Bee Movie: The End of Trash | Big Joel

hey everybody this is the third and final video I'm making on a series of odd DreamWorks films that came out when I was a kid this time we're talking about b-movie you know of the films we've talked about so far in these videos b-movie is far and away my favorite like for the first time in a while it felt like DreamWorks actually cared about being good and endearing and funny I mean there's jokes in the movie that genuinely make me laugh a lot and that's refreshing honestly uh TiVo you could just freeze live TV that's insane you don't have anything like that we have high VOC but it's a disease it's a horrible horrible disease oh my what's more as the conclusion of this ruff trilogy b-movie says some incredibly interesting things and works surprisingly well as a thematic end to the series so that's what we'll be talking about today b-movie cool part 1 the hive so looking at b-movie as a part of this set of DreamWorks films it's genuinely shocking how well it fits in with them thematically how it does exactly what we'd expect it to do I mean I don't want to dive too deep into Shark Tale or over the hedge because I already made videos about them but if we really simplify these movies we can boil them down to one idea there is a moral tension between hierarchy and the attainment of pleasure like Oscar from Shark Tale wants to be famous and successful but feels constrained by a rigid society that keeps him oppressed with sharks and poverty this group of animals from over the hedge wants to get food and live and be comfortable but to do this they have to go against a social order invade the more powerful human society and in the end both films come to the same conclusion the imposed hierarchies that our main characters have to deal with are actually not so bad as it turns out Oscar doesn't really want to be successful or famous he wants to do manual labor at the way and that's the very thing society was telling him to do all along as it turns out these animals don't need to go over the hedge even though it's their only way of getting food it's probably best that they not do it again they do the thing that power wants them to do within these films the message is clear in order to attain pleasure one should accept existing often violently imposed hierarchies it is only by realizing that the status quo is just that these guys can finally be happy ok that was probably boring to the people who saw my first two videos but I think it's important because in the broad strokes that's the movie I mean as we step into the film we are once again introduced to a society defined by strict and unyielding hierarchy the majority of bees are the working-class interchangeable and disposable cogs who have to spend their lives producing honey for the hive the minority of bees are the lucky Chad's who get all the ladies and get to explore the outside world once again our protagonist Barry finds himself at odds with this hierarchy he wants to have fun and be a Chad but he's not supposed to because he wasn't born for that life you know dad the more I think about it and maybe the honey field just isn't right for me and you were thinking of what making balloon animals and once again the protagonist resists this social structure until he realizes that the hierarchy was kind of good all along at the end of the movie after Barry makes the worlds of bees a post-scarcity utopia one where there is enough honey that nobody is forced to work a number of problems come up for one bees no longer making honey means no more pollinated flowers and that's a disaster but more importantly we have this scene that occurs toward the end of the movie probably the most important moments in the whole thing that's Barry's friend Adam by at least we got our honey back yeah but sometimes I think so what if the humans liked our honey who wouldn't it's the greatest thing in the world I was excited to be a part of making it this was my new desk this was my new job I wanted to do it really well and now now I can't so there we have it folks loud and clear it was bad for Barry to disrupt the way social structures work to attain pleasure because pleasure at the end of the day is a product of those structures the hive the way it demands labor and forces hierarchy that is the secret to happiness and any character who tries to challenge that order to make things better is making a mistake and now now I can't so cool I guess we've done our little interpretation of b-movie ultimately it's pretty fanatically similar to the other two movies we've talked about says a lot of the same things that they do and I guess we're left with a question here are we good with this if I rounded out this interpretation for a few more minutes would we be happy with this video honestly I wouldn't be and I'll tell you why it feels too easy it feels cheap I mean with over the hedge and shark tail sure they had this message but it was always intricately delivered baked in subtext easy to miss in b-movie though a character just comes out and says it restrictive hierarchy good transgressive behavior bad it's just on the plate staring at us and when you see something like that it doesn't feel like an opportunity to stop but to keep going to try to figure out what's really going on here and luckily for us B movie is a kind of brilliant film and when we look more closely at it we can see that it works not as some embrace of this ideology but as a critique a critique of hierarchy and a critique of what DreamWorks had become part to the other hive society in an early scene in the movie Barrie ventures out of the hive with some of the beach ads and one of the big boys tells him the most important rule of being exploring don't talk to people and a reminder for all your rookies be law number one absolutely no talking to humans this is something that an audience of these movies should be very used to at this point within the DreamWorks trash era communication between different animal classes has always been strained in Shark Tale it was aberrant and looked down on in order the hedge it was impossible so watching b-movie there's an intuitive sense that you don't need some big explanation for why bees don't talk to people that's just how things work here but then something weird happens berry talks to a person and it's fine and it's not fine at the end after the conflicts of the film has been resolved it's fine immediately berry talks to Rene Zellweger and she's confused but not that confused and she's nice to him and offers him cake hey you want a little crumb cake I really I can't oh come on I know I'm trying to lose a couple micro grams here well these stripes don't help