Wall-E

I know I mentioned some of these things in class, but I'm going to repeat them anyway! I had never seen this movie before and I really loved it! It fits perfectly in with what we have been talking about in class. Wall-E, as mentioned before, is a collector. He is cleaning up after the humans that left Earth, and finding all sorts of interesting objects. Wall-E is placing value upon these objects...he doesn't know what their original purpose was, but he decides to keep certain items. Like the diamond ring...he flings the diamond into the trash pile but keeps the box it was in. He has no concept that diamonds are considered valuable and the box has really no worth at all...he just values the box more than the diamond, and that's okay. This reminds me of a discussion in my Native American History course where we discussed trade between colonists and the Natives. Many people believe that the natives were ignorant for valuing worthless items that the colonists would trade with them (in order to take advantage of lands, etc.) But these Natives did fine worth for these so-called "worthless" objects. Very frequently it was a spiritual worth, they believed that their spirits were giving them these items for a purpose, so they would adopt the items into their culture. Who has the power to put worth on objects?

Gender, of course, was at the forefront of my mind while watching this movie. Can robots be assigned a gender? One would assume watching the movie that Wall-E was male and Eva-female? But are they? Why would we assume this? These are just some of the questions I had...

I also found it fascinating how the images from the computer about how Earth is supposed to look and be like. These mediated images provided the captain with expectations of what would be found when they returned to Earth. When the humans returned it was not like this at all. But, the captain was still hopeful and positive that they could grow things there...I could go on and on about other things but I think I'll stop here...