By David Ross. We all have a vague idea of the ‘Pixar story’: John Lasseter, Steve Jobs, technological innovations of some kind, fractious dealings with a decadent Disney, eventual world-wide success measured in billions of dollars and universal critical adulation. The 2008 documentary of the same name fills in the historical detail and provides human color.
If the documentary itself is merely workmanlike, the story it narrates belongs amid the July 4th bunting of the American pageant. It’s a chapter in the tale of Graham Bell, Edison, the Wright Brothers, Disney, and Apollo 11, an episode in the cheerful reinvention of the world on the basis of something deep and generous in the American spirit. There’s very little for which contemporary Americans will not have to apologize to whatever god or superior alien race is watching, but Pixar speaks well of us. It mitigates just a little the malls and video games and rap music, everything we might, following Allen Ginsberg, call “Moloch.”
The Pixar Story is informative cultural history, but its implicit lessons have wider and more important application. For better and for worse, corporations now infiltrate every crevice of our culture, and it has become crucially important to weigh how corporatism and cultural meaning can be reconciled. Pixar represents a rare digital-age example of a corporation that’s deepened rather than debased the culture. The lessons are not particularly abstruse, but difficult to drive home and implement, viz.:
1) Corporations must construe themselves as communities rather than machines. Communities consist of autonomous and interactive people; machines consist of inanimate parts that exist in a paradoxical state of mutual dependency and complete isolation. Pixar resists the temptation to rationalize, regulate, and formalize presumably because those at the top – Lasseter et al. – are so free of the usual egomaniacal impulse to control and subsume. The result is an organization that’s supple, organic, and decentralized, as loose and yet unified as an eighteenth-century village. I imagine that Chuck Jones’ Warner Brothers team was much the same.
2) Corporations must enact some foundational moral, spiritual, or aesthetic commitment. Pixar is animated by reverence for the history of animation, by the excitement of creative possibility, by delight in the childhood imagination, by an impulse to keep faith with the American past. However manifested, there must be some value – ergonomics, tastiness, usefulness, whatever – that trumps profit. There’s nothing wrong with profit – profit is wholly good and necessary – but it cannot be its own end. Even Ayn Rand, the ultimate apostle of profit, understood this; indeed she may have understood this better than anyone. Her steel baron Hank Rearden measures success not in dollars, but in intellectual joy, in realized vision, in bridges and buildings built for their own sake. John Ruskin expresses a version of the point in Unto This Last (1862):
Observe, the merchant’s function . . . is to provide for the nation. It is no more his function to get profit for himself out of that provision than it is a clergyman’s function to get his stipend. This stipend is a due and necessary adjunct, but not the object of his life, if he be a true clergyman, any more than his fee (or honorarium) is the object of life to a true physician. Neither is his fee the object of life to a true merchant. All three, if true men, have a work to be done irrespective of fee – to be done even at any cost, or for quite the contrary of fee; the pastor’s function being to teach, the physician’s to heal, and the merchant’s, as I have said, to provide.
Ruskin adds that the merchant, burdened with such moral responsibility, “is bound, as soldier or physician is bound, to give up, if need be, his life, in such way as it may be demanded of him.” Can anyone imagine David Geffen or Michael Eisner giving up their lives in an act of Ruskinian self-sacrifice? Hank Rearden would do so, without hesitation. Might Steve Jobs or John Lasseter? The possibility is at least not infinitely implausible.
3) Corporations must respect the dignity and intelligence of the consumer. Of course you can make a fortune by insulting the public intelligence – witness the Eisner-era Disney, modern Hollywood in general, contemporary journalism, the entire MTV-era music industry – but enduring empires are not built on foundations of cynicism and condescension. Self-disgust eventually corrupts and shows through; the organization becomes frayed; consumers recoil; barbarians gather at the gate. The Internet dispatched the network news in a trice, but only because the latter was so pompous and empty to begin with. The Berlin Wall should be a cautionary symbol for all corporations. The lesson is that even the most enshrined entity – the most entrenched reality – may evaporate instantaneously if nobody genuinely loves it. Corporations must strive to make themselves worth loving, not in the faddish and superficial sense, but in the sense that their demise or decline would cause real anguish, as would the destruction of an old church in a community that had long organized around it.
