Futurama and Philosophy Read online

  The video Farnsworth shows succinctly presents a key element—namely, that our current mode of waste disposal, such as landfills and incinerators, doesn’t address the need to dispose of waste. The video shows Old New York suffocating under trash bags while people carelessly throw trash into the streets. The voice-over accompanying the video asserts the crisis began when the landfills could no longer hold any more trash. To fix this problem, scientists devised a plan to send the trash into the biggest landfill of all, outer space. At its core, this video debunks the idea that trash is disposed of when nobody can see or smell it. The citizens of Old New York don’t get rid of their trash; they simply move it to a far away location.

  The plan to blast the garbage into space represents a humorous and biting portrayal of the “waste stream.” Where many see the trash on the curb as the end of the line for their garbage, Heather Rodgers argues in her book Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage that the curb is just the beginning of a “lengthy and complex system that is . . . integral to the functioning of our daily lives and the metabolism of the market.”

  Basically, the waste stream is the way capitalist society regulates its “dead commodities” in order to make way for new ones. The video makes this point in the final ominous comments from the announcer: “Some experts claimed the ball might return to Earth some day, but their concerns were dismissed as depressing.” The use of the word “depressing” has a double meaning, as evidenced by the sarcastic inflection given to it by the announcer. The experts’ view was depressing because it signaled both the return of the trash ball and the feelings of a society forced to confront the waste produced by their collective lifestyle.

  In fact, the logic of the episode connects both meanings of the word depressing to stress that the trash ball is a symbolic image of all the waste produced in a heavily capitalistic society. The citizens of Old and New New York have not changed the pattern of their waste stream, they’ve simply enlarged the geographical area of it. Hence, much like our current system of waste disposal today, the scientists of Old New York have merely moved the trash to a different area of the waste stream and left the future generation of Leela, Fry, and Farnsworth to deal with the consequences.

  Junk Isn’t Garbage

  After discovering the looming threat of the trash ball, Farnsworth and the crew visit Mayor Poopenmeyer to warn him about the threat to New New York. Eventually, everyone decides on a risky plan to blow up the trash ball in the most Michael Bay-type fashion by planting a bomb on the trash ball while it’s in space.

  Although a minor point, the spoof of Bay’s film Armageddon serves to advance the theme of political ecology insofar as this disaster, unlike the one presented in the movie, is a man-made disaster. As expected, the crew of Planet Express is chosen to undertake the “suicidally dangerous” mission. Once the crew lands on the trash ball, the show, in a great twist, stages a debate between Fry and Leela about what items actually constitute trash.

  Upon landing on the trash ball, Fry immediately rejoices and proclaims: “It’s not filth. It’s a glorious monument to the achievements of the twentieth century!” In this simple declaration, Fry redefines the trash ball from garbage to a giant ball of great, if old, commodities. For Fry, the trash ball is not “filth” or garbage, because many items in the ball, such as Beanie Babies and Bart Simpson dolls, carry the sheen of nostalgia that makes old commodities valuable again. Fry believes “junk isn’t garbage,” because “junk” can be reclaimed from the waste stream and re-sold as a valuable commodity. The “glorious monument” of the trash ball is found in its quality to be a floating “junk shop” that is filled with old items that have nostalgic value as fashionable or kitschy commodities.

  Yet, Fry’s interpretation of the trash ball is not the only one presented to the audience. Unlike Fry, Leela doesn’t view the trash ball as a floating “junk shop” filled with neat curios from the twentieth century. For her, everything in the ball is garbage. She counters Fry’s enthusiastic appreciation of Beanie Babies and Bart Simpson dolls with the claim: “This stuff was garbage when it was new.” Leela has always been the most environmentally savvy of the Futurama characters—her conservationist attitudes can be seen in the episodes “The Problem with Popplers” and Season Three’s “The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz.”

  Leela understands that the word “garbage” not only refers to disgusting objects but also to a quality found in all objects, as all objects are designed to be consumed and then, at some point, discarded. In other words, Leela’s claim that everything on the trash ball was “garbage when it was new” mirrors Rodger’s assertion that “garbage reveals the market’s relation to nature; it teases out the environmental politics hidden inside manufactured goods.” By looking at garbage as a quality inherent in all commodities, it’s possible to see how, in order to keep the system of consumption and production moving, all commodities must become worthless trash at some point.

  Eventually, the debate between Fry and Leela gets settled in a slapstick manner when Fry, while searching for more treasures, gets caught on the plastic rings of a six-pack container. After Leela saves him from choking, Fry joins her side in the debate over junk and garbage by simply proclaiming, “Let’s blow it up.” This debate is the central point of the episode as it represents a moment when all the main characters of the episode work to dispose of trash. Unfortunately, a mix up by Farnsworth—he sets the bomb’s timer for 52 seconds and not 25 minutes—leads Bender to panic and throw the bomb into space where it harmlessly explodes.

