#humankind

lifeofdai:

labentiasidera:

“Qui autem civium rationem dicunt habendam, externorum negant, ii dirimunt communem humani generis societatem; qua sublata beneficientia, liberalitas, bonitas, iustitia funditus tollitur.”

—

Cicero

Those who claim that we must take care of our own citizens, and ignore foreigners, they break apart the universal harmony of humankind. And once that is gone, kindness, generosity, goodness, and justice are altogether destroyed.

carpediim:

sometimes i think about how constellations are an entirely man-made construct and don’t actually exhist inherently in nature. i mean, the universe just gave us stars, and we saw art and myths and stories in them. the capacity that humans have for seeing purpose in the incidental makes me realize just how lonely we are on this planet, desperately searching for meaning elsewhere in the universe.

Choco Taco

It’s occurred to me that the movies WALL-EandSnowpiercerhave the same message but drastically different tones.

Spoilers for both movies below, obviously.

This isn’t one of those posts where someone takes two movies and cuts out all the important details to create a bare-bones summary that applies to both films. I do love those posts, especially when they make really big stretches to establish that these two very different stories are “actually the same thing.” It’s hilarious! But that’s not what I’m doing here.

What I’m doing here is facing the fact that a movie I love and a movie that made me sick to my stomach, two movies with vastly different plots and settings and characters, have the same message. They both ask the same question, and both provide the same answer to that question.

If you haven’t seen either of these films, or if it’s been a while since you’ve seen them, here are my synopses.

InSnowpiercer,after a global-warming cure gone terribly wrong, the Earth is completely frozen and inhospitable to life, and the only surviving humans live on a perpetually moving mile-long train called the Snowpiercer. The poor people in the back of the train have to survive on scraps and are treated like absolute crap, while the rich people in the front of the train live in drugged-up bliss. The plot follows an attempt at rebellion, as a group of people from the back of the train fight their way to the engine, planning to take over the train. Nearly all of them die terrible, violent deaths along the way. When the protagonist, Curtis, reaches the engine, he meets Wilford, the man who created the train. Wilford tells Curtis that the rebellion was planned, and planned to fail – that it is necessary to reduce the train’s population by a certain percentage in order to sustain the closed ecosystem of the train. Curtis also learns that the train engine runs on child slaves. Wilford offers to make Curtis his successor to keep humanity surviving on the train. Instead, Curtis and his surviving allies cause an explosion which derails the Snowpiercer, killing everyone except two children, who crawl out of the wreckage to find a polar bear – an indication that life exists outside the train.

InWALL-E,when the Earth is completely covered by trash, humanity lives on space-traveling cruise ships. WALL-E is the only remaining robot still working to clean the Earth. One day, he meets a robot named EVE, sent to Earth to search for signs of life. WALL-E falls head over heels in love with EVE and, when EVE finds a plant, WALL-E follows her back into space to her cruise ship, the Axiom. There he finds that humanity is completely apathetic and bored with their luxurious, labor-free lives. WALL-E’s attempts to make EVE happy involve helping her get the plant to the ship’s captain, who is excited by the thought of going back to Earth. The captain realizes that even though the Earth is still covered in trash, it just needs someone to look after it and help it get better. When he first tries to turn the ship around, the ship’s autopilot, AUTO, stops him. It turns out that seven hundred years ago, when it seemed that the Earth could never be cleaned up, AUTO received an order to keep the ship in space forever, because on the Axiom, humanity will survive. “I don’t want to survive,” says that Captain, “I want to live!” In the end, with WALL-E and EVE’s help, the Captain manages to defeat AUTO, and the Axiom returns safely to Earth.

I mentioned before that these movies have drastically different tones, and that should be clear by now. They both present postapocalyptic scenarios, sure, but one is a dark and bloody action movie which ends with all but two characters dead, while the other is a cheerful Disney/Pixar flick in which everyone but the bad guy lives happily ever after.

Despite their differences, these films both present the same question: “Is it enough for humanity to simply survive?”

Wilford and AUTO believe it is. The Snowpiercerand the Axiomboth exist to ensure that humans still exist even though the Earth is (supposedly) inhospitable to life. They’ve done their jobs; the human species is still a thing.

But at what cost?

Nobody on the Snowpiercerhas a good life. They’re abused, tortured, and addicted. The train runs on literal child slaves! Wilford would argue that all of this is justified because it maintains the survival of humanity. But is it?

Despite the relative comfort of the Axiomcompared to the Snowpiercer,nobody there has a “good” life, either. They don’t want anything, they don’t learn anything, they don’t really do anything. They just survive. Is that enough?

Curtis and the Captain answer this question in the same way. “No,” they say, “it’s not enough.” Both characters make a moral decision on behalf of all of humankind, choosing humanityover mere human survival. In WALL-E,humanity means putting work and care into the world around you instead of just taking the easy life. In Snowpiercer, humanity means being good to other people – if murder and child slavery are necessary to preserve the human species, then the human species is better off dead. Survival is not enough; there’s more to life than that, and both movies end with the idea that there canbe more to life than that. In both movies, despite the beliefs of the antagonist, life is sustainable on Earth. And in both movies, the characters make choices that prove that they deserve that life.