by Joe Kernen
And I’d feel even better if I knew that Blake and Scott were immune to, or at least skeptical of, the way their favorite TV shows and movies treat the world of business. In order to know this, of course, I needed to find out what those favorite shows actually were, and for once, I didn’t need to ask. I just had to check out the shows that had been saved onto our DVR.
“ ‘ iTake on Dingo’?”
“It’s an episode from iCarly.”
For the benefit of readers in families without young girls—and I hope you’ll understand why I say you’re only living half a life—I should explain that iCarly is a cable sitcom in which the show’s main character, a teenager named Carly Shay, produces and stars in her own Web show while refereeing disputes among her friends and coping with teachers, and her guardian, a twentysomething older brother. It is one of the most successful franchises on the Nickelodeon network, generating revenue not only from advertising but also from spin-offs, including books, videogames, iPhone apps, Web sites, music downloads, and DVDs.
In the “Dingo” episode that Blake had saved, Carly and her buddies learn that quite a few of the signature features of iCarly.com were turning up on a cable show called Totally Ten and head off to Hollywood to confront the show’s writers about the theft. For viewers who miss the joke that the cable company carrying Totally Ten is called “The Dingo Channel,” the show has a side plot involving the frozen head of Charles Dingo, the founder of Dingo Studios. When the kids finally talk their way into the Totally Ten writers’ room—which contains a whiteboard headed “Things We Can Steal from iCarly”—they have the following exchange:
“You can’t just take our ideas, change them a little bit, and then pretend they’re yours.”
“You said we could.”
“No, we didn’t. We’ll sue you.”
“This is the Dingo Channel. We have the money, the lawyers, and therefore the power to do anything we want.”
Okay. It’s just a sitcom. The private joke of one multibillion-dollar media conglomerate—Viacom, owner of Nickelodeon—tweaking another aside, is there anything especially bothersome about a teen sitcom showing Disney—oops, I mean Dingo—as a bully?
By itself, probably not. But in the world of television, it isn’t by itself. It is one of the most reliable features of filmed entertainment that big business equals bad business—an unexamined but toxic assumption that is even more common in Hollywood than in the most Progressive public-policy think tank. In fact, on those rare occasions when TV and movies portray the world of commerce in a (relatively) positive manner, you can count on the subject being small business, which is always more virtuous than big business.
Consider, for example, the Disney-theme-park-turned-billion-dollar-movie-franchise known as Pirates of the Caribbean. Once upon a time, the villains in pirate movies were always either other pirates or naval vessels in the service of a corrupt governor. And indeed, those were the villains in the first (and best) of the Pirates movies. By the second, however, a bigger budget allowed for the addition of not only a vengeance-seeking former Royal Navy commodore and a ship full of fish men in the service of Davy Jones, but also a sea monster roughly the size of a supertanker. Given all that, who do you think was the movie’s real villain?
A multinational corporation, that’s who.
The world’s first multinational, in fact: the British East India Company, which, for unexplained reasons, had relocated to the West Indies for the duration of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Actually, though the reasons are unexplained, they’re also pretty obvious. If you need a character that immediately screams out, “I am a villain beyond any chance of redemption,” then the easiest way is to make him a CEO. In this case, his name is Lord Cutler Beckett, his many-times-stated obsession is eliminating all freedom from the world, and his pet phrase, generally used to explain why he has, yet again, violated a solemn agreement, is “It’s just business.”
Now, the East India Company has a lot to answer for, not least because, while it was a consistent advocate for free trade, its devotion to free markets was essentially nonexistent. Its competitive advantage was built on the domination of India at the point of a gun—a domination that was secured by using its army and police force to rule the subcontinent from 1757 to 1858. But the real reason that the creators of Dead Man’s Chest used the company was that, well, that’s what movies do, especially when their audience is mostly kids.
It’s hard to say whether Cutler Beckett is a cause of the widespread distaste for large and successful firms or just another symptom. Probably both: The more we see how malevolent commerce is—especially when compared to occupations as virtuous as, for example, piracy—the clearer it becomes as a symbol for villainy. And symbols are important; with one hundred or so minutes to tell a story (or forty-six or so for an hour-long TV show), economy is important, and being able to communicate a character’s status rapidly is a jewel beyond price.
Case in point: If you didn’t already know that the worst kind of business executive—the very worst, worse even than senior executives employed by murdering multinationals—is one who cuts down trees, spend a few minutes with Mr. Potter, the CEO of the logging company that is foiled by the title character in Dr. Doolittle 2. Or Mr. Muckle, the CEO of the pancake-house chain who wants to build a restaurant on a vacant lot occupied by a family of owls in Hoot. In today’s television and movies, a bulldozer is the equivalent of a Nazi uniform: a symbolic shortcut that screams, “Evil! Evil! Evil!” In a dramatic format that relies on conflict between good and evil, this saves a whole lot of expensive film.
And conflict is essential. Even someone like me, who never took an English or drama course that I could avoid, can understand why a story needs conflict. Not so obvious, though, is why the conflict so often takes the form of an underdog versus an overwhelming favorite—and why the underdog seems to have such a claim to the moral high ground.