  That’s the Twentieth-Century Spirit

  The failure to destroy the trash ball keeps the focus of the episode on the relationship between production, consumption, and garbage. Since the trash ball wasn’t destroyed, Farnsworth theorizes that an equally large object possessing a similar consistency could knock the trash ball into the Sun. Surprisingly, Fry devises a plan to save the day by making more trash to stop the threat of destruction by the trash ball. However, the rest of the Futurama characters are mystified by Fry’s plan because “Manhattan has been trash free for five hundred years!”

  The reason that the Mayor and, by proxy, the citizens of New New York are unable to understand how to “make garbage” is due to the hyper-efficiency of their recycling system. Their perfect system of recycling obscures the reality that commodities retain an element of obsolesce that will, in the future, turn them into trash once they have become outdated. The very objects the New New Yorkers understand as recycled material are the pieces of garbage that will be put together to make the new giant ball. The inability of the New New Yorkers to understand garbage underscores the reality that recycling is a step in the right direction towards fixing our environmental issues, but it isn’t the final solution because it still contributes to the production of new garbage.

  As Rodgers points out, despite being the focal point in many “green” programs, recycling can’t keep pace with the staggering output of trash we produce. According to Rodgers, “80 percent of U.S. products are used once and then discarded,” and recycling programs often lack buyers for their raw material (plastic and paper), which means many supposedly recycled items still end up in a landfill or incinerator. Futurama highlights the failings of recycling by having a society with a perfect system of recycling still face an ecological disaster. The episode compels the audience to reflect on how society must do more than promote recycling to fix the issues created by our production of waste.

  The key element in Fry’s plan is that anything, from Slurm cans to a picture of Mayor Poopenmeyer’s wife, can become trash once it’s put into the waste stream. Since anything can become trash in Fry’s plan, the episode argues that many things that aren’t normally considered trash, like family photos, all have the potential to become useless trash. Even in New New York’s perfect system of recycling, all products and goods have the hidden potential to become garbage. Again, Futurama is making the point that trash isn’t a bug in the system of buying and selling goods, but an essen
tial feature in any capitalist system.

  The endgame of Fry’s plan results in building the perfect trash ball that’s successfully used to knock the original ball into the Sun. Yet, even though Mayor Poopenmeyer celebrates Fry’s “twentieth-century garbage making skills,” Leela notes that they’ve just recreated another dangerous trash ball that could return to Earth. Similar to the scientists in the video about the original trash ball, Leela’s concerns are shouted down as depressing. She’s told that the new ball is “none of our concern” because it won’t return for “another hundred years!” The quick fix of the new trash ball represents current attitudes on waste removal, where “out of sight, out of mind” is the dominant mode of thinking. In reality, Fry’s plan has staved off the current disaster, but it accomplished that feat at the expense of creating a new disaster (in the form of a second giant ball of trash).

  The key irony in Fry’s plan is that it creates a kind of time loop where the only way to stop an ecological disaster is to double-down on the very same tactics that caused the problem. Fry’s thinking is symbolic of contemporary responses to pollution and garbage. For instance, there’s a growing technological industry devoted to making landfills and incineration plants more effective and “green.” However, these new technologies, much like recycling, cannot keep pace with trash production. Rodgers notes that these advances in waste management hide the essential question regarding trash: “What if we didn’t have so much trash to get rid of?” If the citizens of Old New York had asked this question, then the disaster facing New New York may have been avoided.

  The final line of the episode ties together the overall critique found throughout the episode. After summarily dismissing Leela’s (quite legitimate) concerns, Fry praises everybody by saying “that’s the twentieth-century spirit!”

  Essentially, Fry is praising the New New Yorkers for adopting the ignorant stance of the Old New Yorkers. In fact, Fry’s comment works to downgrade the advances of New New York’s system of recycling by praising them for embracing a system that makes, not reduces, garbage. The “twentieth-century spirit” is a willful ignorance about the connection between society and nature. It’s a spirit that just wants to move trash to another location. By labeling this idea the “twentieth-century spirit,” Futurama compels its audience to not follow this spirit, but rather to act like Leela and question how all the aspects of our lifestyle affect the environment.

  Futurama, Garbage, and Capitalism

  “A Big Piece of Garbage” is a wonderful episode that nicely encapsulates Futurama’s criticism of how capitalism hurts the environment. It’s a humorous and smart critique that wants viewers to reject the “twentieth-century spirit” and start thinking about why we produce so much trash. By asking the audience to think about trash from a different perspective, Futurama is using the form of a cartoon to present an argument about political ecology.

  The giant trash ball and Fry’s plan to destroy it are effective metaphors for how our society refuses to understand how trash is made and produced. In the words of Rodgers, this episode shows that trash “has the power to unmask the exploitation of nature that is crystallized in all commodities.” The episode uses the trash ball to show how our commitment to newer and newer stuff is dangerous and unhealthy for the environment. Just like the two giant trash balls that threaten the characters of Futurama, we’re threatened by overfilling landfills and pollution-creating incinerators. At its core, the symbolism of destruction by a giant ball of trash shows how no real movement toward a green future can begin without first examining how trash is created as a commodity.

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  Zapp Brannigan’s Big Book of War

  DANIEL P. MALLOY

  Fire all weapons and set a transmission frequency for my victory yodel.

