The Changing Face of Enviromentalist Media
Got a chance to see Wall*E last week, awesome movie — A++ great shipping would buy again. They’ve essentially accomplished the same engaging tone without dialogue that something like Triplets of Belleville did, but without the expressive advantages of human characters (i.e. though totally baller go see it).
Wall*E’s also got this strong social commentary element about how over consumption and waste is going to come back to bite us in the ass. Obviously, movies with a “save the environment” message aren’t anything new. The easiest example is, of course, Ted Turner’s brainchild Captain Planet, which hilariously transformed during its run from a tightly focused show about environmental problems into a general crusade against social issues like the IRA conflict and urban crime.
But I think it’s interesting that we’re seeing a shift in the way society is constructing these environmental problems in media. While both Wall*E and Captain Planet are facially about the same thing, the way they deal with these issues and prescribe solutions are radically different.
First, the protagonists plays a different role with regards to the enemy they are fighting. For Captain Planet, the superhuman destroyer of pollution, always triumphs. His enemies never seem to put up much of a fight, and they tend to be far outmatched by his powers. Moreover, he’s reliably summoned: the Planeteers never face their enemies on their own, Captain Planet is always there to beat the bad guys.
Wall*E is a far more modest claim. He’s a robot, which has two implications. He’s touchingly sub-human (as when he attempts to mimic the dancing of “Hello, Dolly!” And also, he’s a victim of the system — largely abandoned by humans to take on the impossible task of cleaning up the trash and constantly veering towards becoming a broken piece of trash himself.
Second, the kind of advisory made to the viewer is fundamentally different. For Captain Planet, the mantra is “The Power Is Yours!” and the amusingly stilted PSAs (and terribly designed website), remind us that through local recycling and composting, we can somehow (and inexplicably) build a bridge that changes things for the better on a macroscale.
The picture is totally different in Wall*E. While Wall*E and his friends play an important role in preserving what nature exists on the spaceship, it’s ultimately the high-level decisions of the Captain that bring the ship back home. And, indeed, this is a pattern that’s repeated in other pro-environmental works as of late. Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” seems to touch on a note of lobbying government and political solutions, rather than independent ones. In both cases, the solution is one of influencing government and other “big” monolithic actors to act on behalf of the environment.
In both cases, there seems to have been a shift from viewing environmental problems as essentially surmountable to one that is essentially insurmountable by the private sector. Where Wall*E needs the Captain of the ship, the Planeteers who are “just kids” can get together to create Captain Planet on their own. The “normal” individual has become downgraded from the effective unit of power in favor of the “man alone” leader or decisionmaker.
It seems to be understood in this new generation of environmentalist media that only those with the levers of power (or buttons, in the case of Wall*E) can confront these issues. And since the effect of media is a feedback (market forces imply that we define it, sociological forces imply that it defines us), I wonder what this general trend of constructing and understanding the problem means for public policy approaches in general? Will individual local efforts at conservation lose steam as larger scale lobbying gains momentum in the future?
