In M.T Anderson’s, Feed, and the motion picture, Wall-E, multiple parallels show. Feed takes place in a dystopian Earth some 200 years from the present time. Everyone has a machine in the back of the head, called a feed, which allows the user to access the internet or text other friends directly from their head. The omnipotent corporations control what people wear, buy, or learn about. When Titus meets Violet, they engage in a romantic relationship. They struggle to be together as a couple, and eventually Violet’s malfunctioning feed takes over her body, causing her death. Wall-E depicts a trash compactor, named Wall-E, in future, too. Wall-E is stranded on a pollution filled Earth, where all the humans have gone to space many years ago. When Eve lands onto Earth, Wall-E falls immediately in love with her. Wall-E and Eve start connecting when Wall-E ends up showing her a plant, possibly the only one on Earth. Eve shuts down, and both of them end …show more content…
up journeying to space. When they land on a mega-spaceship where a massive population of humans have been living, they will attempt to overthrow the ship command robot, and return the ship to Earth. While analogies between Feed and Wall-E are present, major contrasts between both works emerge. First of all, these two works can be compared with the amount of technology dependency in the humans in the works, the romantic relationships that take place, and the amount of pollution in both the environments. In Feed, due to copious amounts of pollution, the outside world is not inhabitable. Air factories are being made, and clouds are being produced and trademarked by massive corporations in order to cope up with the rotten environment. Lesions are highly frequent among humans, causing them to be classified as a “new fashion”. When Titus and Violet visit the ocean, M.T Anderson mentioned, “We watched the sea move around. It was dead, but colorful…we had suits so we wouldn’t smell it” (Anderson 179). Also, in Wall-E, the Earth is filled with pollution. Towers of trash are apparent throughout the film. The abundant amounts of pollution made Earth uninhabitable: “Operation Cleanup has, well uh, failed. Wouldn’t you know, rising toxicity levels have made life unsustainable on Earth”(Wall-E). Also, humans in both works are heavily reliant on technology. In Feed, everyone has the feed, a device attached to the back of their head. No one has to think anymore because people can search up anything on the feed; Titus says: ‘That's one of the great things about the feed--that you can be supersmart without ever working. Everyone is supersmart now. You can look things up automatic, like science and history, like if you want to know which battles of the Civil War George Washington fought in and sh*t.’ (Anderson 47) This goes to show that no one thinks for themselves, and everyone depends on the feed. The irony in Titus’s statement is although he claims that the feed makes everyone super-smart, he thinks that George Washington fought in the American Civil War. Similarly, in Wall-E, all the humans are dependent on a chair which has access to chatting and videos. Because of this, no one gets out of the chair to walk, resulting in the entire population of the spaceship being obese. Everyone on the ship “cruises around on reclining chairs, eyes fixed on video screens” (A.O Scott). Finally, both works have comparisons in their romantic relationships. Feed depicts Titus and Violet falling in love, only to have Titus not mind her in the end. When he finds out Violet’s feed is killing her, he ignores her and pays her no attention. Later in the book, Titus says, “By that point, I was going out with Quendy, and I kind of missed her”(Anderson 277), showing that he doesn’t care about Violet anymore. Wall-E is also analogous, as when Wall-E and Eve first meet, Eve doesn’t wish to become friends with Wall-E. Although both of them end up falling for each other, Eve ignored Wall-E for the beginning of the film. Altogether, both Feed and Wall-E have parallels dealing with pollution on Earth, technology dependency, and romantic relationships. While the correlation between both works is present, Feed and Wall-E are not the same; each work has differences, starting off with the human’s habitat. In Feed, everyone lives on Earth. Due to the abundant amounts of pollution, Earth is uninhabitable. Because of this, everyone lives in “tubes” on Earth to keep away from the pollution. While the characters do travel into space and on various planets and moons (Mars, one of Jupiter’s moon, the Earth’s moon, etc.), they still live at the wrecked junkyard of which is Earth. Also, no one seems to mind the degrading environment. Everyone in the novel tries to make the scenario vague; everyone treats lesions (which the contaminated air causes) as a norm instead of worrying about the air conditions. However, in Wall-E, all the humans have abandoned Earth to live on a spaceship in the middle of space. Since Earth became unlivable from the massive amounts of trash, the humans left Earth on a BnL (Buy n Large) spaceship. A.O Scott says, “Eventually [BnL] loaded its valued customers onto a space station.” The humans have spent around 700 years on these ships. When Wall-E boards one of the ships with the plant, the Captain decides that they must recolonize Earth. However, an earlier message of the BnL CEO says that they cannot travel back to Earth due to the immense pollution levels there: ‘Darn it all, we're gonna have to cancel Operation Recolonize…rather than try and fix this problem, it'll just be easier for everyone to remain in space …I repeat, do not return to Earth.’ (Wall-E) Nonetheless, the captain still wished to return to Earth, and later the rest of the passengers. Near towards the end of the film, plants are starting to emerge from the trash as it seems that the humans are starting to clean the Earth. With Wall-E, the humans care about the environment, wherein Feed, they do not. Next, the type of technology in Feed was different from that in Wall-E. In Feed, everyone depended on the feed, a chip with access to the internet planted inside the brain. People could chat with it, search things up on the “feednet”, and buy certain objects that they see by looking at them. However, the feed controls the person’s entire body; if the feed malfunctions, that person could be harmed. As in Feed, Violet’s malfunctioning feed lead to her being disabled and not being able to speak. At the end of the novel, M.T Anderson describes Violet, “on a screen, [her] heart was barely beating. I could see my face, crying, in her black eye”(Anderson 298). The feed, overall, is a much more