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Podcast 24 looks at the
Pixar animation distributed by Walt Disney
Studios, Wall-E, directed
by Andrew Stanton
(2008). The film is discussed in the context of robotics and artificial
intelligence as found in many Science Fiction texts, with a special focus on
the unusual positioning of the characters as distracted guardians of
humanity, if not the planet. This delightful film is recommended for
students in Year 7, of about 12-13 years of age, and it fits into an unique
niche in the ‘Ghost
in the Shell’ theme area of the
mySF Project.
Following recommendations in
Podcast 23 to have students create their own SF podcasts, the final
section looks at one of the ‘extras’ on the DVD version of
Wall-E, the
sharing of techniques for sound production by Sound Designer
Ben Burtt.
All watched over by machines of loving grace
Let me start with a stanza from
Richard Brautigan’s
1968 poem ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’,
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labours
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
(Brautigan, 1968)
Brautigan depicts a pastoral idyll of verdant fields.
Humans stroll through soft grass down to a clear mountain stream. As they
pass, kangaroos look up and ruminate, wombats pause briefly in their
excavations of dark soil before returning to their quiet work. This is the
great romantic dream of a return to nature where species are ‘brothers and
sisters’ but most particularly, the whole vision is made possible by
benevolent technologies standing sentinel on hilltops, blessing and
protecting the innocent mammals.
At the start of the film, Wall-E is very definitely a
robot, a “machine created by human beings to perform some specific task or
function”, as defined by Mann (2001) in the
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Wall-E has an obvious function,
"some form of manual labour or monotonous assembly-line work in a factory".
Wall-E’s function is to grasp loose rubbish and compress it into a tight
cube. Wall-E has been doing this for seven hundred years, building
ziggurats that show,
like the rings of a tree, the spiral paths of his futile work.
Mann notes that "society’s
technophobia can be
measured by looking at how the opinions of robots have changed in SF over
the years" (Mann, 2001) but that is too simple a notion. Certainly in
Western SciFi robots are often threatening, Frankenstein-monster creatures
that turn on their creator, but in Japanese SciFi culture the robot has been
a friend, even a cute and playful pet.
Wall-E is clearly not an object to be feared. Instead, he
is quirky, with goldfish eyes and tortoise reflexes. And of course in a
description of the robot Wall-E I must slip into giving him a gender, and
ascribe his interest in ancient musical comedies to human wistfulness,
loneliness or even to romantic yearnings. This cannot be avoided, it is very
definitely an ambition for the film. Younger secondary students will know
this immediately.
Roberts, in Science Fiction: the new critical idiom (2000), speaks at some
length of robots and machines but
Wall-E the film, is not a case where the SF text dramatises and
characterises our understanding of the alterity of machines (Roberts, 2000).
Wall-E the robot is not ‘other’, he is much more like an eccentric friend
from childhood.
The creators of Wall-E went to some trouble to make sure the robot lead character
was not humanoid. As
Baudrillard notes in his 'The Automation of the robot', found in
McCaffery’s
Storming the Reality Studio
(1991), this robot’s truth is in its mechanical efficacy. Wall-E looks like
a mobile machine for making rubbish cubes.
Wall-E is the last surviving clean-up robot and like many
Apocalyptic narratives, his world is a vast, deserted
Megapolis but this time
it is towers of rubbish, not steel and glass that dominate the scape. An
earlier podcast that looked at Last Man narratives covers this sub-genre of
disaster in more depth and in Wall-E it is not as central. There is no valid
correlative between Will Smith and his German Shepherd of
I am Legend
(Lawrence, 2007) and Wall-E with his cockroach in this film.
There are other correlatives of more value: Wall-E’s work
building trash ziggurats links to the story of
Sisyphus and this may be
of interest to younger secondary students. While the activity may be
unending and repetitive for Wall-E, it is not Sisyphean exactly because the
rubbish structures do not tumble down – they stay intact, even if they are
pointless.
Others have seen a likeness between Wall-E’s creation of
the trash sculpture to honour Eva, and the legend of the first sculptor,
Butades. The film Wall-E
echoes the Greek legend, reminding us of the urge to create in response to
beauty, if rather pointedly in this narrative the sculpture in question is
household trash and the sculptor a sentient trash compacting device.
