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The 2012 Universal Pictures/Illumination Entertainment film Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, an adaptation and expansion of the environmental children's classic, represents a vexed intersection between sociocultural mandates and a desire for future change. The film relates in parallel the Once-ler's tale of greedy Truffula tree overuse and the consequences for the valley, striving to maintain both Seuss's whimsy and his frame tale: a young boy seeks out the Once-ler in hopes of discovering the Lorax's identity and the reason he was "lifted and taken somewhere" (Seuss, Lorax n. pag.). At the same time, the adaptation also elaborates upon the original text, both productively and reductively. On the one hand, the film's narrative promisingly builds upon the solution or call to action advocated by the book-that the reader "Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care." On the other hand, the narrative particularizes certain stereotypes as the source of the environmental threat (Seuss had left this unspecified), while spawning a number of commercial product tie-ins that rely on a model of ecological change as consumption based and individualized.
In this article, I argue that, though the film's narrative takes a progressive stance by questioning what Lance Newman describes as "an all too familiar American ideology of unfettered individual freedom" (186), calling instead for community action and the development of a societywide ecocentric consciousness, it does so in a way that retrogressively codes the target of that group action as greedy working-class up-and-comers. In this way, Dr. Seuss' The Lorax works to maintain the status quo, directing its validation of environmentally-minded interventions into avenues that do not, ultimately, threaten the power and resources of the privileged. Beyond the vexed ideological messages of the narrative, the marketing and tie-in products generated for this film function to undermine the group-based activism it ostensibly promotes, serving instead to re-individualize environmental change as "Lorax-approved" consumption. This film trades on Seuss's progressive credentials, yet its synthesis of ecocentric activist messages, reductive social stereotypes, and the suggestion that change occurs through consumption ultimately functions to undo the narrative's promotion of ecologically driven change.
"We Open in Thneedville": The Story
Dr. Seuss' The Lorax opens in the simulacra-city of Thneedville, to the joyous musical praise of the happy Thneedvillers. The audience, however, soon realizes that...