I may not be a trained critic—okay, I am definitely not a trained critic—but I do know how to do research. And when I started researching this particular topic, I found that a lot of people had been there before me.
Many of them studied the place where the phenomenon appears most frequently: sports, where the need for a competitive contest practically obliges rooting for the team or player that is less likely to win. Sports fans, like ten-year-olds (and Progressives, especially those in positions of power), want everything to come out fair in the end, and the only way this could happen if, for example, the Yankees were to play my poor Cincinnati Reds, would be if the underdog were to overachieve.
There are other reasons. When they win, underdogs have a bigger return on emotional investment than favorites, who can only perform as expected or disappoint. This is also why, unaccountably, racetracks are full of people who underbid favorites and overinvest in losers.
Some of this is perception: In a sort of Lake Wobegon effect—where “all the children are above average”—more than six out of ten voters in the 2004 presidential election described their choice as the “underdog,” and the same phenomenon caused them to see underdogs, in areas ranging from the Olympic Games to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as the ones who try harder. And who, after all, doesn’t love the Little Engine That Could? By definition, 90 percent of people aren’t in the top 10 percent in athletic ability, intelligence, wealth, or good looks, so if you want someone with whom an audience can identify, you’re probably going to do a lot better with an underdog.
The underdog perspective is everywhere. It is the reason local news anchors can’t finish a broadcast without a human-interest story about someone overcoming great odds. It’s why they televise the hearings in which senators torment large and successful corporate executives. And it is especially the reason that business executives make such terrific villains.
Think I’m cherry-picking? Since it was first awarded in 2001, nine movies have won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (a tenth will have been awarded by the time you read t
his). Two of them—Finding Nemo and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit— have no real connection with, or attitude about, free enterprise, business, or the economy. Here are six of the others:Shrek: The villain, Lord Farquaad, is not only evil incarnate but also a monopoly capitalist bent on evicting all competing magical creatures from his kingdom, the Land of Duloc. The kingdom, by the way, is a totalitarian theme park obsessed with cleanliness, order, and enforced happiness—kind of like Disney’s prototypical Magic Kingdom, against whom the CEO of DreamWorks, Shrek’s studio, had a legendary vendetta.
Spirited Away: An anime movie that was, for a time, the biggest-grossing movie in Japanese history but went largely unseen in the United States (with just $10 million in gross receipts). Even so, the director’s stated purpose was to show his distaste for modern Japan’s habits of consumption. The main character’s parents are credit-card junkies who are transformed into pigs, symbolism not very hard to follow.
The Incredibles: The hero—Bob Parr, Mr. Incredible—is forced to work as a customer supervisor at a health-insurance company, where his supervisor, Gilbert Huph (“Tell me how you’re keeping Insuricare in the black! Tell me how that’s possible with you writing checks to every Harry Hardluck and Sally Sobstory that gives you a phone call!”) is a caricature of every corporate flunky who ever lived.
Happy Feet: Tacked on to a story about a dancing penguin yearning to escape captivity and return to his Antarctic home is a subplot about a rapacious fishing industry. The addition of a completely unrelated theme (overfishing = bad) results in a totally unnecessary second ending, but at least our kids get their dose of environmental anticapitalism to accompany the closing song.
Ratatouille: The plot for this movie about a young chef working in a three-star restaurant, inspired by the culinary talent of a rat, turns on the intentions of the restaurant’s owner to link up with a multinational and—Quel horreur!—market a line of microwave burritos, barbecue, and corn dogs, therefore getting two for one: sneering not only at commerce but also at down-market American food. The ironic fact that the movie was shown in theaters serving hot dogs, popcorn, and nachos appears to have been lost on the filmmakers.
Up: Carl Fredricksen’s house, in which he shared an idyllic life with his now-deceased wife, is targeted by a developer who buys all the land surrounding it, thus forcing Carl to (a) hit one of the construction laborers and (b) flee the scene of the crime by attaching a gazillion helium balloons to the house. Developer. Evil.’Nuff said.
And then there’s WALL-E.
Like most parents, I expect a G rating to stand for “generally harmless,” as well as “generally boring.” But this particular G was attached to a movie that was receiving the sort of reviews usually reserved for potential Oscar winners. And when we saw it at the multiplex in 2008, it was pretty impressive. On the screen, the camera’s eye raced through the depths of interstellar space. Nebulae and galaxies flashed by. The members of the audience—several hundred parents and their children—watched patiently (parents) and eagerly (kids) as their destination came into view: Earth.
Or what was left of it, anyway. The scene was apocalyptic. Mountains of trash had replaced cities; high-tension towers and windmills were completely silent. The oceans had unaccountably dried up, the sky was the color of sewage, and not a single stalk of grass marred the perfectly sterile brownness. No plants. No animals. Well, one animal: a single cockroach. The lone sound was a snippet from an old movie musical played by the one purposeful thing on the entire planet. Earth was obviously dead—and as a rule of thumb, when the only sound heard for centuries is a song from Hello Dolly, you’re not in heaven.
