In 1953, Robert Rauschenburg completed a conceptual piece of art after one month of difficult work. The result was a blank canvas with faint smudges of charcoal and oil pastels. This art piece, “Erased de Kooning Drawing,” was a labor of abstract expressionism, art created by erasing. The piece also serves as a metaphor for the 2012 Illumination movie, “The Lorax.”
This movie fascinates me on a fundamental level. It’s not a good movie by any stretch. There isn’t anything to dissect through the traditional eye of movie reviewing. The story is almost all fluff due to the source material being under 2000 words, the environmental message barely runs skin deep and the characters are specifically designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. And yet, I find all of these elements more than worthy of study, like a deep–sea specimen that seems to defy all known laws of nature.
Every choice in this movie is bizarre, starting with the framing device. Rather than a child simply showing up to hear the Oncler’s story as in the book, he now lives in a bright, colorful town made out of plastic. The child, now named Ted, is motivated to seek the truth about why plants are extinct to impress a girl. Ted is voiced by Zach Effron, the girl by Taylor Swift. Despite the movie having elaborate musical numbers, neither of them sing a single note. Somehow, the material within the movie is not the strangest thing about it. For that, we look to the movie’s production and marketing.
Most people are familiar with Dr. Seuss’ bleak depiction of industrialization. His normal vibrant colors were sapped from the pages as the faceless tycoon, the Onceler, continued his unchecked growth until the last tree was cut down. Within the movie are the traces of an updated version of this cautionary tale.
Rather than an industrial entity, the movie presents a corporate one. It depicts a mega corporation selling bottled air. They have a strangle-hold on the market and purposefully pollute the air to increase people’s need for their product. This is not Onceler’s company, but the one that took over after all the trees died. The Oncler tells the story of his company’s rise and fall while the other is in operation. This is an odd choice that has amazing potential. The movie presents a story of two corporate towns; one that drained a finite resource and the replacement which profits off of a vital one. Saldy, this genuinely clever modernization is not critically examined beyond the trees getting chopped down. We don’t see mountains of plastic waste, no urgency to fix things, nothing.
The movie was not only different from the original vision, but it undermined the entire message of the story. The new bottled air company poses no real consequence for its citizens, Ted doesn’t grow or learn from his experience and the Onceler has been demoted to being blindsided by his negligence. The final product feels toothless. You can practically see the hands of the studio executives scrubbing away anything that would make the movie less marketable. Although this sounds like it’s entering the territory of conspiracy, the evidence is in the movie’s own marketing.
“The Lorax” was promoted by commercials with various sponsors that included IHop, DoubleTree, and, most bafflingly, Mazda. In a marketing move so tone deaf it seems intentional, a commercial was released of a Mazda SUV driving through the truffula forest with a voice over declaring it had the “Lorax seal of approval.”
To add the cherry on top, the movie itself has the Lorax’s image unwillingly plastered on a billboard to promote the Onceler’s product, with the text “Lorax approved.” In a now infamous moment, the marketing team did exactly what the movie presented as cartoonishly evil. This visual was part of a musical sequence that encapsulates the friction between the creative team and the studio overheads. The song, “How Bad Can I Be?” is our erased portrait.
In the movie, the Onceler’s product finally takes off and he begins to turn a profit. A musical montage ensues, showing the exponential growth of his company and him joyfully singing about the seemingly endless expansion. It shows the Onceler overcome by greed, only ending when the last tree is cut down. He stands back, finally seeing all the destruction he has caused.
This is a solid critique of corporate expansion, until you look at the song it replaced. An early version, called “Biggering,” takes a different angle to the issue. In the song, the Lorax makes a clear distinction between greed and the Onceler’s practices. As the song puts it, “greed isn’t [his] problem, [...] it’s got this worm inside. [His] problem is pride.”
It frames greed and pride as different things. Greed is an impulse, a temptation that can trap someone. Pride, the deadliest sin of the seven sins, is conscious action. Unlike the other six sins, pride stands out by the fact that someone knows full well that their actions are wrong and they choose evil anyway. There is no gap in knowledge, no blindspots to consequence, just someone believing they are above their actions. That was the message of the cut song in “The Lorax.”
Much like advanced imaging tools attempting to discern the process by which a painting was created, fans have sifted through the cut song to try to understand the original vision of the movie. Unfortunately, filmmaking is far too complex for the full picture to be pieced together.
A mix of the song, with the final vocals, was released to the internet. Given how large studio animation tends to work, I would guess this was made with synthesized instruments and accompanied by a drafted storyboard. This hypothetical storyboard has never reached the light of day, nor has any clue about how this song fit into the final movie. All us “Lorax” fans know is that the studio had cut the song. Due to the nature of filmmaking, there was no warning of this cut, no effort to archive the original drafts. “Biggering” is just one demo, a faded smudge left over from dense layers of colors.
For Robert Rauschenberg, his final piece was not the artwork. The erasing of the painting was an act of art. It was why he chose de Kooning as his subject. Rauschenberg had tried erasing his own pieces, but found the impact lackluster. It had to be a special piece, from a well established, respected artist. No official record exists of the drawing before its erasure. Though the final blurs can be analyzed to discern a few vague forms, the original de Kooning drawing is lost to time, remembered only by those who saw it for themselves.
Dr. Seuss’ most poignant book, being adapted to criticize corporations, was then produced by one of the largest media corporations in the world. The result was an incredible, bleak story about corporate hypocrisy that shows the important difference between greed and pride — and a hilariously confusing movie.
Jayme Mintz is a photographer at The Beacon. She can be reached at mintz24@up.edu.
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