For a little family entertainment this weekend, we caught up on another excellent Pixar film, WALL-E. The movie is a nice story about robots (which explains one of the reasons I liked it), but its one of the themes that made me think of this post. One of the implied messages of the movie is that humans are forced to flee earth due to our own rampant consumerism, accelerated by the Buy N Large corporation.
To me, Buy N Large is a satiric stand-in for Walmart, and the movie is poking fun at the company and asking the audience to recognize the role the company plays in the ultimate decimation of Earth. I don’t do much shopping at Walmart, but I got the point that the movie was making, and of course there is some truth to it. What struck me as funny was wondering if Walmart carried the very movie that poked fun at the chain.
Of course Walmart carries the movie! Walmart, in typical Buy N Large fashion, carries 22 different WALL-E related items so we can super-size our consumption of this cute movie. Oh, the irony.
So my lesson was that irony is apparently lost on Walmart.
Personal Learning 