For related opinions on Pixar and Disney, see my posts on The Princess and the Frog, Tangled, and Toy Story 3.
Posted on May 23rd, 2011 at 1:45pm.
Excellent piece. Lasseter was essentially fired for trying to innovate at Disney. Which is ironic when you think of how many times the Ol Moustruo blew the bottom line because of experiments like Fantasia. When corporations become “too big to fail” they are also too big to innovate, which is why big business is more likely to be in the pocket of big government instead of the free market.
You’d think that would be a narrative Hollywood would pick up on – the big corporate dinosaur vs the small agile mammal – but I guess “Tucker” put an end to that.
It’s unfortunate that a post this well-written by a writer I respect has to employ an invective against video games. As an avid supporter of the industry, I find more creativity in video games than in most movies these days. I have been playing Portal 2 co-op with my 11-year old nephew and what a wonderful game it is! It encourages creative problem-solving and is an excellent educational tool. That’s not to say that only puzzle games like it have merit – Gears of War with said nephew is a blast and instils in him ideals of self-sacrifice, courage and honour. A current favourite of mine is Mass Effect 2, in which I get to side with a human supremacist organisation (who may have dark designs of their own) and recruit alien talents to combat an existential threat to humanity. When was the last time we encountered such themes in a movie? Libertas had spoken highly of some video games before. Perhaps we could have some game reviews in the spirit of the site’s movie ones.
I’m glad to here that some video games have become more morally responsible.
I stopped playing them when similar elements of the morally abominable “Grand Theft Auto” started showing up in kids games like “Jak and Dexter”.
We often lament on this site how Hollywood lacks imagination, vision and quality. This picture points out the fact that it’s STILL all about the story. It doesn’t matter how you spend on fancy animation and special effects, if the story sucks, the movie sucks. Look at the recent failures in 3D movies. (Clash of the Titans anyone) It’s a lesson for Hollywood. The question is…..Is Hollywood willing to learn? Also is there a bigger visionary than Steve Jobs? When I hear what our media labels a hero, it makes me cringe.
That is an absolutely brilliant piece, David.
I once read that everything Pixar does is to facilitate the creative process — right down to the building’s layout design. Bathrooms are situated, for example, in such a way where people pass each other in certain areas that make it more conducive for them to converse about ideas.
You said: “Corporations must enact some foundational moral, spiritual, or aesthetic commitment.” There simply isn’t a better way to describe how our founders envisioned our society. Our founding principles (self reliance, faith, charity) have been systematically attacked with the goal of propping the state up as the only savior.
To make matters worse, the Republican Party, largely tasked with upholding those principles, have allowed the opponents of our society to dictate the narrative. I wish every conservative politician would read this article, so they’re not bullied into the position of defending corporate America the way leftists portray it. We as conservatives need to do a better job of differentiating between the corporatism and crony capitalism of the left, and the true life-improving free-market empowerment of the individual our founders envisioned.
Vince,
This is well put on your part. “Crony capitalism” is one problem, but a more basic problem is simple greed and shallowness, a quest for profit by any and all means without any thought to countervailing aims or values. In my utopia, there would be completely unfettered free-market capitalism, but profit would merely shadow other motives and concerns. This does not mean that every corporation has to try to save or redeem the world. A genuinely good cookie — as opposed to a mere sugar-delivery device — is worth having and celebrating. I think of the seventeenth-century Dutch painters and the eighteenth-century French ebonistes (furniture makers). These craftsman did not slavishly respond to market demand but created a market for themselves (and created new art forms in the process) out of their own desire to exercise their craft at the highest level. I believe Pixar has done something similar.
Thank you for the reply, David.
When I read writing like this, I feel even more confident about the future because your ideas reflect our founding principles. Your contribution is the formation of them in an elegant, dispassionate, contemporary manner that could crush class warfare rhetoric and the rest of the left’s lies.
I also believe there’s an engine already built onto our society that could bring your utopia: Judeo/Christian ideals of our founders. There are those that say that’s proselytizing, but it’s simply implemented as a philosophy to bring charity, goodwill, and a genuine concern for fellow citizens through the fruits of your individual gifts. It’s why statists attack the church so vehemently — without these ideas, they can promote the state as the savior.