Posts Tagged ‘Wall-E’
February 28 Links! All the Links You Need for February 28
* Science Fiction Film and Television 10.1 is out, with articles on the suburban fantastic, the work of art in the age of the superhero, utopian film, review essays on The Martian and Terminator: Genysis, and my article on apocalyptic children’s literature. At long last, the world can discover why The Lorax is actually bad…
* My Octavia Butler book was discussed on the most recent episode of GribCast, on Parable of the Sower. (They start talking about me about 59ish minutes in, and especially around 1:30.) Meanwhile, later this spring: Octavia E. Butler’s Archive on View for First Time.
* If you knew our friend Nina Riggs, here is the donation page for John and the boys. And here’s the Amazon page for her book, which comes out this June.
* Instrumentalizing Earthseed.
* Fast Forward #289 – Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.
* CFP: “Crips In Space: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Futurism.” And there’s still one day to submit to the SF exec group’s guaranteed MLA 2018 session on Satire and Science Fiction in Dystopian Times.
* Presenting the Nebula finalists.
* Inside the Brutal World of Comedy Open Mikes.
* The Melancholy of Don Bluth.
* Comics studies comes of age.
* Purging Iowa’s universities. The Campus Free Speech Battle You’re Not Seeing.
* How Trump’s campaign staffers tried to keep him off Twitter. In Trump’s Volleys, Echoes of Alex Jones’s Conspiracy Theories. Asylum seekers take a cold journey to Manitoba via Trump’s America. We Are Living In the Second Chapter of the Worst-Case Scenario. How to lose a constitutional democracy. Silence of the hacks. Trump’s Tlön. The Trumpocene. Untranslatable. Neurosyphilis?
* We can imagine a person slowly becoming aware that he is the subject of catastrophe.
* Hear Something About An Immigration Raid? Here’s How To Safely Report It. On ICE. Is ICE Out of Control? ICE detainee with brain tumor removed from hospital. Deportation ruses. What It’s Like to Be a Teen Living in an Immigration Detention Center. Ten Hours in Houston. Abolish ICE.
* On the Milo Bus With the Lost Boys of America’s New Right. 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump.
* On the deep state. Ditching the deep state. The Deep State, the Media, and the Crisis of Legitimacy.
Indeed, both sides are equally illegitimate on the popular level. Both sides are pushing agendas with no constituency. No one outside a small hardcore of party insiders and hack pundits wants either “smart” technocracy or nihilistic faux-libertarianism. The Democrats have been electorally devastated, but the Republicans are in the awkward position of being given the keys to the kingdom and yet realizing that they are advocating things that no one wants. They probably will push through more of their destructive idiocy, just because that’s who they are, but it’s mainly happening because they’ve set up the system so that it’s nearly impossible for them to get voted out — an interesting counterpoint to the other major institutional structures (the Deep State and news media) that we absolutely can’t vote out of office.
The only rallying point for genuine popular legitimacy right now is a desire to remove Trump and, in the meantime, humiliate and impede him as much as possible. And I’ll be clear: those are goals I share. The danger is settling for that goal, in such a way as to finally close the door on democratic accountability altogether.
* On North Carolina’s Moral Mondays.
* Space news! Nearby Star Hosts 7 Earth-Size Planets. SpaceX plans to send two people around the Moon. Mars needs lawyers!
* The Relevance of Biopunk Science Fiction.
* Like domesticity, segregation had to be invented.
* Do voter identification laws suppress minority voting? Yes. We did the research. The Trump Administration’s Lies About Voter Fraud Will Lead to Massive Voter Suppression.
* Income inequality and advertising. That link is probably the good news.
* Guys I think the FBI might be bad.
* Even Trump’s fake terror arrests are worse.
* Anyway we’re all going to die. And pretty soon!
* Rule by algorithm. An Algorithm Is Replacing Bail Hearings in New Jersey.
* Why facts don’t change our minds.
* Visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
* The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens.
* Checking in with SMBC: The Problem of Good. The Path of a Hero. How to Solve a Physics Problem. On the Etiology of Fuckers. Paging r/DaystromInstitute. Solving Sophie’s Choice. Gifts from God. And now to insult my core demographic. And that’s why I invented cancer. Don’t you dare stop scrolling, not now, not ever.
* The radical argument of the New Oxford Shakespeare.
* The Rise and Fall of the Socialist Party of America. After more than a half-century in the wilderness, the socialist left reemerges in America.
* Teen suicide attempts fell as same-sex marriage became legal.
* The ACLU sues Milwaukee over stop-and-frisk.
* The last days of Standing Rock.
* ‘Alternative’ Education: Using Charter Schools to Hide Dropouts and Game the System.
* Now Arizona has responded with a new — and some say bizarre — solution to this quandary: Death row inmates can bring their own execution drugs. The state’s manual for execution procedures, which was revised last month, says attorneys of death row inmates, or others acting on their behalf, can obtain pentobarbital or sodium Pentothal and give them to the state to ensure a smooth execution.
