Do You Pity Waternoose?

Pixar's Feature Films Monsters, Inc. / University
#1

I think Waternoose is sort of an unappreciated character in Monsters, Inc.. His transformation from a grandfatherly, friendly and comforting CEO to an evil child snatcher who will stop at nothing to save his company definitely works in the context of the film, but I think it leaves an impression on the audiences’ minds of Waternoose being inherently evil because he was secretly a threat against Boo, and because Boo is the epitome of innocence, anyone against her is seemingly wrong and disgusting.

So, do you think what Waternoose did was justified? There was undoubtedly a lot of pressure on him simply from the knowledge that the company had been in his family for so long, and large amounts of pressure over long periods can really screw someone up and force them to do things they wouldn’t usually do. If Waternoose’s plan had worked, and using machines to extract the screams out of the children became commonplace, is that okay as it’s for the sake of the company? And, more widely, for the sake of their world? They were running out of energy by the sounds of things, and if we presume that the power of laughter wouldn’t have been found if it wasn’t for Mike and Sulley (though, let’s be honest, it would’ve been at some point- is it really that unlikely for a Scarer to have entered a child’s room and to have made a silly mistake, inadvertently making the child laugh? But that’s for another thread) then what other choices would Waternoose have had?

At the end of the film, how do you feel about him as a character?

#2

Interesting point, what is the ‘cost’ of extracting energy. It definitely has repercusions with today our “need” of energy in the world. Are we any better in our scalping of the land for oil, coal and property?

Waternoose was under lots of pressure, we’d like to think we could never do something like that, but it makes you think. Waternoose is actually a real character with real problems. A ‘villan’ in the “anyone against boo is bad” way, but just trying to survive.

I for one will see him in a more even light.

#3

Waternoose was under pressure, but it was Randall who made the evil machine! Waternoose wanted more energy, but never wanted to get it in an evil way. He probably asked Randall to help him, and Randall saw an opporitunity and built the evil machine.Waternoose should’ve asked for something less evil, though…

#4

I think that he knew about the machine, and probably ordered it to be built as well.

We hear him say… “I will kidnap a thousand children before I let the company die!”

This being said, until anyone in the monster world got to know an actual human child, they would not have actually understood them. Would our government not kidnap a monster and do whatever to it if they ever found one? Would they automatically assume how they feel, onto it?

Somewhere along the way, be it management issues, or whatever else, the company became sort of corrupt. Facing an energy shortage, which would ultimately lead to economic downfall, Waternoose panicked, and he obviously had recruited others in the company to help him with his plan. Do you actually think that Randall built the Scream Extractor all on his own??? There were probably others involved that we just don’t see. Other’s that probably recieved nice company bonuses.

  • C-3PO
#5

First off to make something clear. It was WATERNOOSE who was the one who planned the whole deal with the Scream Extractor and used RANDALL to build it. cranes neck That’s already fact.
And Waternoose apparently has no limits to keep his company up, whether it be kidnapping, or banishing someone he treated fatherly.

Now…to Waternoose. I don’t so much pity him. Waternoose, lets be fair…Henry…took over Monsters Inc. at the “tender” age of 142. Now sure in this context, it showed he was experienced. He was educated in an Ivy Leauge school, was at one time a well-respected scarer, and inherited the company from his father.
Now…unsure what age Waternoose was at the time of the film, but I’ll be fair in saying he inherited the company rather close…at least 5/10 years or so.
Now it wouldn’t surprise me if Waternoose the 2nd, Henry’s father, expected that Scream wouldn’t be taken in as much as time progressed and decided to “let the son handle it”. Needless to say, the Waternoose have been involved in the scream industry, and Monsters Inc. in general.
In the year of 1985, one of the previous Waternoose took headline in Monsters Inc., making the company prosper and expand it’s facilities, becoming a more official location of power collection.
Wasn’t until 90 years later that kids were becoming hard to scare. It wouldn’t be too far fetched that somewhere around here, or a few years later, that Waternoose took up the mantel of CEO.

