Futurama and Philosophy Read online

  Oh, My God! I Bet I Can Eat Nachos and Go to the Bathroom at the Same Time!

  In a “what if?” imaginary sequence in Season Three’s “Anthology of Interest II,” Professor Farnsworth uses a process of “reverse fossilization” to transform Bender into a human. Viewers then witness the literally fatal consequences of Bender’s complete surrender to his base desires.

  Bender’s awakening to what it means to be a human begins in a relatively benign way. First, he gains an awareness of how his body functions, both in terms of what it can do (such as spit and vomit) and how it reacts to certain stimuli (such as a kiss from Amy, which Bender proclaims “felt great,” while, for some reason, kissing the Professor failed to generate the same effect—for Bender, that is). However, Bender’s journey of self-discovery takes a turn for the worse when the gang decides to visit O’Zorgnax’s Pub. Once at the pub, Bender begins drinking and smoking.

  Though such indulgences are a regular feature of Bender-the-robot’s daily life, Bender-the-human is immediately struck by the pleasurable impact they have on him, exclaiming: “Whoa! This is awesome!” He proceeds to simultaneously eat nachos, drink another beer, and dance (to “Conga!” by Miami Sound Machine), at which point Amy informs him that “part of being human is having self-control.” Immediately thereafter, having been thwarted in his attempt to simultaneously each nachos and go to the bathroom, Bender ignores the request of the Professor to “go home and rest.” Instead, he climbs out a window and runs down the street shouting “Goodbye, moderation!” And thus begins Bender’s descent into self-abuse of genuinely lethal proportion.

  Fast forward to one week later at the Academy of Science, where the Professor, Fry, Leela, Amy, Hermes, and Zoidberg are attending the Nobel Prize Committee awards dinner. No one has seen Bender for the past week, and the Professor is nervously giving his presentation to the Committee, when Fry quietly informs the Professor that Bender has been found and is waiting behind the stage curtain. When the curtain’s pulled back, Bender is revealed to have transformed into a “bloated man-ball” with a pulse of 300, a failing liver, and a cholesterol level of forty pounds!

  Bender has clearly been “free” to indulge in excessive, debauched behavior, which has resulted in his becoming a “bloated man-ball” desperately in need of medical attention. But do his actions represent those of a genuinely free individual? On the surface, the mere fact that he’s been able to so rapidly evolve into his deplorable physical state suggests an answer of “yes.” But it seems somewhat implausible to suggest that a (healthy) person who is thinking “rationally” (that is, in his best interests) would, under normal circumstances, freely engage in behavior that jeopardizes his life.

  Indeed, Bender-the-human dies as a result of his excessive behavior. Such a proposition certainly flies in the face of the widely accepted belief that the most powerful, innate psycho-physiological drive among humans is that of self-preservation. Insofar as that conclusion is persuasive, Bender’s actions aren’t those of a truly “free” person. Obviously, there are no “external” forces constraining his liberty. Rather, it’s his uncontrolled desires and freedom to feed his base appetites—for food, booze, and the rest—that are constraining him from thinking and acting rationally. Put differently, Bender’s rapid physical deterioration and, in turn, untimely death are consequences of his lacking positive liberty.

  Everyone Out of My Body or the Brain Gets It!

  In Season Three’s “Parasites Lost” Fry must decide whether to allow the continued presence of the “intelligent worms” that have invaded his body and given him the ability to win the love of Leela, long the object of his unrequited affection, or expel them and risk losing his newfound relationship.

  After buying and eating an egg salad sandwich from a dispenser in the men’s room at Greasy Sue’s Truck Stop, a group of worms build a miniature city in Fry’s bowel. It quickly becomes apparent that the worms bestow Fry with new talents, such as the power to self-heal a wound, a newfound facility with language, and an ability to play a holophonor, something that “Only a few people in the whole universe can play . . . and they’re not very good at it.” Most importantly, the worms give Fry the ability to eloquently express his love for Leela, both in words and deeds, causing her to proclaim: “Fry. I haven’t felt this happy since double-soup Tuesday at the orphanarium . . . Oh, Fry! I love what you’ve become.”

