immaterial thoughts: brand value, environmental sustainability, and wall·e

Immaterial Thoughts: Brand Value, Environmental Sustainability, and WALL-E

Maria Bose

Criticism, Volume 59, Number 2, Spring 2017, pp. 247-277 (Article)

Published by Wayne State University Press

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247Criticism Spring 2017, Vol. 59, No. 2, pp. 247–277. ISSN 0011-1589. doi: 10.13110/criticism.59.2.0247© 2018 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

IMMATERIAL THOUGHTS: BRAND VALUE, ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY, AND WALL-E

Maria Bose

Just before Earth Day 2014, Apple released Better, a short film outlin-ing the company’s new environmental responsibility campaign. In Better, a placid sun rises over a glistening field of solar panels (figures 1 and 2). Next, the camera cuts to an Apple engineering lab: from the smooth reflective surfaces of the solar panels to the immaculate screens of iPhones and iPads (figure 3). “Better,” narrates Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, “It’s a powerful word and a powerful ideal. It makes us look at the world and want more than anything to change it for the better. To innovate, improve, to reinvent. To make it better.”1 Later, we are moved from Apple showrooms, filled with stately plastic and aluminum prod-ucts, to groves of oaks swaying in the wind and colonies of ants atop an anthill. Midway through the film, a hand places an iPhone in its now less-wasteful container. An engineer strides purposefully between rows of solar panels. Knotty roots are juxtaposed with multicolored electrical cables, wind turbines with circuitboards. Finally, thunder cracks and the panels are drenched in a luxuriant rain, which soon abates in order for the sun to rise again. “We have a long way to go,” concludes Cook, “and a lot to learn. But now, more than ever, we will work to leave the world better than we found it. And make the tools that inspire others to do the same.”

It is hard to miss the visual homology that Better constructs between the screens of solar panels and those of Apple’s products. But what makes Better an instructive response to the current ecological crisis rather than simply another exercise in green branding is neither this homology nor the film’s aestheticization of physical environment. Instead, Better exceeds typical green strategies by working to construct Apple’s brand equity as an optic through which environment might, first, be apprehended and, ultimately, disavowed. As we will see, Better borrows this approach from Apple’s onetime affiliate Pixar, whose greenest and most environmen-tally symptomatic film WALL-E (2008; WALL-E: Waste Allocation

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Load Lifter, Earth-class) is this essay’s primary subject. Arguably more pronounced in Better’s visual rhetoric, however, is the attempt to man-age the perception of physical environment by using the Apple brand to circumscribe the visual field, something the film accomplishes by figuring Apple’s logo—an apple missing a single bite—in the viewer’s simultane-ous access to and protection from environment.

Understood in this way, we notice that Better’s most significant visual motif is not the studied homology between solar panels and iPads but rather a more nuanced riff on Apple’s trademark apple: a circle.

Figure 1. Betting on the Future? Buy Apple.

Figure 2. Apple Solar Farm in Maiden, North Carolina.

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Articulating the camera’s field of vision, the circle first appears in the sun’s reflection on the panels, only to recur throughout the film: the cylin-drical shell of Apple’s new Mac Pro frames our view of the engineering lab (figure 4); the blades of a wind turbine are circular, not elliptical; the camera cuts from the circular cable opening of the iMac display stand to the circular opening of a windsock through which we glimpse the solar panels (figures 5 and 6); a large and prominent halo encircles the sun in a closing image; and two small, circular dust motes trail to the right of the Apple logo in the final shot (figures 7 and 8).

Figure 3. iPad Flex Test.

Figure 4. Mac Pro Hardware.

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Serving as an aperture into the film’s key sites of production (the Apple laboratory, the field of solar panels, and the sun), Better registers the circle as the camera’s decisive point of view—one that carefully marks the edge between Apple’s curated environments and the fragile, reticent planet that lies beyond them.2 But more than this, Better’s circle also negotiates and refashions Apple’s iconic logo, the half-eaten apple whose familiar evoca-tion of creative defiance comes dangerously close, in an era of ecologi-cal crisis, to signaling the exigencies of resource depletion. Attempting to overwrite the apple—whose missing piece is, as it were, filled in by those amenable dust motes floating just above it (see figure 7)—Better extends the circle as Apple’s new green logo, a figure that appears pervasively

Figure 5. iMac Stand.

Figure 6. Through a Circle, Sustainably.


in Apple’s recent product design and in the company’s plans for its new Cupertino headquarters (figures 9 and 10). Repeating at the level of lan-guage those visual gestures of containment and curation realized by the circle, Better hijacks terms like “better” and “environment” as signifiers for Apple’s brand identity, suggesting that what matters isn’t physical environment but the environments Apple and its products make possible, not sustainability per se but the sustainability of the Apple brand.

What makes Better an especially intelligent response to the current ecological crisis is not, however, the film’s hijacking and redeployment of

Figure 7. Halo Effect.

Figure 8. The Restorative Power of Dust Motes.

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the terms of environmental discourse. Neither is it Better’s suggestion that Apple’s customers might simply allow themselves to feel better about eco-logical reality by accepting Apple’s curated environments as viable alter-natives to real ones. Rather, it is how Better’s formal gestures of enframing and resignification illustrate a notion of the Apple brand as a closed sym-bolic economy the film cannily distances from material circumstance by

Figure 9. 2014 Advertisement for Mac Pro.

Figure 10. Promotional Artwork for Apple Campus 2, 2014.


seizing upon the presiding value of Apple’s immaterial brand assets—by emphasizing, as Cook does, the equity lodged in Apple’s ethos of innova-tion, improvement, and reinvention, qualities that reside not in Apple’s “tools” but in what they might “inspire.”

As Adam Arvidsson observes, the market value of tech brands like Apple is now, more than ever before, “only tenuously linked to material production.”3 Under new capitalisms variously hailed as affective, cog-nitive, creative, immaterial, informational, and postindustrial, value is increasingly understood to derive from the unremunerated microlabor of prosumers like online shoppers, gamers, and social media users whose actions figure forth the social, emotional, and aesthetic contexts in which value is realized.4 Correspondingly, value in the new economies comes to reside in intangible assets like information, intellectual property, patents, and, significantly, brands. Under increasingly abstract value regimes, then, the bulk of equity ascribable to a brand like Apple is located in “the lived reality of [its] consumers,” lodged in intangible yet highly valuable properties such as Apple’s “name awareness” and “brand loyalty,” its “per-ceived quality” and “customer associations.”5 It is through the appraisal of these social and symbolic categories by consultancies like Interbrand that Apple’s market value—which surpassed $900 billion in November 2017, following the release of the iPhone X—is finally determined, through a series of financial calculations whose validity is “not so much guaranteed by their accuracy as it is secured by their legitimacy.”6

Arguably less concerned with marketing iPads or Macbooks than with appropriating the ethos of environmental responsibility for Apple’s brand identity, then, Better uses Apple’s immaterial brand equity in order to think about material ecological decline. In so doing, the film accomplishes much more than the incorporation of green conceits. Rather, Better’s vision of a sustainable future models brand equity as a configuration of value that exists at once beyond material reality yet retains the power to withstand—and even recuperate—material losses. In this way, the envi-ronment Better portrays is not simply green. It is also a dematerializing rebuke to the realities of resource depletion and toxification, an ultimately artificial environment in which the financial stability of the Apple brand displaces concern for an all-too-precarious ecological situation. Insofar as the logic of informational capitalism extends the notion that immaterial assets like “environmental responsibility” might enhance a brand’s con-sumer appeal and subsequently increase its overall monetary value, Better fantasizes that these same immaterial assets might even have the potential to stabilize the material infrastructures upon which that monetary value at least tenuously depends.