Sure…I would respect Waternoose that he had taken up his family’s acquired business and keep it afloat…but he made a grave error.
He stopped at NOTHING to keep it alive. He engaged in the scheme of broadsiding an employee to build a machine, misuse (in subtlty of words) of M.I. property to have it built, kidnapping, banishment of an employee…the list could be increased.
Waternoose was too prideful to let anyone but himself have Monsters Inc. rise from the grave of scream shortage. Not surprising he would get rid of Randall and Fungus to take the credit all for himself (which he planned to do, at least to Randall).
He would even hurt those closest to him for his actions, then give them little thought. Waternoose shows his true colors to Sullivan, who thought of Waternoose as a father figure (though morely uncle I think as Sulley does have a father).
I don’t pity him…I pity the Waternooses in general.

#6

“I never should have trusted you with this” - Henry Waternoose, confession of a mastermind.

The use of the Toxic Card leads to some debate amoungst Monsters themselves. Through the events, humans were learned to not be as fearfully toxic as thought, thus the years of a lie makes for wonder of how and why toxicitcy became an issue.
Humans as a mass are fearful of what they don’t understand. They would sooner kill than question.

Randall and Fungus were likely the only ones involved in the construction, and Fungus becoming involved could, perhaps, had been an accident, as Fungus was unaware of Waternoose being behind it all.
Randall actually could have built it on his own, as the majority of the parts were from Monsters Inc. materials/machines themselves, and Randall had training and education to know how they work. Despite Fungus’s jabbering and…personality, he might have been a helpful hand in construction…albiet an annoying one.
There were probably, however, those in Scare that were aware of what Waternoose was doing. Note that if the Scream Extractor was inevitably an unacceptable machine…why make it? And why think it would be accepted? Because…the Scream Shortage. It wouldn’t be too farfetched that the shortage was also helped by a decrease in release from Scare-owned facilities. In such, the public would be desperate for power, willing to accept any solution. And thus, the Scream Extractor would be accepted. And the paperwork of it’s use and contraversy would be handled by the uppers Waternoose was involved in.
There was more to this than Waternoose, Randall, and Fungus…

#7

I’ve got mixed feelings about Waternoose, although he IS, beyond any doubt in my mind whatsoever, the REAL villain here and the real reason why the Scream Extractor was built. He was the one who ORDERED Randall to build it, taking advantage of Randall’s insecurities and fear of failure as well as his need to have the praise of others to gain the use of his talents. It was Waternoose’s plan all along to kidnap human children, at least until a version of that machine which was more portable could be devised. The mere presence of that illegal “banishment” door he kept there in the factory was proof that Waternoose had a long history of dealing with those who had crossed him, or whom he considered to be threats, and that this probably went back to his father, was well, sort of a Monster World version of the Gotti clan. That was just part of the culture of generational wealth that he’d been born into-if you were one of the elite, the born-rich, you were entitled to pretty much be able to do whatever you wanted, to whomever you wanted, and were above reproach due to your money and social status. I can understand his concerns that this company that his family had owned for so long could become bankrupt, but at the same time, I have as much difficulty dredging up sympathy for him as I do for the top execs at AIG who gave themselves MILLION dollar bonuses of money they’d just been given at the expense of American taxpayers and who will now have to pay it all right back to the IRS. In general, I can’t find much sympathy for the rich who use others as if they were toothpicks, and think nothing at all of it, and actually feel they’re entitled to do so because of their money and family name. It’s got nothing to do with Boo, actually, since I would not expect monsters to have the same feelings for a human child that we do, given that most of them still basically thought of humans as very dangerous “lower” life forms at that point, since they’d had no opportunity to find out otherwise. My negative feelings towards Waternoose have more to do with how he treated people in general, how he used others and thought no more of doing so than most of you would of using a toothpick and tossing it in the trash afterwards, than the fact that he planned to kidnap human children as part of his effort to save his company and bolster the economy, especially how he came off so friendly and caring, when that was just a facade. It’s been said that a pretend friend is much worse than an overt enemy, and Henry J. Waternoose is a shining example of that. Again, though, this was no doubt how he’d been raised and educated, so he saw nothing wrong with it.