  However, just when it seems Fry and Leela will consummate their love for one another, Fry recognizes that it might not be his true self with whom Leela has become enamored. Concerned to ensure that such isn’t the case, Fry returns to the Professor’s lab and generates a miniaturized droid of himself, which he inserts into his body, and which subsequently confronts the worm mayor who rules the worm city—“Cologne”—constructed in Fry’s bowel. Fry asks the mayor and the other worms to leave his body, explaining: “I need to know if it’s really me” Leela loves, “or just what you worms have made of me.”

  What Fry wants to determine is whether Leela will love him when he acts as he “normally” would—that is, without the uncontrollable influence of the worms that have taken up residence in his colon. Let’s face it: history clearly suggests that under “normal” circumstances Fry inevitably says and does things that annoy, exasperate, and/or disgust Leela and, in turn, generally prevent him from securing the type of relationship he seeks with her.

  However, Fry’s journey (or, more precisely, that of his miniature droid) to his colon, and his subsequent battle with the worms residing there, indicate his realization that the actions that have enabled him to “win over” Leela aren’t actions that he has undertaken “freely.” That is, his newfound eloquence, physical strength, and musical talent have been generated without his consent. He did not ask the worms to take up residence in his bowel or to “repair” his body and mind; nor did the worms ever seek and receive his permission to do so. In essence, the consequences of the worms’ presence and actions have been imposed upon Fry. However, as with the example of human Bender, there are no “external” obstacles to Fry acting as he wishes.

  Consequently, in this situation Fry possesses negative liberty. Yet, despite the fact that the worms’ presence has allowed Fry to achieve a long-held goal, he recognizes that their influence impedes his freedom to be himself—like human Bender, Fry isn’t “self-governing.” Though he doesn’t necessarily recognize it as such, from Fry’s standpoint, positive liberty is essential to his securing the type of relationship he desires with Leela. Of course, the irony is that once Fry expels the worms and can (and does) act “freely,” his comments produce a rapid dampening of Leela’s romantic interest in him—especially after he proposes to give her one of his super back rubs, just like he “used to give Amy when he was going out with her.”

  Now Back to the Office for an Enjoyable Evening of Fasting and Repentance

  These examples suggest that positive liberty is essential to realizing true freedom. But should positive liberty be preferred to negative liberty as the best measure of genuine freedom?

  One of the principal concerns associated with using positive liberty as the measure for realizing genuine freedom is that such an approach can be used to legitimate coercing people to behave a specific way, despite their expressed wishes to do otherwise. Essentially, this is Rousseau’s idea of forcing people to be free. According to Rousseau, those who lack positive liberty are unable to recognize what’s actually in their best interests; they’re incapable of thinking or, in turn, acting “rationally.” Consequently, it’s appropriate and legitimate to prevent those individuals from acting as they please, in order to enable them to act in a manner that is compatible with their best interests. Rather than representing a restriction of liberty, such coercion actually facilitates the realization of true liberty, or so it’s been claimed.

  Season One’s “Hell Is Other Robots” offers an excellent example of using coercion as a means for realizing “freedom.” At the beginning of the episode, Bender becomes add
icted to “jacking on”—essentially, connecting to an electrical power source and receiving a current of electricity that generates, in Bender’s case, hallucinations and other sensations. After delivering a crate of subpoenas to Sicily 8, the Mob Planet, Leela, Fry and Bender are returning to New New York in the Planet Express ship. However, Bender is suffering withdrawal from his abuse of electricity, and is desperate for another “fix.” In a happy coincidence (for Bender), they encounter an electrical storm, and while Leela seeks to steer clear of it, Bender (unbeknownst to Leela and Fry) climbs onto the fuselage of the ship and manually redirects the engines so as to cause the ship to fly directly into the electrical storm. As the ship enters the storm, Bender, now atop the fuselage, says: “Come on, universe, you big, mostly empty wuss! Gimme all the juice you got!”; his antenna is subsequently struck by lightning (three times), with the resulting electrical surge melting his legs onto the ship’s fuselage.

