Friday was a rather apropos opening day for Jerry Seinfeld’s Bee Movie. The bees decide to go on strike after Barry, Seinfeld’s animated bee doppelganger, realizes that a few major corporations are making gazillions of dollars off of the bees’ honey, while the bees themselves have just enough honey to get by. When the hives shut down, so does New York City. The trees and flowers die. Central Park becomes gray and dreary. The Tournament of Roses in Pasadena stages its final showing, because after this season, there will be no more flowers.
“Black and Yellow, Help a Fellow,” is the bees’ rallying cry. But unlike the members of the Writers Guild of America, the bees don’t show up in force to declare their rights. Instead, they lie around the hive, getting fat and lazy. Depression sets in. No one has any work to do. They don’t really feel like bees anymore. This is understandable. After all, a bee is a bee to the core. When he’s not making honey, he’s not, well, living.
I’m not a screenwriter, but as a fiction writer I can empathize with writers of any stripe who have been told to put down their pens. When I don’t write, I feel lost. Of course, fiction writers will never strike. Who would we picket? A TV and movie-loving public? And besides, if we were to eighty-six literary expression in the mother of all strikes, one that lasted until the end of time, there would be plenty of books to keep those who do read occupied ad infinitum. It is fair to say that there is really no need, from this point on, for any new novel to be written, ever. There are novels aplenty in the world. What’s missing are the readers.
But back to the bees: Realizing that he has made a terrible mistake, Barry gets the pollen jockeys to fly to Pasadena, where they suck the nectar from a big pile of flowers on the runway–the last remaining flowers on earth–and off they go to pollinate the world.
Color returns to New York City. The bees get fair representation by a crack team of negotiators, and the bees and the humans learn how to work together. The multi-billion-dollar corporation ends up with a bee sting to the buttocks.
The industry knew this strike was likely to happen. Jerry Seinfeld, one of the most successful television writers in history, knew it too. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that the movie opened just days before the walk-out. Maybe not.
Read about the walk-out here.