The animated film WALL-E was the most original Hollywood production of the
summer of 2008. In addition to being excellent technically, the film
communicates, through a touching story with minimal dialogue, an ecological
message that is clearly of our times. The story takes place on an Earth that is
so polluted it has become uninhabitable—and uninhabited. Only a small robot,
WALL-E, is there to continue his work of stacking litter.
Humans had to leave the Earth to live “temporarily” in a space ship, waiting for
the planet to become habitable once again. Over the years, this human population
living in space forgets its roots. People have become amnesic, living only in
the instant. And this instant is filled with excessive comfort: flying
armchairs, pools, junk food, gossip—it’s all there.
The ship is like a gilded prison that the humans are not aware of, since their
consciousness has been put asleep by comfort and the development of
ever-more-attractive immediate pleasures. They no longer look at each other,
with personal screens serving as “sensorial windows onto the world.”
The apparently grotesque image of these people who have abandoned their evolving
destiny for pleasure leads us to reflect, especially when we know the Myth of
the Cave by the philosopher Plato. In this myth, written more than 2000 years
ago, Plato describes people chained in a cave who have been accustomed since
birth to looking at a wall with shadows projected onto it. These people enjoy
their condition, which they believe is normal because they do not know anything
else. They even fiercely defend this condition of slavery against those who want
to liberate them.
With this myth, Plato teaches us that the condition of voluntary slavery is
common. When we live only in the instant, when we are content with superficial
appearances, we cut ourselves off from our roots, making it impossible for us to
fulfill our human destiny—which is a destiny of evolving consciousness.