  Having risked the lives of his co-workers/friends in order to get his “fix,” Bender recognizes that his use of electricity has gotten out of control. After the Planet Express gang conducts what amounts to an intervention, Bender takes a walk alone, and ends up outside of Sparky’s Den (a place where Bender has previously gone to “jack on”), which also happens to be across the street from the Temple of Robotology. Instead of going into Sparky’s Den, he visits the roof of the Temple, and attempts to use the Temple’s neon sign to “jack on,” but is disappointed after the sign quickly short-circuits. It’s then that Bender seems to “hit rock bottom,” exclaiming: “What am I doing? What have I become?” In another happy coincidence, Bender crashes through the roof of the Temple immediately after the Preacherbot asks the congregation “Who will stand up and be saved? Who? Who?”

  Bender subsequently becomes a member of the Temple and agrees to “accept the principles of Robotology on pain of eternal damnation in Robot Hell.” Though Bender’s religious conversion results in his forsaking his debauched ways and gaining “freedom” from his addiction to jacking on, his reformed ways quickly drive his Planet Express co-workers crazy, and they determine they must “get the old Bender back” by re-acquainting him “with a little thing called ‘sleaze’.” To do so, they fabricate a delivery to Atlantic City and, after quickly being exposed to multiple temptations, Bender reverts to his wicked, wicked ways. The next morning when Leela and Fry visit Bender’s hotel room, he’s nowhere to be found. It turns out that Bender has been knocked out and taken to Robot Hell.

  Bender’s abduction and transportation to Robot Hell are a consequence of his failure to behave a certain way: namely, in a manner consistent with the principles of Robotology. Requiring Bender to act in such a manner is understood to be legitimate because it “frees” him to think and act rationally. After all, a rationally thinking and acting individual would not voluntarily risk the lives of his friends, as did Bender when he directed the Planet Express ship into the electrical storm. However, in requiring Bender to act according to the gospel of The Good Book 3.0, he’s being coerced, via the threat of eternal damnation in Robot Hell, into forsaking what seems to be his “natural” behavior—in other words, he’s being “forced to be free.”

  For many, such “freedom” is no freedom at all. Isaiah Berlin aggressively argued that history clearly demonstrates that the idea of positive liberty has often been used to establish totalitarian regimes that seek to realize an “ideal” society, with horrific consequences—think of the “reign of terror” following the French Revolution, or the USSR under the leadership of Lenin and, in turn, Stalin.

  Freedom, Freedom, Freedom, Oy!

  While providing many examples of the potential problems accompanying a lack of positive liberty, Futurama doesn’t seem to offer a clear or definitive position regarding whether positive liberty is to be preferred to negative liberty as the best measure of genuine freedom. Perhaps as is the case with many “either/or” propositions, the best approach is one that encompasses both options.

  Which is to say, perhaps genuine freedom is best realized through a combination of positive and negative liberty. There can be no doubt that Fry’s addiction to Slurm, and Bender’s addiction to “jacking on” constrained their freedom in a discernible and problematic way. But the attempt to force—via the threat of spending an eternity in Robot Hell—Bender to behave in what for him seems an “unnatural” manner also ended badly.

  In the final analysis, though people may disagree about which type of liberty is most important to living a “good” life, we can likely all agree with Zoidberg when he states: “no punishment could be worse than denying my freedom.”

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  Futurama and the Economy of Trash

  JASON BUCHANAN

  In Brian Doherty’s 1999 interview with the creators of Futurama, Matt Groening claimed the show was designed to be “just another spiffy TV show . . . that’s going to honor and satirize the conventions of science fiction.” However, viewers quickly discovered that Futurama was much more, especially in regards to its dedication to examining and discussing important political and social issues.

