Inefficiencies at the Monsters, Inc. Power Plant, Ranked

I would begin with a spoiler alert, but honestly, this post will make no sense unless you have seen Monsters, Inc. fairly recently.

Brief recap: this is a movie about a universe populated by monsters, living in parallel to our own universe, and crossing over using closet-door-portal technology to harvest the screams of children. The harvesting is performed at a power plant owned and operated by the titular “Monsters, Inc.,” an apparent energy monopoly serving the city of Monstropolis (if not the entire monster world/universe). Our heroes work at the heart of the plant, doing the actual scaring of children and loading the screams into yellow canisters.

Monsters, Inc. takes place during an energy shortage in Monstropolis. This is actually critical to the film; the plot hinges on scream scarcity and the management practices and ownership history of the company and causes of the shortage are actually addressed in dialogue at some length. At the end of the film, the Monsters, Inc. power plant switches to harvesting human child laughter, which solves the shortage due to the higher productive power of laughter.

The film’s final resolution raises the obvious question, discussed to some extent below, of how a civilization could obtain technological advances on par with modern humanity (driving cars, operating power plants, etc.) while remaining so ignorant of its power source. Moreover, the film’s titular corporation displays such astonishing inefficiency that a reasonable viewer may conclude the power shortage to be caused by simple mismanagement. This essay discusses some of the most egregious inefficiencies at the Monsters, Inc. power plant.

Please note that this is not a ranking of plot holes. For purposes of this essay, we maintain our suspension of disbelief that, among other things, the monster world exists and that its inhabitants are capable of human-like rationality as apparently intended by the movie’s creators, and that the screams and laughter of humans is capable of providing usable energy to the monster civilization. (Likewise, we are unconcerned with the vast array of conspiracy theories seeking to explain the film’s idiosyncrasies by way of its tie-ins to other Pixar movies. And additionally, this is not an attempt to explain economic concepts to beginners.) In other words, we are examining the film on its own terms and simply showing why Monsters, Inc. is a poorly run company.

5. What kind of power plant shuts down at night?

The first act of the film establishes the plant’s operating procedures. Mike and Sully arrive at the plant, prepare for the day in a sort of locker room (which seems to have made it into the film to establish a forum for “locker room talk,” as none of the workers wear clothing or are seen to bathe), then pass through an administrative corridor and are provided paperwork identifying their scare targets before entering the “Scare Floor” for a shift of scaring. Mike and Sully are one of many pairs of monsters comprised of (i) the “scarer” (Sully) who enters childrens’ rooms and causes them to scream, and (ii) the station runner/coach (Mike) who reviews files, sets up the scare and loads the door, and files the paperwork that tracks the productivity of the door and the target. (The prequel, Monsters University, suggests that Mike additionally serves as an architect/showrunner who crafts elaborate narratives to maximize the psychological horror of Sully’s appearances in the human world.) The Scare Floor appears to house facilities for about 10 scarer/coach teams, and from the glimpses of the timing of scares, it seems that the teams accomplish perhaps a few dozen scares per shift. (The volume of paperwork we see suggests the number is lower - four or five at most.)

We’re told that the shift occurs during a key hour in the human world in which the east coast of North America is going to sleep. During the initial shift, one of Mike and Sully’s colleagues accidentally brings a human sock back onto the Scare Floor, at which point he is cleansed, the sock comically destroyed by a swat team, and critically, the plant’s owner Henry J. Waternoose III laments that he has to close an entire Scare Floor for 30 minutes. In other words, we are informed here that (i) monster time corresponds roughly to human time and certain hours of the day are more productive than others, and that (ii) there are multiple Scare Floors, and that (iii) a brief loss of productive time on a scare floor causes a noticeable loss of overall productivity. Later in the film we see a storage facility containing millions of doors (36 million, if you believe this wiki entry citation to Pixar’s John Lasseter, and, ok sure). And we later learn that the entire plot of the movie is driven by a conspiracy led by Waternoose to invent a productivity-enhancing scare harvest machine to save his company and save Monstropolis from its energy crisis, even if it means kidnapping children. In other words, the energy shortage is no minor issue at Monsters, Inc.

At the end of a shift of scaring, Mike and Sully leave the plant - which appears to close down entirely. This is a problem.

We have observed that screams are stored in canisters (more on that later), and we can assume that the canisters have a long enough shelf life that overnight storage and use is not a problem. Thus, in theory, in the absence of an energy crisis, the plant need not operate 24/7 to meet the energy needs of Monstropolis. However, there is an energy crisis. The plant should be operating at maximum capacity at all times.

