In the movie, the town of Thneedville is a boxed-in plastic paradise. Almost everything in the town is fake, and as the Lorax describes at the beginning, “they like it that way.” The air outside has gotten so polluted that the town’s inhabitants buy bottled fresh air without question. They’re unaware that the world outside Thneedville is a desolate wasteland, and O’Hare, the corrupt CEO who basically rules the town, makes sure that they stay unaware.
What O’Hare makes them believe, as Bourdieu puts it, “confirms what they already know, and above all, leaves their mental structures intact” (Bourdieu 254).
What bothers me most about the movie is its ending, when Ted introduces the tree to the town, and all the townspeople turn on O’Hare in an instant. They figure trees would be better for Thneedville, but they don’t really try to understand why. They simply accept it because a kid got on a soapbox and told them what to think, and they give him “respect that is... quite out of proportion with [his] intellectual merit” (Bourdieu 254). Their thought process is along the lines of, “hey, let’s plant a tree, because this kid says trees are cool.” Ted is just another person telling them what to think, just like television tells us what to think.
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