Christmas with Wallace and Gromit: A tale of hubris, treachery, and alcoholic neurasthenia

by Cameron Bilsland | February 1, 2025

WARNING: This review contains spoilers for both Wallace and Gromit: A Vengeance Most Fowl, and for the real mysteries of the interstellar demonic lizard world order.  

 

In a world of remakes and sequels, the return of Wallace and Gromit is surely a sign of impending apocalypse. It is Christmas day; I’ve just sank my ninth whisky sour, and everything seems to be going quite nicely. Little cousin Mary chirps up with some nonsense like, “Who’s that doggy?” The ignorant swine. Feet up, lights darkened, tenth whisky sour poured, my family and I begin our foray into a monstrous world of clay and misery.

 

We begin with Wallace. The poster-boy of the industrial revolution—the great man, the inventor who will bring us all to paradise through the sheer force of will and determination. He carries with him the optimism of a steampunk society, piped through with the possibility of technology’s vaulting ambitions. Of course he lives with his sullen, scowling little luddite of a dog, who furrows his brow at Wallace’s pride. If Wallace reads Ayn Rand, Gromit must read Deleuze.

 

Before long, we meet the machine who eats dreams. Norbot is the future, the unceasing tide of progress at all costs that is spurred on by the behemoth of Capital. He is the solution to Wallace’s struggle to live as an independent man in the modern age. He is a product of postmodernism and its proponent. When we arrive at the scene where Norbot transforms Gromit’s Arcadia into the pristine machine-cut garden cum car park, I am suddenly struck with awareness that this film is not the mere decaying detritus of the failing entertainment industry; this is a fable of the hubris of modernity.

 

Pausing to pour an eleventh whisky sour (finished with a secret portion of gasoline), my haggard family and I continue. When Wallace calls Norbot an AI, the filmmakers are at their most revealing. Aardman studios are showing us exactly how the solid melts into air, how the moral becomes secondary and good men are ruined. How could this not be the meaning hidden in all of this? Is it not obvious that Norbot exudes 5G mind-control waves?

 

The neighbourhood delight in the power of this AI daemon—they demand to bask in the fruits of Wallace’s creation. Like Icarus Wallace wallows in his pride, believing himself the pioneer of a new golden age of horticultural technology. Norbot’s gardening style of even edges and primmed lines communicate a consecrated harmony which provides comfort in a world of uncertainty and lack. But such a mechanical unity is functionally empty.

 

When the police finally arrive on screen, I am moved to such raging fury that little cousin Mary is escorted out. This piece of art is clearly too provocative for such young eyes. But let’s to the police—the incompetent and unfeeling arms of the authoritarian state. The older officer is ineffectual—his laziness and reliance on his “gut” showcases a state in decline—at the mercy of the reptilian tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley. The younger copper’s eagerness is evident when she’s introduced; fresh from training her vindictive appetite for justice leads her on a voracious hunt for a bike seat. She is the real fascist; she melts liberty and casts it in the mould of efficiency. She voted for Ed Davies for the same reason the older pig voted for Thatcher.

 

But we have not yet been introduced to the true horror—the reflection of humankind in all its most wicked and vicious aspects, the killer of solidarity and master of solemnity. Feathers McGraw is human consciousness untethered from the shackles of moralism—the same shackles Norbot trims, straightens, and annihilates. He is likely also an accelerationist. McGraw is Nietzsche’s Ubermensch imbued with the tragedy of mankind: the tragedy of Enlightenment. He is a penguin cursed with knowledge, just as man is cursed with the ability to know but not comprehend. When Marx said that the future held either socialism or barbarism, how could he not have had Feathers McGraw in mind?

 

Dressed in the clothes of an innocent film for God’s children, the television set impresses esoteric psychic knowledges onto my cranium on this fine Christmas Day. The scene where McGraw hacks into Wallace’s computer is a sly admission that evil agitators (demons, murderers, government bureaucrats, etc) can access our most secret files, and programme us to do their bidding (which explains my behaviour at the work Christmas do).

 

I can hear my uncle whispering across the room and I throw my right boot at his jaw, which makes an excellent connection. He would’ve done the same had this been the King’s Speech, the fascist pig.

 

Speaking of fascists, Foucault would have chortled at the choice of a zoo as McGraw’s prison. The implications of this prison-factory-entertainment industrial complex spin round my head as McGraw’s plot unravels across the screen. Why does he want the blue diamond? Well, why is it guarded so tightly? It is worthless of course, just like the turnip that secretly replaces it.

 

The message is clear—all that we circle around in this world to motivate us and give us meaning, are phantasms. Money, sex, drugs, Gore-Tex jackets: these are naught but a series of mirages, designed to keep us in chains. To keep us unaware of the organ harvesters that roam empty train tracks at night and eat all the Dairylea dunkers (and that’s why you never see them in the shop anymore).

 

By the end of this sordid tale my fortitude begins to weaken, and I wonder if perhaps I’m reading too much into it. Perhaps all this was only meant to be a joyous and nostalgic return of one of the nation’s most beloved franchises which, despite lacking in much meaningful originality, due to re-treading the story beats of its admittedly superior predecessor, still packed a rewarding emotional punch by the end, justifying its creation and bringing smiles to old and new fans alike. Maybe this tale is not about the hubris of man or extra-terrestrial mind control, but about the genuine love and care that we all must have for one another. Maybe it is saying that in the face of an ever-changing world of technologies and indescribable evils, human solidarity can always win out.

 

But I quickly come out of my stupor and remind myself that this couldn’t possibly be the case. Wallace and Gromit is absolutely a psyop.

 

As my putrid cocktails begin to take hold of me, I retreat into my chair and reflect on the transformative experience I have just had. I would like to do it over and over, but I’ll need to get those TV licence folk off my back first. Maybe when it re-airs on New Year’s Day I’ll peer into my neighbour’s windows to catch it. Only then will all the secrets of this Rosetta Stone be revealed. But for now, I should return to my family and prepare them for the coming apocalypse, however when I look up, I see that I am alone, and that they seem to be calling the police. Well, at least I’ll have some time to log this on my Letterboxd before they arrive.∎

 

Words by Cameron Bilsland. Image courtesy of Humbledaisy via Wikimedia Commons.