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As we will see, Pixar’s ecocatastrophe narrative WALL-E models a similar fantasy of material restoration for which the equity residing in Pixar’s recognized ethos of corporate responsibility is imagined to be capable of redressing the current ecological crisis. Additionally, WALL-E functions as what Jerome Christensen calls a “brand-lore” allegory for Pixar’s corporate history and identity.7 Understood in this way, WALL-E’s emphasis on environments colonized by the fictional megabrand Buy n Large (BnL) articulates the brand as a conceptual link between mate-rial and immaterial dimensions of experience while also serving to indict BnL the better to distinguish Pixar from the monoculture of its parent, Disney. Casting BnL in Disney’s image, WALL-E narrates the conver-sion of an environmentally irresponsible brand by a responsible one: ava-tars for Pixar, the robots WALL-E and EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) possess the innovation, uniqueness, and responsibility needed to transform BnL from a control-driven virtual factory where consump-tion is passive and indifferent into a socially responsible brand willing to acknowledge and repair the physical environment. In this way, WALL-E configures Pixar’s “responsible” brand equity as the engine of Disney’s corporate transformation, firstly, and global environmental restoration, consequently. Not all brands are responsible, WALL-E finally tells us. But a truly responsible brand like Pixar might just save the world.

Saving Disney

In 1990, Disney’s CEO Michael Eisner and chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg approached Pixar’s then-chairman and CEO, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, with an offer to produce a Pixar-animated film. Jobs was interested. Since acquiring Pixar in 1986, shortly after resigning from Apple’s board of directors, Jobs had invested more than $50 million in order to keep the studio afloat. Eager to make a deal with Disney, Jobs, along with Pixar’s president Ed Catmull and creative director John Lasseter, agreed to develop three feature-length films for Disney, the rights to which Disney would retain. The first of these films was Toy Story (1995), whose critical success and earnings secured Disney’s interest in Pixar and prompted Jobs to take the company public in 1995. Encouraged by Pixar’s triumph as the highest initial public offering (IPO) of the year, Jobs relocated Pixar to a larger studio space in Emeryville, California.8

Despite Pixar’s growing reputation in the film industry and its evi-dent profitability for Disney, however, tensions between the two studios persisted. Frustrated by the terms of the original contract, Jobs sought to


revise the three-picture deal. Under his proposed terms, Pixar would con-trol production of its films, retain all film properties, and regain owner-ship of material currently under development. Instead of splitting profits with Disney 50/50, per the original agreement, Pixar would pay Disney a flat fee for distribution.9 Eisner balked at the proposal, but Jobs was ada-mant. Following Eisner’s departure from Disney in 2005, Jobs resumed negotiations with his replacement, Robert Iger. However, rather than working to revise the original agreement, Jobs and Iger began discussing the possibility of a merger. In 2006, a decision was reached and Disney acquired Pixar for $7.4 billion. The merger propelled Jobs to Disney’s board of directors.10 Lasseter was named chief creative officer of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Catmull, too, assumed a dual role as president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. Both were to report directly to Iger.11

The decision to consolidate Pixar’s senior management with Disney’s was a strategic one, designed to foster accountability and promote col-laboration between the two studios. Of equal importance was Disney’s pledge, hard won by Jobs in his negotiations with Iger, to “help main-tain the Pixar ‘culture.’”12 In his analysis of the merger contract, Jerome Christensen makes much of Disney’s use of “culture” and its placement in scare quotes. Here, Christensen observes, “culture” refers to the cultural products developed and marketed by Pixar, as well as to the studio’s unique corporate culture, long esteemed for its bottom-up policies and equitable treatment of employees. By placing culture in quotes, Christensen argues, the merger contract “distance[s] Pixar from a potentially destabilizing avowal of the priority of its own culture by . . . imply[ing] that the word culture properly belongs to the dominant partner [Disney], as part of its corporate identity.”13 Signaling Pixar’s subordination to Disney’s domi-nant cultural identity, the contract thus authorizes Pixar to enact its own distinct identity. “Whether the quotation marks [around ‘culture’] were imposed by a condescending Disney, by a strategic Pixar, or in an ironic collaboration,” Christensen concludes, “its authorship belongs to what-ever set of norms, practices, and personalities make Pixar not what it is but what it does, and which thereby constitute not its identity but its value.”14 Distanced from, while also protected by, the Disney brand, the merger contract identifies Pixar as a valuable cultural author in its own right, liberated from “complete fidelity to [Disney’s] dominant creed in order to make no statements, only movies.”15

As Christensen demonstrates, the movies Pixar made, beginning with Toy Story, variously imagine what it means for Pixar to maintain a culture distinct from that of its corporate parent. Christensen reads Toy Story,

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for instance, as a “deeply corporatist” allegory for Pixar’s relationship to Disney: a figure for Pixar’s creative culture, the toys of Andy’s playroom reflect Pixar’s conviction that “no distinctive, satisfying way of doing things can be formed without the institutional framework of Andy’s bedroom or Disney’s boardroom; no [corporate and creative] culture can be held together without Andy’s mark or Disney’s brand.”16 Just as the film’s toy spaceman, Buzz Lightyear, must carefully negotiate his social role within, as well as his value to, the “pluralistic culture that thrives under Andy’s benign corporate canopy,” so too does Toy Story advance Pixar’s sense of its creative identity and function within Disney’s plural-istic corporate culture.17 Additionally, Toy Story meditates on the nature of Pixar’s value to Disney. In particular, the film and its sequels under-score Pixar’s capacity to not only generate culture for Disney in the form of multimillion-dollar cinema successes, but also provide Disney with a much-needed corporate conscience, imparted by way of Disney’s associa-tion with Pixar’s commitment to “taking responsibility for [its] corporate projects, getting things right, and, crucially, accepting liability for what goes wrong.”18 Understood as a conscientious cultural author, Christensen writes, Pixar presents itself in Toy Story and elsewhere as the generator of that “intangible but quantifiable managerial capital called ‘goodwill,’” the implicit guarantor of a corporate culture “indefinitely productive of more value” for Pixar and Disney both.19