anything about fashion I sincerely find that really cool because here we develop a new kind of relationship to this world like humans are on top in the society and bees are on the bottom they steal honey and use bees as slaves and there's a set of behaviors that the bees think they should have when they interact with the human world don't talk to them don't let them know they're sentient but now those assumptions are thrown out the window there was no good reason why he shouldn't talk to people it was actually a pretty good idea for Barry to do that and so we realized the hierarchy between bees and humans is totally artificial it is born of a set of ideas that have no basis in reality that bees live by for some arbitrary reason that nobody explains that maybe nobody can explain this is a movie where ideas about how things should work can be proven wrong in an instant and this little moment can tell us a lot about the movie because on one hand we have this hive plot a story that affirms the importance of artificial hierarchy and which rejects the idea that we ought to change things but on the other we have this people plot the interactions between Barry and the human world and that plot is just filled with all the little chaotic moments that don't outright challenge social structures but which do express a certain apathy for them a resistance to understanding them as this logical important thing and let me just give two examples of that first let's look at what is probably the most iconic scene in the film where a bunch of beekeepers talk about their work couple breaths of this knocks him right out they make the honey and we make the money they make the honey and we make the money they make the honey we make the money that's an amazing line because it seems to reach through the screen and tell the audience this movie doesn't care about maintaining some coherent relationship between bees and people like the whole points was that humans didn't know bees could talk right that unbeknownst to them they were exploiting creatures who have total sentience and because they're not supposed to know about the secret worlds of bees these guys should probably act like normal beekeepers act people doing a job but here that's not what happens these men are explicitly malevolent talking in a way that makes it clear that they know they're using slave labor treating what amounts to people as instruments in their little honey scheme so how do people see bees at the beginning of this movie as insects like we see them in real life or as human slaves well the movie doesn't tell us doesn't give us that reliable world whatever hierarchy there is between humans and bees it is not one that follows a consistent set of rules second let's look at this lengthy scene where this buff boy tries to kill Barry you know I just about had it with your little mind games what's that Italian phone I mean that's a lot of pages it's a lot of ads looking at this it almost feels like it's ripped out of over the hedge or shark tail the large predatory creature exerting power over a smaller one treating it as lesser unimportant it looks like another reminder that ultimately humans are on top here but within the context of the film that is not at all what's going on here really this muscle baby is not powerful at all rather he's clinging to a sense of power that has already escaped him this B is cucking him he's like getting with his girlfriend and inserting himself into his life and this guy just was so desperately to return to a time when things could be simple and his relationships were in his control I didn't want all this to go to waste so I called Mary luckily he was afraid yeah oh that was lucky so even though he's aggressing against Barry Barry is winning what's more this entire fight scene is played as a huge joke even as someone is trying to murder someone else nobody really seems to care very much Barry laughs it off his new human GF scolds the fit King the big ham runs out in a little huff talking bees no yogurt night my nerves are fried from riding on this emotional roller coaster goodbye Ken the whole thing works to remind us that even though this looks like a serious scene looks like a moment of hierarchy in action it's actually just silly kind of irrelevant not something the movie devotes a lot of energy to maintaining but okay we can go through bits and pieces of obscure evidence in the film and that is a really good time for me at least but when we just look at the plot of b-movie this critique of hierarchy comes into much clearer focus to recap the film a bit after Barry leaves the hive and goes off on his own he stumbles onto a honey farm and seeing the terrible conditions that the bees live under he decides to levy a lawsuit against big honey to seek the liberation of all bees unfortunately there are some people in this room who think they can take whatever they want from us because we're the little guys and what I'm hoping is that after this is all over you'll see how by taking our honey you're not only taking away everything we have but everything we are that's basically the second act of the film and this may seem like a pretty normal plot right but it's not it's super weird and interesting within the context of the films we've been discussing and to tell you why that is I have to one more time start at the very beginning of our series start with Shrek so looking at Shrek a sort of obvious observation about the film is that Shrek the character is only ever motivated by the desire to attain happiness when lord duloc ghettoize 'as the fairy tale creatures shrek doesn't care about that injustice for some altruistic reason rather he just wants to get his land back I'm already on a quest a quest to get my swamp back your swamp yeah my swamp where you dumped those fairytale creatures and while Shrek changes and matures over the course of the film his motivation doesn't really change shrek never cares about fighting evil about disrupting an unfair system he just wants the good in life and has to learn what that means now to be clear I'm not saying this as a dig against the movie I think it's pretty cool and realistic like when society deprives someone others them and treats them as lesser it's only natural to personally want to escape that and the message of shrek something I agree with is that when a socially deviant person pursues pleasure that pursuit can be a form of transgression the idea here is that the world of Duloc of outcasting and mistreating fairytale creatures can't meaningfully coexist with shrek having what he wants in life and so the story of him gaining happiness is also the story of society getting better now that's super