Environmental Gothic Part One: The Fat of the Land

A couple of years ago I found myself on a long haul flight watching, without a hint of irony, a very Gothic film with a heavily environmental message. It concerned a sentient robot stranded on a dead planet amidst the ruins of civilisation, and proceeded to portray a dystopian vision of the decadent remains of humanity, wallowing in their own corpulence, slaves to mega-corporations and a psychotic computer overlord. The film in question was Disney/Pixar’s Wall-E (2008). Wall-E revolves around the discovery of the first plant to grow on Earth in centuries following our wasteful destruction o