  As Groening said in the same interview, he designed the show to use—and at time spoof—the themes of science fiction to speak about “the way things are now, which is a mix of the wonderful and horrible.” Throughout its run, Futurama has prominently engaged some of the toughest and most controversial environmental issues of our time, and it’s given us a glimpse of how twenty-first-century damage done by society to the environment will affect the thirty-first century. Although Fry, Leela, Bender, and the rest of the gang usually escape their environmental crises unharmed, the show strongly hints that we, the current and future viewers, may not be as lucky as the cast of Futurama.

  The characters of Futurama have faced extinction from global warming, an overpopulation of pine trees, and a giant ball of trash coming from outer space. What’s especially interesting is that these near-disasters occur in a universe that’s mastered recycling. As Leela informs Fry, in New New York “nothing just gets thrown away.” And Leela isn’t kidding: even the sandwiches in Futurama are made from “old, discarded sandwiches” (“A Big Piece of Garbage,” Season One). So, if the universe of Futurama has mastered recycling, why do these ecological disasters keep happening? If mastering recycling isn’t enough to save the Earth, what must we do to stop the continued damage to the environment?

  The writers of Futurama ask viewers to connect environmental damage to the larger workings of society, especially in regards to how we make and buy things. In the episode “A Big Piece of Garbage,” New New York is threatened by the return of a giant ball of trash that was shot into space roughly five hundred years earlier. This episode slyly underlines how green technologies, especially when tied to capitalism, can’t, by themselves, reduce the chances of an ecological crisis. Capitalism has been a common target for the writers of Futurama—as the depictions of MomCorp and the Season Three episode “Future Stock” attest. Capitalism is connected to an economy of trash, which is designed to reveal how current modes of consumption will always outstrip our ability to recycle goods in a “green” manner. The giant trash ball is the dangerous remainder of all the goods purchased and made during the twentieth century.

  In typical Futurama style, this focus on an economy of trash is a gentle, yet pointed critique of the inability of capitalist modes of waste disposal to promote lasting environmental improvement. Despite New New York’s efficiency in recycling, the giant ball of trash can only be stopped by creating and sending another giant ball of trash into space in order to knock the first ball into the Sun. This plan creates a sort of time loop in which the citizens of the city can solve the trash problem only by recreating the very conditions that threatened the city in the first place. This loop shows that since New New Yorkers haven’t changed their system of consumption, they’ll never escape what Fry calls “the twentieth-century spirit” that makes trash an integral component of the economy. In this episode the symbolism of the giant trash
ball, and the humorous attempts to destroy it, combine to present a criticism of how capitalism damages the environment.

  The Most Wasteful Society in the History of the Galaxy

  When discussing the relationship between society and the environment, it becomes clear that humans can no longer think about nature as a separate realm disconnected from human actions and politics. In their book Third World Political Ecology, Raymond Bryant and Sinéad Bailey assert that “environmental and developmental concerns are inseparable—and . . . any change in environmental conditions must affect the political and economic status quo.”

  Bryant and Bailey argue that the environment is politically connected to society in more ways than just laws about deforestation, recycling, and pollution. As these authors see it, existing laws and regulations privilege capitalism’s need to create, produce, and consume newer and newer commodities.

  The flip side of this focus on newer items is, as noted by Elizabeth Royte in Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash, “consigning expired and unwanted goods to their fates in a landfill or incinerator.” Although there are several practical reasons for this fascination with new products, such as changes in fashion or technology, Royte argues that the most fundamental reason for this desire for new stuff is “the plain economic fact that it is often cheaper to buy something new than to repair something old.” In other words, a political approach to the environment forces us to question how the patterns of our life, what we buy and what we sell, actively (and often adversely) affects our environment.

  Near the beginning of the episode, Fry uses Farnsworth’s Smelloscope—a telescope-like object where you search with your nose—to randomly discover the worst-smelling object in the universe. Farnsworth quickly deduces the object is a giant ball of garbage that was sent into space, and shows a video clip on the Internet, titled “The Great Garbage Crisis of 2000.” This video expresses a political ecology via a brief look back at Old New York, which the announcer in the video calls “the most wasteful society in the history of the galaxy.” (Oddly, the episode “Crimes of the Hot” in Season Four also uses a funny “old” video to critique contemporary attitudes on the environment.)