powerful to me I love that but here's the thing there's something a little uncomfortable about it isn't there like when you tell a story about a protagonist who wants to be happy then the story ends when the protagonist gets happy and because of that none of the great things that happened in the film the freedom of these fairytale creatures the death of Farquaad none of that had to happen for the primary conflict of the story to resolve I don't know maybe Shrek could have gotten half some other way maybe he could have learned to love the ghetto make friends with the other fairytale creatures and that is a disconcerting thought and this is the discomfort that gets exploited by shark tail and over the hedge these films are unapologetically about terrible unfair societies about over classes predating on the week about characters not having what they need to live about cultures that lower people and make them feel worthless but within these stories none of that stuff actually has to change the protagonists want to get happy and they find a way to achieve that with the hands they've been dealt that's it the world of these films may not be perfect but in the end who cares they're perfect enough for these boys so be movie just marches in looks at that and is like wow that blows because sure Barry does want to gain personal pleasure wants to escape the rigid structure of his hide by that conflict gets resolved in around 20 minutes of screen time the protagonist goes off establishes a weird relationship with this woman lives in relative freedom and comfort he's good and after that the focus of the film totally changes the second Barry sees the conditions under which the slave bees live he's no longer working for himself he's not even working for his hive no he's working for his people for liberation and I think there's something delightfully uncompromising about that because there is no turning back from this story no way for Barry to find out that slave labor is actually fine because he can find happiness as a slave it's either the bees are free or they're not and Barry fights for them and succeeds and makes the world better because that's what he wants to in Barry for the first time in this series we have a revolutionary and now considering this let's revisit the scene that I said was really important a few minutes ago where Adam laments Barry's lawsuit against people because he's sad that bees will no longer have to produce honey least we got our honey back yeah but sometimes I think so what if the humans liked our honey who wouldn't it's the greatest thing in the world I was excited to be a part of making it this was my new desk this was my new job I wanted to do it really well and now now I can't now on one hand yes this very clearly affirms the social structures of the film the idea here is that compulsory labor is secretly a good thing and that Barry is depriving his fellow bee of that forced goodness but on the other what is this guy even talking about like it makes no sense from any perspective Barry in this lawsuit was fighting on behalf of bees who lived in actual slavery corporations owned them and treated them terribly and Adam Berry's best friend was never affected by this sort of oppression he never lived on a honey farm so his saying sure was great before right before the lawsuit that's not just silly it's also deeply malignant and confusing he is favoring his status quo his precious hierarchy over a huge number of people not being tortured and you know I would write this off as just a bit of cinematic weirdness the film not understanding the meaning of its own content but the truth is the film agrees with my assessment here in this scene it might look like Adam is speaking some deep important truth but by the end of the story nothing he says carries any weight be still make honey and pollinate flowers but they do so because they want to not out of some forced arrangement that comes from on high the bees on the honey farms are still free berry doesn't go back to live on the hive he likes living with people and in the last scene we see that he's still fighting the good fight taking on a case to liberate cows from human ownership and some strange sense I think we can see Adam here as a representative of Shark Tale and over the hedge that fear of change that commitment to the idea that artificial hierarchies are good and that we can only find happiness within them but he's wrong the world of bees gets better because they wanted to change it there is no going back and that's a good thing part three conclusion you know writing that sentence there is no going back it kind of made me sad because it's true in more ways than one I think that bee movie was so self-aware so fundamentally rejecting of its predecessors that DreamWorks never could go back b-movie used all these well-worn tropes the hierarchy defined by species difference the rigid culture the protagonist who breaks the mold and it used those things to say something genuinely and unexpectedly subversive when you do that you can't just make Shark Tale again you can't just reproduce the very lineage that you just rejected or at least it would be really weird to do that and on some level that kind of sucks right I loved making these videos there's something so crunchy about this era of DreamWorks movies like they're filled with all these secret meanings and political implications and I like dreamworks azur stuff to come whoo panda and How to Train Your Dragon but I like them in the way I like a competent film they are good fun to watch simple and that change in DreamWorks is probably for the best right watching RJ from over the hedge learned the value of social segregation is fun once but it gets old and I can't keep making the same video forever all this to say this was fun I had a great time with these films but it's a good thing that the trash era of DreamWorks came to an end and I can't imagine a better conclusion to the series so that was that that's my that's the end be sure to LIKE comment and subscribe if you like my videos and be sure to give me money on patreon if you want to I make a silly bonus video every month and I think it's super fun and speaking of patrons it's time for my patreon question of the video Amanda asks do any of your family members slash friends know about your YouTube channel what do they think of your content yeah they all know I make youtube videos that would get hard to conceal real quick as they would just come to believe that I was severely unemployed I think they like it I think they do I think they think I don't know maybe they're just nice to me but they say they like it ok that was the answer to that question bye whoa