One possible explanation for the shutdown is the fact that monster time appears to track human time, and there is a suggestion that only a few evening hours of human time are capable of scream production (i.e., the brief window when children are trying to fall asleep and most likely to be scared by monsters without having to be woken by monsters, which would require the monsters to touch the humans and/or their stuff. This leads to some questions discussed below.) So, given this, the plant should be operating at max capacity during the evening hours of the relatively few time zones in which the vast majority of humans live.

From a cool blog post by some guy.

As demonstrated in this cool chart, nearly half of the world population lives in the comparatively narrow band of longitudes encompassing east and south Asia, with about a quarter of all humans in UTC +8:00 (China/Indonesia and more) and nearly another quarter in UTC +5:30 (India). Additional material portions of the population live in the Europe/Africa longitudes, UTC 0:00 to +3:00 or so, and the Americas, UTC -5:00 to 8:00. (We’re approximating longitudes and time zones here, although they aren’t really the same thing given that time zones are created as a matter of policy. But all of this has to be approximate, as childrens’ bedtimes are determined by a combination of culture, geography and seasonality among other factors, and bedtimes are likely to vary by hours even within a single time zone. The most we can really say is that most children sleep during nighttime hours and monsters are unlikely to try scaring during daylight, for obvious reasons.)

So, the plant closure starts to make some sense when you consider that the vast, vast majority of humanity lives between UTC -8:00 and UTC +9:00. That would mean that operating the Scare Floors of the Monsters, Inc. power plant approximately 17 hours per day would lead to nearly 100% capacity. (Apparently the children of Micronesia would receive a free pass from monster terror.)

But the film does not suggest that the plant is open 17 hours a day. In fact, Mike and Sully begin their shift during the U.S. Eastern seaboard bedtime - towards the end of that hypothetical 17-hour shift. Mike and Sully could reasonably expect to achieve only 3 or 4 hours of scaring before nighttime falls over the comparative emptiness of the Pacific.

Both this North-Atlantic shift orientation and the number of doors itself suggest that no attention has been given to maximizing the plant’s productive capacity. Let’s start with the 36 million doors. It’s not enough. There are around 1 billion people between the ages of 3 and 11. Even factoring in that many of them do not sleep in rooms with appropriate doors, 36 million isn’t enough. And even if 36 million is the right number, the Pacific isn’t exactly a wasteland. Between the various tropical archipelagos and the polar populations, there are probably hundreds of thousands of children per time zone, if not more, across the Pacific. And again - each Scare Floor has only about 10 scarer teams, each capable of a few dozen scares per shift, i.e., a few thousand scares per Scare Floor per shift. That means that even as darkness crosses the Pacific, Monsters, Inc. should have multiple Scare Floors in operation.

Granted, we don’t know everything about this plant. It is possible that certain Scare Floors do operate during nighttime hours, and we don’t see it. It is also possible that for any number of reasons (some discussed below), the plant’s operations are too inefficient for it to operate below a certain threshold of capacity. Less plausibly, it’s possible that Monstropolis law mandates an 8-hour work day that must fall during daylight hours, or that monster time does not correlate 1:1 to human time.

The film implies that none of these is the case. For instance, consider that the scarers’ “leader board” shows the productivity of only a couple dozen scarers, including Sully and Randall and apparently several others within the same Scare Floor. Moreover, that leader board appears to be frozen except during Sully and Randall’s shift, suggesting that the plant is unproductive at all other times. And the plot of the movie hinges on Sully and Randall’s scare floor being unproductive during its off-hours, as Randall uses that time to kidnap Boo, and Sully accidentally interferes with the plan by attempting to recover Mike’s paperwork after the shift. (There actually is a conspiracy theory regarding monster time travel, but if monster time does not correlate to human time and/or monsters are capable of time travel, the whole plot point of approaching North American east coast bedtime hours is nonsensical.)

Our lack of knowledge suggests a possible, if not likely, explanation for this inefficiency. Hence, frustrating though it may be, we’ll leave it at the top of the list.

4. The door storage disaster

This one’s pretty easy. When Mike and Sully attempt to return Boo, alternately chased by and chasing Randall, we see a massive storage facility. The doors are stored in hanging position, and travel by a sort of hanging monorail that appears to be located hundreds of yards (perhaps miles) from the Scare Floors.