The cause was less obvious, at least until we rewatched the movie on DVD. Was it some unimaginably violent nuclear war? An attack by aliens out of some science-fiction nightmare? Could it have been a plague so deadly that not a single organism had survived? Or maybe some environmental catastrophe had been able to do what four billion years of asteroid strikes, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions could not. What could have sterilized an entire planet?
Walmart.
Not literally Walmart. Not Walmart in a way that might expose the filmmakers to a cease-and-desist letter. The author of earth’s destruction, according to Pixar and the creators of the movie WALL-E (or at least their attorneys), was the super-ultra-mega corporation known as Buy n Large, sometimes shortened to “BNL.” Throughout the garbage heaps of the dead city in which WALL-E opens, the only recognizable trademark is that of Buy n Large. A Buy n Large Ultrastore, roughly the size of the Pentagon, stands empty in a vast parking lot. Buy n Large gas stations. BNL transit stations. Even the newspaper that is one of the millions of articles of trash filling the streets is a Buy n Large production. Earth has been destroyed not by fire or by ice but by Everyday Low Prices.
But more about that later. First, a confession. I liked WALL-E. Blake liked WALL-E. Pretty much everyone liked WALL-E. It’s a good movie. The robot characters are funny, affecting, and memorable. The combination of pictures and sound without dialogue, particularly during the movie’s first forty minutes or so, is terrific. The movie enjoyed both huge ticket sales and critical acclaim, and it earned both. Only a killjoy would see it primarily as anti–free market propaganda, and only a complete idiot would tell his daughter that he thought so.
I’m not a complete idiot, anyway.
But I did turn off the WALL-E DVD, as I often do after sitting through one of Holly wood’s unbearably smug attacks on the world of commerce, scratching my head while wondering whether the entertainment industry’s consistently villainous portrayals of business and businesspeople are the results of hypocrisy or ignorance. Do the creators of films that generate billions of dollars in profit not care or not know?
WALL-E, for those who never saw it, is set on a future Earth that had been so poisoned by human garbage that virtually the entire population boarded immense spaceships, built and operated by Buy n Large, in order to cruise around the galaxy while BNL’s robots cleaned up the mess left behind. Seven hundred years later, Earth is still devoid of human, animal, or plant life, and only one lonely robot—a Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-class, or WALL-E—is left to package the trash into cubes with no apparent purpose.
He finds that purpose when another robot arrives, dispatched from the Axiom, one of the BNL spaceships, to discover whether earth can support life. WALL-E and EVE (for “Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator”) court each other to the sound of Louis Armstrong singing “La Vie en Rose.” Soon enough, EVE learns that WALL-E has discovered a single plant growing in a discarded refrigerator, at which point she returns to the Axiom, with WALL-E following. There we discover that the seven-hundred-year-long cruise has left the human passengers grossly obese, completely passive, and utterly dependent on the perfect service offered by the ship and its computers, which have been following the directive given to them by their BNL builders: Since earth was too toxic to support life, the Axiom must continue its cruise forever.
At least until WALL-E’s arrival. With the spaceship’s captain, whose reading about Earth has sharpened his curiosity (though not his wits: “Earth is AMAZING. These are called ‘FARMS.’ Humans put seeds in the ground, pour water on them, and they grow food, like PIZZA!”). WALL-E and EVE lead a revolt that ends when the Axiom accepts the plant as evidence that earth can now support life, and the ship returns to disgorge its passengers like the Ark after the flood. WALL-E, who has been nearly destroyed, is brought back to life by EVE, and the two robots, along with Earth, live happily ever after.
What could be wrong with all this? Along with dozens of irritants that bother only the irritable (How in the name of photosynthesis did the planet’s single surviving plant germinate in a refrigerator with neither water nor light? What does the cockroach eat?) are two that seem specially designed to illustrate the dumbing down of American economic literacy.
First is the notion that free markets, when they are permitted to run amok, lead inevitably t
o a single supercorporation that not only will dominate all economic activity and control all forms of economic demand—when the Axiom’s computer decides that all passengers will change from wearing red to blue, compliance is immediate and enthusiastic—but will do so for more than seven hundred years. This is mind-numbingly wrong, both theoretically and empirically. The defining characteristic of free market capitalism is that nothing stays the same for seven hundred years. Or even seventy. Ask U.S. Steel. Or General Motors. Or even Walmart’s spiritual predecessor, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, which once upon a time controlled 80 percent of America’s supermarket business. If free markets aren’t dynamic, they aren’t free; they need what the Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter called “the perennial gale of creative destruction” to operate as productively as possible.
This doesn’t mean there aren’t any examples of economic stagnation. That’s what describes almost all of human history, after all—before, that is, the advent of free-market capitalism. The same story applies to single enterprises dominating all economic life, which appeared in dozens of preindustrial civilizations and even some nations of the industrial age; a few of the mid-twentieth-century communist nations got fairly close. However, their experience reveals the second of WALL-E’s glaring misunderstandings of economic behavior. Even if you accept that, for historically mysterious reasons, a single corporation was able to eliminate all competition and all substitutes for the products it sold, it would for that very reason be unable to operate efficiently.