Like Toy Story, WALL-E presents an extended allegory for Pixar’s value to Disney, one in which Pixar’s benevolent avatars (WALL-E and EVE) provide Disney (BnL) with a sorely needed corporate conscience. In addition to registering Pixar’s self-consciousness about its cultural and financial relation to Disney, however, WALL-E’s narrative about envi-ronmental collapse is also keyed to broader questions of value in the new economies and, in particular, to the value and sustainability of a brand like Pixar within them. In contrast to Toy Story, then, which figures the brand as either a benign or repressive corporate canopy, the mark of a parent (Disney) either willing or unwilling to help Pixar maintain its cul-ture, WALL-E registers symptomatic concerns about the economic con-figuration of brand value itself—namely by foregrounding the relation between the fictional BnL’s immaterial assets and their material contexts. Appearing in theaters on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis that would make clear a disjunction between physical assets (like homes) and the market for intangibles (like derivatives) with which they were becoming increasingly bound up, WALL-E aims in part to assess imminent crises both economic and ecological by linking the BnL starship Axiom’s pro-ductless information economy to the concrete, devastated infrastructures


on Earth that underwrite this economy.20 Like Apple’s Better, then, the film responds to the current ecological crisis by invoking the reparative dematerializing and rematerializing potential of Pixar’s “responsible” brand equity: while allegorizing Pixar’s cultural renovation of Disney’s top-down management practices, WALL-E also constructs and formal-izes Pixar’s ethos of corporate responsibility—not, as Better does, by ren-dering its logo as an aperture onto environment, but rather by articulating Pixar’s hyperrealist animation style as a formally “responsible” medium and means for representing it.

Branding Survival

WALL-E transports audiences 700 years into the future to arrive at two extraordinary posthuman universes: the trashscape of a now-abandoned and uninhabitable Earth, degraded by industry and smothered in con-sumer waste bearing the logo of corporate megabrand Buy n Large (BnL) and the psychedelic corporate brandscape of the BnL starship, Axiom, home to a race of future humans now comically reliant on technology. The BnL trashscape composes a dystopian site of ecological disaster whose sole survivors are WALL-E, a waste-removal robot tasked with managing humanity’s rubbish (much of which he cherishes, especially an obsolete video iPod), and his pet cockroach. The enclosed universe of the Axiom, by contrast, figures forth a fantasy space of subjectivity lib-erated into digital consciousness, a techno-utopia where future humans schedule rounds of virtual golf and video chat with friends sitting right beside them, all while bathing in the milieu of media advertising for BnL products that, curiously enough, are rarely seen. Importantly, the Axiom combines this techno-utopian fantasy with an altogether darker vision of humankind’s imagined future enslavement to technology, gradually revealing that the ship is secretly controlled by a sinister autopilot bent on preventing the humans from returning to Earth. What, then, is to be made of WALL-E’s twinned fantasy spaces—the waste site and the vir-tual brandscape—the first luxuriating in the inevitability of capitalism’s apocalyptic outcomes and humankind’s imminent extinction, and the sec-ond envisioning an escape from the materiality that binds humankind’s future to capitalism’s and evolution’s narratives of decline? As WALL-E’s reviewers were quick to observe, the film’s critique of consumer society is, quite literally, risky business: as a commodity designed for consumption, WALL-E risks denouncing consumer practices whose imperatives are its own.21 Ergo the happy ending: WALL-E discovers viable plant life on

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Earth; he and another robot, EVE, transport it to the Axiom; reassured of the planet’s habitability, the humans free themselves from the evil autopi-lot; and everyone returns home to Earth. To put this another way, ecology gets reduced to the hunt for sustainable futures; technology finds a way to correct the damage we’ve done to the environment; and political progress gets understood as the movement toward “better” modes of consumption, such as WALL-E’s preference for the retro iPod.22

Reading in the Christensensian mode, Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann were among the first critics to nominate BnL as a figure for Disney. “By critiquing consumerism so overtly,” they write in 2009, “WALL-E also critiques Disney’s aesthetic and production values.”23 Suggesting that the film initially privileges Pixar’s ostensibly anticon-sumerist values by granting a dystopic, utterly un-Disneyfied vision of the destroyed Earth, Murray and Heumann conclude that WALL-E nevertheless allegorizes Pixar’s critical submission to Disney’s values by electing to “reinforce the conservative romantic ideology found in classic Disney features from Snow White (1937) onward.”24 In this way, while WALL-E advances powerful critiques of consumerism, overtly, and Disney, obliquely, it subsequently works to redeem its own commodity status by reconciling with consumerism and Disney both, something the film accomplishes through the union of its robot lovers.

While WALL-E’s director Andrew Stanton has never confirmed Murray and Heumann’s thesis about Disney’s allegorical appearance in WALL-E, he has candidly acknowledged Disney’s aesthetic influence on his team’s design for the Axiom. “We knew that we wanted [the Axiom] to be cool,” Stanton states in a 2008 interview.25 “We are all probably very similar in our backgrounds here [at Pixar] in that we all miss the Tomorrowland that was promised us from the heyday of Disneyland.”26 Citing Disney’s cruise line as another source of inspiration for the Axiom, Stanton’s nostalgia for Tomorrowland and his attraction to the futur-istic vibe of Disney’s cruisers reorient Murray and Heumann’s sense of how BnL might refer to Disney. If, for Murray and Heumann, Disney haunts BnL as an ideology, enacted through aesthetic gestures that serve to consolidate Disney’s brand ethos and identity, then, following Stanton, Disney also haunts the Axiom at level of sociospatial organization, coded in an imaginary architecture that broaches questions of environment by materializing Disney’s brand identity into physical space.

In Disney, Stanton and his team selected a foundational model for the spatialization of brand identity. Indeed, as architecture theorist Anna Klingmann points out, “[I]t was the Walt Disney Company that created the prototype for all branded environments.”27 Today, Klingmann continues,


Disneyland and Walt Disney World are two of the best-known and most-visited recreation locations in the world and constitute prime examples of a completely constructed environment, one that is based not on traditional principles of composition but rather on the choreography of scripted experiential sequences that are compounded with the iden-tity of the brand.28

In its pioneering effort to provide visitors with an environment in which they might experience hands-on the imaginative qualities of Disney’s films, Disneyland inaugurated “a completely new vocabulary of brandci-ties, brandlands, and brandscapes.”29 Inspired by Disney’s transposition of a “synthetically conceived [brand] identity . . . onto a synthetically con-ceived place,” Klingmann suggests, architecture in Disneyland’s wake has sought increasingly to locate itself at the intersection of “place and mar-ket, [oriented by] expanding information technologies, local authenticity, and global consumer culture.” As a result, architecture today asks to be evaluated not simply on a formal basis but also in terms of its capacity to evoke, as Disneyland does, modes of being and feeling that encourage subjects to partake in specific cultural and consumer practices.30

