How pop art has captured the imagination of our culture.

[Stealth3si]

Some thoughts in first-draft form.

Recently I saw a prominent Christian author suggest that at its best Hollywood might aspire to "pure, innocent entertainment," leisure without the baggage of art. Now, I'm no enemy of whimsy and fun, but I must protest; pop art is still art! Movies tell stories by which we narrate our lives, often in deep and profound ways. So I want to dig in to an unlikely genre: animated children's movies. I hope we can see in two Pixar films, Toy Story and WALL·E, that even pop art can capture a whole sweep of culture, and isn't restricted to a few idle laughs.

Toy Story is, on one level, just a fun adventure about toys. Buzz Lightyear, a space ranger action figure, is introduced into the community of sheriff Woody and a host of other toys. Woody sees Buzz as a rival and plots against him; the two get into some serious trouble and become friends as they work together to return to the safety of home. We've got comedy and camaraderie, action and animation -- fun!

Yet, whether consciously or unconsciously, this film also tells a profound story that has shaped Western culture for centuries, the story of disenchantment. At the center of both the problem and solution of the film's conflicts is Buzz Lightyear's belief that he is a real space ranger, not a toy. Once he overcomes these grandiose visions of himself and his world -- his mission from Star Command aims "to infinity... and beyond!" -- he can start solving the real problems facing the toys. Once he recognizes that his enchanted world was just imaginary, he can move forward bravely and genuinely in the real, disenchanted world in which he actually lives.

This is a perfect allegory for modern stories of disenchantment, stories of "losing my religion." Richard Dawkins would be proud to tell the tale: There is no Space Command out there with a majestic mission for us, no God who comes to redeem the world unto a bright future, and if we would just give up those delusions we could concentrate on the real world in front of us and make real progress. Even more than that, when we come to grips with reality, once we let disenchantment sink in, we will be empowered to do even greater things than we imagined in our false, enchanted world.

WALL·E criticizes this story of disenchantment and offers in its place a story of re-enchantment. In a disenchanted world we are not Buzz Lightyear's space rangers, not made in the image of God, so we come to see our humanity as something that is merely incidental. In time, we regard our bodies not as beautiful and glorious expressions of the divine but rather as limitations to our aspirations of progress, prisons of weakness from which we must be freed in order to realize our true destiny. And what will liberate us from our bodily prisons? Technology. Technology becomes not a tool to help us tend the garden that is the world but a liberator to rescue us from the confines of our outdated bodies and the frustratingly weak physical creation.

The film exposes the hidden side-effects of this mythos of secular technological progress. Our lofty, if abstract, aspirations to "progress" quickly fade into a fascination with meaningless trinkets. In an instant we consume their novelties, toss them aside, and immediately turn to the next trivial pleasure in line. They may just be trinkets, but when we are consumed by them destruction follows in their wake. When trashed they remain in our world and crowd out the deeper, embodied aspirations of humanity. (This is no partisan attack on capitalism, by the way; the film's humans live in a socialistic society in which everyone receives everything without working, and that is part of the problem.) Since we regard our world as a "disenchanted" place, we are happy to dump our trash on Earth and run lightyears away in our spaceships, leaving behind robots on cleanup duty.

Protagonist WALL·E is the last robot on Earth, and somebody forgot to turn him off! For centuries our solar-powered antihero has been faithfully organizing and compacting our trash so that one day we might return. In a fascinating contrast, while we built technology to escape our feeble bodies, our technological creation WALL·E is thoroughly spellbound with the splendor of embodied humanity. At the end of the workday his curiosity explores human song and dance, and he even learns to dance himself. Notice that this is no mere environmentalist screed: The problem in the movie is not that we have failed to love Mother Gaia but that we have forgotten our humanity. This is a Christian critique of secularization, of disenchantment.

The appearance of a female robot, Eve, presents the opportunity for hope, for re-enchantment. She is sleek and advanced, representative of the future, while WALL·E is kinda dumpy to look at and has a cockroach for a best friend. This is not unlike most couples I know. Eve discovers a plant, proof that Earth may yet be salvageable, places it in her robotic "womb," and hibernates while WALL·E sacrificially cares for her. They return to the human spaceship to deliver their botanical proof that Earth's suppressed potential, where WALL·E meets humans quite opposite his embodied expectations. Rather than be a people of dancing and laughter and food, we lay on hoverchairs idly staring at screens and chatter over frivolities. WALL·E's imitation of embodied humanity inspires us to recover the simple profundity of our bodies and the physical world, and we return to Earth in the hope of "re-enchanting" it, recovering the divine stamp on all of creation.

Combined, these two films tell our story: We live in a radically disenchanted cultural world, and it is absolutely anti-human. It provides a radical critique of disenchanting secularism as tantamount to vapid dehumanization, and counters that by recovering the physical, the bodily human, we might re-enchant our world, seeing real hope and real "change you can believe in." This project of re-enchantment -- which is to say, this project of re-emphasizing the image of God in humanity and the goodness and purpose of God's created order -- in one to which Christians ought to be devoted. If we can, we will be doing something deeply orthodox yet profoundly "relevant," not in the sense of selling out to secular culture but instead in the sense of captivating people with real Christianity right where they are with the proof of where they could be.

How will we reflect on this project, and how will we go about it? The movie suggests that we may turn to dancing, to laughter, to feasting, to children, and above all to love. For the movie is at root a love story between two very different, yet still very good, genders. And isn't that true for Christians? At root, we are telling a love story between the groom Jesus who lays down his life and the bride Church who carries within her the potential future for the life of the world.