Your Teacher Said What?! (14 page)

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 this). 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:

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 to 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.