That said, I still don’t consider him evil, per se, even though I myself have had to work for someone just like him and suffered great emotional pain because of it. I can actually understand his desperation, to some extent, as the changing times and economy clashed with his sense of financial security and worse, his sense of family pride. I also do not consider the Scream Extractor to be “evil”. I suspect that Dan-E, Randall-Hater Extraordinaire, believes that the machine was intended to KILL the children that were put into it, but that would make no sense whatsoever. No monster, not Randall, not even Waternoose, was under any delusions that humans weren’t an extremely valuable resource, albeit a “dangerous” one. They knew that monsters depended on human children, so it would make absolutely no sense whatsoever to design a machine that would purposefully kill a child! Doing so would be detrimental to the Monster World on more than one level; first, it would eliminate the next generations of adult humans, by killing them when they were still children, before they ever got a chance to grow up and produce children of their own. No matter how successful the Scream Extractor was, the supply of Scream it gathered would not have been limitless, and if humans were effectively made extinct through zero population growth, this would hardly be to the monsters’ benefit, now would it? Second, if the machine were deadly, this would have ultimately led to the discovery of the Monster World by the REALLY dangerous humans-the adults. An adult is, for the most part, going to chalk up their child’s occasional nocturnal screams as nightmares, but if kids all over the world started disappearing, en mass, as it were, from their beds every night, or started turning up dead in their beds, parents aren’t going to take this lightly, and eventually it will lead to someone realizing that someTHING is coming in the children’s rooms at night and taking them, without forced entry, and this will lead to enough surveillance of children’s rooms that it will be inevitable that a monster will get caught as he/she enters through the closet. Given our history, once that happens, the Monster World is pretty much done for! It would have been like killing the proverbial goose that laid the golden eggs, while simultaneously cutting off their proverbial noses to spite their faces, for any monsters to have designed a machine that would kill human children or even do them serious harm in any way.

pitbulllady

#8

Oh yes I nearly forgot about the Banishment Door. THAT in itself would be something Waternoose would had had connections to get…illegal connections. Such doors in the hands of anybody is dangerous.

Whoa…PB…you blew my mind :open_mouth: I actually DID start a semi-book fanfiction of M.I. with criminal/justice themes of crime lords in such places as New York during such times…and GOTTI WAS one of the main players 0_o

Easy there Pitbulllady ^^; Wouldn’t say Extraordinaire ^^; I think ^_^;

#9

I sympathized with Waternoose for awhile, up until the end really, when he said he’d kidnap 1000 children. It seemed to me up until that point, he didnt want to do what he was doing, but felt he had no other choice. And I couldnt condemn him for that. Not that I condone it, either :wink:

#10

An interesting thread…well, if one were the type that was quite merciful than it’s possible that someone may be able to have pity for him…if one was the type who wasn’t so then maybe not…personally, I don’t know if I would or not…oh well.

#11

While it is still possible to have some sympathses for Waternoose- he clearly does not want his company to fall, and he probably has alot of ‘family pride’ driving him, sometimes it’s pretty hard to do so. He may have the board weighing down on him (a case of a bully being bullied?) but that sort of pales to the situation of an employee with the full weight of a CEO on his back. (Ahem).

I don’t care for the way he uses Randall, not do I care for his handling of my favourite character (Sulley)- he makes him love him like a father, but in the end, the relationship is CLEARLY one-sided. He doesn’t even try to strike up a deal with the bloke. Then again, perhaps he knows Sulley far too well and knows that such a thing would be impossible?

It seems to me the whole ‘getting to know your employees’ is VERY self serving- perhaps another reason from going down to the scare floor- to maintain appearances, relationships… and knowledge of potential pawns.