For Klingmann, Disneyland remains the brandscape par excellence, a built environment whose evocative potential is programmatically bound up with its design. Leading visitors through predefined routes designed to replicate the experience of viewing scenes from Disney’s films, the park establishes “a one-direction communication [system] where visitors become passive consumers in a highly staged environment[—an environ-ment in which] the degree of control necessary to produce the required effects is carefully hidden.”31 William Hackenbroich compares the park’s design to Ford’s conveyor-belt system: “[E]verything [at Disneyland] is designed, from the design process to product to usage. The experiences of the visitors are precisely planned in detail and possibilities for action are predefined.”32 The park, he continues, unfolds as a sequence of events that visitors “can easily consume, but which they can never actively gener-ate.”33 Of a piece with Disneyland’s heavy scripting of visitor mobility is the park’s subtler manipulation of perception. As William Borrie notes, building edges and sidewalk intersections on Disneyland’s Main Street are deliberately rounded so as to appear less threatening. Also on Main Street, buildings are constructed according to a principle of forced perspective, where each ascending floor measures at a fraction of the floor beneath it. “As with any theatrical exaggeration,” Borrie writes, “if done well, the visitor will readily accept the manipulation as ‘natural.’”34 Behind

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Disneyland’s scrupulous production of the “natural,” Borrie concludes, is an acute desire to provide its visitors with “clean, safe, and psychologically comfortable” environments in which they can happily resign their per-sonal and social responsibilities to the Disney “corporate control system.”35

Informed by Borrie and Hackenbroich’s analysis of Disneyland’s sociospatial control system, a list of correspondences between Disneyland and the Axiom might easily be drawn: immobilized in their hoverchairs, WALL-E’s future humans resemble nothing so much as bored children riding Ford’s conveyor belt through the safe, clean, corporate control sys-tem of BnL (figures 11 and 12).36 But the Axiom also amplifies Disneyland’s core principles of safety, cleanliness, and control, as safety gets upped to survival, cleanliness is provided at an interstellar remove from Earth’s global waste crisis, and the corporate control system now regulates

Figure 11. Riding BnL’s Conveyor Belt.

Figure 12. Welcome to the Information Economy.


everything from passenger movement to the course of human evolution. Likewise, where Disneyland works to manage visitor experience within a carefully constructed built environment, the Axiom manipulates experi-ence in its fullest dimensions: having accidentally slept through his daily morning announcement, the Axiom’s buffoonish captain, McCrea, simply resets the time of day (figure 13). Basking at a balmy seventy-two degrees under an artificial sun branded with BnL’s logo, atmosphere itself is spon-sored by BnL. Isolated behind personal media screens, passenger vision and behavior are not simply regulated but actively programmed, any hope of intimacy and spontaneity curtailed. It is, for instance, only after WALL-E accidentally deactivates passenger Mary’s media screen that she is able to bond with another passenger, John. Later, both assist WALL-E and EVE in steering the Axiom back to Earth.

While Stanton’s comments about Disneyland’s aesthetic influence on the Axiom are thus entirely plausible, his design of the Axiom also admits to an equal, if not greater, influence by the spatial and ideological work-ings of Disney’s corporate control system, magnified in WALL-E to the status of the all-out lifestyle brand, BnL, whose foremost product is life itself.37 This is to say that while the Axiom in no uncertain sense refers to Disney, either in the spirit of homage, per Stanton’s remarks, or that of disapproval, per Murray and Heumann, it also figures the types of perceptual manipulations and distortions realized by the Disneyland brandscape. Additionally, because WALL-E is interested not only in the controlled space of the Axiom but also in the devastated planet that lies many light-years beyond it, the film compels its viewers to relate the Axiom’s carefully programmed “frames of action” to the larger ecologi-cal frame within which BnL moves.38 In this sense, WALL-E’s narra-tive relay between the ruined Earth, branded with BnL’s waste material,

Figure 13. Turning Back the Day.

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and the branded environment of the Axiom starship, a site for the consumption of predominantly immaterial communication and infor-mation services, extends a critique of Disney’s corporate control system that shows how brandscapes and the value forms that underwrite them might control and distort how we see and interact with environment on the whole, even those environments lying ostensibly beyond the brand’s purview (figures 14–16).

In this sense, WALL-E’s narrative relay between Earth and the Axiom implicates the brand in a foreshortening of environmental perception by highlighting the disjunction between BnL’s material ontology on Earth (a bounded and differentiated product space that, by unchecked brand extension, has altogether gone to ruin) and its most idealized form within the Axiom’s information economy (a free-floating and nearly product-less brandspace powered by the purportedly sustainable combination of machine labor and human attention).39 Consequently, WALL-E’s journey from Earth to the Axiom not only fantasizes about the displacement of value from a material landscape prone to the devastating effects of over-production to an information economy dependent solely on consumer attention, but also shows how, as a hybrid value form composed of both material and immaterial assets and generated within both industrial and informational modes of capitalism, the brand’s spatial and its economic character might facilitate illusions of value freed from its dependence on real, industrial economies. To put this another way, in addition to illustrating the brandscape’s spatial and perceptual capacities to distort and overwrite material environmental substrates, as Stanton’s citation of Disneyland suggests, I am proposing that WALL-E illustrates how the brand’s hybrid configuration of value also conditions environmental per-ception by reinforcing rhetorics of dematerialization and virtuality that predispose consumers to disavow the material lives of commodities and information.

In making the claim that WALL-E illustrates how brandscapes’ per-ceptual manipulations might repress awareness of actual physical envi-ronments, I draw on Lawrence Buell’s notion of an “environmental unconscious.” Referring both to the “impossibility of individual or col-lective [environmental] perception coming to full consciousness at what-ever level: observation, thought, articulation” as well as to an imaginative potential, “a residual capacity (of individual humans, authors, texts, read-ers, communities) to awake to fuller apprehension of physical environ-ment and one’s interdependence with it,” Buell’s term is deliberately pliable, working along the contours of psychoanalytic topography to define a mechanism by which environments are inevitably foreshortened


by perception and only partly narratable within social experience.40 The term’s suggestiveness obtains in part from its allusions to Freud’s theo-rization of unconscious mental processes, but moreover from its affinity with Fredric Jameson’s account of a “political unconscious” crucial to the interpretation of literary texts. Like Jameson, Buell affirms that texts mask

Figures 14-16. The BnL Trashscape.

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their status as “socially symbolic acts” and thus repress a latent political ideology.41 Unlike Jameson, Buell conceives of an originary, prelinguistic and hence preideological unconscious, “very likely as primordial as uncon-scious psychic activity itself,” an environmental unconscious keyed to the subject’s “embeddedness in spatio-physical context.”42 Positing such an unconscious allows Buell to read acts of perception that follow the subject’s entry into the Symbolic social order as constitutively, but not irremediably, determined by ideology. In this schema, environment as such becomes cat-egorically unavailable within a social order mediated by language. Rather, it gets articulated through the conditions of social life, defined with respect to ideological categories like Nature and Civilization.

