A Box and His Oval Friday.

Hello. I’m new.

This is the last post on Wall*E, I promise.

Speaking recently with Joie about a completely unrelated film, I realized that among the mess of cinema that I have experienced in my life, the films that I value most – that remain bubbling about at the top of my mental archive for some time after a first viewing – are films that I have enjoyed on a fairly basic, visceral level. These are films that have a sort of intoxicating affect on me that does not necessarily have anything to do with the work as it exists on an intellectual plane. I remain most attached to films that have gotten under my skin in an abject, immediate fashion; to films that relax me bodily or that imprint themselves in my memory with physically associative tag. I’m not just talking about the ‘Body Genres’. It appears, as its strikes me now, that in spite of my best attempts to assume the stance of a theoretically engaged spectator, I love movies like a child. I think that an attempt to define this sort of love is particularly relevant to our discussion of Andrew Stanton’s new bit of techno-bricolage, a film that flourishes on a spirit of simplicity and is perhaps complicated unnecessarily by its eco-friendly subtext. WALL•E insists on combining real-world relevance to a completely unencumbered kind of storytelling, and accordingly has a few moments of reflexive trouble.

The type of film that WALL•E engages with most historically is the silent comedy. Chaplin, Keaton, and their contemporaries are visible here because the film encourages a drastically simple type of spectating that was default in the purest, formative stages of cinema. One does not necessarily benefit from applying tangential modes of thought, far removed from the gleeful reverie of softshoe choreography and clumsy, infatuated courtship, to CITY LIGHTS or THE GENERAL. These films are definitely complicated creations, but are profoundly rewarding in the immediate event. Their system of comedy was augmented historically by 1930/40s screwball comedy, a group of films that injected a mischievous level of dialogue and social commentary into the mix, but still amount basically to a genre about children falling in love. WALL•E shares this charming quality of relinquishing ambition – just as IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT stays on the brain because of its heady, moonlit reveries in spite of its terrific depth of social commentary. Continuing on my historical tangent, I think the best company WALL•E can claim are the films of Jacques Tati.  In his films, Tati crafted a huge architectures of comedy (literally, looking at the production of PLAYTIME), films that contain depths of social commentary but float playfully along without concern for their structural levels of substance. They are biting critiques of the dizziness of modern growth, consumerism, and capitalism, but communicate a tender, profoundly hopeful idea of humanity with their equally dizzy style of humor.

As a genre film, a derivation, a sci-fi adventure, and one in that no uncertain terms hints at homage to everything from 2001, A.I., and ALIEN, to TITANIC (for fucks’ sake) WALL•E complicates its mode of comedy in a blithe Tatian style. It provides what might be considered a bit of bitchy, if humanistic, finger-pointing, but is systematically turned back around by a gleeful love story. A little garbage can crushing on an armed iPod. This formula, squeezed out of a company that still purports to make children’s films, provides a real challenge for Pixar and Andrew Stanton. However, in the end I very much enjoyed their struggle and the charming, joyful, visually lyrical strain that stands out most in the film’s apparatus.

Although I don’t think that it’s necessarily a better movie than my favorites in Pixar’s mini-canon (TOY STORY, INCREDIBLES, RATATOUILLE), WALL•E hints at a spectacular new capacity in this brand of film for complexity and stylistic daring. It’s a purely beautiful movie, full of images that actually challenge the value of live action for depth and texture, preferring a kind of romanticized photoimitation that adds new meaning to the term animation. Despite appearing to struggle a bit with how best to deliver its politicized baggage, I think the film accomplishes a successful mesh of overt satire with pure, earnest romance. Like PLAYTIME, its message is a heavy one, but the film’s heart can still be found kept securely in the body of its blundering tramp. Monsieur Hulot is swapped for a clunking, ‘Hello Dolly’-obsessed trash compactor, but its protagonist and his story are oblivious to the allegories they tread upon. The film is definitely at odds with itself in many ways; it’s literally divided in half and often struggles to reconcile its smudged, boxy, earth-colored protagonist within pristine, Macintosh-inspired ovals and a sterile sci-fi palate – perhaps we’ve found the twin fathers of Pixar, computer technology and boyish distraction, finally coming to physical odds – but in the end its more complicated textual moments do not outlast a spirit of childlike, nose-to-the-glass awe. I was particularly thankful for the film’s central, spacewalking pas-de-deux. When Eve and WALL•E dance around in space, Stanton took time to marvel at the reaching majesty of the stars, just as he contemplated the pleasant blue stretch of NEMO’s ocean. I think, finally, that WALL•E gestures energetically towards an earthly statement, but in spite of its ambition is still, thankfully, a film with its head in the clouds.

