Okay. I am going to sound like the biggest grinch ever. I am prepared to look back at these words and cringe over how pretentious I sound.
But as much as i LOVED wall-e as a movie, I have some huge problems with it as a text. And as children's movies are often the most pervasive texts that shape our impressionable pudding brains, I'm worried it's more insidious than marketed.
I was talking with sisner (melissa's sister laura, who is basically my older-sis-hero-figure) who was a gender studies major at smith. She took some fantastic gender and cinema class and the way famous professor gave a lecture on how Pixar is usually really progressive in terms of the coding of their films. While in most of them, the characters are gendered, there are also frequent examples of non-gendered characters (most of the secondary toys in toy story, a lot of the fish in finding nemo, etc.) For the characters who are gendered, the storylines infrequently celebrate rigid adherence to the binary/roles. The male father fish in Finding Nemo raises his son without any question from his anemone community; Buzz Lightyear (the hypermasculine toy! the high tech toy!) is portrayed as a sterile piece of technology, while Woody and Mr. Potatohead et. al are classic favorites appreciated by both children and thus not ever totally rejected. Sure, there's instances in Pixar films where characters shoehorn themselves into their gender roles for safety, but overall, these films aren't about heterosexual love or the masculine/feminine place in society. Also, the characters aren't villianized or ridiculed for defying social conceptions of their "place" based on gender, which is a HUGE step forward for Disney. (don't get me staaaaaahted on not only gender but ethnicity in disney movies. So upsetting)
I was so gleeful when I saw Wall-e that I actually exclaimed out loud and clapped my hands and acted like a six year old. I had SUCH high hopes for Wall-e, and it didnt disappoint. That robot was ADORABLE and I dug the message and I cried for about 45 minutes of the movie. And not just little tears at the requisite "all hope is dashed" moments- I cried when Wall-E went home to his trailer. I cried when he left his cockroach friend behind. I cried big fat sobby "Notebook" style tears for this movie. And then I went home and thought about it and realized that I was more than a little hurt.
Wall-E and EVE didnt have to be gendered. They're ROBOTS. They didn't need to have a heterosexual love affair. They could have had nice neutral robot love, and I would have been happy. If they had nice low key gender performances, I could have given it the go ahead. In fact, our lovely Wall-E isn't hypermasculine- he's a bot. He's a bot that wants to be loved and is more than a little emasculated and loves musicals- he's a metrobot. EVE, on the other hand, is a bitch on wheels. For me, therein lies the problem.
EVE is an OBVIOUSLY female robot. She's all rounded surfaces (hello, vagina!) and receptacles for civilization saving organic material. Her acronym pigeonholes her as not only a woman but THE woman. The original. The standard. But EVE herself is a bitch on wheels, what with her machine gun arm and her laser vision. She has an important part to play in the maintenance of humanity- unfortunately, that part fits neatly within her gender construct. Outside of her directive, however, EVE is a self sufficient, goal oriented, high functioning/high technology being. Which would be a wonderful message to the young ladies in the audience about their own capabilites lacking limitation. But herein lies the problem:
the film CLEARLY faults EVE for stepping outside the gender boundaries. She can be an independent woman, but as we're meant to empathize with Wall-E, she becomes an ice-bitch just because she's trying to do her job, and she's less anthropomorphized than he is. EVE's all "directive" this and "directive" that, when Wall-E just wants to hold her hand, like he saw in the musicals (another delicious reactionary bastion of strict adherence to gender codes) she misses out on the "connection" he's trying to make with her.
EVE is being denied love because she won't behave like a woman should, and forget her job to put emotions first. But why does EVE have to be a she in the first place? and why is she lambasted for having priorities beyond finding a nice boy-bot and making baby-bots? Is that even possible?
I loved Wall-e, much to the contrary of what I've said here. It made my heart sing, it made me cry, I loved the fat people and I worried about our world. But now that I'm thinking of Disney movies as universally acceptable texts, digested without question by masses who look to them as "safe" material for their children, I get uneasy.
Why can't our non-gendered robot friends just get along happily without heterosexual concerns?
