So I saw Wall-E the other day. It’s a great film with an anti-consumerism message that it wears proudly on its sleeve. In the movie, a mammoth corporation named Buy N’ Large is the only visible corporate force in the marketplace. And when I say visible, I mean the behemoth size of Wal-Mart supercenters combined with the collective advertising ubiquity of Coke, McDonald’s, and yes, Disney!
The earth has been so overrun with trash that humans have abandoned the planet and the lone inhabitants are a little trash-compactor bot named Wall-E and his robotic cockroach friend. It’s amazing how a Johnny-5 lookalike can be imbued with such stark human emotion while computer animators are still failing miserably at getting it right with CGI people. But I digress…
Two things jumped out immediately on my trip to see the movie. First, I went to the El Capitan theater in Los Angeles for the first time. For those who don’t live here or have never been, the El Capitan is owned by Disney and is their own version of Grauman’s Chinese (it’s right across the street, in fact). Old-school theater, massive pipe organ that some guy plays before each movie starts, only one screen, etc.
Apparently one of the draws is the little show that the theater puts on beforehand. They have this trippy little silkscreen show that ends with a lit up version of LA. I thought that was it and I was pretty satisfied, until the horror of what unfolded next dawned on me.
We were treated to a 15 minute (or was it two hours?) barrage of Disney marketing at its absolute most rock-bottom. Clips from almost every single one of their own animated classics, as well as all the Pixar movies play while poor chumps who apparently didn’t make the cut at Disneyland parade out in costumes and dance little numbers as the characters being shown onscreen.
What it amounted to was Disney covering all the bases for all the kids in the audience. Just in case some four year old hadn’t seen The Lion King, or Toy Story, or Pocahantas, they threw just enough at all the families in attendance to whet appetites and drive DVD sales. I used to work in the DVD industry, so this is one area where I know that my cynicism is 100% justified.
Reports from people who have worked at Disney paint it as midly cult-like in the more relaxed accounts I’ve heard. Employees are called “cast members.” It’s not uncommon for people to have their desk areas completely plastered with Disney paraphenalia. And the Brand department is king there. They trump all because the Disney brand is the Coke formula and Ronald McDonald wrapped up into one holy grail of consumer marketing prowess.
For example, Disney is a big corporate donor (to their credit). But the beneficiaries of this generosity are required to lace events with massive amounts of Disney branding apparel (standees, banners, etc.) as a condition, complete with a rabid brand representative ensuring full compliance. All other corporate sponsors are just happy to turn over the cash, but Disney never misses a chance to target young, impressionable minds with their content.
Between The Disney Channel, ABC, Pixar, ESPN, Buena Vista Pictures, the theme park division, and the Disney core itself, they constitute nothing short of a media empire, classified as one of the Big Five media conglomerates who engage in cartel like behavior and “indulge in mutual aid share investments in the same media products†to ensure they all reap “slightly varying shares of the total profits,” as detailed in Ben Bagdikian’s book The New Media Monopoly.
To come back full-circle to the second thing that jumped out at me, it was strange to see Disney releasing a movie that skewered a corporate entity that most resembles itself. Sure, there are undeniable links to Wal-Mart with the ghastly ultracenters that appear in the movie, and Buy N’ Large also sells gasoline, giving the requisite potshot at Big Oil that any socially conscious movie must take these days. But the remnants of the Buy N’ Large virtual billboards and omnipresent ads definitely stir up thoughts of the mouse ears. As does the planet’s apparent descent into hopeless consumerism.
Unfortunately, Pixar sort of cops out at the end. What began as probably the greatest animated movie I have ever seen fell flat in the last half an hour when the villain of the movie did not turn out to be the Fred Willard-led corporate behemoth that was setup for the first hour. The captain of the Axiom (the massive cruise ship where humans are so plugged-in that they don’t have to move themselves or even turn a head to interact with their thousands of counterparts) was a weak character in my opinion. The company that led to the planet’s ruin was let off the hook fairly easily in the climax.
Maybe Disney did have some measure of control over just how culpable they would be in the complete degeneration of our planet (metaphorically speaking). Or maybe I’m just a conspiracy theorist. But I’ll be damned if I’m ever sitting through that brow-beating at the El Capitan again.
Tags: ben bagdikian, consumerism, disney, el capitan theater, pixar, the new media monopoly, wal-mart, wall-e
My tale of Wall.E woe is granular in comparison to your Very Big point about conglomeration. But it is this: brought my 4 year old son to Wall.E. And what does he get with the price of admission? A plastic watch, with an unchangeable battery, made in China, wrapped in plastic. The jig was up. As if Disney gives a hoot about who pollutes.