Young Andy packs for college, taking his woody, Woody, with him (he has heard how much action his woody will get in college) but leaving behind all his other, sissy toys. But evil Mommy “accidentally” throws out the toys, even Andy’s woody (that castrating bitch!). The toys end up a daycare center, where Lotso the bear rules with an iron fist. Only Woody is agile and excited enough to escape and find Andy but his plan is thwarted little girl named Bonnie, who takes him to her house. At Bonnie’s house, Woody finds out more about Lotso and his companion Baby. Their kid owner had accidentally disposed of Lotso and Baby but Lotso manipulated Baby into believing that their kid purposefully abandoned them. This represents the father convincing the Babyish mother that Andy intends to hurt them when he leaves for college. The mother, mistakenly, turns on Andy and punishes him by “accidentally” disposing of his toys: so that he can know what it is like to be abandoned. The father, goes one up, and actually rules over his toys cruelly destroying their ability to provoke or receive pleasure. Andy’s evil father manipulates his abject mother into castrating Andy (eliminating his woody) and rendering him impotent, as he begins college.
Lotso is the cruel corporate power of Disney, which has exploited our childhood dreams for profit, while Baby is the abject artist who does Disney’s bidding. Well, that might hold up if we could ever believe that the toys in this film actually resembled our childhood dreams and that Andy actually resembled us. In fact, it is hard not to read each character in the film as being a part of a grand-deceit that intends to have us believe we are watching a representation of our own childhood imagination, even though it is quite obviously a lobotomized imitation of our childhood imagination. Granted, the American childhood has itself become Disneyfied but no child is capable of truly submitting to the stereotypical roles provided to them in even a “Pixar” film (as if Pixar implied a product that was somehow better than Disney).
Back to the plot: Woody returns to the daycare center to help save his friends, secretly hoping that doing so will give pleasure to Andy. After all, Woody can only think of pleasing his master/owner. Woody has an easy time getting to the abject mother (Baby) and convincing her that the evil father was wrong: Baby recognizes Lotso’s deceit and pushes him into a dumpster. But Lotso drags Woody and all of his comrades along with him.
At the dump, after kindly helping Lotso break free, the toys face imminent death from incineration. They all hold hands and we weep: the father has gotten away with his wicked deed, leaving us behind to burn. To Pixar’s screenwriters, this moment is intended to symbolize the death of “fun,” the closure of an era, the loss of our childhood, and we are supposed to wholeheartedly hope that the toys are saved. But I can’t help but note our wish and Andy’s too is just the opposite. Woody burning up, as it resembles the penis entering the infernal vagina, would quite pleasurable to Andy and he would be miserable to see the Aliens swoop in and rescue the toys from the fire. The father may have “gotten away” but at least he is gone! Now the real fun can begin: the orgasmic death that blows our woody to bits! But of course, this is the type of pleasure a film as predictably filled with clichés and as empty as this one forbids.
Now for the audience: the fact of watching the near-death of mockup, virtual, stereotypical CGI toys that continually pander to the most conventional norms of sentimental adults in the audience, and seem only to serve a hollow shell of a boy, who is impossible to sympathize with (therefore, Pixar assumes he is empty enough that any of us can sympathize with him); this fact can only bring about a joyful wish for the death of these toys once and for all: A wish that this didactic, sentimental, narrative forbids us from even consciously glimpsing. But far worse then the fact that we cannot wish for the death of these toys, worse even than the fact that they do not die, is the quintessential franchise moment that comes at the film’s end: Woody and the toys are given away to young Bonnie and we are promised yet another generation of brainwashed, hollow children, living through “toys” that could only be imagined as “fun” by corporations that attempt to push wasteful products down our throats and by audiences who blindly oblige.
But are we not inevitably disappointed by the ever-increasing graphic capabilities to render that “other world” more and more realistic? Does not each step forward create two steps backwards? Are we not doing to this “other world” what we fear it shall do to us: invade us and force us to conform to its rules. Have we not captured the other world of narrative and myth and bound it to the extreme magnifying glass of high-definition Imax 3D?
No comments:
Post a Comment