While WALL-E’s depiction of the ruined Earth is perhaps the film’s clearest example of humankind’s collective failure to fully apprehend physical environment and our interdependence with it, this same site also works to coordinate Jameson’s political unconscious with Buell’s envi-ronmental one. If WALL-E’s trash is legible as the return of a repressed political unconscious, a figure for the hidden costs of production under purportedly immaterial value regimes, this trash is equally a specter of our debt to the environment, a material reminder of capitalism’s unsus-tainable practices and thus a sign of humankind’s embeddedness within much broader material conditions. Likewise, if WALL-E’s discarded iPods and Rubik’s cubes, braziers and diamond rings refer us once more to Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, compelling us to acknowledge the labor that subtends the products we consume, the film, too, discloses the extent to which this fetishistic approach to the commodity mirrors a fetishistic split in environmental perception: repressing the labor costs that go into producing our goods, we likewise repress the environment whose substrates supply the material upon which this labor acts. Read in this way, WALL-E’s corresponding trashscapes and brandscapes shine a light on the new economies’ increasingly abstract regimes of production and consumption by setting immaterial value against the real, embodied spaces of its creation. But the film equally relates this discussion of value to the broader dynamics of perception—namely, by staging the emer-gence of a responsible environmental subject willing to acknowledge the disjuncture between immaterial production and the very real violence being done to a material world.

This subject is, of course, neither WALL-E nor EVE, whose embed-dedness in spatiophysical context, if nothing else, appears to be largely uncontaminated by ideology (recall that the first thirty minutes of the film featuring WALL-E and EVE alone unfold without spoken dialogue, in what amounts to an approximation of the presymbolic condition),


but rather the Axiom’s captain, McCrea, whose awakening to ecological reality the film narrates in the precise terms of perceptual foreshorten-ing. Soon after encountering the plant specimen brought from Earth by WALL-E and EVE, McCrea begins to research Earth on his private media screen. But he soon tires of the flat images and turns, with curios-ity, to a globe resting in the corner of his office (figure 17). Picking up the globe and a small model of the Axiom, McCrea proceeds to play, imagin-ing that he is finally navigating the cruiser back to the home planet he has never seen. The captain’s move from the spatial experience of two dimensions to three tracks his emergence as a responsible environmental subject: inspired by WALL-E and EVE’s heroic efforts to secure the plant specimen, and, indeed, by the heroic journey of the plant itself, McCrea rejects the foreshortened, immobilizing world of the screen and takes his first steps toward a deeper apprehension of physical environment.

WALL-E elaborates this ethics of perception in a later, climactic show-down between McCrea and the ship’s sinister autopilot, Auto. In a bid to regain control of the Axiom after Auto stages a mutiny, McCrea attempts to trick Auto by rigging a two-dimensional hologram loaded with video of WALL-E’s plant, the same plant McCrea must recover in order to acti-vate the Axiom’s return to Earth (figure 18). Auto, meanwhile, is under orders to destroy any plants brought aboard the Axiom, believing, as did BnL’s late CEO Shelby Forthright, that the Earth could only give off false signals of its habitability.

Naturally, Auto falls for McCrea’s ruse. But the reason for this is not simply that the machine’s vision is flawed. Rather, Auto’s inca-pacity to know the difference between three-dimensional reality and McCrea’s two-dimensional manipulation reflects the machine’s percep-tual conflation with Forthright (figure 19), the corporate avatar whose

Figure 17. Un-foreshortening McCrea’s Environmental Perception.

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environmental vision is most ideologically foreshortened of all. Unlike Auto or Forthright, then, McCrea’s desire to look beyond his media screen allows him to perceive another, potentially realer physical envi-ronment covered over by BnL’s proliferation of images and advertise-ments. Yearning to see more deeply into this environment, McCrea comes to appreciate his phenomenological relationship to the image as a pro-foundly ethical one: a canny digital editor, McCrea not only regains the ability of see his environment but also begins to see how this seeing might be determined by corporate entities like BnL.

If McCrea’s play with Auto’s depth of vision thus signals larger themes in WALL-E, concerning the restoration of perceptual depth to environ-ments foreshortened by the media-formal logic of corporate branding, then this same play also retrieves and expands WALL-E’s allegorical treatment of Pixar’s relationship to Disney. By coding Disney’s “irrespon-sible,” shortsighted subscription to the global ideology of consumerism through Auto and Forthright’s dangerously foreshortened environmental

Figure 18. Auto is Duped by 2-D.

Figure 19. The Gaze of the Corporate Person.


perception, WALL-E also critiques Disney’s animation style at the level of form. At the same time, McCrea’s awakening to ecological reality, which the film narrates as his advancement from two dimensions to three, appears as a self-reflexive comment on the formal and, consequently, ethical superiority of Pixar’s high-depth animation. Such a reading builds on Murray and Heumann’s, as well as Christensen’s, accounts of Pixar’s self-understanding as a corporation possessed of greater social responsi-bility than the consumerist, top-down Disney. It does so by suggesting that, in WALL-E, Pixar’s responsibility is both allegorized and formal-ized. Against Disney’s flat, “irresponsible” animation style, Pixar appears as a “responsible” brand precisely because its digital aesthetic comes closer to modeling real physical space.

Coming closer, but not too close, to the real was one of the ways that Lasseter, early in Pixar’s career, described the studio’s stylistic goals: “[I] knew that we could produce settings that looked absolutely ‘real,’” Lasseter announced shortly after the release of Toy Story, “[but I also] didn’t want the audience to think it was a real world. I want[ed] the audience to say, ‘I know this isn’t real, but my gosh, it looks real.’”43 Arriving on the scene well after the heyday of hand-drawn animation, Pixar was the benefi-ciary of Disney’s continued efforts to combine live-action sequences with computer-generated imagery (CGI). Building on Disney’s work, Pixar developed the groundbreaking digital animation software RenderMan, which made use of virtual cameras, multiplane effects, and complex mod-eling structures in order to render digital worlds of convincing depth and quality.44 These hyperrealist, three-dimensional worlds would come to define Pixar’s signature aesthetic, the “highly stylized cross between live-action reality and a typical squash-and-stretch cartoon world” that grants Pixar’s characters and settings their “lifelike feel without actually being photorealistic.”45

As J. P. Telotte suggests, Pixar’s films register a high degree of self-consciousness about the studio’s unique technical approach to animation, often by dramatizing how audiences respond differently to Pixar’s hyper-realist worlds than they do to Disney’s two-dimensional, hand-drawn ones. As Telotte has it, Toy Story allegorizes the difference between Disney’s classic animation style and Pixar’s newer digital techniques by “laying out two very different sorts of constructed imagery . . . [which] play on both the lowest and the highest [audience] expectations.”46 In a similar vein, Telotte reads WALL-E as an allegory for “the situation fac-ing the [Pixar] digital animator who sees him [sic] or herself tasked with a version of the titular WALL-E’s work: recovering lost space, cleaning up and revealing the forgotten beauties of reality for a humanity that

