No, I haven’t watched it yet, so there aren’t any spoilers. I just read the review in the L.A. Times from yesterday, and it seems like it would be very much my movie, the way, I suppose, I got obsessed with “Beauty and the Beast”, even.

The sense of the protagonist’s shy, tentative optimism despite the overwhelming sense of loneliness, abandonment, and alienation that is already just palpable in the 5 min trailer is a little heartbreaking.

I can relate.

OK, I should’ve warned you, Kenneth Turan’s review of Wall-E does have a few details that could be construed as spoilers, although it doesn’t actually give any part of the plot away. The details make it sound almost like something that Douglas Adams would write.

Wall-E (which stands for Waste Allocator/Loader/Lifter - Earth Class, basically an autonomous, intelligent trash compactor) is the only sentience that seems to remain on Earth, excluding insects. He is tasked with the goal of reducing the amount of space all of the Earth’s garbage takes up.

Seemingly at odds with the typical Disney stereotype of “singing Zippy-dee-doo-dah out of your asshole”, “Wall-E” starts off with a rather dystopian vision of a planetary eco-catastrophe. The writers take our fears about rampant global capitalism and the inexorable expansion of the consumer culture, and they extrapolate them to their logical conclusion: the Earth basically becomes one large toxic landfill from which every human has fled, cavorting off into space polluting the rest of the universe too. The vision of lonely ruins of modern cities buried in garbage is extremely haunting, mostly because its probably going to be right.

And yet, despite this utterly hopeless desolation, you get the sense that Wall-E can’t help but harbor a spark of hope. As meager as his existence is, he finds small, meaningless joys in small, probably ultimately meaningless tasks. But none of this fulfills the need for companionship. For communion. For connection.

In a literal act of deus ex machina, EVE (which stands for Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) arrives on the planet, armed with a high-energy laser cannon. She is apparently the herald of the exiled, morbidly obese, wanton and gluttonous humans who have been living on interstellar cruise ships since the mass exodus—reminding me very much of the Golgafrincham B class as created by Douglas Adams in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe—an acerbic, sardonic send-up of humanity as a whole. Idiots, the lot of them. And that is where the mostly predictable plot begins.

Still, maybe that’s all there is to life. While I’ve had my moments of companionship, communion, and connection, they have, for the most part, been brief exercises, not going too deep, not getting too difficult. People slide in and out of life like set pieces. As long as you don’t ask too much, you’ll get by, but you won’t get much, either.

And it seems the moments that I’ve tried to bridge the gap, tried to reach out and go for something more meaningful have all been shot to shit somehow.

There’s no point in connecting closely, meaningfully, to anyone, because no one wants to be that close to me, and even if they did at the beginning, in the end, they leave as fast as they can physically go.

Times like these, I end up asking: why continue to burden the universe with my existence?

It would be one thing to be bitter and angry about all this, to learn all the wrong lessons. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Get yours while the getting is good. Fuck everyone else. But all of that is pretty much just as meaningless as my one-dimensional existence of microscopic, ultimately meaningless, achievements. Why trade in one set of nonsense for a whole new set of nonsense, when the current set gets me nowhere just as well as the new set probably would?

So, instead, I’m just sad. And I wake up in the morning like everybody else, take a shower, get dressed, go to work. If I’m lucky, some of the meaningless little things I do will actually have measurable results, no matter how small.

Like I said, it’s not that there aren’t awesome people around me who are looking for deeper meaning in life. But they can usually find someone less mentally convoluted and more physically attractive than I am.

Ben likes to say that I’ve never (or at least, almost never) tried, and that’s why it hasn’t worked out for me all these years, and maybe it’s true. But each year I’m a little more tired. The gangrene affecting my soul advances just a little bit. Each advance, I feel less and less pain. Eventually I won’t be able to feel a damn thing at all, and then they can rip my soul out of me and I won’t even flinch.

Then again, when we’re talking about someone who is just awesome in so many ways, even just being friends with her is probably more than I deserve.

Small victories. Little triumphs.