I think it’s because like Mike, Waternoose is just so… fake. Fake people and friends have burned me in the past (specifically I’ve been more or less the Sulley in a Sulley-and-Mike friendship… they don’t make the best friends people in fact. And Mike keeps on USING Sulley all the time, his life would not be much without the ‘fuzzball’, and personally for various reasons I DON’T think Mike is all that popular without Sulley- irronically my best EVER friend is someone who used to be like my Randall- someone with a rivalry, a grudge I wanted no part in, even if the favouritism displayed to Sulley wasn’t really involved-, yet at the time they had been having BIG BIG problems, real big, too bad for me to post here, and through various circumstances we ended up being friends anyway. Before that it was simply a case of us being friends with the same person. Needless to say, she remained friends with ‘Mike’ for alot longer than me, I know odd.)

Is it odd to say but ALSO Waternoose creeps me out due to the various parellels which can be drawn to SULLEY! They both act as parental figures to someone tyhey AREN’T RELATED TO (Waternoose to Sulley; Sulley to Boo). They both become CEOs at some point. Also with the fact that Randall’s exile cannot be legal for the world to make sense, they are not always legal in their approaches to their problems as it were either. They both have vindictive sides.

However in the end Sulley is GENUINE in his affections towards Boo, with Waternoose… that idea is unfortunatly very up in the air. But somehow I can’t see Sulley doing the saem thing to Boo, even when she grows up, can you? Plus Sulley feels guilt and doubt rather intensly (more so than his friend in the end too), which means that I’m thinking doubt over how he handled the first movie events should be touched upon in the sequel… guilt and doubt are an inherent part of Sulley’s personality. Plus Sulley is more influenced then Waternoose would be- Mike (directly) influences him alot and the only aspect Sulley argues against is when it is in regards Boo’s safety… we don’t see anyone do this on Waternoose. It’s more or less all him. His own influences are indirect in nature at best and mostly internal and because of his own desires most of the time.

Actually a similar thing could be said about why I prefer Randall to Mike too- Randall is smarter etc. but it’s more than that- Randall is GENUINE. If he doesn’t like you, you know this. Like Mike, he doesn’t have the greatest grip of maturity, but at least he doesn’t PRETEND. Mike lies out of his ass all the time. With his fronds… I’ve always thought Randall would have difficulkty lying anyway. I don’t like how Mike treats Sulley nor Randall Sulley to be honest but Randall is GENUINE, doesn’t make out he’s his best friend or anything like that really. He doesn’t pull a Mike, or worse, a WATERNOOSE on the big guy. Geez.

Granted, my own version of older!Boo is somewhat of a liar, but she’s genuinely nice to people because she thinks it’s the best way to go for them. She does have a nasty habit for hiding things though, as a result mainly of her growing used to hiding the idea of monsters from her parents and other people. She’s genuinely optimistic and likes to help people… it isn’t really as self-serving as Mike’s or Waternoose’s reasons for deception in the end. Though she has lied to make things easier for herself. Like most people do.

At some point though, these lies are going to catch up with her and bit her in the butt if she’s not careful. As with most of the characters really. Granted, Sulley is actually making more efforts to rectify and show his in a certain way due to various circumstances he has to be careful over…
(Sorry going on a fanfic tangent there.)

#12

A lot has been said about Waternoose’s concern that the company was in danger of failing and that it would fall from his family’s possession, but consider this: by that point in time, the company was most likely in his family’s possession ONLY as a matter of formality, as the actual ownership of the company would have belonged to the stock-holders. The Waternoose family might have started the company, but as it grew and as the times changed, their hold on it would have diminished. Also, the company might have had to declare bankruptcy, or more likely, been bought out and taken over by another company, or broken up into several smaller companies, but it’s very, very unlikely that it would have simply dissolved and been shut down totally, leaving thousands of people out of work and MILLIONS without electricity. In the event of any of those things happening, either another, more-powerful CEO would be put in place, usurping Waternoose’s power, or he would be made CEO of a smaller, less-rich company formed from the break-up of the original, which would mean taking a big cut in pay. THAT was his bottom line, right there: money and power, NOT family honor or concern about the citizens being left in the dark.

