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How Empire Ruined Geeks Forever

- or why Wall*E needs to stay out of the dark.

Some days, I really hate The Empire Strikes Back. Yeah, I know. Cinematic masterpiece. Fantasy Juggernaut. Dramatic Uppercut of Jedi Proportions. But it’s also “The Dark One” and that’s where sometimes the double-edged sword of “getting what you want” chops my hands up. People often point to Star Wars as the movie that shifted the cinematic paradigm for good or ill. I think its sequel shifted a generational paradigm as well. Just as Star Wars turned Hollywood into a blockbuster machine, Empire turned geek culture into something almost vampiric in its need to take something fun, and make it dark.

That’s not to say I think everything should be sunshine and smiles like the two-scoops of sunshine on a Raisin Bran box. I appreciate darkness – when it fits...

This summer is the summer of The Dark Knight, and there, it fits. Great care has been taken to make it fit by Chris Nolan and his dour partner in crime, Christian Bale (number of smiles captured on film in the last 10 years? 6.16) But this is also the summer of Wall*E, and while the film tackles some more weighty issues on the side, it isn’t what you’d call “dark” in the least. Not that geeks across this fine and fair internet are gonna let that stop them.

See, geeks are geeks because of our ease and willingness to slip into arrested development. It’s part and parcel of the culture. Where “normals” grew out of their more childlike endeavors, geeks nurtured and cultivated them into adulthood out of a desire to hold onto that innocence, that sense of fun and wonder that the best childhood entertainments afforded us. And geeks are optimistic enough to believe that becoming an adult doesn’t mean those things need to be put away and forgotten.

But geeks are also oftentimes slave to the cool. Sure, we redefine “cool” but geeks will bow before that particular altar just as faithfully as your typical 16 year old mallrat. They see Abercrombie & Fitch and a purse-dog. We see a couple lightsabers and a Superman Shield. Muslims see Allah, Christians see Jesus, and tomatoes see the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Back in the day people would sacrifice lambs as offerings to their god. Nowadays, geeks sacrifice the innocence of their childhoods to the god of “Dark.”

Take Wall*E. (spoilers ahoy, if you haven’t seen Wall*E, and if you haven’t, GO GET A LATE PASS. And a ticket to Wall*E. Get back here when you’re done having your heart melted by a trash compactor falling in love with an iPod) The criticisms of the film, once you move all the pointless hand wringing over the “environmental” message of the film off the table, seem to revolve around the ending. People think Wall*E shouldn’t have gotten his memory back, and forgotten all his adventures.

Except this makes absolutely zero sense from a plot point of view, or a thematic point of view, or any possible point of view that even Obi-Wan himself could adopt to justify this wrongheaded view of the film. The best reasoning I can see for taking away Wall*E from EVE at the end of the film is to sacrifice him so that others will learn from their mistakes, to be people of action, to be independent thinkers, to go forth and do right in the name of loving one another. Basically, to turn him into robot toaster Jesus.

Which is all well and good—if those lessons weren’t already driven home fully before the ship even touches down on earth. The emotional wallop, the thematic follow-through, they already landed like a fist to the chest when Wall*E pushed EVE out of the way to retrieve the plant, to ensure she finished her directive. All this after Wall*E had sacrificed his body to save the plant, all because he loved EVE. He’s shaken humanity loose of it’s apathy, jarred robotkind out of its rote drudgery, and awakened both groups to a potential unseen until now, solely because he loved EVE. Wall*E’s memory being lost would have no purpose to serve, no thematic loose end to tie up, except to be, as a lot of the wonks online are calling it: “ballsy.”

Darkness is not an end unto itself. There’s no point to making Wall*E dark. It doesn’t fit. It wouldn’t be a cooler, more artistically important movie just because it made some kids cry, especially for no other reason than its dark to make children cry, especially when the story by that point damn near mandates Wall*E, EVE and humanity get their happy ending. Wall*E isn’t The Empire Strikes Back. It’s a kids movie. Yes, I know, so was Empire, but that was crafted to work in the darkness in a way Wall*E wasn’t. It was more like a classic fairy tale, like Grimm, or Aesop. You can’t just take a kids property, rough it up and sully it, and say that it’s cool because there’s dirt and grime and feet of clay and Frank Miller dialog boiling out of it. Just because Lucas did it, just because Moore knew how to deconstruct it, or Willingham knew how to goof on it, doesn’t mean it needs to happen to every piece of childhood nostalgia you’re clinging to. If its too kiddie for you in its original incarnation, sometimes, instead of strapping guns and middle fingers to its kung-fu grip, how bout you just leave it in the toybox for the other kids. You don’t have to break it and chop its hair off and draw x’s on its eyes to make it “Dark” and “cool.”

And trying to redefine some of our more nostalgic properties as “not really for kids” is cheating. Wall*E is for kids. It’s got stuff for adults, but it’s for kids. Same with Star Wars. You can point me all you want to quotes from Lucas himself, that turkey-necked entrepreneur flip-flops more than a sale on sandals at Old Navy. Those are kids movies, made for kids, by a grown-up kid who couldn’t get over going real fast in a car like vroom-vroom. Sure, pretending they’re movies for grownups makes it easier to justify the need to make things Dark for Dark’s sake, but that doesn’t make it right. There’s a split down the center of the geek culture that wants to love being a kid, and the wondrousness of it all, but at the same time wants to pervert it and make it adult and mean. Sometimes you can have your cake and eat it too. Zemeckis knew how with Roger Rabbit. Del Toro has a gift for it as well. But too often we geeks will cut down something perfectly, simply good-natured because it’s not edgy.

And for that, I blame The Empire Strikes Back. It did “Dark” so well that geeks got hooked. Ever since, we’ve been taking nice, fun nostalgia pieces and, like Jimmy Stewart’s portrayal of Scottie Ferguson in Vertigo, dressing them up to look like Carlotta Valdez. Severe. Cold. Mean. “Dark.” Sometimes that particular wig just doesn’t fit. I just wish geeks wouldn’t force it as much as we do.