The Shining/gninihS ehT

Redrumalicious, my favorite!

Channel 4 (UK) is promoting their new season of 10 Kubrick films to mark his 80th birthday by recreating, or in reality, reimagining what a Behind-The-Scenes featurette would be like if The Shining had been made in our DVD-saturated era.   Honest to blog, old man Stan already accounted for the Blu-Ray discs coming out this year, no wonder he archived all the production notes and bloopers for posterity.  

The Making of [part 2/4]:

Still, the fluff piece highlights an ingenious ”wink-wink” tracking shot standing in for ”Kubrick’s point of view as he walks through the set, ending up in his director’s chair as the crew prepare to shoot the famous scene of Danny Torrance, the son of Duvall and Jack Nicholson’s characters, riding round and round the deserted corridors of the Overlook Hotel.”

The Ad:

For continuity’s sake, the actual scene after he rolls “Action!”

Hold me close and hold me fast: Reset, Remembered, Retold

Louis Armstrong – La Vie En Rose

!!! SPOILERS AHEAD !!!

Amnesia has always been a narrative shortcut for dramatic effect, particularly one of suspense, inserted in the beginning of a film (as the plot mobilizes into a detective investigation of identity) or towards its very end (as a requisite hurtle before the sappy reunion). While Wall•E is no stranger to this rule, the film and its titular character do however share an uneasy relationship to the processes of remembrance and memorization, the twin halves of what we normally assign to as “memory.”

Segwaying into Meg’s post about the hazy “new order” between programmes and personalities, on the most basic level, Wall•E and the Gels aboard the Axiom are “humanized” exactly because they learn to replicate what they see and hear from stored cultural knowledge embodied by the Hello Dolly VHS and the computer’s memory bank of our civilization before Earth was trashed. Humanity abides not to the laws of biology, but whether one possesses the mental capacity for acquiring and recalling information, followed by enacting it within a wholly contingent situation. Alanis was right: you live, you learn. If comedy is the result of miscommunication, then our laughs and sighs during Wall•E and Eve’s initial courtship stem from watching signs of affection being misread and ignored by someone who’s oblivious to their intentions. Eve has only one directive so far: to find the MacGuffin (seedling in a boot).

By the second act, everything slowly changes for both robots and humans alike, culminating in a sumptuous scene of emotional recognition by Eve of her own recorded memory, her POV video as surveillance footage. It’s like watching your home movies 10 years from now and noticing details that escape your attention the first time around.   Eve not only witnesses Wall•E’s persistent dedication during her downtime, but the same identical scenes she experienced before, now in a radically different light.   Walter Benjamin couldn’t be more prescient about this triumphant moment of self-awareness through the unconscious mechanism of film:  tapping into a realm where objects are more fleeting than concrete, visible only within the frame that hold its precious cargo of frozen moments, gone then, here forever.

Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man…The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions.

Coincidentally, Benjamin’s observation mirrors director Andrew Stanton’s own attitude in hiring talented cinematographer, Roger Deakins, as a lighting consultant for recreating the photographic apparatus’s penchant for flaws and blemishes, an absent trait in the world of animation, where imagination soars without limit, often without direction either.

We actually had a lot of stuff that wasn’t correct in our software. The math wasn’t doing the right thing, so all the subtle imperfections that you’re used to, that you don’t pay attention to that happen with the camera lens — the way things go distorted in the background, when they do it, how the plane of focus works, what things do in the foreground — all that was either slightly or majorly incorrect with our software, and had always been. I wanted to use the camera much more directly as a tool for intimacy in the film. I mean, I got a metal box falling in love with a metal box and a dystopian background, where am I going to get the intimacy? I’m going to use it with the camera by how shallow of a lens we use and how shallow the focus is, how narrow the lens is. So fixing all that and having Roger there to sort of confirm that we were in the right ballpark with it visually was just key to getting a lot of what comes, I think, unconsciously when you’re watching the film.

