Biggering And Biggering: The Real Problem With The Lorax Movie Tie-Ins

or

Business Is Business, And Business Must Grow

by Michael Bennett Cohn

Universal Pictures, over the past several days, has recouped the entire $70 million budget of The Lorax, the animated adaptation of the classic Dr. Seuss book that was first published in 1971. So, to Universal, the adaptation was de facto a good idea, successfully executed. The viewing public who has not yet seen the movie is now implicitly invited to share in this success, basking in studio’s reflected glory for the price of a ticket. Ostensibly, everybody wins: the studio, the audience, the seventy partner companies (including IHOP, Mazda, and Target) selling Lorax tie-in products, and the environment. And yet, this circle-jerk of profit-as-transcendence is a manifestation of exactly the sort of dollar-sign-eyed myopia that the source material was meant to attack.

There’s an old saw in Hollywood, used to pacify idealistic screenwriters: If you want to send a message, call Western Union. And yet, The Lorax is a didactic book, and the revenues of the opening weekend resulted from a marketing campaign based ostensibly around that book’s message. Most people who have seen the movie at this point were planning to see it before it was released; they’re not acting on word of mouth; they’re reacting directly to the marketing.

So I propose an alternate metric for success. This metric is used, not to evaluate Universal’s marketing savvy, but the credulity of the audience that spent $70.7 million this weekend, during a recession, on a movie that had not been seen by anyone they knew, based on their assessment that the branding they’d been subjected to over the preceding weeks, on TV and in various retail establishments, indicated that their beloved children’s classic had been well taken care of. Were they right?

I’m going to focus here on Universal’s partnership with Seventh Generation, because it’s ostensibly less ridiculous than most of the others. Seventh Generation, a relatively “green” company that makes various cleaning products, is currently peddling a line of dish washing soap sporting the Lorax Seal Of Approval. At the boycott-intensive bastion of Brooklyn shopping integrity, the Park Slope Food Co-op, the little orange guy can, right now, be clearly seen waving to shopper-owners from the bio-degradable Seventh Generation dish washing fluid containers near the front of the main checkout aisle.

Yet it is nonsensical for The Lorax to endorse products of any kind, no matter how green. He doesn’t believe in “products.” And for him, the destruction of the biosphere is not the problem; it is a symptom. The problem is people who want to remake the trees and water and animals and everything else into commodities. People, that is, who would look at a character in a modern folk tale celebrated across generations as a symbol of integrity, and think, Now here’s a resource worth mining.

The Lorax’s nemesis, The Once-Ler, is the anti-Dobbler: all he does is buy, sell, and process stuff. He moves constantly, but (in the book and the loyal 1972 made-for-TV adaptation) only when some thing that he has built or bought or dominated is transporting him. (To be seen using the means of self-locomotion given to him by nature would contradict his inherent drive to exploit in all situations.) He has no interest in the inherent value of anything; everything to The Once-Ler is either raw material or product.

The Lorax first appears by popping out of the stump of the first Truffula tree chopped down, but significantly, it’s not the chopping of the tree to which he is reacting. He waits to appear until after the Once-Ler has converted the raw Truffula material into a thneed. (“The instant I’d finished, I heard a ga-Zump!”) The problem is not that the tree is dead; it’s that it has been converted into something useless:

“I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues,

And I’m asking you, sir, at the top of my lungs” -

he was very upset as he shouted and puffed -

“What’s that THING you’ve made out of my Truffula tuft?”

The thneed is the ultimate commodity: completely unnecessary, yet infinitely versatile. Before you hear about it, you have no desire for it, yet once you own it, there are no limits to what you can do with it.

Near the story’s end, the now-repentant Once-Ler gives the kid a Truffula seed and tells him to grow a forest. But, in that new world of plentiful forests, where will the people live, what will they wear, and what will they eat? Will they use money? Is there any sell-able thing, the synthesis of which The Lorax would grant is more worthwhile than the raw material that created it? Truffula fruit-flavored roll-ups? Free-range Swami-Swans? Line-caught Humming-Fish? Humanely harvested Barbaloot pelts?