* And I say $100/day is too good for ’em!
* Scientists Say They’ve Discovered a Hidden Continent Under New Zealand. Probably ought to invade just to be on the safe side.
* Huge, if true: Millennials aren’t destroying society — they’re on the front lines against the forces that are.
* Fighting Gerrymandering With Geometry.
* Radical feminism finds a way.
* This is what Earth will look like if when we melt all the ice. Is It Okay to Enjoy the Warm Winters of Climate Change? Milwaukee temperature hits 66 degrees, shatters record. Wednesday marks 67 consecutive days since the City of Chicago logged an inch of snow.
* This interview with Peter Singer makes it very hard to see his work as anything but horrifyingly eugenic. What seemed to begin several decades ago as a thought experiment about animal intelligence has shifted into very disturbing ableism.
* In an age without heroes, there was the Boss.
* In search of Forrest Fenn’s treasure.
* I hate this more than the discovery that the Death Star flaw was engineered. I don’t like much of this either. Bring back the old EU!
* 20 Brutally Hilarious Comics For People Who Like Dark Humour. You had me at hello!
* What Are the Chances? Success in the Arts in the 21st Century.
* Zombie cities of the Chinese Rust Belt.
* The nation’s only deaf men’s college basketball team, on the verge of its first March Madness. Meanwhile, UVM is undefeated.
* And you can’t fool me: this one was already a Black Mirror episode.
Notes for a Future Paper on Disney World
0) Let’s just get it out of the way: Micky Mouse appears to have a serious drug problem, most likely speed or crystal meth.
1) The Carousel of Progress, sad to be Walt’s favorite ride, depicts how white American males’ obsessive pursuit of the dream of progress systematically destroys the lives of everyone around them.
2) We didn’t see WALL-E anywhere—and we looked. Our conclusion was that the WALL-E’s critique of consumerism in general and Disney in particular was too dangerous to be allowed inside the park; this made me like the movie quite a bit more.
2a) Or else maybe he was at EPCOT.
3) There’s also the question of Pixar’s relationship with Disney and Disney World, which is still being visibly negotiated. The only costumed characters we saw in the entire park that day were Pixar characters—not one Mickey, Goofy, or Pluto—and the two most prominent new attractions of Tomorrowland were Buzz-Lightyear- and Monsters-Inc.-themed. Pixar, defined by its technological apparatus and always figured as the future of animation, is a natural fit for Tomorrowland, and this is the region of the park where Pixar is foregrounded. (We did see Woody and the female cowgirl from Toy Story 2 in Frontierland, and billboards for some sort of Finding Nemo thing in Disney’s Animal Kingdom.) But where then was WALL-E? Who mourns for WALL-E?
4) For a theme park with a forty year history, Disney is remarkably unprepared for rain. Little or no attention seems to have been paid to drainage in its design; after an hour or so of heavy afternoon rain, there was flooding everywhere.
5) The Hall of Presidents and Pirates of the Caribbean had both been completely redone since I’d last visited as a young teenager. The Hall of Presidents film is narrated by Morgan Freeman now, naturally, and alongside our trip to Kennedy Space Center this was our second huge heaping spoonful of unapologetic American exceptionalism. I was careful to keep my sarcam to just a low whisper in Jaimee’s ear.
For the record, here is Disney’s list of official “great” presidents:
* George Washington
* Andrew Jackson (He’s just like us!)
* Abraham Lincoln
* Teddy Roosevelt (He’s the sort of guy you’d like to have a beer with!)
* Franklin Delano Roosevelt (I was a bit worried they’d leave him out altogether, though if America is your object of devotion I guess you have to mention WWII)
* John F. Kennedy (though the end of the story depicted only in image and a vague LBJ soundbite)
Poor, poor Jefferson, unpersoned again.
After Kenendy—presumably to avoid politics—presidents only exist as authors of public mourning:
* LBJ: JFK assassination
* Reagan: Challenger explosion
* Clinton: unspecified disaster; we think it was Oklahoma City
* Bush: 9/11 (yes, they use the “I can hear you” clip, though not the “the people who knocked down these towers” part)
None of these disasters are actually named, though adults and older children can identify the context from the images.
Both Animatronic Nixon and Animatronic Bush’s faces seemed to us to have been deliberately hidden by shadow; aside from the brief moment in which the spotlight hits them and they get to say their names, they’re basically deliberately invisible. I was pleased by this.
Obama, as the current president, gets a pass on the tragedy trap, and Animatronic Obama gets to give a short speech and recites the oath of office. I confirmed later this was Obama’s real voice; he recorded it for the show last May.
6) Space Mountain remains pretty rad.
Monday 1
Monday!
* The trailer for the SF-infused Paul-Giamatti-as-Paul-Giamatti comedy Cold Souls causes io9 to ask whether “Charlie Kaufman” is officially a genre yet.