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has distanced itself from this world, in this instance abandoning it to sail through space on speedy rocket cruise liners.”47 Telotte thus uncovers in WALL-E Pixar’s technical preoccupation with finding “ways to get back, to map out alternatives to a postmodern retreat from the real and from the world.”48 Following Telotte, Eric Herhuth proposes that Pixar’s films offer up an “alien nature that differs from the hand-drawn animation of classical Disney but share . . . [the] virtues of rendering the invisible visible.”49 By presenting its animation as new and alien rather than as a substitute for realism, Herhuth maintains, Pixar foregrounds how the “technicity of [digital animation]. . . affects human perception and ideas of nature.”50

Building on Telotte and Herhuth, I have begun to suggest that WALL-E’s narrative play with dimensionality serves not only to alle-gorize the technical superiority of Pixar’s digital animation over and against Disney’s but also to align Pixar’s high-depth visual style with an ethics of representation and perception. In this way, WALL-E’s allegori-cal illustration of the Pixar brand’s ethos of cultural and environmental responsibility (chiefly elaborated by way of McCrea’s awakening to eco-logical reality and embodied by WALL-E and EVE throughout) also works to encode “responsibility” as a formal attribute of Pixar’s anima-tion style, generated by and through a digital medium that not only, as Telotte and Herhuth have it, stands to “reveal the forgotten beauties of reality” but that is formally ethical for its ability to do so—a medium, finally, that the film understands to be more capable than that of Disney to track and reveal dilemmas occurring in those real, material spaces of production and consumption existing beyond the world of the film. Moreover, WALL-E’s abiding interest in the foreshortening of percep-tion by increasingly abstract configurations of value, such as brands, links concern for how environments are perceived with how they are represented in the first place: to style environments poorly (in the man-ner of Disney’s traditional animation) means to limit, repress, or fore-shorten the viewer’s encounter with material reality; but to style them well (in the technically superior manner of Pixar) brings viewers closer to apprehending the world as it “really” is. To put this another way, WALL-E does indeed figure “responsibility” as Pixar’s brand asset, an intangible yet highly valuable property located in the responsible, inno-vative culture of robots like WALL-E and EVE who, like Pixar, know what the right thing is and do it. But the film also designates and for-malizes “responsibility” as a property of Pixar’s animation style, realized through the representational merits of films whose viewing promises to produce Pixar’s audiences as ethical ones.


Perhaps this is why the other paragon of visual style that WALL-E cannot help but channel, esteem, and, ultimately, sell is Apple (figures 20 and 21). Indeed, Beth Bulik suggests that Apple’s appearance in WALL-E heralds a trend in brand advertising, in which promoting individual products has come to matter less than evoking a brand’s signature style. “Unlike many movies with actors gulping from branded soda cans and making calls on cellphones with long logo shots,” Bulik writes, “Apple’s WALL-E appearance isn’t what most would deem product placement.”51 Noting that Apple products only appear two or three times throughout the film, Bulik argues that WALL-E describes a new strategy for selling brands—one where “[a brand’s] logo isn’t going to be featured and [its]

Figure 20. Code Survival Aboard the Axiom.

Figure 21. 2008 Advertisement for iPod Nano.

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product isn’t going to be shown but . . . [where its] essence runs through the whole thing instead.”52 Foregoing products for essence, James McQuivey elaborates, WALL-E proceeds to sell Apple by “indoctrina-tion”: what the film tells us is that “600 years from now there’s nothing of value on the Earth but there’s the Mac boot tone.”53

In Brand Meaning, Mark Batey provides another term with which to describe Apple’s essential value in WALL-E: brand iconicity. For Batey, iconic brands acquire symbolic and cultural meaning when they are able to transcend the local and utilitarian meanings of their products. A brand like Harley-Davidson, Batey writes, generates a “deep visceral connection and unswerving [brand] loyalty” that extends well beyond the ownership of Harley goods.54 Marking the difference between owning a brand’s products and participating in a brand’s “aspirational and inspirational context” by using its “vocabulary [and] code of conduct [to construct] . . . a way of life,” iconic brands delve deeply into the affective dimensions of user experience in order to “break out of their [product] categories and into culture.”55

Latching Batey’s terms onto Bulik and McQuivey’s argument, it seems plausible to suggest that Apple’s brand iconicity runs through much of WALL-E. (Apple’s senior vice president of industrial design, Jonathan Ive, consulted on the film and was key to the conception of EVE, Auto, and M-O.)56 But it seems equally plausible to suggest that, if brand ico-nicity is what’s at stake, then, in WALL-E, Pixar might well be evok-ing Apple the better to brand itself. This is to say that while WALL-E surely promotes Apple, it is also Pixar’s fantasy about becoming the type of brand Apple represents, a brand whose essential value doesn’t sim-ply ensure that 600 years from now there’s the Mac boot tone, but whose “responsible” brand equity ensures that 600 years from now someone is still around to hear it. As an aspirational brand icon, then, Apple matters to WALL-E because it models a logic of “responsible” brand equity that once again recurs to fantasies of value’s liberation from the conditions of a real, material economy. If, as Batey has it, iconic brands “transcend products and [market] categor[ies] and become free-standing meanings,” then, in WALL-E, brands are both indicted and admired for their capaci-ties to decouple from real economies altogether.57 That WALL-E finally deploys the fantasy of free-standing meaning and value in both the mode of aspiration (Apple) and disapproval (Disney) returns us once more to the power and prerogative of the “responsible” brand. For while all brands dream of accumulating endless value under the new immateriali-ties of labor and capital, what WALL-E wants most to tell us is that only a “responsible” brand can.


Coda: Brand Architecture of the Anthropocene

Just months before his death in October 2011, Steve Jobs unveiled his plan to construct “the best office building in the world.”58 Three years later, construction for the 2.8 million square foot Apple Campus 2 (which Jobs himself nicknamed the “spaceship”) was finally under way.59 The Guardian reports that Jobs was heavily involved in the campus’s design, demanding that it resemble an Apple product more than a standard building, with seamless, airtight paneling and the invisible joinery remi-niscent of automobiles and airplanes. Early publicity from the campus’s senior architects, who include Norman Foster, Stefan Behling, and Jonathan Ive, also touted the campus as “one of the most environmentally sustainable projects on this scale anywhere in the world.”60 Indeed, Apple recently released a 650-page Environmental Impact Report that claims the facility will run exclusively on renewable energy and will be heated and cooled by natural ventilation. Equally striking, the ring-shaped building intends to house a veritable Garden of Eden, an arboretum filled with seven thousand trees ranging from apricot and persimmon to apple and oak. As Apple’s landscape architects state, the objective behind these green designs is “to bring California back to Cupertino”; to offer “a serene environment reflecting Apple’s brand values of innovation, ease of use, and beauty.”61

Lurking beneath Apple’s language of sustainability is the sense that its campus does not so much bring California back to Cupertino as produce and contain a hyperecological vision of California within Cupertino’s degraded tarmacscape: with its meticulous indexing of thousands of spe-cies of plant life and its fantasy of a serene environment sealed off from prying eyes, Apple’s campus does more than hint at its own resemblance to a postapocalyptic space station (perhaps imaged most similarly in Neil Blomkamp’s 2013 film Elysium). Revealing the realities of social and eco-nomic exclusion existing at the heart of its techno-utopianism, the Apple campus, we are forced to see, is also a fortress. Not a public space of renewal and ecological commitment but a formal-ideological project for which the Apple brand imagines its participation in a profoundly exclu-sive vision of living on. Confronted with Apple’s beguiling talk of green development, it can be hard to remember that Apple’s product designers are neither climate-change scientists nor environmental engineers—that the people who make our beloved iPads cannot, in the final judgment, save us from ecological disaster.