dangerous device, from the possibilities of life-threatening side effects from it. In Wall-E, the technology that humans depended on differed from the feed. First of all, the chair which everyone used was not connected or inside their brain. The chair would give all the support to the humans, including going from place to place, communicating, watching tv, etc. Also, the chair could be switched off and gotten out of, while the feed remained implanted inside the head. However, the chairs did cause the humans occupying them to become obese. Lastly, the endings of both works are different; Feed being sad and Wall-E being happy. At the end of Feed, everything is in a downfall. America is about to annex the moon, the environment is terrible, and Violet is dead. When Titus found about Violet’s malfunctioning feed, he ignored her. Until the end of the book, he was cheating on her and hanging out with friends. It was too late when Titus visited her, as Violet had become paralysed and brain-dead. The novel ends with Titus crying, while Violet lays down, motionless. Wall-E has a more optimistic ending, however. At the end, the humans from the spaceship arrive on Earth. Everyone gets rid of the chairs that they used to depend on, and the rein-habitation of Earth begins. While the affairs of both works have some similarities, the relationships at the end are different. Wall-E and Eve are together in the end while Violet is dead and Titus is in tears. A.O Scott describes the relationship with Wall-E and Eve as “a disarmingly sweet and simple love story” (A.O Scott). Throughout Feed and Wall-E, differences crop out about the human’s habitats, technology, and endings. In conclusion, both M.T Anderson’s Feed and Disney Pixar’s Wall-E have numerous parallels and inequalities between them.
The similarities include romantic relationships happening in both works, the dependency on technology, and the intoxicating amount of pollution on Earth. Wall-E diverges off later in the book, as the characters end up taking responsibility for ridding the Earth of pollution; while in Feed, the people have yet to notice the monstrous acts dealing with pollution happening on Earth. Also, the humans in Wall-E have ridden themselves of the chair. The humans in Feed still have not realised the fatal flaw of their technology dependency. All these similarities between theses works are a satire to human civilisation today. Both Disney Pixar and M.T Anderson send out a message of that large amounts of pollution and technology dependency will become an adversity for the future generations. Altogether, the comparisons between the two works in Feed and Wall-E show the Earth becoming uninhabitable in the near
future.
In Feed, the author satirizes our generation’s dependence on technology. For example, while Titus and his friends are in the hospital without feeds they become bored out of their minds. In one scene Titus stares blankly at the walls of his room. “There were five walls, because the room was irregular. One of them had a picture of a boat on it. The boat was on a pond or maybe a lake. I couldn’t find anything interesting about that picture at all. There was nothing th...
... to foretell of a dystopian America that has eerily similar qualities to current- day- America even though he wrote this book over sixty years ago. Just as the novel predicts, People are becoming buried in their technology, leaving books and social interactions lower on peoples’ priority list. They want to have the latest technology to make it seem like they live a successful life. People have turned towards the technology obsessively in order to have fun entertainment and feel happy. Medication consumption is higher than ever and humans are addicted to fast- paced actions that provide them with their coveted entertainment. America is changing, moving towards an alarming technological dystopia just as the America in the novel did.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" tells the story of a woman living in the nineteenth century who suffers from postpartum depression. The true meaning implicit in Charlotte's story goes beyond a simple psychological speculation. The story consists of a series of cleverly constructed short paragraphs, in which the author illustrates, through the unnamed protagonist's experiences, the possible outcome of women's acceptance of men's supposed intellectual superiority. The rigid social norms of the nineteenth century, characterized by oppression and discrimination against women, are supposedly among the causes of the protagonist's depression. However, it is her husband's tyrannical attitude what ultimately worsened her emotional problems to the point of insanity.
...he wall, he thinks about his rejected opportunities and his unbearable regret. As he sobers with terror, the final blow will come from the realization that his life is ending in his catacombs dying with his finest wine. The catacombs, in which he dies, set the theme, and relate well with the story. Without the yellow wallpaper in the short story, the significance of the wallpaper would not mater, nor would it set the theme or plot. At night the wallpaper becomes bars, and the wallpaper lets her see herself as a women and her desire to free herself. She needs to free herself from the difficulties of her husband, and from her sickness. The settings in both, set up the elements of the stories and ads to the effect in both of the short stories.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, is a first-person narrative written in the style of a journal. It takes place during the nineteenth century and depicts the narrator’s time in a temporary home her husband has taken her to in hopes of providing a place to rest and recover from her “nervous depression”. Throughout the story, the narrator’s “nervous condition” worsens. She begins to obsess over the yellow wallpaper in her room to the point of insanity. She imagines a woman trapped within the patterns of the paper and spends her time watching and trying to free her. Gilman uses various literary elements throughout this piece, such as irony and symbolism, to portray it’s central themes of restrictive social norms
In the 19th century, women were not seen in society as being an equal to men. Men were responsible for providing and taking care of the family while their wives stayed at home not allowed leaving without their husbands. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes about a woman named Jane who is trapped by society’s cage and tries to find herself. Throughout the story, the theme of self-discovery is developed through the symbols of the nursery, the journal and the wallpaper.
