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"Wall•E": Our Need for Relationships

The movie Wall•E is about a lonely robot who for 700 years has been cleaning up the trash left behind by humans on an abandoned planet. Wall•E stands for "Waste Allocation Load Lifter–Earth class." While we are never told so, it is likely that Wall•E is the last operating robot on the planet.

In this scene Wall•E arrives at his "home"—an old storage building on the outskirts of the city where he lives. Wall•E uses the space to store the various trinkets and interesting objects he finds while organizing piles of trash all day long. Once home, Wall•E pops a battered copy of Hello Dolly into an old VCR—his version of "turning on the TV" to settle in. As the movie plays in the background, he begins adding new trinkets to his collection. They include a shiny hubcap, a Rubik's cube, a Zippo lighter, and a spork (Wall•E humorously can't decide whether he should place it with his collection of spoons or his collection of forks).

He begins to start another task, but is suddenly captured by what is occurring in the film. On the screen, a man and a woman are walking through a park, singing to each other. It's a moment filled with romance, and the words of their song seem to resonate deeply with Wall•E. He presses a button on his chest to record them as they sing: "It only took a moment / To be loved a whole life long."

As they sing, their voices harmonizing together, the man and the woman also hold hands. When they finish, Wall•E looks at his left "hand," then his right, and slowly brings them together in imitation of what he has just seen on the screen.

Later, Wall•E goes outside to clean the dust from his cooler. Looking up at the stars, he presses the "Play" button on his chest to hear the song from the movie once again: "And that is all that love's about / And we'll recall when time runs out / That it only takes a moment / To be loved a whole life long."

After being forced back inside because of a dust storm, Wall•E finishes his day by unwrapping a Twinkie for his pet cockroach. Sighing, he settles onto a shelf of the storage building and quietly rocks himself to sleep.

The message being conveyed by the filmmakers in this scene is both powerful and biblical: It is not good for anyone to be alone.

Content: Rated G

Elapsed Time: DVD, scene 3, 00:06:01–00:09:23

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