  —ZAPP BRANNIGAN, “Rebirth” (Season Six)

  The future is a violent place. That might explain how Zapp Brannigan rose from Captain to twenty-five-star General between his first and second appearances on Futurama. Wars and invasions seem commonplace.

  Futurama’s Earth has been invaded multiple times (by the Decapodians, the Brain Spawn, space cats, and three times by the Omicronians) and has itself invaded a number of other planets (Spheron 1, Tarantulon 6, and the failed pre-emptive strike against the Neutral Planet, for example). Some of these invasions have been justified—such as the Omicronians’ second invasion in Season Two’s episode “The Problem with Popplers.” Others were motivated by far less noble causes—such as the Omicronians’ first invasion in Season One’s “When Aliens Attack.”

  Aside from invasions, there’re a multitude of rebellions, revolutions, guerilla campaigns, and a whole host of wars that have not involved Earth at all, such as the genocidal nuclear conflict waged by the Shrimpkins (“Godfellas,” Season Three).

  Finally, wars end. In Futurama, as in real life, wars have very different aftermaths. In the invasions of Spheron 1 and Tarantulon 6, for instance, the Earthican forces took the Spheres’ home planet and the Spiderians cultural artifacts. The mutant uprising in New New York led to mutants being granted access to the City’s surface (“The Mutants Are Revolting,” Season Six), and the robot rebellion in Season Two’s “Mother’s Day” had no discernible consequences—even for Mom, the would-be world conqueror who instigated the entire mess.

  Defeating the Pacifists of the Gandhi Nebula

  People use the language of war all the time. Aside from wars between and within nations, we also have price wars, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on Christmas, and we used to have a war on poverty, though that seems to have disappeared (the war, not the poverty).

  Somehow, as comedian George Carlin pointed out (Jammin’ in New York), war has become our primary metaphor for solving problems. We could draw one of two conflicting conclusions from this fact: either the concept of war is so well-defined that it’s useful for describing other things, or the concept of war is so murky the we feel justified in using it to describe just about everything. The concept of war is clearly a murky one (pun intended), which is unfortunate for anyone discussing war and philosophy.

  Philosophers love sharp definitions, and they love clarity. Before discussing anything, philosophers like to know what it is they’re talking about—it avoids confusion later on. So, in thinking about war, it makes sense to lay the ground work by defining what war is. It’s not as easy as you might think.

  The only common element in all of the aforementioned “wars” is conflict, but it takes more than conflict to make a war—otherwise the ongoing (and seemingly entirely one-sided) animosity between Zoidberg and Hermes would be a war, which it plainly isn’t. So there must be some other conditions a conflict has to meet in order to be properly or legitimately labeled a war.

  One problem with the Zoidberg-Hermes conflict seems to be its size. Individuals fighting one another may be a part of a war, but they’re hardly enough to constitute one. Wars usually involve lots of people fighting one another—though it’s difficult to set a minimum numerical threshold. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to say that, for instance, a fight involving 200 people isn’t a war, but 201 is. Similarly, even if everyone on a given planet were fighting one another, that wouldn’t necessarily entail that a war is going on. It may be a planetary-wide riot—of the type we’ve seen a few times in Futurama.

  Rather than sheer number of participants defining a given conflict as a war, there must be some quality of the participants that makes a conflict a war. In fact, participants in a war seem to share three qualities: they are organized, they are political, and they are violent. So, we can say that a war is an organized, political, violent conflict that usually takes place on a massive scale.

  By this definition, there’ve been many wars in the Futurama universe. Among other conflicts that count as war, we would include most of the invasions of Earth, the Earthican conflicts with the Spheres and the Spiderians, the robot rebellion, and the ongoing conflict between the Brains and the Nibblonians.

  Altho
ugh these instances are numerous, not all of the conflicts in Futurama are wars. Some of the conflicts depicted fail to satisfy one condition or another. The Martian and mutant uprisings, for example, although plainly political, large-scale, and organized, involved very little violence and, so, wouldn’t qualify as wars. However, either of these conflicts could very well have escalated into a war. Both the Martians and the mutants seemed perfectly prepared to engage in acts of violence to get their demands met. But would such a war be justified?

  Our Only Option Is a Thrilling Space Battle

  War is serious business, and not to be undertaken lightly. Philosophers down the ages have given a lot of thought to determining when going to war is the right thing to do. First off, going to war is only justified if there is a just cause. Going to war to defend yourself is justified; going to war to conquer your neighbors isn’t. There are also less clear situations, such as one country going to war to defend another, or to defend citizens of another country against their government, or to prevent future aggression (a pre-emptive strike).

  An excellent example of a war that doesn’t seem to have a just cause is provided by Season Two’s “War Is the H-Word.” In Zapp’s mission briefing before the invasion of Spheron-1, he admits that “it’s a desolate, ugly little planet with absolutely no natural resources or strategic value.” When asked about the Spheres themselves, Zapp responds, “We know nothing about their language, their history, or what they look like. But we can assume this: they stand for everything we don’t stand for.” In other words, the invasion of Spheron-1 seems to have been motivated by nothing whatsoever. “They told me you guys look like dorks” is not a just cause for war.