With the Apple Campus 2, Jobs once again inaugurated a Silicon Valley trend. Less than a year later, Google announced its plan to build an

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NBBJ-designed green Mountain View complex that, like Apple’s, was to feature a hollowed-out center and a living roof. Two years later, Google abandoned NBBJ in favor of Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick, who have promised to deliver “large translucent canopies [that] will cover . . . various sites, controlling climate inside yet letting in light and air” and will contain reconfigurable, Lego-like office spaces.62 Amazon followed suit in 2013, announcing that NBBJ would be designing their new Seattle headquarters. Now nearing completion, these literal “tech bubbles” are “95-foot interconnected glass biospheres” capable of accom-modating up to 1,800 employees each.63 Finally, in 2015, Facebook offi-cially opened its Frank Gehry-designed office complex in Menlo Park: a single, rectangular room that houses as many as 10,000 people. Unlike Apple’s campus, which is visible only from above, Facebook’s headquar-ters are “set lower into the ground and . . . [remain] covered entirely by roof gardens: a building that . . . blend[s] into the landscape rather than hover[s] over it like an alien spacecraft.”64

Over a decade before Gehry took on the task of designing Mark Zuckerberg’s new office complex, he designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, a signature project that has since been read as crucial to the branding of Bilbao. Here is Hal Foster on the impact of Gehry’s design:

To make a big splash in the global pond of spectacle cul-ture today, you have to have a big rock to drop, maybe as big as the Guggenheim Bilbao, and here an architect like Gehry, supported by clients like the Guggenheim and the DG [Deutsche Genossenschaftsbank (credit union)] Bank [sic], has an obvious advantage over artists in other media. Such clients are eager for brand equity in the global mar-ketplace—in part, the Guggenheim has become brand equity, which it sells in turn to corporations and govern-ments—and these conditions favor the architect who can deliver a building that will also circulate as a logo in the media. (Bilbao uses its Gehry museum literally as a logo: It is the first sign for the city you see on the road, and it has put Bilbao on the world tourist map.)65

While it is plausible to read Facebook’s new headquarters and Apple’s new campus as pieces of brand equity in the global marketplace, buildings that also circulate as media logos, I would like to extend my


reading of WALL-E here to suggest that as pieces of brand equity these structures also metaphorize brand equity’s core economic logic. To return to Jameson’s foundational remarks in Postmodernism (1991), architecture represents a “constitutive seam between the economic organization of society and the aesthetic production of its (spatial) art.”66 In this sense, while it must “repress and conceal its economic determinations,” archi-tecture also attempts to “think a material thought” about the economic conditions and dilemmas of its era.67

Thinking a material thought about value creation in the new econ-omies is precisely what Silicon Valley’s green architectural projects do. As manifestations of resolutely material anxieties, evoking, as they do, the postapocalyptic space stations, underground bunkers, and biodomes that signify the end of times, these structures also model tensions between abstraction and concreteness, inclusion and exclusion, in ways that track the illusory configuration of value under informational capitalism. Visible from above but not at ground level (Apple), or from below but not above (Facebook), composed of transparent materials (Amazon) or reflective ones (Google), these corporate brandscapes cultivate aesthetics of partial hiddenness and camouflage that allude to the economic theme of value itself, asking that we read them both as emblems for the brands they rep-resent but also that we allow them to disappear into physical environ-ments that so often go unseen.

Equally concerned with dilemmas of perception and representability, then, these half-hidden structures with their living roofs and sun-powered electrical systems, their artificial skies, and “future-proof microclimates” address dilemmas of environmental sustainability head-on.68 But, in so doing, they also encode visions of sustainability that ultimately disavow the real conditions of environment, visions of value circulating within closed, symbolic economies of immaterial labor, barred from and imper-vious to material circumstance. Like WALL-E and Better, then, Silicon Valley’s green architecture bears the symptomatic imprint of the brand as a core mode of production within informational capitalism, allegoriz-ing the containment and dematerialization of physical environment and, with this, figuring the convergence of physical and virtual functionality upon whose seductive foundations both Silicon Valley and the new econ-omies, more broadly, were built.

Maria Bose is an assistant professor of English at Clemson University. Her current book project examines the political consequences of sustained ideological traffic between postfordist credos of productivity and the precepts of remote precision warfare in contemporary U.S. fiction, film, television, and videogames.

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NOTES

1. Transcribed from the film, which originally appeared on www.apple.com/environment but is now only available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOw6kLgucY4, Apple’s most recent environmental campaign, Better Starts Here (2015), registers similar formal investments in what I am calling Apple’s new green logo.

2. Considering the circle as a device through which Better enframes and directs, I draw on accounts of branding in contemporary media culture by Celia Lury and Adam Arvidsson. Lury describes the brand logo as a “shifter” that “marks the edge between the aesthetic space of an image or text and [an] institutional space of a regime of value.” Managing the space between aesthetic and institutional regimes, Arvidsson suggests that brands construct “‘place[s]’ where [consumers] can have experiences” (see Lury, Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy, International Library of Sociology [New York: Routledge, 2004], 13; and Arvidsson, Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture [New York: Routledge, 2006], 13).

3. Arvidsson, Brands, 132.

4. In 1980, Alvin Toffler coined the term prosumer to describe the amalgamation of the roles of the producer and consumer under production regimes increasingly oriented toward selling services rather than goods (see Toffler, The Third Wave [New York: Bantam Books, 1980]).

5. Mark Batey, Brand Meaning (New York: Routledge, 2008), xvi–xvii.

6. Arvidsson, Brands, 134. Interbrand’s valuation is available at http://interbrand.com/best-brands/best-global-brands/2017/ranking/apple/.

7. Jerome Christensen, America’s Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 7.

8. For a comprehensive overview of Pixar’s history, see David Price, The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company (New York: Vintage Books, 2009).

9. “Finding Another Nemo,” Economist 370, no. 8361 (2004): 64.

10. Laura Holson, “Disney Agrees to Acquire Pixar in a $7.4 Billion Deal” New York Times, 25 January 2006; Web, 16 January 2015.