This just seems to be too great a distance. First of all, the energy required to transport the doors to the Scare Floors would be unnecessarily large. The storage facility should be directly underneath, on top of, or at least next to, the Scare Floors.

Moreover, there should be multiple storage facilities. We know from the Monsters, Inc. television advertisement that opens the movie that each door pertains to a single child who is matched to a single monster scarer. Each scarer has a single station on a single Scare Floor. Based on our calculations of shift lengths and productivity, each scarer should have no more than a few dozen targets per shift. Depending on frequency of repeats, each scarer should thus have a stable of not more than a few thousand doors. Those doors should be stored immediately proximate to the scarer’s station.

(And the film does suggest repeats: we see that once a target outgrows its scaring productivity age, its door is shredded, thus suggesting that until such event, the target is repeatedly approached. There are also references to targets being assigned to scarers like property, likewise suggesting that there is minimal alternation of targets between scarers.)

It would make sense to have both long-term and short-term storage. Perhaps the long-term version could be as distant and gigantic as depicted in the film (and could include doors that are temporarily unproductive, such as those of children on extended vacations, or those temporarily sharing space with an adult). We do not see any short-term storage solution though, which appears to be a gross inefficiency on the part of Monsters, Inc.

3. Why with the canisters - have they not heard of pipes?

We only ever see screams stored in yellow canisters roughly the size of scuba tanks. Each canister has a scare meter on it showing its stored capacity with a red bar. We never see any other method for storing screams. This is a problem.

At the risk of breaking the rules here, I think the yellow canisters are intended to make the plant’s operations more visually comprehensible. The canisters and the red bar provide a shorthand for individual productivity that is necessary for us to understand Sully and Randall’s respective productivity and thus the intensity of their individual competition.

The problem with the canisters is pretty obvious: they have to be manually switched in and out of the scare machinery and then manually carted to whatever storage and distribution center exists elsewhere in the plant. (One of these carts becomes a plot vehicle as Randall creates a replica cart to house his kidnapping victim.) That means that the the plant is hiring excess labor to cart the canisters around and losing valuable scare time as coaches switch out canisters when they could be designing scares and filing paperwork, etc.

[A truly efficient pipe-and-tube-based society, as shown in Brazil, at right.]

This relates to another gross inefficiency, which I haven’t detailed at length here because the movie seems aware of it to the point of offering a Marxist critique: the coaches perform numerous small but critical tasks, running the scarers’ stations, tracking productivity, managing scarers’ physical and mental health, designing scares, and manually loading doors and replacing canisters. The scarers…walk into the doors and get scary. Which, fine, but rather appropriately the film plays on their being overpuffed celebrities in the vein of pro athletes. More apropos for this essay, it suggests that the plant’s productivity might be increased by adding a second station runner, allowing the Mikes of the world to function more as coaches, and ridding itself of a work force that for now solely moves canisters from points A to B.

In the real human world, this type of energy would flow by pipeline. There would be no switching in and out - in fact, as few moving parts as possible. Just straight flow into a refinery of some sort (and we do know from dialogue that the screams must be refined). We even have technology to measure flow of fluids through a pipeline by weight. (It seems obvious that we would have such technology, but apparently it’s recent enough that the guy who invented it in the past century is both alive and insanely rich. I know this because I have been to his airplane museum in northwest Montana, where he keeps World War II fighter planes, among others, in working condition, and flies them all around Lincoln County. My grandfather used to look up, see a P-40 screaming toward him, and…flashbacks.)

2. Waternoose Fails to Envision an Ethics of Profitability

This is a film about a monster civilization that powers itself on the screams of life forms from an alternate universe, and is in the throes of an energy crisis. And yet, its denouement occurs when the owner of its monopolistic energy company admits on camera to his willingness to kidnap children to obtain sufficient energy to save the company.

(Again breaking the rules a bit - there’s a basic economics problem with this storyline, which is that there is an energy shortage - supply is low - which means that Monsters, Inc. should not necessarily be in financial difficulty. With monopolistic powers and relatively inflexible demand, it should be able to raise prices. Exxon does just fine when gasoline supplies fall. But let’s assume Monstropolis exercises some kind of market controls and/or that Monsters, Inc. has obligated itself to a long-term fixed price per unit of scream energy.)

More to the point: the denouement of the film only functions if monster society is somehow (a) completely happy scaring the shit out of human kids with extreme regularity, but at the same time (b) morally affronted by the idea and/or logistics of kidnapping children.

