Toy Story 3 and duty

I saw Toy Story 3 (finally!) on Tuesday.

What a thrilling, emotionally satisfying, beautifully rendered, human film. The conflict that struck me the most was that of duty. (spoilers ahead) In the middle of the film, Woody has to choose between duty to his owner or duty to his friends--duty to the system and tradition versus his duty to the relationships in his life. He can go back to Andy's house to go to college with him, and a life that's safe although useless but to be displayed, as if on a pedestal, or he can attempt to save his friends from certain harm but risk being press-ganged and trapped in the process. If he tries and fails, he is unable to return to Andy, lacking the ways and means to move about and get things done that Andy does.

The similarities between Woody's struggle and the choices that women make in navigating their lives, their politics, and (sometimes) husbands made me sit up and watch this movie with fascination. As the end approached: what would the toys do? To where would they go? And the choice they made in the end--Bonnie's versus Sunnyside, where Barbie stayed! What does that say?

To answer those questions, a little background is in order. As I was a radical, socialist, red state high school feminist, Andrea Dworkin was formative in my thinking. In particular, Right-Wing Women asks the questions: Why do right-wing women agitate for their own subordination? How does the Right, controlled by men, enlist their participation and loyalty? And why do right-wing women truly hate the feminist struggle for equality? Those questions were crowding at my consciousness, and even now, their derivatives come up daily in my thinking. The answer that Dworkin supplies:

Right-wing women understand that their behavior hurt other women, but most importantly, places them on a pedestal for the admiration of one man in particular: their husband. This choice, whether conscious or subconscious, is actually the safe, intelligent choice.

We as an audience are given a look at life with Bonnie that is simple, generous, kind, and loved--her toys adore her, and she clearly has a good heart, having rescued Chuckles (and Woody, too). Having found this paradise once, it should be no surprise that Woody chooses to spirit himself and his friends off to this owner, to this "husband." It's Woody's devotion to Andy, his performance of and commitment to being the perfect toy (the perfect wife) that leads him away from Sunnyside and into Bonnie's home in the first place. And having found the perfect "husband," why waste something good for something that has a reality of being nasty and only the slight potential of reform (Sunnyside)? Rejecting Bonnie is dangerous. It places the toys at the mercy of a larger mechanism than themselves. Sunnyside renders a lot of agency useless, even if there is no master whose every demand needs to be met.

Here, we can look at Sunnyside as a wider society. More specifically, the ease with which it slides into horror and oppression is perfectly represented in the Caterpillar Room, a state which is reinforced not only by Lotso but also a host of other enforcers, all comfortable in their privilege of the Butterfly Room. A woman who rejects the protection of a potential or real husband by refusing to perform the roles of the perfect wife--the cautionary tale of Sunnyside and the Caterpillar Room is her lot.

The reform at the end of Toy Story 3 is really intriguing. It seems that Barbie is able to inspire Ken to give up parts of his privilege in favor of some nebulous form of (more) equality. Barbie seems to be some sort of antebellum social reformer, in the lines of prison reform, temperance, women's suffrage, and abolitionism. Indeed, Sunnyside is a prison, so what she does is nothing other than prison reform. But without Ken's support, his ways and means derived from his authority as a former enforcer, I don't see Barbie accomplishing what she did. Indeed, she would not have been safe enough to implement a lot of these changes if Ken had not defied Lotso--in Barbie's case, then, Ken has taken over part of her ownership in protecting her.

This scenario then calls into question the role of the oppressor in progressive movements and in reform; Toy Story 3 says it can be for the greater good both of a society and to the individuals who find a good, decent protector (or protectress, for Bonnie).

We get the best of both worlds in this movie. Woody's two duties, to his owner(s) and to his friends (the group grows to include the rest of the toys at Sunnyside, with whom Woody and Co. do feel some sort of solidarity), are both fulfilled. Woody and Co. become useful again to Andy by allowing him to pass his beloved toys on, they find a new owner and make themselves fundamentally useful again as toys to be enjoyed, and Barbie stays behind to make sure the Sunnyside toys also get to experience some of the same joy and security that comes from being owned and wanted, but institutionalized.

This ending is why Toy Story 3 remains a children's movie.


