Hello, WALL-E!

We all know the 4th of July is a shyte jingo holiday. So instead of celebrating Independence Day, we at O!I would like to encourage co-dependence day. Or--to reboot an old school women's and ethnic studies term already re-mixed from the Communist Manifesto--we'd like to wish you all a Happy Interdependence Day.

Our fuzzy feelings of collective intimacy should be no surprise by now given their prominence in the ALOTR manifesto that launched our industry. But our heartlights were rekindled anew the other night by an impromptu, west coast double-date screening of Pixar's latest offering, WALL-E. Sure, Pixar has offered up plenty of cute yet radically queer feelings before, as my USC colleague, Judith Halberstam, has noted in her most recent work on the Disney-affiliated studio. And WALL-E does offer up a couple of cuddly instances of gender trouble, including a quickie bit about where to sort a Spork (a spoon and fork fused Platonically into one utensil, for those unfamiliar with fast food cutlery), as well as a scene in which Wall-e wrangles with a bra.

But the film's true queer core, gooey and melty as it is, doesn't come from its forays into gender slapstick, or even from its central love story that has the good natured emo-bot, Wall-e, pining for the tough, gun-slinging, Angelina Jolie inspired girl-bot, Eve (over enunciated as "Eve-AH" by Wall-e himself).

The film's queer heart is heard before it's seen. It announces itself with the words "Out There," sung in Michael Crawford's youthful and dorky pre-Phantom tenor. As Crawford tells it, he landed the part of Hello, Dolly's good-hearted Yonkers simpleton, Cornelius Hackl, by geeking out in a Fairmont Hotel suite in San Francisco with the film's director, the legendary Gene Kelly. Kelly remarked: "We're looking for an attractive idiot for this part. My wife thinks you're attractive, and I think you're an idiot."

We don't have a clip of WALL-E's opening scene available just yet, but here's the song pulled directly from the source--the 1969 film adaptation of Jerry Herman's Broadway classic, starring Barbra Streisand in the title role:



As if plucked from the opening pages of D.A. Miller's Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical, Wall-e is "out there," out here, in a world made of waste that he sifts and sorts alone all day to the multiple refrains of "Put on Your Sunday Clothes." Miller: "Sooner or later, as if in playing Hello, Dolly! he had been playing with an actual doll, it befell every kid in the basement that he was changed into one of the Boys in the Band" (14).

Wall-e's prized possession is his worn out VHS tape of Hello, Dolly!, an appropriately analog archive of schmaltz magnified on an improvised TV. (For less G-rated approaches to queer imaginaries and repeat analog/VHS viewings, see Lucas Hilderbrand's "Grainy Days and Mondays" essay, and Nguyen Tan Hoang's remarkable video art reflecting on worn porn tapes). In WALL-E, the eponymous robot tries to re-enact the up-tempo choreography of "Put on Your Sunday Clothes" with humorous results. But he holds still, riveted to the screen for the heartwarming love ballad, "It Only Takes a Moment." It is then that the film, largely bereft of "human" dialogue in its opening 30 minutes, offers this signature gesture:
Wall-e clasps his own hands, practicing for a moment he hopes someday won't be his alone.

Much has been made of Wall-e's loneliness in reviews of the film, as well as in some of Pixar's own trailers. He finds nightly refuge with a companion cockroach in a makeshift shelter adorned with strings of lights and other keepsakes he's scavenged throughout the day. (While we were watching the movie, CBB observed how Wall-e's life among the heaps could be read vis a vis the Philippines' own Smoky Mountain garbage dump--yet another Oh! entry point to the experience). But there is something about Wall-e that never feels lonely, even in the opening scenes before Eve arrives to shake things up (very literally).

Like one in every 10 viewers, or maybe 1 out of every 100 these days, I felt hailed by the very first "Out There" that opened the movie; by Cornelius Hackl's goofy voice; by the lyrics and dance steps I memorized when I watched my VHS tape of Hello, Dolly! over and over again in my room when I was a choir-drama-band geek at Ramona high-school. And it only took a moment--the moment Dolly's signature ballad filled Wall-e's special screen--for me to feel the senti tears of recognition flowing from my eyes.



"It only takes a moment to be loved a whole life long."

This song is a coordinate in my audiotopia, one that sutures the transnational, the suburban and the queer. It's a queer we cannot neatly sort as belonging only to gay male bodies (qua Miller), or even to fagulous sensibilities (qua moi). It is a queerness forged by the sometimes accidental and awkward circulation of objects that may start with one, but necessarily relies on some kind of reverberation among many. For me feeling queer about WALL-E is not about insinuating queernesses in to a reading of scenes between gendered "bodies" enacting what we might construe as an aberrant normalcy (sensi boy-bot meets butchy girl-bot). Instead queerness, queer affinity and queer affect inheres in how these sounds--this music, these images, this garbage--actually circulate.

Asked why Hello, Dolly provided the thread for his narrative, WALL-E creator Andrew Stanton had this to say:

"I always loved the idea of putting an old-fashioned song against space. I always loved the idea of the future against the past juxtaposed, and I just thought that was a great intro to the movie. But there were so many choices for 'What's an old song to put there?' I'd done enough musical theatre that I knew some of the staples, Fiddler On The Roof, Guys And Dolls, and things like that.

When I got to Hello, Dolly! and I played 'Put On Your Sunday Clothes,' and that first phrase 'Out there…' came out, it just fit musically, I was just like 'Wow, that kind of works, and I can't explain it.' And I kept it private to myself, this little idea, because I said 'This is weird, I don't know if I'm going to lose the confidence of my crew if they see me trying this.' But I couldn't get rid of it, it kept working for me. So I finally realized, 'You know what, this song is about two guys that are just so naïve, they've never left a small town, and they just wanna go out in the big city for one night and kiss a girl. That's my main character.'"

When I first heard "It Only Takes a Moment" on VHS, I too had never kissed a girl and longed to be in the city for just one night. Little did I know that it would be these twin longings that would mark me as a queer subject. Last October, CBB and I co-presented a paper at ASA on what we've begun to theorize as "intimate re-enactments." To conclude the talk, I revisited a line of thought that has proven endlessly relevant to my intimate, intellectual and emotional worlds, sometimes one and the same. I'll let it speak for me again here, like an old familiar song I refuse to let go:

Queerly, all of this brings us back to our bedrooms (but not in the way you think). It brings us back alone with our headphones on in the dark until we find those precious others who’ve done the same, who’ve maybe even swayed the same in nowhere elses or in desperate elsewheres, teaching themselves every painstaking move and note until someday we can clasp our hands together, while unmistakable voices sing with a tender, faraway sorrow. - (KT)