Wall-E, sentience and artificial intelligence
Wall-E the robot’s
sentience is not
examined in any great depth in the movie. For some reason, over the seven
hundred years since the filthy Earth was abandoned by humanity, the robot
Wall-E increased his capabilities and develops much more than was needed for
simple mechanical efficacy.
Many SF texts focus on the nature of
artificial
intelligence and how it might arise and several of these are covered in
the text pages of support in the
Ghost in the Shell theme area of the mySF Project. For Wall-E I turn to
the author of The Philosopher at the
End of the Universe: philosophy explained through science fiction film.
Rowlands (2003)
tackles the thorny area of AI by noting that intelligence involves much more
than the mere acquisition of information. “It involves being able to use
that information in an appropriate way. What does ‘appropriate’
mean here? Roughly, it means ‘used in such a way as to further your own
goals and plans’” (Rowlands,
2003).
The philosophic generic terms for goals and plans are
beliefs and desires. The goal is a desire of some sort, Rowland (2003) says,
that a certain situation comes about and a plan is a kind of belief that,
“if you do such and such, certain things will happen” (Rowlands,
2003). Wall-E desires the egg-shaped or iPod-like robot Eva in some fashion
hard to describe and believes that she can reciprocate his feelings. He acts
according to a desire for Eva and a belief in a future attachment, though
‘attachment’ is a difficult term for two machines. Curiously, it is the very
real attachment of Eva and Wall-Es hands that demonstrates their unique
relationship throughout the film. The joining of hands and two single sparks
of energy between the two robots are as close as the film
Wall-E comes to manifesting the love between the robots.
Rowlands proves that machines can not have minds and therefore can not
possess intelligence. Wall-E is a “purely physical thing” and minds are
non-physical. He says, “there is some part of us that is quite different
from our physical bodies and the rest of the physical world. This part is
our mind, and whatever else it is, it is not physical” (Rowlands,
2003). He reminds us that the mind has no mass, “is not made up of
recognised physical particles such as atoms and molecules, and does not obey
laws of nature such as … the law of energy conservation.” Wall-E and Eva are
“just machines, and while they might do what we program them to do, true
intelligence is beyond them.” (Rowlands,
2003)
It is the suspension of our disbelief that allows us to
imagine Wall-E and Eva having minds, sharing goals and beliefs and even
forming romantic relationships, but these are crucial, as seen by
fanfiction stories
such as Irene Molloy’s ‘The Garden’ at the collaborative
www.walleforum.com. Young viewers
have continued the romance right up to the plighting of eternal love with
mechanoid sighs of ‘Walleeee!’
Wall-E and machines in the SF imagination
In their Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Nicholls and Clute (1995) note that
SciFi can be considered a genre in which machines are more important than
people. They state that “various kinds of machine have exerted a powerful
fascination upon the SF imagination, and the social impact of technology has
been a continual concern in SF” (Nicholls & Clute, 1995).
Eva, the amazing and svelte robot who has a Laserblaster in one arm, might engender concern but Wall-E is surely too timid and nice to raise apprehension, you might think, but Dave Allen (2009) in a post on Pampelmoose sees the film Wall-E as a parable for human extinction. Allen quotes from Gray’s Straw Dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals (2002) with an astonishing predication,
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… 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
(Gray in Allen,
2009).
Rowlands, who told the reader that mind was an ineffable quality
impossible for machines nevertheless issued similar warnings in 2003,
It may be that as the universe evolves towards greater and greater
intelligence, and so greater and greater understanding of itself, these
mechanoid intelligences, these silicon-based life forms, will leave us
behind. The next step in evolution may be upon us, and we may be its
progenitors but not its participants. And, then, who knows, a bad end may be
in store for us all. (Rowlands,
2003)
This fear of machine evolution is not new. The ‘Ghost
in the Shell’ section of the mySF Project points to just a few of the
myriad short stories and visual texts from the earliest popular SciFi
onwards.
One way of looking at computer intelligence - the Ghost in the Shell arc
I think it’s worth pausing for a moment to look at how a
study of computer intelligence might be examined with secondary students, as
it relates directly to Wall-E the film.
