Defining What's Dirt-y in Wall-E

    There’s not a human in sight. Wall-E, an aging service robot, chases a strange red laser through a desolate wasteland. He’s captivated; it stands out like a sore thumb amidst the brown soil, a glorified piecemeal of mechanical scraps and rocks. Above him, sunlight unsuccessfully tries to scrape its way through the thick clouds of dust. The horizon is completely obstructed by skyscraper after skyscraper, the largest of which their bricks are bales of trash, mortared together by Wall-E’s sheer will to keep serving his duty to organize dirt.

    The anthropocene has left Earth a floating trash can. Their descent into a monstrous, self-destructive form of capitalism has ruined the planet and caused them to leave it behind. They’ve gone off on their humanity-sized intergalactic ship, cruising in convenience and aimlessness. Meanwhile, Wall-E, the only left of his kind, roams around looking for scraps he can put into his compactor and construct towers out of them. He occasionally collects his own trinkets that he finds as peculiar reminders of human cultures—Atari games, Rubix cubes, Twinkies, and the like. The only thing he has to keep him company is a small cockroach, which is also presumably the last of his kind.

    One thing has gotten out of control in this fictional Earth—dirt. According to Mary Douglas, author of the book Purity and Danger, derives from the Durkheimian tradition her original definition of dirt as “matter out of place,” (Douglas 2002:44). There’s a distinction between dirt as disorder and cleanliness as order, which mirrors Durkheim’s concept of the sacred and profane he explains in his 1912 magnum opus the Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Subjectivity of what a group deems as sacred is emphasized here, where he says, “anything can be sacred,” meaning that there is nothing that is arbitrarily sacred. In opposition to the sacred is the profane, or that which is mundane and of no special significance (Durkheim 2008:151). Because of Durkheim’s study in religion, he examines the inner workings of religious systems, but his point in Forms is to show that even secular society has a certain religiosity to it in its functioning. As a new Durkheimian, Douglas extended this idea and applied it to the sociocultural concept of purity. She later refined her old definition to clarify that any type of organization of dirt is also inherently classification, which can reveal the ways in which a group conceptualizes social organization. In her work, she uses the body as a means to communicate this, claiming that “all margins of the body are dangerous” in that they represent opportunities for contamination and thus, disorder. That’s why in different societies there are different rules about what goes in and out of the body.

    For most humans, once objects are thrown out into a trash can, they stay out. There’s no re-entering their living space. This mirrors the body metaphor, as the door to their home is like the margins of the body Douglas described. This is because trash is dirt, and dirt in their home would be disorderly. Wall-E has a quite different idea of what’s dirt and what’s not though—he finds previously discarded trash in piles and in fact takes them home, which would be like the re-entry into the house for a human, or re-entry of excreta into the human body. He even takes the trash, puts it in his compactor, and makes it into blocks of trash, showing he’s not afraid of what humans would call “contamination”—which is why they left Earth. He’s also organizing dirt himself and classifying objects as either worth keeping in his home, or becoming part of a skyscraper. As humans, to deal with the overwhelming amounts of waste would be to mingle with dirt, and to risk disorder. Robots like Wall-E were made to keep them from being defiled, placing robots like him on a lower rung of the social order. While he himself is not living, for the purpose of the film, he is portrayed as highly sentient, strong-willed, and deeply curious. So, given the parameters of the film, the way dirt is interacted with in Wall-E shows a strong connection with Mary Douglas’ idea of dirt and the body metaphor because of the division of robots as impure and humans as pure.

Works Cited

Douglas, Mary. 2002. Purity and Danger. New York, NY: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc. 

Durkheim, Émile. 2008. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc.

Northrup, Ryan. November 8, 2022. “Untitled” from screenrant.com. Retrieved March 30, 2026 (https://screenrant.com/wall-e-movie-future-predictions-director-sad-response/)