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On this review, the gendering of the robots, and footnote 1, I wonder if you have read Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun? This novel is about a robot nanny and does a really good job of grappling with these questions, as well as the disposability of the robots, and love for individuals qua unique individuals in an atomized, consumerist world. Highly recommend if you haven't already read it.

Also, a pedantic note: "setting aside the troublesome tooth and claw for a kind of mutual aid that has only ever existed within species, and precious few of those" is itself a view of nature that comes out of the industrial revolution and capitalism. Arguably the most successful group of animals of all time is the hymenopterans, the group that includes ants, bees, and wasps--all extremely social. "Nature red in tooth and claw" was a popular line from the Tennyson poem for social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer (the coiner of "survival of the fittest") to appropriate to underscore how nature is, like, super selfish and that's why we shouldn't have any social welfare programs. It's interesting to note that even in the late 19th and early 20th century, many naturalists noted that mutual aid across species was extremely common--it's just that (in the west) they were ignored by the mainstream scientists (who happened to be wealthy and pretty big fans of capitalism themselves.)

One of these was Beatrix Potter, whose work illustrating lichens helped to prove that lichens are mutualistic associations across not just species, but kingdoms (a fungus and a plant). The Royal Society would not accept Potter's work, though, because of her gender and because of the mutualistic conclusions it supported.

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This is excellent discourse. I don't know Ishiguro's book, but appreciate the suggestion.

Fair point about how the predatory aspects of nature can be overemphasized -- and were by Social Darwinists. I've actually written about mutual aid and evolution, using Petr Kropotkin's book to argue for more collaboration between environmental activists and laborers. Pelicans are a good example of mutual aid within a species, since they take turns fishing. I didn't know about Potter's lichen illustrations -- a shame that they were suppressed.

However, there is some truth to the indifferent universe in Crane's "The Open Boat," and one of Aldo Leopold's discoveries in "Thinking like a Mountain" is the importance of wolves in a balanced ecosystem. I'm unaware of mutual aid across predator/prey species, except in the indirect benefits of maintaining overall balance. Maybe you have other examples to share? I suppose as humans we are free to selectively recruit whatever models we find in the natural world, and there does seem to be a resurgence of interest in cooperation among trees to share resources. I'm certainly in favor of mutual aid as a touchstone for human culture. But I think my point still stands about the film's false representation of harmony among wild creatures, particularly those who evolved as predators or prey!

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Oct 8·edited Oct 8Liked by Joshua Doležal

Thanks! I think you'd like "Klara and the Sun" a lot. It also has a lot of classic Ishiguro elements about longing and acceptance of one's fate that you see in "Remains of the Day" and "Never Let Me Go." Also, I'd love to read your work on mutual aid and evolution.

As was the case with Peter Kropotkin and Beatrix Potter, a lot of my favorite examples of mutualism involve small and single-celled organisms, rather than "charismatic megafauna." I think that some of our biases in seeing "nature red in tooth and claw" come from focusing on charismatic big animals, and from our tendency to overvalue dramatic rarer events in forming our views rather than less dramatic more common ones. (As an aside, I think that this also can have a gender component: Ulysses going out and having lethal adventures is a story; the fact that there is cloth made by women like Penelope is just an expected feature of the universe. There could be a story if the cloth isn't made, that's a disruption of events--but never that the cloth is made, day after day, year after year. But I digress.)

Once you introduce the single-celled organisms that, after all, do make up the overwhelming majority of all life on Earth and provide the biochemical basis on which all the charismatic animals depend, it's a lot easier to find examples of mutualism--if harder to draw clear lines about what we mean by predator/prey or even individual/group.

But here's one of my favorites, involving a cute animal and an infecting? colonizing? microbe: The Hawaiian bobtail squid is nocturnal, and needs to obscure its shadow when it swims in shallow water lit by the moon, so it doesn't get eaten by predators--and so that its own prey doesn't get scared away. Happily, it can make a ghostly blue light because it's colonized with Vibrio fischeri bacteria, which produce a costly light-producing molecule. But where did these bacteria come from? Well, the ocean is filled with Vibrio fischeri, but the ocean does not glow. Vibrio fischeri only produce the glowy blue molecule if they grow in an enclosed space to a very high population density. The "light organ" in the squid's head fits the bill. But how does the squid get just the Vibrio fischeri bacteria, and not other ones, there? Here's where it gets weird about what we mean by predator or prey: The squid really cranks some of its *anti-bacterial* immune defenses to make extra mucus. Usually, mucus is a means of trapping and killing microbes, but here, Vibrio fischeri colonizes the mucus. The squid clears its light organ every morning, freeing some of the bacteria, but also ensuring there's not too much mucus. Gotta keep those little germs happy, after all. Except that the squid is using its bacterial-killing mechanisms to do so. And that the only benefit to the Vibrio fischeri bacteria in making the glowy blue chemical is to help the squid not be preyed upon, but be a better predator. But the bacteria only know to make the glowy blue chemical because of signaling with each other--they don't get a signal from the squid. They make a, from their individual perspective, totally worthless but expensive chemical merely because they are surrounded by so many of their peers.

I haven't seen the movie, but I can understand why (a) you're irritated by this scene of kumbaya carnivores, and (b) why there aren't more animated movies involving microbes. That being said, I would love to see Pixar's representation of a bobtail squid. Google it and see how cute!