* Kari in the comments directs us to a defense of Holden Caulfield against the spurious assertions of irrelevance I blogged about yesterday.
* Bruce Schneier: SF Writers Aren’t a Useful Aspect of National Defense—a followup to an article I posted last month. Via Boing Boing.
* Also not useful: classifying “protests” as “low-level terrorism activity.”
* The Art of the Title Sequence considers the end of Wall-E. Via Kottke.
* What’s wrong with the American essay? I’m not sure anything is, but certainly not this:
The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization. Montaigne thought it the essayist’s duty to cross boundaries, to write not as a specialist (even in himself) but as a generalist, to speak out of turn, to assume, to presume, to provoke. “Where I have least knowledge,” said the blithe Montaigne, “there do I use my judgment most readily.” And how salutary the result; how enjoyable to read—and to spar with—Montaigne’s by turns outrageous and incisive conclusions about humankind. That everything is arguable goes right to the heart of the matter.
“The next best thing to a good sermon is a bad sermon,” said Montaigne’s follower and admirer, the first American essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In a good sermon we hear our own “discarded thoughts brought back to us by the trumpets of the last judgment,” in the words of Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” In a bad sermon we formulate those thoughts ourselves—through the practice of creative disagreement. If an author tells us “love is nothing but jealousy” and we disagree, it is far more likely we will come up with our own theory of love than if we hear a simple autobiographical account of the author’s life. It is hard to argue with someone’s childhood memory—and probably inadvisable. It is with ideas that we can argue, with ideas that we can engage. And this is what the essayist ought to offer: ideas.
It doesn’t seem to me at all that American letters suffers from a lack of hypotheses confused for certainties.
* And Shia Labeouf may live to ruin Y: The Last Man after all.
Clips from the Roundtable
Okay, I think YouTube and I have reached an accord, and all of the clips from the Morton/Rudy roundtable are now up and viewable. The whole playlist is in order here.
Rudy Introduction
Morton Introduction
On Discursive Intervention in Ecology
On Ontology and “Ground”
On WALL-E, Sentiment, and Irony
On Dark Ecology and “Bambification”
On Science
On Marx and Anti-Capitalism
Tim Morton / Kathy Rudy Roundtable on YouTube
Excerpted moments from the Tim Morton / Kathy Rudy / Polygraph “Ecology, Ideology, Politics” Roundtable are now up on YouTube. You’ll note the clever product placement of our secret sponsor, Dasani.
The poor camera angle, somewhat poor audio quality, and incomplete coverage are all functions of the device used to capture the video, but still, I think these excerpts came out pretty well.
Introductions (YouTube messed with this one. Up in two bits soon.)
Question #1 (on rhetoric)
Question #2 (on ontology and “ground”) (YouTube messed with this one. Up soon.)
An Excerpt Concerning WALL-E, Sentiment, and Irony
Dark Ecology and “Bambification”
On Science
On Marx and Anti-Capitalism (YouTube messed with this one. Up soon.)
Take That, WALL-E
The New York Film Critics Circle has spit on WALL-E and named Milk the movie of the year.
Busy, Busy, Busy
Busy, busy, busy, as the Bokononists say.
* Sci-Fi has put out a “Catch the Frak Up” video for the last four seasons of Battlestar Galactica.
* All about Patrick Fitzgerald, the man everybody wants to put in charge of everything.
* Daily Routines: how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days. Via MeFi, which has some greatest hits.
* In 1945, after the atomic destruction of two Japanese cities, J. Robert Oppenheimer expressed foreboding about the spread of nuclear arms. “They are not too hard to make,” he told his colleagues on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, N.M. “They will be universal if people wish to make them universal.” How the bomb spread (and didn’t) around the world.
* The Los Angeles Film Critics Association has named WALL-E the best film of the year. It’s a bit of a strange choice against Dark Knight and Synecdoche, among others, but WALL-E was a hell of a good film, potentially a very important one, and damnit if I don’t love Pixar.
* No book more deeply and revealingly explains the spasm of madness through which the United States has passed in recent years than Moby Dick. For generations, it has been considered a masterpiece of world literature, but now can it be seen as an eerily prophetic allegory about 21st-century America. It is now truly the nation’s epic.
* The Barack Obama of 2018 has been playing video games all his life.
* Everybody loves Silent Star Wars.
* Pharyngula has been having an awful lot of fun with found images lately.
* Has Greenpeace been rating Apple unfairly?
* Will we nationalize the auto companies?
* And the good news: Gabriel García Márquez is still writing after all.
Writing about Film on the Internet
I find the blog form is exceptionally good for discussions about film. Here’s just two recent examples, Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed talking about Wall-E in the context of Kenneth Burke’s Helhaven and the Pinocchio Theory on Harold and Kumar Go to Guantánamo Bay.
Allegory of the Cave in Science Fiction
The allegory of the cave in science fiction, from Orwell to Wall-E.
Gerry Canavan 
