Movies - WALL-E animated movie - symbolizes an ayahuasca trip?

[Expat98]

I've read a few reviews about this new animated movie, and it sounds great. I was just reading a reader response (posted below) to one of the reviews, and according to this person, the whole movie symbolizes an ayahuasca trip that the director experienced, and also represents a critique of the war on drugs.

(I'm also posting a more conventional review of the movie after the reader response. If you don't know anything about the movie yet, it would make more sense to read that review first to get an overview.)

Here is the reader response:

Major Wall-E nerd here. BEST MOVIE EVER. You should watch Wall-E again. Wall-E is a 4 dimensional film encoding an ayahuasca trip, twisted like a mobius strip. You must watch it twice to get back to the starting point. It starts at the same place it ends.

First, there is a strong autistic element to the film. Wall-E's trouble with contact, isolation, routine, stacking behavior, continually watching the same movie, etc, all mirror autistic traits. It is much more revealing to look at wall-e, at the start, as the way a person with autistic traits experiences the world, rather then as a robot. The emotional and social struggles mirror autism.

There is a level where there is a love story between Eve and Wall-E. This story represents an internal union between two aspects of the directors personality. Wall-E roughly corresponds to the persona of a person with strong autistic aspects, and Eve roughly corresponds to the Anima. Persona meets anima right after the persona finds the vine in the boot, in a series of explosions that mirror both the movie Altered States and reports of the ayahuasca experience. The love story represents a psychedelic mediated psychological process within one person.

There is a cultural critique about over-dependence and simulated reality, on the Axiom. This, which most critics take as the deep meaning, represents the mind body split as it occurs in actual people, and can be considered analogical to Plato's allegory of the cave.

There is an ecological critique about all that garbage on earth, which (with the axiom representing mind and earth representing body) is a metaphor for psychic debris. At this level, the axiom returning to earth is a metaphor for the experience Alan Watts calls coming to your senses, as the mind returns to the body not running on autopilot.

And there is a critique of and play on the drug war, in the way auto responds to the renegade robots carrying the ecological promise in the plant. When Wall-E and eve struggle to get the psychedelic knowledge represented by the vine in a boot, into the hollow detector, their struggle mirrors the story of rebels trying to put psychedelics into the collective consciousness. This level is also a metaphor for the personal experience of ayahuasca. In this, the highest metaphoric level, we see the personal ayahuasca trip of the director, who is best understood as all the characters in the film, but mostly with the captain of the axiom. The director, as the unintegrated autistic persona represented by wall-E, encounters ayahuasca, trips, and returns to earth, fully human, with the autistic persona and anima acting in harmony to help spread ecological wisdom. At the end of the movie, when the director returns to earth, it is the beginning of the movie, because that process is what allowed him to create the film. So, to get back to start, you must watch it once as a trip, and once as a movie that represents the trip.

There is even a little rosetta stone over the credits, where the same forces we saw as characters representing aspects of one psyche are reinterpreted historically and as archetypes.

The science in this art is the repressed science around the internal aspects of the psychedelic therapeutic processes (including mystical experience and curing autism and obsessive behaviors with psychedelics). The basic premise of the movie was to sneak psychedelic alchemical wisdom into the unconscious of every kid who sees the movie.

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Here is a more traditional review of the movie. Read this first if you don't know anything about the movie yet.

WALL-E

Year Released: 2008
Directed By: Andrew Stanton
Starring: Fred Willard
Voices By: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy, Sigourney Weaver
(G, 97 min.)

wall-e.jpg

What would Stanley Kubrick – or for that matter, Arthur C. Clarke or even Isaac Asimov – have made of Pixar's WALL-E? It's the story of the last functioning robot (a "Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class," to be more precise), who leads a solitary existence cleaning up an ecologically devastated Earth, some 700 years after the last human being abandoned the dying, trash-strewn planet for the pristine safety of the stars.

