It's not news that the film adaptations of Dr Seuss's books have been the sorts of things I imagine you are forced to watch in Hell. His stories are so pithy and whimsical, and so to-the-point even with all the inventiveness and cleverness of the language, that stretching them out to 80 or 90 minutes necessarily distorts and undermines everything about them. You read some books - even some children's books - and you may find yourself thinking about what a film adaptation would look like, and who should play what role, and who should direct it, and so forth. Dr Seuss's books are not among those. One does not read How the Grinch Stole Christmas and think about costume design for Cindy Lou Who, or wonder about how exactly the Grinch came to have a heart full of unwashed socks, as the song goes. This is so obvious that you know that the people who are making these movies are interested in them not as stories but for their marketing value.
This is mainly why creating a feature-length film version of The Lorax is so uniquely, awfully horrid. You'd be hard pressed to find another book with a central theme so resistant to the whole idea of marketing, unless you made a movie out of Abbie Hoffman's Steal this Book. The marketers (and presumably the scriptwriters) are trying to get around this by pushing the environmentalist aspects of the story. USA Today had an article recently about how the film is being used by a variety of corporations and government bodies to promote "eco-friendly" products and activities. The EPA is using it to sell products branded with the Energy-Star label, and DoubleTree Hotel is using it to persuade people to get on a plane to fly a few thousand miles to Costa Rica, so you can see what remains of the equatorial rainforest. Universal Pictures, the article explains, is being selective about who they partner with in promoting this film, which I guess means that BP will not be featuring any Lorax-themed tie-ins at their gas stations. So that's a relief.
But, as important as it is to the story, the environmentalism of The Lorax emerges from a deeper theme. If you had to express that theme in one word, you would probably choose greed, or avarice. But I'm not sure that entirely captures it.
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The Lorax begins with an unnamed boy wandering through a wasteland, where he comes upon the Street of the Lifted Lorax. In a derelict factory nearby (the "Lerkim") lives the Once-ler, who tells the boy the story of the Lorax. Long ago, he says, this land was lush - "the grass was still green and the pond was still wet and the clouds were still clean." There were brown barbaloots, and swomee-swans, and humming fish, all of whom lived and played in the shadows of truffula trees. It's the truffula trees the Once-ler is interested in. "All my life," he says, "I'd been searching for trees such as these." Their tufts are very fine, and as soon as he sees them, he says, "I knew just what I'd do." He builds a small shop, chops down a truffula tree, and from the tuft he knits a thneed, which is, of course, "A Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need."
Then, the Lorax emerges from the tree stump. The first thing he says is that he speaks for the trees. But then he demands to know what on earth the Once-ler has made out of the truffula tuft. The Once-ler tells him, in language indistinguishable from boilerplate ad copy, the many, many uses to which one might put a thneed. The Lorax says:
Sir! You are crazy with greed.
There is no one on Earth
Who would buy that fool thneed!
Of course, a customer comes along and proves the Lorax wrong. The Once-ler laughs at the Lorax and dismisses him with a line that you will not hear in the movie, I guarantee:
You poor stupid guy. You never can tell what some people will buy.
Though it's not in the book, I imagine that it was at this moment the Lorax realized the magnitude of what he was up against.
The Once-ler, in entrepreneurial spirit, enlists the help of his family, expands his operations, and razes the ground of truffula trees. The Lorax returns after a while to tell the Once-ler of all the creatures suffering because of the damage being done by his thneed-making business. The brown barbaloots must leave because fewer truffula trees means less truffula fruit. They "are all getting the crummies, because they have gas, and no food, in their tummies!" The Once-ler sort of feels bad about this, but,
Business is business!
And business must grow
Regardless of crummies in tummies, you know.
He's a job creator, what can you say?
The swomee swans are choking on the air, the humming fish find their gills gummed up by the sludge from the Once-ler's factory, and they are both forced from their homes. The Once-ler tires of the Lorax's hectoring, and indignantly tells him that he intends to continue chopping down truffula trees and turning them into thneeds. This speech is punctuated by the fall of the last truffula tree.
The Once-ler family, presumably much richer now, closes up shop. The Lorax, after surveying the broken and lifeless landscape around him, gives the Once-ler a backwards glance and lifts himself up by the seat of his pants, disappearing through a hole in the smog. He leaves behind a ring of stones with the word "UNLESS" carved into it. The Once-ler interprets this for the unnamed boy as meaning that,
UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It's not.
He gives the boy a truffula seed, and tells him to go plant it and protect it, in the hopes that the Lorax and his friends will come back.
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All the Once-ler sees is money. When he first comes to the land upon which he will build his factory, nothing exists for him except for that thing which will make him rich: the truffula tree. He doesn't see or appreciate the tree itself, doesn't recognize its intrinsic value, the way it sustains and is sustained by the other beings around it. No, for him it has no value except as raw material for his product, the thneed, the quintessential consumer item, which is advertised as fulfilling every need one could possibly have.
The Lorax sees the absurdity of this. For him, the trees are not the first point in a chain of production. They are whole in and of themselves, and are not there to provide raw material for the Once-lers of the world. The whole idea that they need to be transformed or refined in order to be "useful" is insane, as is the idea that the end product could possibly be something that everyone needs. After all, "everyone" was doing just fine before.
His only hope is that others see things as he does. Unfortunately, he's not just up against the Once-ler, but against an entire system, an entire way of thinking and being, in which growth and consumption and constantly unfulfilled needs and desires are the values and lodestars. It's not so much that the trees have no tongues, but rather that the Once-ler and his family long ago stopped regarding trees - and, frankly, everything else that could make them a buck - as anything but objects whose value depends entirely upon how much money can be made off of them. The trees are speaking, and not just through the Lorax, but the Once-ler doesn't understand, and probably wouldn't bother to listen even if he did.
The consumers are just as much a part of this as are the Once-lers. Born and acculturated into a world in which they are constantly told that fulfillment and serenity lie just over the horizon, in the next generation iPhone, another beer, a new car, a new deodorant, why shouldn't they think that happiness lies in the purchase of a thneed? More to the point, why shouldn't the purchase of an Energy Star appliance, or of an eco-tour to Costa Rica, just to pick two completely random and unrelated examples out of the air, not make you feel better about yourself?
So the Lorax faces a system in which the natural world, in all its complexity and mystery, and of which we are a part despite all of our efforts to prove otherwise, is regarded as little more than raw material, and in which the products that emerge from that raw material are regarded as a means to happiness by a population deliberately kept in a state of constant unhappiness. Play such a scenario out to its inevitable end, and what you find is an almost lifeless wasteland, full of gricklegrass and old crows and little else.
The people peddling and licensing the products branded with the "Lorax" label are, at bottom, Once-lers. The Lorax is essentially a story about how - to put it bluntly - the process of manufacturing and buying stupid shit is destroying the planet. But it's more than that. It's also a story about the mindset behind that process. The objectification of the natural world. The irrational, nihilistic obsession with growth. The belief that fulfillment is about buying the right product. And Universal Pictures and the EPA and DoubleTree and every other Lorax licensee see this and decide that what they need to do is find a way to sell it, to slap a label with the Lorax's face on their products. Like the Once-ler, all they see is money. The book The Lorax is their truffula tree.
And why shouldn't they do this? After all, there's no telling what some people will buy.
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Here's the only animated version of this story you should watch:
Part one:
Part two:
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