Luckily enough we do not need a monitor screen to access our memory, but the film, being a work of science fiction, never treads away from articulating a future where scientific wonders afford the ability to prosthetize our mind from its body. Look up the Precogs from the grandmaster himself, PKD. Instead of being confined to a particular individual or even a localized site (the brain), memory as potential and kinetic energy is transferable and disperse, to be memorized, to be recalled, to be used again and again. 

Eve fidgets with her hands as she reacts tearfully to the  ”It Only Takes a Moment” scene from Hello Dolly, echoing the same movement of yearning that Wall•E expressed, their behavior results from imitation, their hands gradually engraved with familiar reminiscence.    Through this uncanny refraction by media itself are the two able to meet eye to eye, heart to heart. This is the stuff of remembrance, in which knowledge is retrieved in a manner that speaks beyond the level of barebone plots to byzantine associations worthy of prophecies and elegies, where meaning seeks confusion as an equal adversary.

When we finally reached the final act, the threat of amnesia leaves Wall•E in a state far worse than death itself, bereft of soul and spirit.  Reading the weekend testimonies, men and women, young and old wept when Wall•E reverted back to his automated self; saving him from deletion inadvertently made the adorable spunky cube into a flat square, a shell of wires and silicon chips.  Of course, this also happens to be the moment when the film succumbs to the cheap miracles of resuscitation by the ‘Snow White’ kiss (in this case, a spark of electricity), one can only eye-roll the numerous times Matrix got through that ordeal unscathed from fanboys booing at the incredulous act of faith performed by Trinity to the dying Neo.   But I guess that film was an allegory of religion or something, I prefer its simpler elements:  leather, bullet time, and Keanu.  Most people subscribes to what Richard Corliss recently stated in his appraisal of Wanted that fantasy films work because of a built-in motor aptly called “movie sense” in contrast to the scriptures of our common sense.

This answer may be sufficient for most audience members leaving the theater, but I think Wall•E already has its own built-in logic for this unexplainable feat of life after coma.  Recall that the film returns incessantly to a pair of hands in dire search of its righty and lefty, and that the explicit origin of this romantic desire comes from a fragment of an 1960s Hollywood musical.   Despite of its revamped setup, the indirect reference that director Andrew Stanton, the know-it-all movie magpie, wants the smarter kids out there to think about is Chaplin’s City Lights.   Joe Morgenstern beat me to the chase, but I’ll have my revenge soon.  For a more nuanced study of physical comedy’s legacy of jesters and simpletons (Wall•E has a vast family tree), look for the related post from Keaton.   In the 1931 silent film comedy, the tramp falls in love with a blind flower girl, he finds money for her surgery but lands himself in the slammer.  With her sight restored along with a new flowershop, she gives the downtrodden tramp a flower, only realizing when their hands touched that he was her mysterious benefactor.  She utters, “I can see now,” and these final words of the film verbally substitutes for the inexpressible warmth of their third skin, a crossroads of caresses between forgotten soulmates.   Stanton gleefully simulates this classic scene by dividing it temporally and spatially (and gender reversal!), first with Eve’s metaphoric blindness, then at the end, with Wall•E’s amnesia as mechanical blindness, both overcome by the power of touch, of hands enmeshed into one, holding its own form of material memory.  In short, a love conquers all ending that isn’t a deux ex machina, it’s all there, like bread crumbs leading up to the satisfying payoff.  

What’s truly delightful and moving about Wall•E’s intricate layering and retracing of past relics with present crises is the sentimental grasp it has over the viewer, paralyzing us to believe fully in the utopian dimension of the film, and I’m not referring to the optimistic epilogue, but rather how memory is fluidly passed on from human to robot, robot to robot, and on a metalevel, old media to new media, almost to the point of near indistinguishable.  Yesterday’s mass culture is today’s national treasure.  So much of the film, of form and content, relies on the fetish of live action by animation, the meticulous rendering of digital bits into its analog reality, and with that, comes the possibility of actual affect through special effects.  What Wall•E hopes we remember after another 700 years is that it too was a special time capsule, a host of cultural history and emotional relevancy, waiting to be imitated by a new classic far far away.  

P.S.  I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that I wasn’t re-viewing the tragic fates befalling on our star-crossed lovers, it would’ve be relentlessly cruel for Stanton to end on the lingering mood of The Notebook or A Very Long Engagement.  Rated G for happily ever after.  

Alzheimer ‘R’ Us in The Notebook