I love coincidence. Coincidence I mention because as I reach the end of John Gray’s book, Straw Dogs, for the third time in as many years, I read chapter 20, ‘The Soul In The Machine,’ an hour before leaving the cabin this weekend. On arriving home last night I caught up with Friday’s edition of the NYT and read a review of the new Pixar movie, Wall-E, by A.O. Scott. In the first paragraph of his review he tells us – “This is a world without people, you might say without animation, though it teems with evidence of past life.” He also mentions that in the first 40 minutes of the movie – “barely any dialogue is spoken.”
Another coincidence here is that it is as if the movie’s director, Andrew Stanton and his co-writer Jim Reardon, had also read the last few chapters of John Gray’s book. According to A.O. Scott the movie’s underlying theme is far from a happy one – “…… but ‘Wall-E’ surely breaks new ground. It gives us a G-rated, computer-generated cartoon vision of our own potential extinction. It’s not the only film lately to engage this somber theme. As the earth heats up, the vanishing of humanity has become something of a hot topic…”
The Earth devoid of humans, or at least where the remaining humans are reduced to living in cities “emulating the noble idleness of hunter-gatherers, their needs met by new technologies” as Gray writes, is an Earth left to conscious machines. The writers and director of Wall-E suggest that this has already occurred and conscious machines are all that remain on the planet. As he says – “Wall-E’s tender regard for the material artifacts of a lost civilization is understandable. After all, he too is a product of human ingenuity.”
“In his recent documentary Encounters at the End of the World the film director, Werner Herzog muses that “the human presence on this planet is not really sustainable,†a sentiment that is voiced, almost verbatim, in the second half of Wall-E.â€
As Gray writes in his passage ‘The Soul of the Machine,’ – “Those who fear conscious machines do so because they think that consciousness is the most valuable feature of humans – and because they fear anything they cannot subject to their will. They fear the evolution of conscious machines for the same reason they seek to become masters of the Earth.”
Gray predicts – “As machines slip from human control they will do more than become conscious. They will become spiritual beings, whose inner life is no more limited by conscious thought than ours. Not only will they think and have emotions. They will develop the errors and illusions that go with self-awareness.”
That sounds like a movie called ‘Wall-E’ to me.
One other coincidence regarding the movie was that today I read a post by Seth Godin on his blog entitled “Bravery and Wall-E.” At first I thought from the title that by bravery he meant that we humans are brave to be advancing our technological know-how ever forward as we invent “living software” and biological chips, machines that Gray predicts will move us humans toward extinction. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case – Seth discussed the marketing [or lack of] and how the movie will make “plenty of money.”
The parable of ‘Wall-E’ transcends marketing and money.
“Other animals are born, seek mates, forage for food and die. That is all. But we humans – we think – are different. We are persons, whose actions are the results of their choices. Other animals pass their lives unawares, but we are conscious. Our image of ourselves is formed from our ingrained belief that consciousness, selfhood and free will are what define us as human beings, and raise us above all other creatures.” John Gray; Straw Dogs 2002.
There is a lot more mainstream media covering issues of extinction lately. I wonder if other smaller instances of civilizations ending have similar trends in their arts.
I wonder if there are any answers in the various patterns of arts, storytelling and philosophy. Hopefully all of this new attention will uncover something that will save our asses.
July 7th, 2008 at 10:53 pmIt seems that advancements in technology are always harbingers of the end of something. John Gray’s very fascinating book which was published in 2002 points to 3 things 1. we are already using “living” machines such as microbe switches in chips, 2. we ourselves are biological machines and 3. we can not “save” the earth, that’s a conceit driven by our big brains. The Earth will do fine whether we harm it further or not. It will shake us off or at the very least we’ll be sidelined as a species and the “robots” or conscious machines will do the work ala Wall-E. He also argues that if we had remained in hunter gatherer mode and treated the Earth as animals do we wouldn’t be in this mess today.
July 8th, 2008 at 7:22 amFunny, I wrote a bit about this theme recently as I noticed it popping up seemingly everywhere. Compared to the dynamic characters, it seems so subtle in WALL-E.
Like Gray, the late George Carlin once quipped, “Humans are like a virus. Earth will shake us off like a bad cold and continue on its path.” Indeed.
July 8th, 2008 at 10:53 am@Dave–I agree with you to a point, but I think one of our overriding problems in the post hunter/gatherer world is the obsession with EMPIRE. I think an industrialized society could exist in some kind of far-off Wellsian utopia that actually worked in harmony with nature, but human nature being what it is…
I have to give props to Vonnegut for writing our epitaph as a species: “We could have fixed it, but we were too damn lazy. And cheap.”
July 8th, 2008 at 6:48 pm[...] will shake us off like a bad cold and continue on its path.†Dave Allen calls WALL-E, “a parable for our eventual extinction,” and while eschatological themes are disturbingly rampant lately (Children of Men, I Am [...]
July 10th, 2008 at 8:49 amWell, here’s mine.
July 10th, 2008 at 8:56 amWall-E totally looks like the robot from “Short Circuit”… minus the cheesy 80’s style of course
July 17th, 2008 at 9:29 am