WALL-E (Burtt), a boxy, oxidated whirball on treads with expressive, binocular eyes, has only a chittering cockroach pal to share his endless days with, and that makes for one lonely robot. He's learned about companionship from an old VHS copy of the musical Hello, Dolly!, and as the massive dust-and-debris storms roll in every evening, the dingy little 'bot hunkers down inside a makeshift home adorned with the finer detritus of his scavengings – Christmas lights, Commodore 64s, and rubber duckies.

Thus safely ensconced, he dreams not of electric sheep but of love. And then, without warning and in a blast of fiery thruster thunder, a titanic vessel lands in his back yard and deposits EVE (Knight), an ovoid female robot who has been given a directive to discover if life – plant life, animal life, any life – has blossomed in the seven centuries since Homo sapiens turned their back on their home world. She finds it, too, not only in WALL-E but also in a single, frail green sprout that may well be the only real life on the planet. Mission accomplished, she turns herself off to await the return of her mother ship (whose onboard computer is voiced, in a nice touch, by Sigourney Weaver).

WALL-E, however, is smitten almost from the moment of EVE's first appearance, and while the film eventually takes both of these ’droids off-world and into the sedentary, emotionally disconnected world of the surviving human race, the story remains focused on the blossoming romance between the little load-lifter and his blue-eyed paramour.

This is Pixar's finest and most emotionally powerful film yet, and it draws on a wealth of cinematic resources that runs the gamut from Chaplin's best to Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, and even Martin & Lewis. It's a virtually dialogue-free film up until its midpoint, at which point lyrical references to 2001: A Space Odyssey (Industrial Light & Magic's special-effects legend Dennis Muren contributed heavily to replicating the 70mm look of Kubrick's film), Douglas Trumbull's elegiac Silent Running, and even Geoff Murphy's The Quiet Earth begin to crop up all over the place. (There's also a Sputnik-y shout-out to The Iron Giant's Brad Bird.)

But sci-fi aside, WALL-E is a love story, pure and simple. Pixar's ceaselessly creative animation artists drench the screen in a dazzling palette of violets, magentas, crimsons, and pinks – the colors of the heart – and achieve a level of clarity that approaches reality without sacrificing one iota of dreamy, animated wit. By turns sad, hilarious, exciting, and, ultimately, hopeful, this is a film of Great Truths masquerading as child's play. Those past science-fictioneers Kubrick, Clarke, and Asimov would've loved it, I think, and I'd wager my first edition of The Martian Chronicles that Ray Bradbury, too, is going to recognize a kindred, humanist soul in WALL-E's life-affirming quest for love.

**** Marc Savlov [2008-06-27]

http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrob...m=oid%3A639250

[Heretic.Ape.]

My nephews are coming to town, gives me a great excuse to go see this.

[Expat98]

Here's another piece I just found about the ayahuasca symbolism in this movie. Anyone seen it? Reviews?

***

Kids, If You Liked Wall-E, You'd Love Ayahuasca!

This film is an esoteric masterpiece. I am going point the way to decoding it. No matter what your interpretation, your interpretation works, but is probably limited in it’s scope. Stuart Davis says giving a movie like this to a critic is like giving a box of rubiks cubes to drugged monkeys. No critic has hit this nail on the head because no critic has experience with esoteric teachings or psychedelia. In that spirit: SPOILERS. LOTS. BIG ONES. EVEN IF YOU'VE SEEN IT, THIS WILL SPOIL IT!

This story works at four levels, each functioning at a surface and metaphoric level.

The fundamental story is of an ayahuasca (traveling vine, ie that vine in a boot) trip of the principle creative that inspired him to make the movie. At this level, the surface interpretation is that all characters are aspects of the directors psyche, and that he is most clearly identified as the captain of the axiom. The deep metaphor takes it as a collective and equates the systems of control in his own psyche with the systems of control in the drug war that try and protect the buy and large system from gnostic experiences that destroy the illusions necessary to maintain the system, and his personal triumph over auto represents a collective triumph over censors.

