Does Wall•E Dream of Electric Kale? The California Dream as Post-Scarcity Nightmare
Keywords:
post-scarcity, dystopia, WALL•E, CaliforniaAbstract
Since Europeans first became aware of the California landscape, they have used it as an imagined blank slate upon which to draw utopias. A legacy of failed communes and speculative schemes has never slowed California’s booster class from fashioning themselves as the harbingers of a bright new future: the state’s natural geography of abundance, when mixed by the “right” people with the right technology, will bring forth a cornucopia of wealth and leisure. Where material realities feed fantasies, and where fictions shape social-relations is perpetually blurred. This paper uses Pixar Studio's 2008 academy award winning film, WALL•E, as a departure point to examine how the California dream is shaped by its nightmarish inversion—technological innovation overtaking and destroying the nature that is the true source of happiness. In the film, a dystopian world appears not from the nuclear war or the strife that incites other dystopias, but from a post-scarcity society driven to mass overconsumption and a labor-less life. The film, however, does not attempt to warn us away from this path, but works to revive the technological fetish as nascent ecological utopia. The audience is shown thinking machines that transcend the boundary between human and non-human, with the heroic eponymous character stumbling its way into reestablishing human social relations, de-alienating their labor, and bringing forth a cyborg-mediated nature. The paper offers a critical reading of how California ideologies are reflected back and reinforced in the world of films like WALL•E, not as radical and open, but liberal and confined by their commitments to the status quo.References
Anderson, C.T. (2012) ‘Post-Apocalyptic Nostalgia: WALL-E, Garbage, and American Ambivalence toward Manufactured Goods.’ Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 23(3), pp. 267-282.
Asimov, I. (1950) I, Robot. Reprint New York : HarperCollins Publishers, 2018.
Asimov, I. (1951) Foundation. New York : Random House.
Boal, I., Stone, J. and Watts, M. (eds) (2012) West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in northern California. Oakland: PM Press.
Bookchin, M. (2004) Post-scarcity Anarchism. Oakland: AK Press.
Čapek, K. (1923) R.U.R. (Rossums̓ Universal Robots): A Play in Three Acts and an Epilogue. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carlsson, C. (2008) Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today. Oakland: AK Press.
Culver, L. (2010) The Frontier of Leisure:Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davidson, I. (2015) ‘Motion, Mobility and Philip K Dick.’ Literary Geographies, 1(1), pp. 24-41.
Davis, M. (1990) City of Quartz: Excavating the future in Los Angeles. New York: Verso.
Davis, M. (2001) ‘Sunshine and the Open Shop: Ford and Darwin in 1920s Los Angeles.’ In Deverell, W. and Sitton, T. (eds) Metropolis in the Making : Los Angeles in the 1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Forster, E.M. (1909) The Machine Stops. Reprint San Franisco: Jovian Press, 2018.
Goldstein, J. (2013) ‘Appropriate Technocracies? Green Capitalist Discourses and Post Capitalist Desires.’ Capitalism Nature Socialism, 24(1), pp. 26-34.
Guthman, J. (2004) Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Guthman, J. (2011) Weighing in: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Harvey, D. (1982) The Limits to Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Johns‐Putra, A. (2016) ‘Climate change in literature and literary studies: From cli-fi, climate change theater and ecopoetry to ecocriticism and climate change criticism.’ Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 7(2), pp. 266-282.
Keil, R. (2002) ‘Los Angeles as Metaphor.’ In Sawhney, D. (ed) Unmasking L.A. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 199-212.
Laslett, J. (2012) Sunshine Was Never Enough: Los Angeles Workers, 1880-2010. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lipschutz, R. (2018) ‘Eco-utopia or eco-catastrophe? Imagining California as an ecological utopia.’ Elem Sci Anth, 6(1), p. 65.
Marx, L. (1964) The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McClintock, N. (2010) ‘Why farm the city? Theorizing urban agriculture through a lens of metabolic rift.’ Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 3(2), pp. 191-207.
McKibben, B. (1989) The End of Nature. New York: Random House.
Mitchell, K. (2010) ‘Pre-Black Futures.’ Antipode 41, pp. 239-261.
Nicolaides, B. (2002) My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nikoleris, A., Stripple, J. and Tenngart, P. (2017) ‘Narrating climate futures: shared socioeconomic pathways and literary fiction.’ Climatic Change 143(3-4), pp. 307-319.
Otto, E. (2012) Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Pellow, D. and Park, L. (2002) The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High Tech Global Economy. New York: New York University Press.
Pitti, S. (2003) The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Saadia, M. (2016) Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek. San Francisco: Inkshares.
Schoenberger, E. (2004) ‘The Spatial Fix Revisited.’ Antipode, 36(3), pp. 427-433.
Solnit, R. (2010) Infinite City: a San Francisco Atlas. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Srnicek, N. and Williams, A. (2015) Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London: Verso Books.
Starr, K. (1990) Material dreams: Southern California through the 1920’s. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tsing, A. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tsing, A., Bubandt, N. and Swanson H. (eds) (2017) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Turner, F. (2006) From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Walker, R. (2004) The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California. New York: New Press.
Walker, R. (2009) The Country in the City: the Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Walker, R. (2018) Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area. Oakland: PM Press.
Yates, M. (2011) ‘The Human-As-Waste, the Labor Theory of Value and Disposability in Contemporary Capitalism.’ Antipode 43(5), pp. 1679-1695.
Yates, M. (2015) ‘Labor as “Nature,” Nature as Labor: “Stay the Course” of Capitalism in WALL-E’s Edenic Recovery Narrative.’ ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 22(3), pp. 525-543.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).