Here's what some other people thought this movie said about society (emphasis mine):

The film begins with Woody trying to defend a crumbling system of communism (presumably the Soviet Union). Toys have a duty to their owners, he argues. The owner is a personified totalitarian state (Stalin?) — he decides what the toys do and the toys are not permitted to escape....Communism having collapsed, the toys emigrate to Sunnyside (the US, that nation of immigrants), which leader Lotso depicts as a libertarian paradise. In his introductory he speech, he touts the joys of self-ownership and interacting with children through the market (new children are constantly replacing old ones, maximizing the efficiency of the toys), as well as the improved material comforts his system brings (the repair depot, the dream house)....Ken and Barbie now lead Sunnyside, making it a “fun and groovy” socialist utopia. --The Political Philosophy of Toy Story 3

As social commentary, Toy Story 3 is provocative but vague, even unrealized. Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear's torment of Woody's friends by locking them in with the daycare's younger and considerably less kind children suggests something of a slave trade. Their nightmare imprisonment is practically a statement on gentrification, as you get a sense of the rich life Lots-o'-Huggin' and his cronies enjoy being impossible without other, less fortunate toys wasting away in less desirable, impoverished conditions. (There's no "in" for the undesirables, just one way "out": the trash.) The scenario is evocative, suggestive of a New York City street with a Whole Foods and expensive luxury rentals on one side and the projects on the other, but the correlation the film makes to real-life urban gentrification ultimately feels tacky because the way justice comes to Sunnyside has no correlative in Harlem. (slant mag)

But the movie is all about identity and what do you become when everything you knew is gone?....I could go all day about the prison metaphors, the fact that Woody himself was always kind of obsolete as far as toys go, or entertain excessive discourses about Big Baby, the scariest toy in all three Toy Story movies. And then there’s the fact that the Ken doll (Michael Keaton) is one thousand percent gay and no one in the movie (and probably, a good chunk of the audience) has any idea. So I suppose you can add mob mentalities, closet cases, and the like to the list of Pixar’s storytelling devices. (The Faster Times)

The shocking parallels to the Holocaust in Toy Story 3 begin just moments after the opening playtime set piece. Andy is seventeen and about to leave for college. These toys are left behind, just as host nations left behind the Jews as the Third Reich conquered Europe. --Toy Story 3 as Zionist Text

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Here's a thought and a lovely photo of the day to end this giant post:

What are the nature of my duties?

(via)

We are the people that rule the world /

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I saw Up yesterday. It made me laugh and cry, but I was still bitterly disappointed.

Carl and Ellie's story, told as it is mostly in images and without words, had me bawling. I don't even know why, as it's a fairly typical story of two people growing old together.

Dug made me laugh. The Cone of Shame, in particular, was a nice touch and its use at the very end is a nice illustration of how the circumstance can influence a person's identity.

But holy crap. The Wilderness Explorer (a Boy Scout parody) kid, Russell, was beyond annoying. It got to the point where I was groaning every time he came on screen, which was basically every minute of the last 3/4ths of the movie. His existence just reaffirmed my opinion that kids suck. Every minute on screen he was whining, pouting, or arguing. Or looking "sad." I put sad in quotation marks because that kind of "ohhhh poor me I'm a puppy don't kick me" look doesn't work well unless it's on a puppy's face (read: Dug).

The part that angered me, though, was the ageism against Carl. Oh, sure, he's 70+ and the real hero of the movie, but that doesn't stop the old-people jokes from flying fast and furious. My question: What's the point of making a character a hero if the movie just makes fun of said character the entire time?

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Today I read Someday This Pain Will Be Useful, by Peter Cameron. It's about an 18-year-old boy, James Sveck. He has gotten into Brown but is thinking about abandoning college to live in a no-name town in the Midwest and pick up a trade, all because he hates people his own age and would much rather be a loner. He is the quintessential rich white city boy. He doesn't fit in anywhere. He spends his time thinking about the past, and hates pop culture but is at the same time very aware of the culture. He's able to pinpoint a Marimekko dress that is worn backwards, and identify a Comme des garcons shirt. Those are pretty obscure high fashion brands!

The one part that stood out the most to me was when James is attending the American Classroom, one of those week-long camp things run by conservatives that supposedly give you experience in civics and government. Actually, James is telling the reader what happened during his stay with the American Classroom, which happens several months prior to the present of the book. James likes to sit alone at the tables because he is acutely aware of his own uncomfortableness with other kids and also disdains the rules that govern their (and his) lives, such as having the back of the bus reserved for the "cool kids." (Oh, how I remember that the cool kids were always in the back, and you really wanted the back seat, and how this one bus driver would reserve the back seat for the birthday kid.)

During the intermission of a dinner theater performance, another girl invites James to sit with her table. James is disgusted because he recognizes that she thinks she is doing him a favor, and is trying to be nice, but he doesn't think that it's nice at all. He would much rather be alone.

And so I find this a really strange book to put in the young adult section of a bookstore or a library, but that's where this book is classified. I suppose it's for all the loners of the world, but I can't say if this is an optimistic book or not. James finds that not even his dream of living in a beautiful old home in the Midwest can stand up to scrutiny. He ends up attending Brown, but it's not an active decision.

This worldview is so completely from all the other books and movies out there. this one says it's okay to feel like James does, although it probably won't make you happy.

When I read this book, I ended up just feeling sad. I recognized all the social awkwardness in myself, but I was also too cowardly to buck the silly rules that James disregards.