WALL-E: great for girls?
November 26, 2008
I was a kid in a candy store at my first screening of Pixar’s new miracle WALL-E. The film has generated quite a bit of Oscar buzz in that it might transcend the patronizing “Best Animated Feature” category and ascend to the higher realm of “Best Picture.” (As if animated movies require less vision or hard work on the part of their creators than do live action films!)
I fell in love with the little bot as he diligently hummed to and fro, compacting more than 700 years’ worth of human trash into orderly spires of stinking excess. As the sign says, he’s “working to dig (us) out.”
The darker message of the film is that we have destroyed our planet, making it so uninhabitable that we literally cannot inhabit it anymore. We relocate to a luxury spaceship cruise liner where – over those 700 elapsed years – we’ve managed to bulk up our body fat and trim down our bone mass. (Sounds like a terrific movie for children!)
Actually, it is a terrific movie for children. The lighter message is one of love: WALL-E and EVE will sacrifice everything – including their sacred directives – to spend time with each other. And what do they do together? Dance and hold hands. Isn’t that love…at least to a 4-year-old?
My husband – of the pantheon of men who tell their wives “No, I will not watch a love story with you!” – watched the film for a second time with me a few days ago. And just when I got up to go to the kitchen for a cup of tea, I heard a shout from the living room: “Babe, EVE has found WALL-E!” he yelled with glee.
Well, he did watch a love story with me after all…but that’s the secret genius of this film: it isn’t what it appears. To recap: WALL-E is at the same time a love story and a condemnation of our collective consumerism and ecological shortsightedness. But the film also proves a theory that I hold dear: gender (i.e. masculine or feminine) is almost entirely a social construct having very little to do with one’s given sex.
My brother the psychologist says that most children can identify their sex by the age of 3 or 4. And even if they have gay parents, they’re so inundated by examples of heterosexual coupling in the pop culture world around them that they begin to distinguish the differences between men and women – other than those differences they’ve exposed to each other on the playground. Before they even see the film, they identify WALL-E as a male character and EVE as a female character, even though these robots are not anatomically correct. The boy is boxier with square shoulders, my brother points out. EVE, the girl, is shiny and smooth. And if you hear their voices, you note that WALL-E’s voice is slightly deeper in tone than is EVE’s.
Magically, these characters’ genders do not correspond. WALL-E has spent 700 years alone on a deserted Earth…with no real company except for Cornelius Hackl and co. in the 1969 musical extravaganza Hello, Dolly! (And let’s face it: Michael Crawford is not the world’s most masculine hero!) Ergo, WALL-E spins and sputters in an earnest attempt at musicality. He picks up trash and shoves it in his vaginal-cave-of-a-stomach. And he’s emotionally moved by all of the little things rougher beings take for granted: a love song, the life of a lowly cockroach, etc. Like Princess Ariel in The Little Mermaid (1989), WALL-E collects precious (to him) things from the long gone human world and treasures them in his tiny, lackluster domicile.
EVE, on the other hand, has a great big weapon that shoots nuclear missiles in a split second. She’s slightly larger than WALL-E, and certainly more aggressive. She rescues him – the “damsel” in distress – and carries his broken body back to Earth in a desperate attempt to heal him and hold his hand. This is an empowering message for little girls, who are alternatively allowed princess role models or Bratz dolls (you know, the dolls who sport bare midriffs and the appearance that they’ve just emerged from botox injection therapy?).
Now, I know what you’re thinking: will WALL-E turn little boys into sissies if EVE is giving little girls another Joan of Arc? Certainly not! But there may be a silver lining in this film viewing experience for boys too: they might learn a little sensitivity…and one day they’ll be open to movies other than Rambo and Die Hard.
The bottom line is that until we’re told we have to behave in a certain way – for instance: our parents say so, our girlfriends do so, or magazines show so – we girls usually behave in a way that feels natural for us. Sometimes, we find ourselves seeking permission to behave differently than other little girls. There are standards out there. This is why little boys often find it difficult to cry…and probably why little girls often find it difficult not to. How quickly they learn the rules!