Channel: Big Joel

Views: 557,897

Keywords: bee movie, over the hedge, shark tale, shrek, trash era dreamworks, big joel, big joel dreamworks, jerry seinfeld, bee movie big joel, bee movie review, bee movie analysis

Id: -Y8ybdzbfl4

Length: 25min 10sec (1510 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 27 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ThePlacebroEffect]

Wow, so that's how we beat capitalism

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MORE 👏 CHAD 👏 BEES 👏 CUCKING 👏 HUMANS 👏

[u/evergardens]

t h e b e e i s c u c k i n g h i m

[u/Tweevle]

I wonder how Antz fits into all this, being Dreamworks' first film (before Shrek) and having a similarly revolutionary aspect.

[u/selwun]

Big Joel as always being as sweet as honey <3

[u/[deleted]]

Big Joel is becoming my favorite breadtuber.

[u/Griffin777XD]

I want a chad bee to fuck my wife

[u/LastGarthrim]

His humor is on top in this one

[u/mehtastic]

Big Joel, whose work I deeply enjoy and respect, recently concluded a series analyzing the “trash” era of Dreamworks animated features with an essay on Bee Movie. I had been looking forward to this content as, much like Mr. Joel, I likewise have found Jerry Seinfeld’s animated Apis melliferan parable to be compelling, and I lack the tools, skill, and, frankly, willingness to produce anything of real value because I’m terribly, terribly lazy. However, I must say that I was a bit disappointed by Mr. Joel’s critique, especially with how it treats the matter of Barry Benson’s friend, Adam Flayman.
Now, this is a response to Mr. Joel’s video, not a takedown. I find the approach in his corpus to the subject of hegemonic power structures in previous Dreamworks features to be insightful and compelling--only misplaced in this latest video. Presumably if you’re reading this you’ve already seen his video, but if not the link is here.
Fundamentally, I believe Mr. Joel misreads the nature of Bee Movie’s hive society. It may have rigid roles without room for individual change or growth after a job is chosen, but at no point are any of the characters restricted in their opportunities. The bee graduates are not assigned roles, they choose them from a lengthy list--sure, some roles may be less desirable than others and it is possible that one may not got their first choice, but turnover rate is textually high--and as Barry demonstrates in the pool scene (alluding to, of course, The Graduate, another film about alienation), the only force pushing these bees to decide on a career path is one of social pressure, and a demonstrably toothless force at that--one could simply wait until their preferred position reopens.
However, the most damning evidence against Mr. Joel’s thesis of an authoritarian social structure is Barry’s attempt to join the “Chads” among the pollenation force. Yes, the majority of the members are eugenically-created ubermenschen (uberhonigbienen?), but Barry is able to waltz directly onto the “tarmac” of their “airfield,” and all it takes to override the supposedly strict separation between jobs is the word, clearly given in jest and with malice, of two other members of the force. This would be the equivalent of the American Air Force (which the hotshot “Chad” bees are directly coded as) allowing a civilian to wander onto an airbase and fly off with a helicopter just because another pilot vouches for them. And indeed, what consequence does Barry face for violating the hive’s single textual rule (“Don’t talk to humans!”)? At most, light pushback from Adam, and not even for his diplomatic transgression, but for his supposed sexual deviance.
Barry’s hive is an industrialized society, and certainly post-scarcity, if Barry’s family can afford to maintain a honey pool on his father’s fixed income (and this is assuming he even receives a pension). Labor is divided granularly (is this not the case in every industrial society?), but the only obstacle to a more just society is their lack of class consciousness.
That’s right baby, time for some Marxism.
So if Barry’s hive is not so totalitarian as Mr. Joel would have us believe, what then is to be made of Adam’s lamentation over the loss of his job? It is not the rigidity that he misses, it is the labor, by which he (and all of us) defines his relationship to the world. He loves and values the fruits of his labor, honey, much as artists such as YouTube video essayists love and value the products of theirs--that is, fruitful discussion and analysis of children’s cartoons.
