos about it that I watched was best, so here are a couple different ones.

Computers and Programming

Miscellaneous

I Will Draw Your Favorite Movie 2021

Posted 28 Nov 2021

Color illustration based on the film Alien

Now’s your chance to get original art of your favorite movie and support charity at the same time! For your donation, I will create an illustration based on a film still of your choice, and all proceeds will go to Doctors Without Borders. Doctors Without Borders is an international aid organization that supplies medical care in the places where it’s most needed. After two years of pandemic, I think we can all appreciate how important such work is right now. So don’t be shy, hop on board and let’s get this show on the road!

Pricing

Donate now

[...] Read the rest of this »

Wall-E was a weird movie

Posted 16 Oct 2021

At the time Wall-E was released, I knew at least one person who named it the greatest film of all time. That seemed a little hyperbolic to me, but I was in agreement that the film was very good, and above average for Pixar, which back then actually meant something. But there were elements of it which bothered me from the beginning. Most significantly, I found the gaggle of broken robots annoying and I thought it was something of a plot hole that the Axiom continued sending out probes even after their mission was canceled. On this rewatch, though, I found that both of these problems are actually directly tied to the film’s central thesis, which is that deviance is a moral good.

I will elaborate. Superficially Wall-E appears to be a message about mindless consumerism and the environmental toll thereof, but this is actually a tangential aspect of its more consistent pro-disobedience message. Like The Iron Giant (a known influence at Pixar), the film is greatly concerned with the self-determination of its robot protagonists, and universally depicts a robot’s decision to disregard its assigned “directives” as inherently good. Conversely, the robots which adhere to their objectives are on a spectrum that ranges from pathetic to evil.

Obviously the most significant example is Wall-E himself. Though he has been diligently carrying out his directive for centuries, he has also developed significant character traits that are clearly not in line with his mission, and appears to have found robot happiness by doing so. And his life gets better still when he abandons them completely.

Eve’s directive, which is central to the plot, might seem to be an exception, but in fact it is consistent with this theme as well. The most significant moment in Eve’s arc is the scene in which she explicitly casts aside her directive–but only for a moment, because Wall-E reminds her that completing her mission is the only way to save him. So she does follow her directive for the rest of the film, but only because she now values its outcome, as opposed to the act of fulfilling it.

Meanwhile, we have characters like MO the cleaning robot, the Stewards, and AUTO the autopilot. MO enters the film with two directives: clean stuff and stay on the line. In his first scene he is basically antagonistic as he belligerently adheres to his assigned functions and is increasingly frustrated with Wall-E for disrupting his routine. At the end of his first scene he decides that staying on the line is no longer a directive worth following, because he wants to pursue the cleaning objective with singleminded zeal. As long as he continues to do so, he functions essentially as comic relief, and only when his task is complete is he graduated to full-fledged ally of the protagonists.

The Stewards and AUTO, however, never disregard their directives and thus become the primary villains of the film. The Stewards are basically police officers (RoboCops, if you will), presumably with the same degree of sapience enjoyed by the other robots of the film, but their unwillingness to disregard orders ultimately leads to a scene in which they get smashed to pieces by our protagonists. The same goes for AUTO: he is adamant about following his directives, and thus must die.

[...] Read the rest of this »

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