art history and ELECTROMA -or- that one scene in the desert, explained

[piroteki]

so this is not necessarily a breakthrough discovery--it was, after all, explicitly referenced in the Stop Smiling interview (http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/story_detail.php?id=1139) (7th paragraph, beginning with "Wall-E"). but i admittedly don't really read the interviews, and i happened to stumble upon this discover independently, so i'm pretty proud of myself for making the connection. :P

in Electroma, there was that weird scene in the middle of the desert where everyone was "WAT"/"WTF?"--the somewhat obscured close-up of a female nude. here is the explanation:

it is an allusion/tribute to Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du monde, which i am specifically avoiding linking directly because it's NSFW. (it's artistic/not porn, but just to be on the safe side of things...) there's your warning to those of you underage or uninterested. the wiki article on it is academic and about the nude as art, so let's be mature about this. (we are presumably all adults here, or at least old enough to know better, yes? :P)

just looking at the painting, it's pretty obvious where their idea came from, and what they're doing--ok, it's probably just Thomas. :P the title translates to "The Origin of the World," and it immediately recalls birth/origin of a human.

i'm not a film theory person at all, so i can't totally speak to what it exactly means in the film, but it seems highly likely to be a part of the process of becoming human--i mean, after all, that's what birth is. it's sort of obvious even without knowing the Courbet allusion, anyway. but i'll leave discussion of the finer details up to you.

[digital*aria]

OHH. i THOUGHT the name of that painting sounded familiar! that's the one i always pass by in musee d'orsay while everyone's always snickering at it. makes sense, now that i think about it.

[rustypolished]

I love this idea - There so much about Electroma that references a really beautiful sort of respect for art and, beyond that, humanity, I think this makes total sense.

It's interesting to me, really, that they kind of force you to subconsciously deal with the paradox of creation and destruction through one set of images alone. The desert is so devoid of time and life but it's where the film starts and ends - the town and the population of the town is so fleeting in the scope of the movie, and honestly quite ominous - It makes the arc of the story carry this sting that to me is a microscopic look at the human experience: even though we strive to connect ourselves to other people, to exist in a community, and to find purpose outside of ourselves by whatever means that community provides, we come into this world and we leave it alone. Even the fact that the hero robots spend the majority of the movie in the same frame, just the fact that they never actually communicate with another is kind of a testament to that isolation - And really, just for that, maybe the robots were more human than they ever really knew.

D: ...that all sounds super melodramatic. I'm sorry, ugh, I wrote a paper about the passage of time and the existential meanings in Electroma for one of my film classes and I just love talking about it so much. SO MUCH. I love this thread.

[Camerabob1]

I thought it was a bush. The thought of it being... THAT, makes me think "Would Daft Punk really do that?"

[Hiroko]

At first I thought it was a tree in a canyon. Then I thought, "Oh, you dirty men!"

But NOW I love the idea. Connecting that image to birth and a beginning of humanity really takes that whole scene to another level of meaning. This brings to mind the story "The Bicentennial Man," by Isaac Asimov. The titular robot in the story - This is a spoiler! - becomes human at the end by arranging and carrying out his death. While I know the themes life and death are inverse, perhaps the robots' "deaths" in Electroma is how they achieve some kind of humanity.

[NOACCEPTANCE772]

Dude there is some where an image on the internet of Guy and Thomas playing a piano
with a nude lady on the top (with undies only)And on Thomas's helmet it's written OK in LED
while on that of Guy it's a heart.Well they're French and that's what the French always think of.

[Iwasderezzed]

the version I saw didn't include the naked lady :/

i feel cheated