Gestión Ambiental en Campamentos 1. Condiciones para Ubicación

The year is 2810. The last humans left Earth over 700 years ago. After total exploitation of its natural resources, the planet became an uninhabit- able wasteland. Skyscrapers made of refuse tower over a once glittering city, while dust storms ravage streets lined with advertisements selling to the long dead. The progeny of the humans who managed to escape Earth have been confined to a spaceship for over seven centuries. Raised and regulated by an army of machines, the new humans are condemned to the electric chair — a life support system designed to immobilize and distract, complete with a dig- ital screen permanently planted six inches in front of the eyes. Gorged on liq- uid diets and corporate slogans, these men and women have no memory of Earth or culture. The only systems that make sense are capitalism and digi- tal circuits. Humanity’s last hope lies with a Frankenstein monster left behind on Earth — a machine who has learned to endlessly build and rebuild him- self out of the cannibalized parts of fallen comrades.

Though this synopsis may sound like the next installment in the Ter- minator series, it is in fact a description of Disney/Pixar’s extremely popular family-oriented animated feature WALL-E. At once postapocalyptic and utopian, the film’s plot and naming conventions allow for multiple and often contradictory readings. While the situation for humans appears bleak at best, it seems that much of the film’s audience took heart in the convinc- ing pluck of the film’s title character — a robot, whose name is actually an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class — and his attempt at a romance with EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), a female robot

probe sent to Earth from the human encampment on the spaceship Axiom to find evidence that life has returned to Earth. Toying with the very ways in which we might define or locate “artificial life,” the film pushes humans to the periphery with a narrative that borders on dystopian horror while at the same time it casts anthropomorphized robots as its romantic leads in a retelling of the Genesis story. And yet, such a dark sketch of the film seems dramati- cally overstated, especially considering the warm responses from reviewers. While many critics link WALL-E to silent comedy traditions or praise the tal- ents of sound engineer Brad Burt and his uncanny ability to provide robots — including Star Wars’ R2D2 — with personality, one critic even dismisses the horror latent in the representation of future humans representation by refer- ring to passengers of the Axiom spaceship as “hilariously infantile technol- ogy-junkie couch potatoes” (Gleiberman 48). Furthermore, reviewers and critics on both sides of the political spectrum often found the film — and its ultimately rosy conclusion — suited to their (conflicting) ideologies. As the online science fiction site io9.com put it: “You may have thought Pixar’s trash- bot epic WALL-E was an environmentalist screed about humans ruining the planet through over-consumption. But you’d be wrong, say a rising chorus of conservative commentators. Rather, WALL-E is a right-wing dream come true, a saga about the need to escape big government and return to small- town family values” (“WALL-E, Right Wing Hero?”). Indeed, one of the rea- sons conservative commentators tended to approve of the film was the ease with which the little trash compactor WALL-E, EVE, and the exiled humans could be read through the lens of the Old Testament.

In what follows, we investigate how WALL-E balances these possible contradictions, a question we consider tightly bound to the hybridity of the film’s genre(s). More specifically, we believe that the film’s soundtrack, an often-commented upon yet under-explored aspect of the film, provides par- ticular insight into WALL-E’s generic identity and its successful mediation of the tension between horror and utopia. First, we will investigate WALL-E’s relationship with music borrowed from two landmark science fiction films, one that illustrates the horrors of machines becoming sentient: Stanly Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and the other which examines the extent to which humans are already machines: Godfrey Reggio’s lesser-known Koy- aanisqatsi: Life out of Balance (1982). The ensuing discussion focuses prima- rily on the thematic relationships between all three films and elements of their shared science fiction horror generic identity with an eye to the use and func- tion of previously recorded classical music tied to a particular cinematic con- text. After this investigation of the WALL-E as a possible horror film, we will turn to the film’s use of songs from the 1969 film musical Hello Dolly! to con- sider how WALL-E’s relationship to the film musical — specifically the genre’s

concerns with utopia and nostalgia — contradict, reinforce, or temper certain generic readings. Finally, we will consider the relationship between the Hol- lywood musical, utopian science fiction, and how the conventions of both film genres work in tandem. Ultimately, we hope this study points to the impor- tance of considering the music and sounds contained within films when attempting to understand a film within the rubric of its genre. Indeed, seri- ously considering how music is used within films can significantly compli- cate and deepen understandings of what is meant by “genre.”

Koyaanisqatsi and 2001, or How I Learned