In discovering the distressed proletariat of Ray Liotta Private Select, Barry achieves a sort of false consciousness. He hears the beekeepers say, “They make the honey, we make the money,” and assumes that it must be the making of the honey that is the problem. While the bourgeoisie (humans) explicitly confess to stealing the surplus value of the bees’ labor, Barry, unable to imagine a different mode of production, believes then that the labor must stop entirely. And though he manages to wield the coercive might of the state against the oppressors (as the Bolsheviks did by agitating among conscripted soldiers), no system of production is established in its place. Just as migrant farm workers are without a doubt exploited by agricultural conglomerates, the solution is not to simply stop growing food at all. No, the labor must be done--the proletariat, as represented by the bees; the bourgeoisie, as represented by the humans; and the earth itself, as represented by the flowers in Central Park, all require the force of the bees’ labor--but the means of production must belong to the bees, just as they must reap its rewards. The bee society does not return to its old ways, not quite--as the “bee approved” honey demonstrates, it is now they who control their own destiny. Adam may buckle down for overtime shifts at the honey plant, as he does in the film’s final moments--yes, labor is difficult, and as Lenin himself maintained with the adoption of Russia’s semi-capitalist New Economic Policy in 1921, for a socialist economy to survive, it may be necessary to temporarily maintain some capitalistic modes of production--but Adam’s labor is joyous, for he now knows for certain that his labor is his.

I have only scratched the surface of what a Marxist lens can bring to the interpretation of Bee Movie’s other rich, layered subplots, and much is to be learned from the socialist society that Mr. Seinfeld proposes. For example:

He asserts that a bloodless revolution is not only possible, but necessary--after all, Adam’s angry attack on John Goodman in court almost wrecks the revolutionary effort entirely. Barry’s legal office offering assistance to other beleaguered proletarians (cows) in the film’s final scenes demonstrates the importance of solidarity across borders and industries, as well as mocks on its face the Stalinist folly of “socialism in one country.” Chris Rock’s mosquito, Mooseblood, whose group is coded Black, is treated as a member of a racial underclass (see: Barry’s dream in which a mosquito’s senseless murder at the hands of a capitalist is treated as a joke, Adam’s supposition that inter-species romance is a form of deviance) until the film’s conclusion, where he is an equal partner at Barry’s law firm. Bee Movie, though it, like many pieces of Western Leftist media, largely erases the suffering and labor done by women and people of color, still argues for the importance of intersectionality in any revolutionary movement. Barry’s relationship with Renee Zellweger’s Vanessa Bloome demonstrates that, while there may be bonds of sympathy between worker and capitalist, possibly even that class traitors among the bourgeoisie must be recruited for the revolution to succeed, consummation of this relationship is, and should be, impossible. Worker and capitalist, proletariat and bourgeoisie--they are fundamentally different species. Electoralism, according to Seinfeld, is a farce: the ruling class, exemplified by the (elected) Queen, plays next to no role in defining or improving the lives of workers--it is the factory owners, the managers, the taskmasters who wield real power. Additionally, though democratic, the hive’s system of government poses no threat to the power of the capitalists--for a revolution to succeed, Seinfeld argues, the people must take power into their own hands.

I am certain that there are more Marxist interpretations that I am missing--I last saw the movie several weeks ago and did not take notes, and I am typing this whole thing pretty baked.

[u/ThatOneGuyIsYou2]

Big Joel, one of the most wholesome content creators.