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Just before Earth Day 2014, Apple released Better, a short lilm outlining the company's new environmental responsibility campaign. In Better, a placid sun rises over a glistening field of solar panels (figures 1 and 2). Next, the camera cuts to an Apple engineering lab: írom the smooth reflective suriac.es of' the solar panels to the immaculate screens of iPhones and iPads (figure 3). "Better," narrates Apple's CEO Tim Cook, "It's a powerful word and a powerful ideal, it makes us look at the world and want more than anything to change it for the better. To innovate, improve, to reinvent. To make it better."1 Later, we are moved írom Apple showrooms, filled with stately plastic and aluminum products, to groves or oaks swaying in the wind and colonies of ants atop an anthill. Midway through the film, a hand places an iPhone in its now less-wasteful container. An engineer strides purposefully between rows of solar panels. Knotty roots are juxtaposed with multicolored electrical cables, wind turbines with circuitboards. Finally, thunder cracks and the panels are drenched in a luxuriant rain, which soon abates in order for the sun to rise again. "We have a long way to go," concludes Cook, "and a lot to learn. But now, more than ever, we will work to leave the world better than we found it. And make the tools that inspire others to do the same."
It is hard to miss the visual homology that Better constructs between the screens of solar panels and those of Apple's products. But wha t makes Better an instructive response to the current ecological crisis rather than simply another exercise in green branding is neither this homology nor the film's aestheticization of physical environment. Instead, Better exceeds typical green strategies by working to construct Apple's brand equity as an optic through which environment might, first, be apprehended and, ultimately, disavowed. As we will see, Better borrows this approach from Apple's onetime affiliate Pixar, whose greenest and most environmentally symptomatic film WALL-E (2008; WALL-E: Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-class) is this essay's primary subject. Arguably more pronounced in Better's visual rhetoric, however, is the attempt to manage the perception of physical environment by using the Apple brand to circumscribe the visual field, something...