Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Taught My Kids to Love the Energy Company

Rating: 7/10 (12 January 2013)

To understand this film ask this question: who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist? The answer is surprising: the person you might imagine to be the bad guy — Flint Lockwood, who almost destroys the world — is actually the protagonist. And the antagonist is actually the Mayor. We are groomed from the beginning to root for Flint and to dislike the Mayor — Flint has a back-story and we first meet him as a wide-eyed child who is bullied by his peers. Unlike Flint, the Mayor has no back story — I didn't even know that he had a name until I saw it here.
Flint = good; Mayor = bad. Everything unfolds from this.
Who is Flint Lockwood? He is a dreamer and an inventor. He is a bit nerdy, a bit misguided, but always well-intentioned. And he does something of great significance: he invents a machine that causes it to rain food, thereby revitalizing the economy of a town that was dying and creating access to a resource that was quite limited (previously, the townspeople lived off of sardines). Food, of course, provides people with energy — Flint is an energy provider.
However, Flint's method of resource extraction produces some troubling results. The amount of waste produced is staggering and it piles up on the horizon and threatens to tumble down upon the town. The mass production of this resource also results in an environmental disaster, which threatens to destroy the entire planet.
Does this story sound familiar to anybody? It should. Flint isn't just any energy provider, he's Big Oil.
Who, then, is the Mayor? Let's look at the way he speaks of himself in a candid moment: "This hellhole is too small for me, Brent. I wanna be big. I want people to look at me and say, "That is one big mayor." Otherwise, I'm just a tiny mayor of a tiny town full of tiny sardine-sucking knuckle-scrapers." Of course, the mayor very quickly does become very big and transforms from being small and slender to being massively obese.
So the oil company is the good guy and the Mayor is the bad guy and the bad guy wants to be big the antagonist in this film is big government. The problems arise because the government wants to exploit the good-hearted but somewhat naive energy producer in order to gain wealth and status. Flint just wants to make everybody's lives better — the Mayor wants to be big. Because of this the Mayor pushes Flint to do things he would not do otherwise, and he stops Flint from pulling the plug when Flint tries to do that. Then, when disaster strikes, the Mayor abandons the town to try and escapes at the expense of others. Big government is not your friend.
But there is another enemy lurking here, somebody else who is to blame for all of this. Who is this hidden enemy driving the world to the brink of destruction? You. If you weren't demanding that the energy provider continually flood the market with more, everything would have been fine. The energy provider was only trying to make you happy. Unlike the Mayor, Flint was never motivated by a desire for wealth or power. He wanted to be loved by others and maybe that blinded him a little, but that's true of everybody.
All of this is beautifully explained in a speech that the police officer, Earl, makes to the townspeople when they are intent on lynching Flint because they blame him for the disaster. Earl intervenes and says: "This mess we're in is all our faults. Me, I didn't even protect my own son. Look, I'm as mad at Flint as you are. In fact, when he gets out of that car, I'm gonna slap him in the face. I know Flint Lockwood made the food, but it was made-to-order. And now it's time for all of us to pay the bill." So, you see, BP, Keystone XL, Imperial Oil, none of them are to blame for any of this mess. We are. If the oil companies are guilty of anything it's of trying too hard to make us happy.
Notice, also, that it is a police officer making this speech. Earl is the representative of the Law, and the Law vindicates Flint. Flint may deserve a slap but even that is barely enacted, and Earl quickly apologizes to Flint for slapping him (Flint responds by saying, "That's okay"). So, really, the law punishes the energy provider more to placate the people than to serve justice (and, of course, out of love for the people, the energy provider goes along with it).
Not only does the law vindicate Flint but it is right to do so — for Flint is the one who ends up saving everybody. How does he do this? With further technological advances. He invents a flying car that permits him to gain access to the machine in the sky so that he can put a stop to things.
Of course, flying cars are the symbol of a future when technology has produced a wonderful world for us wherein anything is possible and all our problems have been solved. The solution, then, is not to abandon any of our technological advances but to trust in technology to miraculously save us from an impending disaster that appears to be unavoidable and catastrophic. Another familiar story — the oil companies have been saying the same thing to us for years about climate change.
All told, the message here is this: any environmental catastrophe we are experiencing was produced by self-serving politicians and greedy consumers exploiting well-intentioned energy providers. The solution, then, is to not cast stones, except at big government, and wait for the oil companies to save us, just like Flint saves the townspeople in the film.