11. Charles Solomon, “Pixar Creative Chief to Seek to Restore the Disney Magic,” New York Times, 26 January 2006; Web, 18 January 2015.

12. Cited in Christensen, America’s Corporate Art, 326.

13. Ibid., 327.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., 333.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., 340.

19. Ibid., 339–40. Although the 2014 lawsuit filed against Pixar studio executives over the fixing of employee wages would evidently seem to challenge Pixar’s professed commit-ment to conscientiously doing things right, the studio’s self-understanding in the wake of this scandal appears to remain unchanged. As of January 2017, animation workers at

http://www.apple.com/environment

http://www.apple.com/environment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOw6kLgucY4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOw6kLgucY4

http://interbrand.com/best-brands/best-global-brands/2017/ranking/apple/

http://interbrand.com/best-brands/best-global-brands/2017/ranking/apple/


Pixar, LucasFilm, and the Walt Disney Company have reached a $100 million settlement with their former employers (see Ted Johnson, “Animation Workers Reach $100 Million Settlement with Disney in Wage-Fixing Suit,” Variety, 31 January 2017; Web, 25 January 2018).

20. Concerned with the collusion of material and immaterial assets, WALL-E might be read as prefiguring Pixar’s 2009 feature film UP, whose major visual pun is, of course, the “housing bubble.”

21. See especially Richard Corliss, “Pixar’s Biggest Gamble,” Time, 23 June 2008; and Greg Pollowitz, “The Hypocrisy of Wall-E,” National Review Online, 29 June 2008.

22. On fantasies of technology’s correction of environmental destruction, see Slavoj Zizek, “Nature and Its Discontents,” SubStance issue 117, vol. 37, no. 3 (2008): 37–72. On WALL-E’s illustration of better modes of consumption, see Christopher McNaughtan’s “Distinctive Consumption and Popular Anti-consumerism: The Case of Wall-E,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 26, no. 5 (2012): 753–66; and Christopher Todd Anderson’s “Post-Apocalyptic Nostalgia: WALL-E, Garbage, and American Ambivalence toward Manufactured Goods,” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 23, no. 3 (2012): 267–82.

23. Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann, “WALL-E: From Environmental Adaptation to Sentimental Nostalgia,” Jump Cut: Review of Contemporary Media 51 (2009); Web, 10 January 2015.

24. Ibid.

25. Bill Desowitz, “Stanton Powers Up ‘WALL-E,’” Animation World Network, 7 April 2008; Web, 12 January 2015.

26. Ibid. It is worth pointing out that Disney’s top-down management ideology would also seem to be coded in the servant-class labor of anthropomorphized robots like WALL-E and EVE aboard the Axiom, ideal nonhuman laborers who serve BnL’s human custom-ers while demanding nothing from BnL in return. The robot class’s insurrection (led by WALL-E and EVE) might then be read as Pixar’s overturning of Disney’s top-down labor practices.

27. Anna Klingmann, Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 71.

28. Ibid., 69–70.

29. Ibid., 83.

30. Ibid., 83, 86.

31. Ibid., 76.

32. Wilfried Hackenbroich’s comment is from “Designing with Images” (mentioned by Klingmann in Brandscapes, 75).

33. Ibid.

34. William T. Borrie, “Disneyland and Disney World: Constructing the Environment, Designing the Visitor Experience,” Society & Leisure 22, no. 1 (1999): 71–82.

35. Ibid. The concept of Disney’s “corporate control system” is Klaus Ronneberger’s from “The Disneyfication of the European City” (mentioned by Klingmann in Brandscapes, 79).

36. All images from WALL-E are copyright <a> MMVIII Disney Enterprises, Ind./Pixar Animation Studios.

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37. In No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (London: Flamingo, 1999), Naomi Klein sug-gests that every brand’s ultimate goal is to be made manifest as life itself.

38. Drawing on sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of the “frame of action,” Celia Lury suggests that brands contrive artificial places where consumers are promised “particular relation[s] between ‘action and semiosis,’ between what [they] do and what their actions mean to them” (Brands, 8).

39. On the ontology of the brand, see especially Wolfgang Grassl, “The Reality of Brands: Towards an Ontology of Marketting” [sic], American Journal of Economics and Sociology 58, no. 2 (1999): 313–59.

40. Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 22. Michel Serres’s virtuosic Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution (French, 2008; English, 2011) also makes important connections between perception and pollution.

41. See Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981).

42. Buell, Writing, 24.

43. Lawrence French, “Toy Story: Art Direction,” Cinefantastique 27, no. 2 (1995): 32–33.

44. See J[ay] P. Telotte, Animating Space: From Mickey to WALL-E (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010).

45. David Price cited in ibid., 209; see also Rita Street, “Toys Will Be Toys,” Cinefex 64 (1995): 85.

46. David Price, cited in Telotte, Animating Space, 204–5.

47. Ibid., 219.

48. Ibid.

49. Eric Herhuth, “Life, Love, and Programming: The Culture and Politics of WALL-E and Pixar Animation,” Cinema Journal 53, no. 4 (2014): 53–75, quotation on 73.

50. Ibid., 74.

51. Beth Bulik, “Wall-E Offers Preview of Branding 2.0,” Advertising Age issue 79, vol. 28, no. 6 (2008): 6; Web, 13 January 2015.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid.

54. Batey, Brand Meaning, 203.

55. Ibid.

56. Rene Ritchie, “Mr. Ive Goes to Hollywood: iPhone Designer Designs for Wall-E,” iMore.com, 14 May 2008; Web, 17 January 2015.

57. Batey, Brand Meaning, 198.

58. Oliver Wainwright, “All Hail the Mothership: Norman Foster’s $5bn Apple HQ Revealed,” Guardian, 15 November 2013; Web, 15 January 2015.

59. Steven Levy, “Inside Apple’s Insanely Great (or Just Insane) New Mothership,” Wired, 16 May 2017; Web, 25 January 2018.

60. Apple’s report is available at http://www.cupertino.org/index.aspx?page=1178.

http://www.cupertino.org/index.aspx?page=1178


61. Wainwright, “All Hail.”

62. Google’s vice president of real estate, David Radcliffe, revealed the company’s plans in a 27 February 2015 blog post: “Rethinking Office Space,” https://googleblog.blogspot .co.uk/2015/02/rethinking-office-space.html.

63. Paul Goldberger, “The Shape of Things to Come,” Vanity Fair, January 2014; Web, 19 January 2015.

64. Ibid.

65. Hal Foster, Design and Crime and Other Diatribes, Radical Thinkers (London: Verso, 2002), 27–28.

66. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Post-contemporary Interventions, ed. Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 113.

67. Ibid., 113, 129.

68. Brad Stone, “Big and Weird: The Architecture of Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick,” Bloomberg Business, 7 May 2015; Web, 15 September 2015.

https://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/rethinking-office-space.html

https://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/rethinking-office-space.html

immaterial thoughts: brand value, environmental sustainability, and wall·e

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