The ‘Ghost
in the Shell’ theme area is designed as an arc. On the bottom left of
this arc are the stories where a computer (often a vast machine with glowing
dials and fed by a tape) seems to either become sentient, either by accident
or by its own learning. An example here involving a computer’s love for a
woman is Kurt Vonnegut
Junior’s ‘Epicac’.
Moving up and to the right we arrive at a position where
these machines are more divorced from people. They can even be machines from
another planet. These machines have some distinctly human characteristics,
often involving hostility to humanity or at least a challenge to human
domination by a competing will or intelligence. These narratives are
plentiful, with films like
Colossus: the Forbin Project (1970),
Kubrick’s
2001: a Space Odyssey (1968) and a
plethora of stories, such as
Simak’s
‘Skirmish’.
Further along the arc are the robots with their complex
needs, sometimes competing with humans, sometimes slaves, pets or
companions, and often questioning the reader about the nature of humanity
itself, as seen, of course, in the wonderful
Asimov narratives such as
‘Robbie’ (1940) and ‘Robot Dreams’ (1986).
Pacing down the arc are found the narratives where people
and machines are starting to mix. It might be that the machine has a human
mind, or the human has parts or the whole of a machine carapace, but now the
secondary reader and viewer is confronted by a ‘merging’, seen readily and
with wonderful help from
Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg
Manifesto’ (1991) in the early Borg stories from the
Star Trek: Next
Generation series, such as ‘The Best of Both Worlds’ (Bole, 1990).
There is help again with the movement into and beyond the
machine with the simple but effective ‘Warhead’ episode from
Star Trek:
Voyager (Kretchmer, 1999) and Data from
Star Trek: NG,
in ‘Measure of a Man’ (Scheerer, 1989). These sentient machines, one a
tactical warhead and the other a ‘fully functioning’ android show the best
attributes of humanity without being human at all and in their own way
rebuke and correct us.
Further down the arc are the many texts that grew upon
Sterling and
Gibson’s
Cyberpunk sub-genre and
here the short story ‘Burning Chrome’ (Gibson, 1982) is used with older
secondary students. Through a cable fitted below the left ear or through a
silicon chip implanted directly into the brain, humans can access, then
become part of the ‘consensual hallucination’ of the Matrix, a more
virtualised internet. And what do the hackers and jockeys meet in the
Matrix? They meet artificial intelligences floating free, following their
own agendas, sometimes trying to assist humanity in the ugly neon world of
the near future.
The end of the arc is a complete separation from the
body, a mind online or a mind in a completely artificial body. Some of these
narratives show a craving, a longing for the purity of mind alone with
information, as seen in
Greg Egan’s digital yet human intelligence who strands himself in deep
space to work out, from first principles, the laws of mathematics.
Others pursue a more traditional course, wondering what
it is to be human and exactly where the boundaries of machine and mind lie.
For this end of the arc the first Ghost in the
Shell (Oshii, 1995) movie is used with older secondary students,
with good results.
It seems churlish to bring in Anime only with
Ghost in the
Shell (Oshii, 1995) right at the arc’s terminus. There are so many
other anime texts directly focused on the area of this study that two dozen
could be inserted along points as the arc descends to a complete liberation
from the physical body. To redress this, Podcast 28 looks in detail at one
critic’s view of the anime
Patlabor 2 focusing
on the way modern life can be mediated by technology, a subject close to the
hearts of many students in middle and upper secondary years.
So, now that the ‘Ghost in the
Shell’ arc is traced, where does
Wall-E the film fall. It would be
easy to reply that it is a film about robots and people, so there it is near
the top. It is also about artificial intelligence and the ability for a
machine to love and again these themes relate directly to well-known
examples.
It is important to note that
Wall-E does not fit easily into
the arc structure, even next to allied ideas seen in films like
A.I.
Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg, 2001) or
Bicentennial
Man (Columbus, 1999).
Wall-E
must be placed outside the arc that traces humankind’s interactions with
computers. Why? Because Wall-E is
about two robots in a traditional love story who meet, share little in
common, then through travail, find each other. Humans are not incidental to
the movie, but they are not essential apart from the narrative device of the
mission to return humanity to Earth to start life again.
At no stage do these robots want to destroy humankind, or
conquer the world. They have programmed directives and they have love and
these are the two fundamental forces in their lives.