Furthermore, it would have been very, very surprising if Waternoose had not had another agenda in mind down the road: the realm of politics. When you consider that most successful American politicians come from one of two situations prior to entering politics, either big business or the legal profession, it makes more sense, and MOST of those who enter politics via the business world do so from the field of energy production, especially the coal, oil and fossil fuel industries, of which the parallel in the Monster World would be Scream energy. If Waternoose himself had manipulated the books and the press to make it SEEM as though a crisis was taking place, and then HE was one to come along and “solve” that crisis through “his” invention of a machine that would extract Scream from human children no matter what, he’d be perceived as a hero, and of course, when he chose to run for political office, the voters would remember how he had “saved” them from that terrible “crisis” when they entered the polling booth.

pitbulllady

#13

Maybe I should actually put an answer that makes sense to this question then…as far as would I personally pity Waternoose…I would have to say that I personally wouldn’t…he seems to remind me of some of the higherups from where I work in that if there is one thing that is a main concern it’s the company and what direction that it’s going. Of course, that’s how it is in the business world, it’s survival of the fittest, dog eat dog world and such. While keeping a company alive is important considering all the things at stake, considering that if a company were to fall, what the aftermath is would truly be diseasterous. Despite that, there is a fine line to cross when it comes to keeping a company alive and to me, it seems that he had crossed that fine line. Going so far as even kidnapping children even though to the monsters, human children are not seen the same way as we would see them, it’s still considered too far. When one thinks about it, what he would be attempting to do was mainly being done for the company, not for any other reason…

#14

Of course a reminder is that Waternoose inherited the CEO position from his father, who in turn, inherited from his father. The Waternoose had the CEO position of Monsters Inc. since the beginning (after it was known as Monsters Lmt.). So it’s also a family pride sort of thing, which is rather selfish in this position…considering the Waternooses do not OWN the Scare Industry. No no. They are merely a powerful figure family, great stockholders, and self-purposed collectors. Heck. The Waternooses even have their own company somewhere, rather uncreatively named “Waternoose Inc.”, as well as “Waternoose Holdings”. So the family is rather self-centered.
The Waternooses are not above stepping on people to get what they want. It’s a pity really…they live for perhaps 150/200 years…yet they still don’t learn a thing…

#15

A matter of pride…sadly an emotion that like other negative emotions, it can bring out the worst in a person…as for learning, some may never learn despite your age or how long you live for…

#16

“Sometimes a child can see better than an adult”…I like that statement. Though…it’s a wonder just how charasmatic Waternooses are. Able to “make friends” quite easily and dispose of them JUST as easily. Heck…even Boo ran to him when Sullivan scared her unintentionally.

#17

You know, what you just said does remind me of someone we used to know on the Mezco’s LDD forums, she acted like she was so nice until she tried ripping off other people’s customs for money…she’s gone now though, the mods there had banned her at midnight on Christmas eve which I felt was a wonderful christmas gift for her…he could be charasmatic or just have very good acting…

#18

Waternoose is indeed a good actor. Which is actually something CEOs have to be most of the time, especially to the Board of Directors. Showboating is sometimes done for marketing champaigns, public appearences, what have you.
Waternoose had allot of “practice” that simply came natural to him…and his family.

#19

Interesting points made here.

PBL also has a point- the fact he wants to keep power/money is a major drive…

But I STILL also think family pride would be a driver in it all the same- despite the family hold on the company now being more or less ‘superficial’ (it’s owned by shareholders), there would still be family pride involved regarding it I believe. Waternoose WOULDN’T want to be KNOWN as the Waternoose who had to take a further reduction in power or lost power completely, in combination with simply wanting that power on a more personal note.

Waternoose would make a great political leader if he had just a… TOUCH more patience. Even then, he’d probably be really great at it.

Note I say ‘great’ as in talented and that he would go far, I don’t mean on a moral basis at all.

#20

Of course, Waternoose DOES have some political pool. Afterall he is in esscence a public representative of the Scream Industry and is referred to as a strong player in it.
Being found out would tarnish the Waternoose name. And if Henry’s father is still alive at the time, it wouldn’t be too farfetched that he’d “take up precautions” to his son ruining things for the whole family.