Anathem, Wall-E and thematic convergence
Over at the American Scene, Matt Frost compares WALL-E to the recently ended Battlestar Galactica — a show that has by now had so much irritating nonsense written about it that I’m permanently prejudiced against actually watching it (though to his credit, Ron Moore has not yet gone the David Simon route of informing his viewers that they were too stupid to get the point).
I have, however, recently watched WALL-E nearly in tandem with finishing Neal Stephenson’s awesome and awesomely ambitious Anathem*, and the two have more in common than just the sci-fi tag.
As others have surely noted, WALL-E’s nearly wordless first half hour or so is an extraordinary accomplishment. Figure that your average film is capable of conveying about eight or nine human emotions, tops, and your average non-Miyazaki animated film conveys half that number, so we’re getting into really primary color emotions here. Well, WALL-E‘s first half hour gives you eeriness, ennui, foreboding, a sense of Sysiphean futility, and a feeling of terrible loss.
However, as the plot gets underway, the film grows more didactic in tone, with its depiction of Nietzschean last men-who-are-actually-just-like-us. Far more interesting in my view was Anathem‘s reverse take on the issue. If WALL-E explicitly asks what happens to the human race when it grows thoroughly dependent on technology to manage every aspect of peoples’ lives, Anathem implicitly asks what happens to a subset of humans when you remove every possible vestige of dependence on technology (kind of an expanded take on Dune‘s mentats).
The answer is that their mental skills (and in some cases physical skills), unshackled by technology, would develop far beyond normal (yes, this Atlantic article occurred to me about 900 times while reading the book). Their hermetic separation from the outside world and abdication of technology renders them harmless to the secular political order, while their unique abilities make them mankind’s last, best hope in the midst of the crisis that sets the novel’s plot in motion.
Maybe it’s my current path in academia that drew me to its two-cheers-for-the-ivory-tower theme. Or maybe I just prefer to imagine myself as a potential budding genius, waiting to slip the chains of modern technology, rather than a potential lazy fatass who would order one of those hoverchairs in a second if they ever came on the market.
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*Incidentally, this xkcd comic kinda sorta gets it on the nose re Anathem. Deciphering Anathem‘s curious vocabulary induces a feeling that probably only has a name in German. It would be a five-syllable word that translates to “a feeling of pride over a useless accomplishment and a concurrent feeling of shame over having felt pride over something so trivial.” It’s not as bad as learning Elvish but it’s in the neighborhood.