And if the Once-Ler is so concerned about the fate of the last Truffula seed, which he inexplicably possesses, why doesn’t he plant it himself? Perhaps he can only approach the idea of living a better life in a better world in the abstract. Now living in his Lerkin, wearing clothes he makes himself out of miff-muffered moof (as opposed to thneeds made in one of his factories), he charges the boy a fee of fifteen cents, a nail, and the shell of a great great great grandfather snail to hear a story that he’s eager to tell anyway. The Once-Ler is trying to create an alternate lifestyle, one that isn’t based on consumption and profit, but he can’t figure out how to do it. Being an addled, guilt-wracked consumer who is himself no more palpable than his former enemy, The Once-Ler comprises what ought to be the entire market for Seventh Generation Lorax-endorsed cleaning products.

Seuss leaves the young reader to grapple with the question: How can I apply the Lorax’s ideals in my life, in my world? This grappling is really the whole point of the story. Disappointingly, this vital anxiety is muted in an abominable new book (which I found in the special “The Lorax” section at Barnes & Noble): How to Help the Earth — by the Lorax. A sample:

Spend less time in the shower

and you’ll still get clean.

Try a four-minute shower.

You’ll see what I mean.

The language here lacks the punch we found in the original, but then, we have to remember that the words here are credited, not to Dr. Seuss, but to the fictional character that he created. One suspects that The Lorax doesn’t read much, and wonders if this poetry is his first effort. How to Help the Earth, according to its cover, was written “with” Tish Rabe, who also wrote the bizarrely remedial Look For The Lorax, directed at children who are too young to handle the main text, and Oh, Baby, The Places You’ll Go: A Book To Be Read In Utero (no comment).

The advice in How to Help the Earth is simple, easy to follow, and mostly beside the point. Would reusable batteries and turning down home thermostats have kept the Swami-Swans singing? Would donating old clothes and recycling soda cans have saved the Humming-Fish from Gluppity-Glupp (not to mention Schloppity-Schlopp)? Can parents use this stuff to explain to their kids why an oil plume had its way with the Gulf of Mexico for five months in 2010? The Once-Ler doesn’t appear in this book, presumably because he has been reduced from an ego-maniacal industrialist to a naughty devil on the shoulder of every child. Certainly, recycling and energy conservation are values worth inculcating, but only by a low-level do-gooder operative like Big Bird. The Lorax doesn’t have time for such crap. He deals directly with The Once-Ler; we never see him confronting the thneed-buying consumers, or even any of the Once-Ler’s many employees/family members. If Random House wants to really provide a guide to lending real-world tangibility to The Lorax’s ideology, a better title might be Once-Lers in the Real World: How to Find and Smoke Out The Motherfuckers.

And yet, The Lorax speaks for the trees, but he doesn’t take any action to protect them. This is a distinction Seuss made on purpose. Books like How to Help the Earth and promotional partnerships in which The Lorax endorses green products carry with them the supposition that Seuss meant for The Lorax to advocate some specific action, but that he just never got around to writing that part.

I don’t claim to have an exact prescription for how to convert The Lorax’s abstract ideology into real-world action. But I am sure of this: it shouldn’t involve buying anything.

Perhaps The Lorax would ask why we’re buying dishwashing liquid at all, instead of making our own out of baking soda, borax, and vinegar. He might ask why, if we’re not making our own, we’re not buying in bulk. And why, if we’re not buying in bulk, we’re buying from a company in another state that burns truck or airplane fuel to send their redundant product to our local retailer. And, most importantly of all, he might ask why we are allowing personal responsibility to be defined in terms of a choice between brands.

The Seventh Generation promotional tie-in is what Slavoj Zizek calls “cultural capitalism at its purest”: you don’t just buy dishwashing liquid; you buy redemption for being complicit in the vast system that makes the purchase of branded dishwashing liquid — this kind or any other — seem necessary to begin with.

Watching the movie should not feel like part of the solution, either. Kids (and parents) should not leave the theater believing that they have just helped to make the world a better place, or that, based on the experience they’ve just had, they are even a little bit closer to doing so. One of the most unique and beautiful things about The Lorax is that it is a children’s book with an unhappy ending. The Lorax and all his friends, we’re told, may come back, but the crucial part there is not the words come back, it is the word may. The last Truffula seed, passed from the Once-Ler to the unnamed boy at the end of the book, is a seed of anxiety planted in the reader’s stomach. If the movie is any good, kids will leave the theater a little disturbed. And when their parents reach for the Lorax-branded dish soap, imagining how delighted their kids will be to see their favorite new movie star on the bottle, they should feel something at the pit of their stomachs too.

If they don’t, then no one who grew up loving the books should consider the movie a success, no matter how many box-office records it breaks.