WALL-E

Finished WALL-E last night, after dashing off a quick 1000 words of the novel that I've returned to writing.

What struck me about the Idiocracy-themed Disney flick was how it already has the sense of being dated. Sure, it's creative and clever at every turn, with a fascinating level of physical detail, but at the same time it all seems like something from another era, when we thought the middle class would continue to prosper. It's dark vision of the future isn't nearly as dark as what might be upon us.

After seeing it, I remember back to an NPR interview with director Andrew Stanton, in which the interview claimed that people on the right criticized the film for being too left-wing, and people on the right critized it for being too left-wing, and the director disavowed any politics whatever. This is all if my memory serves. After having seen it, I will now go so far as to doubt the sanity of anyone who sees this film as coming from a right-wing perspective, and I doubt anyone did in the first place.

Speaking of right and left, Christopher Hitchens (is there any other major public intellectual these days?) wrote a piece on Sarah Palin late in the campaign that I find myself returning to, not just because he ended up predicting the outcome and diagnosing the wherefores of the vote, but because he seems to one of the few who isn't afraid to speak out against dangerous tendencies in American populism: most notably, the odd notion that the only true Americans come from small towns.

*

So pardon me if I skip away quickly. I want to work on the novel while I still have energy left in me to write.