At first the dirty old yellow wallpaper makes the narrator feel uneasy. For example, she writes in her journal that “the color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight” (3). However, as time passes and she has very minimal physical stimulation, it is clear that the endless solitary confinement drives her mind towards insanity. Subsequently, she later realizes that there is a sub-pattern in the wallpaper of a trapped woman who is trying to escape. Undoubtedly, this wallpaper is a direct representation of the domestic culture and tradition of docile women in 19th century society – the time in which this literary piece was published. Therefore, the narrator’s act of tearing down the wallpaper is a symbolic representation of women asserting their self-identity and “creeps” around to signify the initial stages of the feminist
In the 19th century, women had to accept their situation because they lived in a world dominated by men. In the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a woman named Jane is suffering from postpartum depression. John, the husband of Jane is a doctor. In order to cure her illness, he tells Jane that they will go to a summer house. Once they arrive in the summer house, he orders her to stay in bed. At the beginning of the story, Jane was not sick as her husband said, all she had was postpartum depression. She was in a big house away from the others, unable to see or care for her child, in a room with ugly walls, windows with railings, without doing anything and alone, that led her to madness. Jane began to observe all objects in the room, specifically the yellow wallpaper. The yellow wallpaper symbolizes the way women were perceived in the 19th century by society. The illness of the narrator explains the problems of imprisonment, captivity and the lack of freedom that the women were going through in the period of the time. The yellow wallpaper acts as a metaphor of how Jane and the
At the beginning of this story, the narrator sees the wallpaper as ugly and dull. Then towards the middle a lot deeper meanings start to develop. She starts to see imaginative people in the wallpaper. These objects/people start to talk to her and make her think about her life. In the yellow wallpaper, she sees a striped pattern and to her it looks like a jail cell. With this, it reminds her of all the women stuck in second class not being able to speak up with their own voice. She believes that the wallpaper stands for something, holding women back from their life. Then at the end of the story, the wallpaper turns ugly and she has begun a since of insanity. She has begun to tear down the wallpaper and go
Though the two stories are very different in how they deal with the issues of society, the symbols of houses present a very similar meaning to both stories. Both relate to a flawed society, however one acts as a barrier and another as an agent for change.
The presence and use of smartphones strongly contribute to the similarity between today’s society and the society depicted in 1984. PC Magazine defines modern smartphones as cellular telephones with applications, Internet access, and still and video cameras. One way, in which the use of smartphones brings today’s society closer to the society depicted in the novel 1984, can be demonstrated by the resemblance between smartphones and telescreens. “ … Back in 2008, the NSA was hard at work developing a ‘software implant’ called DROPOUTJEEP that could remotely activate the first-generation iPhone’s microphone and camera without alerting the user” (Ippolito, Nina). “...
The psychologically thrilling story of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman explores the dark and twisted aspect of the American society in the nineteenth century. Through the use of theme, Gilman creatively captures the cultural subordination and struggles women faced on a regular basis.
Outside of film's amazing score, effective minimization of dialogue, and the beautifully rendered animation, Wall-E is a film that presents many common Pixar themes while supporting some new ones along the
...ness in the form of all "of those creeping women" trying to escape from the oldness that trapped them, acted as a premonition for changes in women’s rights movement (Gilman 89). For Gilman and her story "The Yellow Wallpaper" life is imitating art.
Through the lens of Post-Structuralism, literature is a system of signs with an impossibility of understanding their meaning due to the fact that language is unstable, arbitrary and ambiguous. The signifiers so familiar in Structuralism become floating signifiers in Post-Structuralism in that the function of a word, or phrase, is not concrete, i.e. it changes. Binary oppositions (male/female, good/bad, open/closed) represent an implied classification and as such, along with the reader/author relationship, are destabilized. Through this lens, “The Yellow Wallpaper” contains binary oppositions worthy of focus. The narrator could very well be insane as she isn’t intimately familiar with her illness, she speaks of the house as being hateful and even haunted, and she almost immediately begins to hallucinate once she moves in. On the flip side the narrator could very well be sane as she is able to write legibly and maintain her diary in a neat and orderly fashion and acts in an intelligent manner, with movements that can be considered carefully planned. This blurs the line between sanity and insanity. The short story appears to present a situation in where a woman has endured a situation designed to deliberately exclude any sort of enjoyment of activity or mental expression. As such, the