Where does beauty come from? Is it a mere roll of the dice, a collaborative collision of nuclei, cells, chromosomes and genes? So completely accidental. So arbitrarily random. Is it purely chance, like discovering a vein of gold in a rock slide?

Is that why we value it so much? Because it’s so rare?

Wall-e, the little trash compactor robot, wasn’t made with beauty in mind. He was designed to perform a task– a dirty task at that. Accordingly he is boxy, durable and economical. Hardly sexy.

Moreover he is behind the times, obsolete and rusty. And scarred.

But Wall-e is a poet. No he doesn’t speak it–he barely speaks at all–he whirs, and beeps…And sighs. He doesn’t write it either.

Poetry in motion? No. He is slow and clunky, patched together with spare parts that are always breaking down.

Wall-e is a poet at heart. His scroll and quill are the deeds inspired by his own gentle soul.

Take his relationship with Hal, only Wall-e could find the beauty in a cockroach. When we turn on the light and a cockroach scurries across the floor we are horrified. (Okay. Not all of us. Most of us. Bear with me here.)

We do at least one of these things:

  1. Scream.
  2. Step on it.
  3. Spray it with bug spray.
  4. Call our significant other to step on it.
  5. All of the above.

Not Wall-e. He nurtures Hal. He’s happy to see Hal of the mornings and, of course, Hal is happy to see Wall-e. When he accidentally rolls over Hal, he is mortified and heartbroken. Thank goodness Hal is virtually indestructible. He shakes it off, just a little worse for the wear and tear.

(Sigh…Cockroaches and Keith Richards.)

But while Hal is utterly content with his garbage filled world and endless supply of Twinkies, Wall-e is not. He longs for a specific kind of companionship that Hal cannot afford.

Enter Eve, a state-of-the-art, voluptuous robotic probe. She is sent to earth to scan for organic signs of life.

(No. Hal doesn’t count.)

Efficient, disciplined and mission orientated she is disinterested in, and annoyed by, Wall-e. If she had a nose it would be turned skyward.

Wall-e thinks Eve utterly beautiful and himself outclassed, but he is so smitten that he cant help from perusing her–deferentially, tenderly. And to his dismay, clumsily.

Gradually, Eve’s reserve and superiority complex starts to thaw. She begins to understand what we already know…She really is out of Wall-e’s league.