Distinctive consumption and popular anti-consumerism: The case of Wall*E

Abstract

Ostensibly, the widespread acceptance of environmental critiques that stress the unsustainability of existing patterns of consumption threatens the expansionist logic of consumer capitalism. In this respect the commercial cultural industries, which historically have both exemplified and rationalized the imperatives of consumerism, have a significant role to play. The Disney/Pixar animated feature film Wall*E (2008), one of the most celebrated recent examples of a popular anti-consumerism that now appears all but obligatory, is an instructive example of their ideological instrumentality. Implicitly endorsing the ‘individualizing’ practices of distinctive consumption, the film constructs a mass society critique that nonetheless validates the basic imperatives of consumer capitalism.

Notes

1. Richard Corliss (2008) is typical in hailing the film as an ‘astonishment’.

2. Coffin, deprecating this ‘leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind’, notes ‘Disney and Pixar can make mega-millions off of telling us just how greedy, lazy, and destructive we all are’, a sentiment echoed by Greg Pollowitz (2008).

3. Likewise, Heath and Potter (2004) argue that the critique of mass society actually sustains and invigorates consumer culture.

4. It should be noted that Gendron is taking the industrial metaphor Adorno applied to Tin Pan Alley in ‘On Popular Music’ (2002) and reapplying it to the ‘pseudo-individualization’ of tangible commodities (in this case, cars).

5. Fredric Jameson, whose ‘Cultural Logic’ thesis spells out the socioeconomic basis for the exhaustion of personal style, and our subsequent cannibalization of past styles, is obviously the most prominent of these. Within the sphere of pop music, Gendron (1986, 33) concurs: ‘The music industry produces standardized and cartooned histories of its own standardized and cartooned products—it gives us cartoons of cartoons’.

6. Influentially analysed by Susan Sontag (1969, 275) as ‘a private code, a badge of identity’.

7. Crispin Miller (1986, 188) also identifies a process of leaching, whereby the ironic practices of advertising have coloured other cultural industries, such as film: ‘As advertising has become more self-referential, it has also become harder to distinguish from the various other features of our media culture’.

8. Or ‘BnL’, the corporation that realizes Baudrillard's prediction, ‘laying hold of the whole of life’, including all economic and governmental activity.

9. Disney Consumer Products (2010), which licenses all the company's film merchandising, reported global retail sales of $US27 billion in 2009. According to The Walt Disney Company (2010), royalties from these sales contributed $US2.425 billion to the parent company's 2009 revenues of $US36.149 billion.