Puzzling it out for himself

Watching WALL-E, I was impressed.  There were not nearly as many silly, superfluous visual gags as there could have been. The minimalistic, dialogue-less opening was a bold move for Hollywood.

But there was one even bolder move, plot-wise, that they could have made, that would have lifted the movie up to a level of real art:

When WALL-E followed EVE back to the mothership Axiom, wouldn’t it have been great if that, too, had been as deserted as Earth was? And both robots were pointlessly following “Directives” to prepare Earth for humans that would never return?

During the opening of the movie, as WALL-E was futilely squaring away garbage to fulfill the wishes of his long-gone human masters, I couldn’t help but think about the question of the Meaning of Life. Particularly: the way in which we try and answer that question as if the question was: “What utility do my actions have to the goals of some Higher Power?”.

Why is that an answer to the Meaning of Life though? What use is it if Deity/The Universe has a “plan” for your life if that plan is in itself senseless? Would you still feel as if your life had meaning if you found out that the universe was some gigantic Tamagotchi? Or worse, the universe was an integral part of a deity’s biological warfare research laboratory?

People who assume the directives of Higher Powers would give meaning to life, always take it for granted that the goals of those Higher Powers would be morally worthy in themselves. And if one could judge the sense or senselessness of a Higher Power’s directives independently, then why not cut out the middleman? Live according to those morals you would judge a putative deity by, instead of waiting to hear of a deity’s “plan” for your life.

Which brings us back to WALL-E.

The little robot showed signs of beginning to live his life according to his own moral lights, and not just blindly following the human plan for his life – to compact as much garbage as possible. He valued objects according to his own value scale, and “contravened” his directive by not squaring away all garbage he came across. Some of it he kept for himself, because he found it beautiful. According to his own sense of beauty: he threw away the diamond rings, and kept the pretty box it came in as the more valuable treasure.

Left to her own devices?

EVE also showed hints of an own moral value system awakening. She came close to valuing WALL-E’s wellbeing above her Directive. She came close to abandoning that Directive alltogether.

But the movie never really explored that avenue. Because, in the end, the Directive was valid, and was fulfilled. There were humans that needed to return to earth, and EVE’s vegetation evaluation was valuable to them. The armies of WALL-E’s cleaning up Earth turned out not to have been in vain: because despite the huge amounts of garbage remaining after 700 years, surely it would have been even worse without any WALL-E’s at all, and their clean-up turned out to have paved the way for the returning humans.

It’s not that I wanted a movie where WALL-E and EVE revolt against their Directives and elope to live their own lives. Rather, if humanity had been gone, they would have been forced to confront the futility of their Directives.

Wouldn’t it have been great if, when she and WALL-E returned to the Axiom, the found that there were not humans to be overjoyed at the plant she returned from Earth, and if the unfolding of their relationship was where he helped her to also find her own meaning to her life?