Not one of the many robots in
Wall-E wants to harm humans. Even
the Autopilot of the vast ship where some of the remnants of humanity lounge
about is following programming given by its human creator. No machine has
any malice for a human.
In Wall-E it is
also clear that humans have destroyed the Earth with pollution. The machines
are built to clean it up and to care for the humans in exile. It is not
machine intelligence evolution that is the cause for fear in
Wall-E, it is the evolution of
humans into blubbery consumers living virtual lives that is should give
concern.
A cautionary note about Wall-E and eating disorders
As a cautionary note for some teachers, schools in the
USA have complained about the depiction of humans wallowing around on
hovering beds like vapid jellies. Teachers engaged in campaigns fighting
obesity have complained that plump children were picked on after the movie
and some children could not watch for fear of seeing themselves in these
boneless, bean-bag bodies. Parents were alarmed by the movie for their
children with eating disorders.
Other critics drew attention to the essentially
horrifying message of a post-apocalyptic Earth, feeling the film was a
child’s version of Gore’s
An Inconvenient
Truth (Guggenheim, 2006). Others pointed to the director of
Wall-E, Andrew Stanton, with his
Christian beliefs, retelling the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark.
For their part, NASA used the various launches of
Wall-E to display ‘walkers’,
landing equipment and space flight movies, then worked with Pixar and Disney
to create simulations and games, based on
Wall-E’s journey into space following Eva.
Some parallels for Wall-E from SciFi suitable for secondary students
Leaving aside political, Biblical or dietary readings,
the most obvious parallels within the SciFi genre for
Wall-E point back to the clever
little robots who maintain Earth’s last gardens in the movie
Silent Running
(Trumbull, 1972) and certainly to the rather annoying defence robot that
becomes sentient, Johnny 5 in Short Circuit
(Badham, 1986). Johnny 5 has a strong romantic streak and incorporates a
laser blaster but most of all he is a pain in the neck, more of a comic
side-kick than a character in his own right. His role is to expedite the
love affair between two humans, rather than to explore his own sentience.
Wall-E deserves
to be studied in its own right. It stands quite apart from so many of the
other intelligent machines, robots or discorporate minds of SciFi
narratives, yet is an excellent point for comparison for any study of
humanity’s complex relationships with the machine. It stands on its own also
because it ends with simple animations over the credits showing Eva and
Wall-E helping rebuild and revegetate the Earth. These two robots are a
loving, yet asexual couple who have new prime directives, to assist humans
to rediscover the physicality of their selves and their home planet. It is a
truly unique idea in a short, charming and beautiful narrative.
Eva and Wall-E are the ‘machines of loving grace’ (Brautigan,
1968) watching over us, freeing us from our labours, as we rediscover our
planet and our selves.
Building a new world in sound - the Ben Burtt extra on the Wall-E DVD
As a final bonus for teachers the
Wall-E (2008) DVD
version includes a short film called ‘Animation Sound Design: Building
Worlds from the Sound Up’. In
Podcast 23 the
X Minus One radio
series was discussed and one of the ideas was for students to create their
own SciFi podcast. This short film as a bonus of ten minutes on the
Wall-E DVD will certainly help
with that project.
Sound Designer
Ben Burtt from the
Disney Studios worked on
Wall-E
from an early stage. With the director of the movie and other commentators,
Ben Burtt discusses the
creation of the remarkable sound track by catching or creating real sounds
and in some cases adding digital effects to these. This short film shows
some of the early Disney films with their sound effects and how they were
made, cutting back and forth to
Wall-E. It
is an excellent short film that would be most useful to a Media class and
will assist students creating their own SciFi narrative podcasts,
challenging them to turn away from downloadable sounds from websites or CD
disks of effects and instead use the school’s found objects with a portable
digital recorder to bend and transmute their own creations into a sound
environment that brings authenticity to their created worlds.
Wall-E on DVD is
strongly recommended for use with younger secondary students studying
Science Fiction. Its genesis is in hundreds of texts related to thinking
machines in this genre but it also stands apart.
Allen, D. (2009). ‘Wall-E: a parable for our eventual extinction’, in www.pampelmoose.com. Retrieved 14 May, 2009 from http://www.pampelmoose.com/2008/07/wall-e-a-parable-for-our-eventual-extinction
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