I went to see the film Wall-e a few nights ago and was interested in its visual exploration concerning the nature of human fulfilment. The story, as most of you know, begins from the premise that humans have left the Earth because it has become uninhabitable due to the pollution and refuse that has resulted from our insatiable desire to consume. Human have opted to temporarily live in a huge spaceship called “axiom” until the earth is habitable again. They originally intended to leave for only 5 years but, when the film begins, they are in their 700th year. Before leaving the Earth the humans left an army of robots charged with the task to clean the mess up however, over the years, all but one of these robots (the hero) have broken down.

The idea of humans leaving Earth and going to live in the heavens can be seen to mimic the notion of heaven that is found in the popular imagination. The spacecraft is represented as a place where all ones needs are met, a place where there is no pain or suffering or tension or conflict and no-one has a job to do (except the captain whose job is largely a symbolic one). In short it is a place of perpetual peace, harmony and relaxation. While we can presume that people still grow old and die the film does not show any old people (or, of course, death) – everyone appears to be around the same age (apart from some brief scenes of babies) and so we get the impression of a place of equilibrium, a place without old age or death. On the spacecraft people’s needs are instantly satisfied. Desires for particular foods and fashion etc. are all met in an instant and (in homage to Silent Running) it is always a perfect 72 degrees.

However, it turns out that this “heavenly” existence is actually a type of mundane, melancholic hell. No one walks anymore (they all use hovercrafts to move), everyone is overweight, and humanity is portrayed (via the photos of different captains) of slowing devolving into what one can only imagine to be a fatty, inactive blob. This dystopia is not however enforced on people (as in films like Equilibrium), it is what human beings have chosen, what they want, or at least what they think they want. They do not hate it any more than they love it, they have rather entered into a type of undead existence, not unlike a cryogenic state, in which they are not dead and yet not really alive.

Once the film has shown us how this first (“heavenly”) attempt at salvation and fulfilment has failed it charts humanities return to Earth and, more than this, of humanities return to the earth itself, to the ground, the soil. Here, as humans slowly turn from their reliance on technology and desire for instant gratification, they begin to experience joy and wonder again. This is symbolised in their desire to return to growing food rather than instantly getting it in the form of an artificially flavoured smoothy (as they did before).

This is not however a romantic scene in which the director paints the rural life as one of true peace and tranquility over and against the false peace and satisfaction of their heavenly existence. This is to miss the point – their heavenly existence did offer peace and tranquility in a direct, unmediated way (not some false version of these) and was, for this very reason, the true enemy of existence. Instead, by forsaking this direct (horrifying) engagement with peace and tranquility, and instead living up to the fact that life involves a host of tensions and difficulties to overcome, a more substantive life was rediscovered.

Here we see a glimpse of Nietzsche’s point that heaven (in the popular sense) would be a living death, a mummified existence. Whereas truly embracing the fluctuations, fragility and tensions of life, supremely difficult as this is, brings with it a true joy and exuberance.

Here, in a Derridian fashion, the obstacle is the very opening to that which it blocks. By returning to the very thing that they thought was the obstacle to their fulfilment they indirectly find fulfilment (a fulfilment without fulfilment, an impossible fulfilment). While their previous direct attempt to find fulfilment (to make it present in its fullness) led to nothing but a type of living death.

So what do we learn? Perhaps we are reminded of the old Christian insight that heaven is the impossible that we indirectly glimpse only when we renounce it and put ourselves to the task of utterly offering ourselves to the world. Of unreservedly embracing worldliness in Bonhoeffer’s sense. In his Letters and Papers from Prison he writes,

“This is what I mean by worldliness – taking life in one’s stride, with all its duties and problems, its successes and failures, its experiences and helplessness. It is in such a life that we throw ourselves into the arms of God and participate in his sufferings in the world and watch with Christ in Gethsemane. That is faith, that is metonoia and that is what makes a man and a Christian”