The Lego Movie has a heart of darkness.
Beneath its glossy façade and messages of friendship, individuality, and freedom, lies the abyss of moral hazard and societal decay. The Lego Movie is, at its core, a capitulation to the venal whims of casino capitalism.
You’d be forgiven in thinking precisely the opposite. You’d be forgiven for thinking, much as Fox news did, that the Lego Movie was simply the lunar left of Hollywood laying the boot into the soft, innocent underbelly of the American meritocratic dream.
As a hyperventilating Fox News presenter claimed:
“What is the purpose of trying to indoctrinate kids in a movie? I guess they believe this movie is going to make a lot of money, so no matter what they can embed these kind of anti-capitalist messages and get away with it.”
I’m sad to say this is wrong.
I wish it were otherwise. I do. I would have enjoyed seeing the suits lined up against the wall and shot with Lego lasers. It would have been wonderful to look on as Emmett appropriated the property of the One Percent and distributed to his fellow construction workers. Delightful, indeed, to see the vanguard of the proletariat take up small plastic spanners and megaphones and those thick aerials and crack open the metal skulls of President Business’s evil robot army.
But no, none of this came to pass.
The sad reality is this: Emmett Brickowski is just as much a villain Lord Business. Emmett is the pied piper of Legoland, luring our children into an immoral chasm.
At the start of the film, President/Lord Business is a brutal oligarch who rules with a cruel combination of iron-fisted enforcement by his robot police force and Brave New World-like brainwashing of a supine populace.
The innocent citizens of Legoland are swamped by mind-deadening reality television, vapid advertising campaigns, and a cultural focus on ‘following the instructions’. President Business owns all the media and controls the technology for voting machines. Those have the talent and imagination to change the nature of the world – the ‘master builders’ – are rounded up by President Business and imprisoned, without trial or any due process.
Enforcement cubes (micromanagers) fly around rearranging the World to the dictator’s tastes, and he literally destroys whole realms that don’t submit to his authoritarian regime (vale, Cloud Cuckoo Land).
Finally, he has a diabolical plan to freeze all of Legoland in place with Krazy Glue.
As you would expect, President Business is defeated in the feel-good ending of the movie, and individuality and freedom are restored to the population.
But is he truly defeated? And what sort of system of government is restored?
What actually happens is that Lord Business and Emmett ‘hug it out.’ All is forgiven. Lord Business is told he is just as ‘special’ as everyone else, and need not lash out from within his insecurity to oppress an entire people.
Wait a minute.
Wait just a minute here. On top of all his other crimes, we must never forget that Lord Business decapitated Vitruvius with a coin. He literally cut his head off. Yet even with this barbaric ISIS-like approach to dealing with political difference, all is forgiven?
This unjust state of affairs is reminiscent of another incident in human history where devastating criminal acts were repeatedly committed by the few against the many, without consequence. Where lives were destroyed, homes lost, whole countries wiped off the economic map, businesses bankrupted, pensions looted and regular, hard-working people the world over royally screwed by the One Percent.
The Global Financial Crisis.
Here’s the thing: the problem with letting President Business get away with murder, attempted murder, fraud, kidnapping, torture, false imprisonment and widespread property destruction, is the same problem the world faces post-GFC: it will all happen again.
Indeed, it is all happening again. Bonuses on Wall Street are back to pre-Crisis levels, and inequality is widening to a point not seen in a hundred years. The unvarnished greed of ten thousand suited American psychopaths continues unbridled, threatening to tear the rest of us down with it.
And, just like the Lego Movie: nobody went to jail over it. Nobody was punished.
Everything is awesome.
My modest counter-proposal to the world ‘hugging it out’ with Wall Street is this: drop the bad guys in a volcano. Literally. That’s all: just take three or four prominent CEOs up in a helicopter and drop them in a volcano. Let see how many of these motherfuckers try to rip off another pension fund after watching that.
Certainly far more effective than a bunch of anarchists with bad personal hygiene occupying a large square of grass somewhere in Manhattan. While I’m sure it’s quite nice to sit around with an acoustic guitar singing Joan Baez songs, watching fire jugglers and double rainbows, with nothing to live on but frequent cash payments from middle-class academic parents – I’m also quite sure it’s not very fucking effective.
What’s effective is dropping a rich guy into a volcano. The social utility of one Goldman Sachs President burning in a pit of fiery lava far exceeds that of one million hipsters typing one million caustic social justice tweets for all eternity.
And in Lego World? We don’t need a sequel to see what is happening in that realm, to see the Brave New World run by Emmett and his cronies – the evidence is all around us. Go to any toy store now and you will see it. Row after row of Lego kits based exactly on the characters and scenes from the movie: Bad Cop Car Chase; Micromanager; Benny’s Spaceship Spaceship Spaceship!; Emmet’s Construct-O-Mech; Metalbeard’s Sea Cow; and Cloud Cuckoo Palace, to name but a few. Oh, and the instructions are included.
So much for individuality. So much for breaking the rules. So much for the anarcho-syndicalist dream of tomorrow.
History repeats itself in art, as in life. Emmett now leads an administration that continues the system of economic exploitation begun by Lord Business. The Fox fascists need not fear: the Lego Movie is on your side. It is a 60 million dollar film that made 468 million dollars promoting product for a company worth 14 billion.
In The Lego Movie, much like the real world, the crimes of the One Percent are consequence-free.
Everything is still awesome in the dark heart of capitalism.