You might argue that most societies are more comfortable with certain levels of gradual, less conspicuous harm than with outright violence. And fair enough! It’s not like we humans allow our energy utilities to outright shoot people in the face, even though the things they’re actually doing, subsidized by our governments, are far more harmful to our species. But there’s the rub: it’s our species we care about. We really don’t care about other species’ bodies or feelings much at all.

I mean, there are people who make arguments to the effect of “sure, we kill and eat cows, but it’s ethically wrong to cause them to feel fear during the slaughtering process.” Those arguments don’t get much traction. We take, we kill, we eat, we don’t give a shit about feelings when it comes to most other people, let alone animals. If we could get free electrical power from aliens - much less, cows, which at least share some common ancestry with us - would we perceive an ethical boundary between feelings and physical harm? I submit to you: fuck no.

Monsters, Inc. functions as a film on the basic predicate that the monsters are analogous to humans in their mannerisms, language, technology, corporate functionality, and basically everything else (they are anthropomorphic). And, like humans, they have found a species of organisms they can harvest for social good. They are even comfortable causing fairly extreme psychological, if not physical, harm to that species. Assuming that their imposition of an ethical barrier on additional types of harm is consistent with the premise of the film - doubtful - Monsters, Inc.’s failure to persuade society to break that barrier is a strategic catastrophe.

Let’s be clear: the monsters absolutely should be kidnapping children to harvest their screams. It is absolutely what humans would do. If Randall is to be believed, his machine to suck the screams out of kidnapped children would lead to a multi-fold increase in productivity and overall power generation. It’s just hard to believe that monster society would balk at that, especially once every family’s electricity bill falls to nothing.

Still, it’s easy to believe that management of Monsters, Inc. would choose to conduct its research on a clandestine basis, because Mr. Waternoose is a poor manager incapable of presenting a public challenge to orthodox thought. It’s easy to believe because there are human analogies to this situation, such as the numerous companies that could’ve been selling high quality silicon dildos between approximately 1950 and 1975 but decided not to because society thought dildos were for naughty people. Fortunately we now live in the world of dildo billionaires. That’s the real problem here: that Monsters, Inc. and Waternoose are not capable of selling society what society really needs. There is a fatal lack of vision and marketing skill.

This ethical conundrum only makes sense in the film in the context of monster society’s fear of humans as toxic. Ethical concern could even make sense as a secondary manifestation of perceived physical danger to the monster world in kidnapping human children. But the film does not imply that the characters’ revulsion to kidnapping stems from anything but personal morality, an unquestioned disgust for human bodies and their excretions. (In that sense, the comparison to human sexual morality is pretty apropos.) Moreover, we never learn what exactly the monsters believe would happen upon monster-human contact (and rather transparently, it’s a mechanism to keep the monsters from interacting with adult humans and forcing the expansion of the film’s universe past its logical breaking point). As discussed below, this fear is misplaced to the point of absurd economic loss.

1. Complete lack of R&D

This is obvious, right? The entire monster culture is based on a belief that humans are toxic and dangerous - to the point that a scarer who touches a sock is brutally shaved and disinfected within seconds. (A gross inefficiency on the part of the CDA: that they maintain swat teams that travel by helicopter to the Monsters, Inc. plant and have to bust through windows to get in. It’s an organization whose job is to police interactions with the human world. You don’t want to, I don’t know, station a few guards at the huge power plant full of portals to the human world?)

You have at least dozens of scarers entering human child bedrooms on a routine basis. None of them appear to be getting sick. Do they not walk on discarded socks on an extremely routine basis? Why are human socks more toxic than human floorboards, anyway?

And that’s not to mention the whole laughs-are-more-powerful-than-scares thing, which honestly, how long should that have taken the monsters to figure out, a day? Ten minutes? The border between screaming and laughing is so thin - it’s almost the definition of laughter, a semi-voluntary human response to a transgression or danger that turns out to be benign. Hard to imagine a more apt scenario for laughter than Monsters, Inc. - and we’re even shown that certain incompetent scarers generate laughter on a routine basis.

This goes hand-in-hand with the point above. Monsters, Inc. is simply incapable of challenging the orthodoxy in terms of how scares are extracted, why they occur and what energy alternatives are out there. The research and development it does undertake is apparently illegal and, as noted above, totally lacking in vision. When, at the end of the film, the corporation appears to reopen under new ownership, it’s not a surprise. Frankly, it’s just amazing that three generations of Waternooses didn’t run the company into the ground.