Distinctive consumption and popular anti-consumerism: The case of Wall*E

Abstract

Ostensibly, the widespread acceptance of environmental critiques that stress the unsustainability of existing patterns of consumption threatens the expansionist logic of consumer capitalism. In this respect the commercial cultural industries, which historically have both exemplified and rationalized the imperatives of consumerism, have a significant role to play. The Disney/Pixar animated feature film Wall*E (2008), one of the most celebrated recent examples of a popular anti-consumerism that now appears all but obligatory, is an instructive example of their ideological instrumentality. Implicitly endorsing the ‘individualizing’ practices of distinctive consumption, the film constructs a mass society critique that nonetheless validates the basic imperatives of consumer capitalism.

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