I’m excited to report that, while WALL-E and EVE might not change our children, they will enlighten them.
Dinner with Tina Fey
November 8, 2008
Over the past couple of months – as I have let the frequency of my posting slide some owing to a hefty workload at my new job and a stressful PhD application process – I have spent my leisure time observing the antics of one delightful Tina Fey. A fan of 30 Rock and Mean Girls, I usually think of her as Liz Lemon, feminist television writer/producer extraordinaire, or the encouraging high school math teacher with a second job as a button-wearing bartender at the local mall; but in the last few weeks, I have gotten to know her as an Emmy winner, a Sarah Palin dead ringer, and as a pair of sexy legs sprawled out on the “Weekend Update” desk on the Saturday Night Live television set.
Those are great legs! But what we all really love about Fey is her shtick: a wry and bold sense of humor that appeals to everybody: from 10-year-old boys who love fart jokes, to girly girls who laugh at pop culture satire. She is beloved for her brain in the way, historically, so few women have been – and that’s what makes her special.
If I went to a party and we decided to play the game in which everybody announces the five people, living or dead, they’d invite to dinner, I would definitely choose Tina Fey as one of my guests. True, she’s alive and the possibility does exist that our paths might cross and I would get to ask her a thing or two about how she started her career as a writer and eventually became a renowned film and television personality. But I don’t want to risk it: so she’d be my living guest sitting next to other famous women who lived and achieved notoriety in an earlier time.
During this game, somebody would of course say “Jesus.” “I would invite Jesus for sure,” he or she would announce. Then, the rest of us would sigh because our choices are less noble.
“Hitler,” one would shout. I’d frown. “Abraham Lincoln!” Hmmm…okay. “Julius Caesar.” I like that last one to be sure.
But alas, my choices would be: Lizzie Borden, Joan of Arc, Edith Wharton and Heloise, wife of Peter Abelard and brilliant scholar by her own merit. Having dispensed with the delicious appetizer (fried mozzarella or an insalata caprese – whatever has cheese), we’d get right down to business. “Ms. Borden, did you really kill your father and stepmother with a hatchet?” I ask.
“And Joan, was it hot under that armor as you marched into battle, driving the English out of France?”
“Ms. Wharton, do tell me whether or not you intended readers to derive a moral from the story of Ethan Frome?”
“Heloise, was the sex with Abelard really that good?”
Yes. Yes. No. Yes. But what I really want to talk about is Tina Fey and her rise to stardom: “How were you able to cultivate a successful Hollywood career and be mother to a beautiful female toddler at precisely the same time?”
“What do you really think of Sarah Palin?”
“Describe for me your take on feminism: are we beyond needing it or is there still a reason to stand up and fight for equal rights, equal pay and control over our own bodies? Do you think women are our own worst enemies?”
“And do you really hate flip flops (because if I had my way, I’d wear flip flops all the time)?”
When I think of Tina Fey carrying that cardboard tray of hot dogs in the series opener of 30 Rock, I can’t help but grin. I remind myself by a handwritten post-it stuck on my computer screen: “Don’t buy all the hot dogs,” it reads.
See, Liz Lemon was standing in line to buy a hot dog from a street vendor one day when somebody cut in front of her and she got so mad that she bought the entire cart of hot dogs just to maintain the integrity of the principle of the thing. That’s something I want to do everyday – more or less – but I don’t because I have the post-it. “Don’t buy all the hot dogs”…even if you really, really, really want to.
So, once I pay due attention to my favorite serial killer, warrior, author and romantic, I want nothing more than to split the warm, flour-less chocolate cake with the woman who has broken almost every barrier and every mold. (Perhaps I should have asked Hillary Clinton instead of Joan.) But no, I’m talking about Tina Fey and her wonderful, crooked grin that seems to say, “R*****, I know exactly who you are, because I’m just like you…and nobody understands you better than me.”
Then, we have a good Scotch, a good cry and a good hug. And I thank her for giving little girls somebody warm, strong and funny to look up to. Because, when you think about it, there really is noone else who doesn’t make them feel fat or stupid if they let them. Tina Fey helps us feel comfortable in our own skin.
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