Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. depicts a country that has all but disappeared: blue-collar, ethnic America. It’s a scene that’s been vanishing from the American imagination for quite awhile. In part, this scene is economic, but partly, it’s because Hollywood treats blue-collar workers so dismissively – witness their portrayal as oafish in The King of Queens or John Goodman’s performance in Roseanne.
Treated most dismissively most of all are the men, whose every move is scrutinized by what can only be described as bitchy women. It’s the logical corollary of feminism. If women must rule, then men must suck. Men cannot be seen as nurturing. Working men cannot be seen as liking anything more than guns or beer.
And so, then, it is refreshing that Pixar chooses to depict everyday workers as they really are – human – even if it is as lovable one-eyed green and big, blue furry monsters. The working stiffs of Monsters City have soft hearts and pursue love and friendship, with each other.
These monsters populate a city that looks very much New York circa 1920 and work in a power plant that looks an awful lot like Homer Simpson’s. You see, their city, like Hartford, CT, the insurance capital of America, is a city built on fear – specifically the fear of children, whose screams power their city. Those screams have become dimmer and less powerful because children have become tougher and tougher to scare, culminating in a veritable energy crisis for the monsters.
Enter Sulley and Mike, two professional scarers and best friends, who seek to beat arch-rival, Randall, as the all-time scarer of children.
But Randall doesn’t want to win fairly. He’s in league with the boss, Mr. Waternoose, to kidnap children, who, they can presumably scare forever. One such child is Boo, a human child, who Randall winds up losing, and who quickly befriends Sulley. Far from contaminating the monsters’ world as was feared, Boo gives Sulley the gift of a child’s love, providing the drama: Will Sulley choose his career with the company over a child he just met?
It says a lot about Sulley that he chooses the child over his profession and takes responsibility for protecting her. Indeed, he and friend, Mike, go out and expose the company for its sinister practices. In turn, they are rewarded, with ownership of the company, suggesting that there is a kind of justice to doing what it is right.
Conservatives, quick to ignore any film that is ostensibly anti-business, should delve a bit deeper into this one. The film never indulges in the kind of quasi-Marxist “power to the works,” nor does it denigrate hard work. Sulley, the best worker, is portrayed as doing anything and everything for his company, so long as it squares with the moral order. His boss, admitting that he would steal thousands of children to meet his energy quotas, betrays Sulley and his company, and so, loses his claim to keeping it.
The company turns over to Sulley and Mike, who learn from Boo that laughter, nor fear, is the best source of energy. The innovators are rewarded; the cheaters are defeated. And rather than dwell on conservation or some such other environmental nonsense, the film suggests that we should preserve our way of life and that we can preserve it if we keep our humanity by choosing what is right.
Pixar has promised a sequel, slated for 2011. Here’s hoping it lives up to the first. This being Pixar, it might actually happen.
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