The Bee Movie is usually remembered by the very weird relationship between Barry the bee and a human woman he meets, Vanessa. While there is definitely a conversation to be had about why they felt like that was the best option for a children’s movie, I’m a bit more interested in how they handled the topic of labor exploitation.
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The movie follows a bee named Barry. After a very hard three days of college (and a well deserved gap day in the middle), he and his friend Adam are graduating and ready to enter the bee workforce. During orientation, Barry finds out that he’s expected to work the same job in the hive for the rest of his life, and he has a big problem with that. In an attempt to find a work around to his dilemma, Barry decides to join the Pollen Jocks, a position he was not bred to do. The pollen jocks are the only workers who go out of the hive everyday to pollinate and bring nectar back to the hive, and Barry looks at that as a chance to explore the world.
On his very first Pollen Jock expedition, Barry gets trapped inside an apartment and meets Vanessa, a nice florist who saves Barry from being killed by her boyfriend. They become quick friends (with a very strange romantic tension). Here’s where things get interesting. While on a grocery shopping trip with Vanessa, Barry sees an entire aisle stocked with jars of honey. With a little bit of detective work, he finds out there are entire farms of bees where beekeepers smoke bees and mass collect their honey. Barry makes the decision to sue the entire human race for stealing from the bees who haven't had a collective day off in 27 million years. |
You would think after all that the answer is simple: The Bee Movie was pushing an anti-capitalist agenda onto unsuspecting 8 years olds. But there’s surprisingly a lot more to the story. At this point of the movie, they had Barry framed as this hero who was the only bee who could fully see how wrong the honey industry was. There were numerous times where the movie very plainly criticized the exploitative nature of capitalism such as lines like “We know you as a bee have worked your whole life to get to the point where you can work for your whole life” and “Living out our lives as honey slaves to the white man?” (the likening of bees making honey to black people being slaves throughout the entire movie is extremely questionable. The line was funny, but still very sus).
And then to really cement Barry’s heroic status, they introduce Larry T. Montgomery, the defense attorney for the honey companies, who is your typical, conventionally unattractive cartoon villain. Montgomery claims that it is in humans' divine rights from God to benefit from nature, even if it’s at the expense of others (sound familiar?). He goes on to berate Barry’s family and intentionally rile up Adam to get him to sting him, giving him a ‘reason’ to call bees “winged beasts of destruction'' and “striped savages,” which draws similarities to how European colonizers treated Indigenous and Black people as lesser beings and stereotyped them as uncivilized and aggressive. Setting Montgomery up as a naturally privileged and unlikable person only further served to validate Barry’s motivations. It was pretty obvious that the message the movie was sending was that under capitalism, the working class is preyed on by the upper class who reap the benefits of the working class’s work. Or so I thought that was what they were trying to say.
And then to really cement Barry’s heroic status, they introduce Larry T. Montgomery, the defense attorney for the honey companies, who is your typical, conventionally unattractive cartoon villain. Montgomery claims that it is in humans' divine rights from God to benefit from nature, even if it’s at the expense of others (sound familiar?). He goes on to berate Barry’s family and intentionally rile up Adam to get him to sting him, giving him a ‘reason’ to call bees “winged beasts of destruction'' and “striped savages,” which draws similarities to how European colonizers treated Indigenous and Black people as lesser beings and stereotyped them as uncivilized and aggressive. Setting Montgomery up as a naturally privileged and unlikable person only further served to validate Barry’s motivations. It was pretty obvious that the message the movie was sending was that under capitalism, the working class is preyed on by the upper class who reap the benefits of the working class’s work. Or so I thought that was what they were trying to say.
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After the bees win the lawsuit, the message of the movie takes quite the turn. With no more incentive to produce honey, the bees finally take a few days off. Very quickly, a lot of bees find that they’ve lost any feeling of purpose and spend their days doing nothing inside their homes. In the blink of an eye, the bees that were once made out to be overworked are now shown as meaningless in the absence of their labor. Initially, this was really confusing to me because how could they change the entire moral of the story so suddenly? But when I went back to rewatch different scenes of the movie, I remembered that Barry was actually the only bee that explicitly showed any disdain for the free market system. Even the bees that were moved from their hives and smoked never actually complained about their situation. Everyone was happy with (or at the very least accepted) their position. This changes the entire lens of the movie. Barry was not actually the hero; he was simply an overzealous bee who put his own desires in front of everyone else's. With the bees no longer pollinating plants, the whole green world was dying, which is pretty bad, but when does Barry step in? When his little girlfriend Vanessa gets mad at him when her flower shop goes out of business. Barry does a complete 180 and has to go to drastic efforts to get the bees to start pollinating and creating honey again. All his “Free the Bees” energy was very much gone. |
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To me, the second part of this movie just sent the message that capitalism has its flaws, but in some ways it’s necessary. Do I agree with that message? Not particularly. It makes it seem like the only purpose that people have to live is to work, and that if they’re not laboring, then they aren’t contributing anything to the world. In the movie, the bees didn’t even try to strike a balance between working and resting; it was simply all or nothing with them. I feel like that gives off the idea that there is no room for compromise.
That in itself could be seen as a criticism of capitalism, but if the creators intended for that to be the point, I don’t think they brought it home the way they should. The Bee Movie made Barry the lone wolf who doesn’t enjoy the prospect of working the same job for the rest of his life, and it made him seem delusional and lazy because everyone else was so excited to work. It seems like they were saying ‘well… most people who work a typical 9-5 job don’t really mind that much,’ and I don’t think that’s true. Even if it was true, it doesn’t make it right for employers to exploit that. Just like Montgomery and the humans in The Bee Movie, the upper class people who don’t work extraordinarily hard for scraps in return don’t understand that basing your whole life around making a living to ensure your happiness and stability is not actually a healthy way to live. By making the bees happy with their endless work, the movie makes it seem like extensive labor is an enjoyable part of life rather than an abusive means of making a profit.
At the end of the Bee Movie, Barry is giving legal advice to other animals being taken advantage of, and Vanessa is selling “bee approved” honey. They didn’t exactly explain what made the honey “bee approved,” but with the bees back to working full time and no on screen evidence of the bee farms remaining shut down, I don’t think the ending gave off the “happily ever after” vibes the creators think it did. The movie just ended up saying that, as it currently stands, the world cannot turn without labor exploitation.
So yeah, unfortunately, the bee movie was not the anti-capitalist masterpiece that I wanted it to be. It started out pretty strong, but it fell victim to the simple fact that people truly cannot fathom that there is more to life than being a cog in the machine.
So yeah, unfortunately, the bee movie was not the anti-capitalist masterpiece that I wanted it to be. It started out pretty strong, but it fell victim to the simple fact that people truly cannot fathom that there is more to life than being a cog in the machine.