In the beginning of the movie, right after he takes the vine in the boot (literally, traveling vine) into his pad, very closely resembles the ayahuasca scenes in Altered States with the volcanos and explosions, as well as actual experiences. The captain with the book with the vine on it, and his exposition, has double meaning about the code in the film, literally mocking the people who don’t understand the code, while they are laughing at his infantilism, which also reflects on them. When he plays with the ship, bringing it back to earth, he is speaking for the director, about the impact of the film. When he conquers autopilot, it is a personal victory of the sort aimed at in meditation, and a metaphor for his cultural victory, all at once.

The secondary story is the ecology parable. The ecology parable is the surface, and it is a metaphor for the psychological debris caused by the effects of the bnl system of thinking in the present day. Returning the ship to earth represents returning psychic awareness to the body, which, as it pays more attention to natural beauty, is freed from the psychic pollution of consumerist culture.

The tertiary story is the consumerist cultural critique, which is actually an extended metaphor about the deep nature of reality. When we see the golfers using screens to control golf bots, we are seeing a critique of consumerist culture, but we are also seeing a representation of the mind body split as it would exist in actual people golfing. The critique of culture is the surface meaning, beneath that is an analogy about the nature of reality. In fact, all the scenes in that economy map directly onto esoteric teachings about the illusory nature of what we confuse for reality.

The fourth story is the love story (which maps onto the conscious and unconscious autistic aspects of the directors self reconciling by completing the archetypal hero’s journey, including death and rebirth, giving him the ability to connect with people). When we see the tree (of life) with roots in the shoe, and wall-e and eve hold hands (connect) and watch, we are seeing a metaphor for hallucinogen use revealing deep religious secrets much more then we are seeing the resolution of a love story or ecological parable or critique of consumerism.

What makes this film work so well, is that it’s perfect at every level. It has all the features of the most brilliant Fellini movie or Joyce novel. But, unlike Fellini or Joyce, there is something for everyone, and everyone can take away just what they are ready for.

The real reason this should piss off conservatives isn't that it makes fun of how stupid and fat and infantile they are in clinging to their delusions, it is that for all their trouble in the drug war, Americans just spent 62 million dollars imprinting the ayahuasca experience and wisdom directly into their kids and the collective unconscious of America. This is an excellent thing.

It’s very explicitly coded in the film, if you are willing to take the scene with the code book seriously. In fact, the scenes over the end credits serve as a rosetta stone to decipher the meaning in the film, as the forces that are represented as parts of one psyche (or characters in one story) are reinterpreted historically through culture, and as archetypes, before the drug war metaphor.

If you click the link below, and click entertainment, then 4d film you will read another clue to deciphering this film. I'll leave the rest as an exercise for you. I want to ask you folks, though, about this. "The technology will cause the end and start of the film to occur simultaneously"

What's your interpretation of that line (what point in the movie is the beginning and end at the same time)? I have my thought on this, I'll share it next time. I want to hear your thoughts. Bonus points for mapping the eight levels (actual and metaphoric) onto Leary's eight circuits of consciousness model. I'll post about that later too. Also, I flipped one of the metaphors and surfaces around. Which one?

Everyone is missing the point. We are the ones who can decode this. Help by sharing your thoughts. I hope people talk about this brilliant movie for years.

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http://www.dosenation.com/listing.php?smlid=4861

[Nature Boy]

SWIM's seen this and enjoyed it very much. What amazed him about it was its sheer simplicity in storytelling. It seems like the type of film that almost anyone could enjoy. Although he didn't read into the symbolism much when he was watching it, SWIM thought about it a few hours later and concluded that WALL-E was much more than just a nicely-animated kid's movie. The elements of sci-fi, the lack of dialogue and the beautiful rendering of the film's characters and backdrops are really something worth appreciating. Pixar have taken animated movies to an entirely different level with this one, a level that should have been reached some time ago. SWIM always thought that animation had a far greater scope than conventional film in telling a space-themed story such as this. It's definitely highly recommendable and it should now be the measuring stick for future movies of its kind.

Reputation Comments on this post:

Great review, thanks!

[old hippie 56]

Swim 7 yo kid seen it the other day, she told him is was funny and weird.

[Hyperspaceblastoff]

SWIM dosed some nice white on white before heading into the theatres
needless to say the movie rocked SWIMs world