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Love this! Truly fascinating. And rather paradoxical if this mutual aid results in some other creature’s death (and in depriving one of the squid’s predators from a life-sustaining meal!). There are so many of these seemingly automatic symbioses. The squid is assuredly unconscious of its own calibrations, just as we are host to hordes of beneficial bacteria (to the point that we can’t really be said to die when our brain stops working).

Endless potential for rumination! If you’re curious and have access to JSTOR archives, here is that 2008 essay: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40339146

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"The Wild Robot has most of what you’d expect from a Disney film: an internally conflicted hero, a wisecracking sidekick, and oversized doses of adrenaline and schmalz."

However, it's NOT a Disney movie, but a Dreamworks one. And therefore it's meant to beat Disney at their own game (as they have before), while being more faithful to Brown's novel than Disney itself would have allowed.

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Oct 8·edited Oct 8Author

Haha -- I originally wrote a long aside about how you can't tell the difference anymore (because this is indeed a Dreamworks -- or Universal Pictures -- film). The original sentence still could be read as accurate, but I've since updated "Disney" to "mainstream." Alas, these corrections do not find their way into emails that were sent long before!

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Ah-Universal's distributing them now. They used to be with Paramount,

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Oct 8Liked by Joshua Doležal

I watched this movie with my eldest this weekend too.

I came at it from a different angle. It was the first book series that we read separately and discussed together: our own personal book club if you will. He had read the first one at school. I found the second for him at the library and he devoured it. When I saw how much he was enjoying it, I listened to the audiobooks while I was working just to get caught up. We bought the third one off the shelf at the bookstore when it came out. He was very happy that I had also taken an interest in something he was enjoying. And it was fun to keep my mouth shut while he told me all about what he thought before I spoke my piece.

I have no skin in the game in defending a Disney movie. But as you might imagine the books hold a special value to me and I was much more willing to suspend disbelief when approaching the movie, which he was also excited to see.

I agree that the wildness part was not very well developed in movie and the winter truce was the hardest part to swallow in the reading as well. But I stuck through it because I wanted to share in this special experience with my kid.

It is a short book, but there is still plenty of nuance missing from the movie, as with any adaptation, and Rozz’s character development is less rushed.

As to your note about her voice, Rozz’s answer in the book was actually delivered by the wispy robot on the ship in the movie. In the book, Rozz wrestles with this a bit with this herself, but her voice was specifically chosen because humans found it less intimidating.

As for your notes about fatherhood, this theme is taken up in the first part of the second book. No doubt Peter Brown had to face this question at book signings. Hopefully multiple times. At the end of the movie, we see her working in an industrial farm, but it in the books it is a family farm.

Conservation, as a theme, doesn’t dominate until the third book.

My own note: Our first introduction to Peter Brown was through a book called, “Fred Gets Dressed,” which is a picture book also centered on identity we came across at a local bookstore.

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Very cool that you've had this discussion (or a version of it) with your son! If I'd taken my eldest daughter, she would assuredly have reveled in a close reading of the film. She once noted 41 discrepancies between the original Hercules story and the Disney adaptation. She comes by critical analysis honestly!

I didn't think about this, but the Rozzum line might be inspired (must be, in fact) by Karel Čapek's play R.U.R.

https://www.amazon.com/R-U-R-Rossums-Universal-Penguin-Classics/dp/0141182083

A reader on Inner Life noted this possibility, which seems convincing, since Čapek's robot company is called Rossum's Universal Robots. In fact, he invented the term "robot," although it means "slave" in his 1920 play. He also seemed to share my dim view of technology.

I'm curious about how Brown incorporates conservation in later books? Perhaps I'll have to read the series myself.

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Oct 15Liked by Joshua Doležal

The leader of the migration, who asks Brightbill to fly with him, is the daddy.

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In a way, yes, Longneck is a father figure. But he doesn’t participate in raising Brightbill, waiting until he comes of age. And like most father figures in these stories, Longneck ends up being disposable.

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Oct 15Liked by Joshua Doležal

True enough. So then the other father figure could be the fox. But he’s more like an older brother or cheeky uncle I guess. FWIW I thought this film was beautiful and my nephews really liked it too.

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I hope my admiration for the film’s craft comes through in this review! It is masterfully told in many respects. If we’re really talking about larger representations of parenthood in literature and film, we need to think about the absence of fathers as primary caregivers in popular culture. Longneck takes over after Rozz has done all the hard work. And Fink isn’t competent on his own. Because the book and the film both try to engage these themes, I think they’re worth reading closely!

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Oct 15Liked by Joshua Doležal

Yep I am here for the discussions about representations of fathers as primary care-givers - so, so important. And I say this as a single auntie with, um, cats 🤣

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Great ending to this essay.

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Thank you, Jill!

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Oct 9Liked by Joshua Doležal

Thr absent father theme, with kids facing the challenge of divorce, has been noted in Spielberg's films.

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I so want you to read Duplex by Kathryn Davis. I say more on your post in Inner Life!

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Thank you, Mary!

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Oct 8Liked by Joshua Doležal

I had an immediate association with the frontier thesis, only with robots as the modern day settler.Thanks for this piece.

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Interesting connection! Not sure if you intended this, but there is something perennially fascinating about the learning that comes from primitive conditions. I experienced some of this as a wilderness ranger while working with crosscut saws and axes. It is one of the reasons Aldo Leopold gives for the preservation of wilderness: so that the chance to engage with nature in its rawest forms is not lost.

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